Endangered democracies and the necessary rebalancing

Are our democracies really dying, as some (scholars, politicians, ordinary men) claim? If so, why? Will the 21st century be remembered as the time when liberal democracy, that unprecedented combination of freedom, widespread (albeit largely unequal) prosperity and peace, waned to make way for authoritarian political forms? To regimes that make the blood run cold to anyone who has the slightest idea what they are talking about? If one looks at the growing consensus achieved in many European and non-European countries by extreme right-wing and populist (and often pro-Putin) parties, one would say yes.

One has the same impression when looking at the growing abstentionism and the reversal of what Huntington called 'the third wave of democratisation', with the return, if not to old-style authoritarianism, to illiberal 'democracies' in many countries around the world. A phenomenon that does not only concern a distant world, but is happening, we should remember, here too. Think of the Hungary case, the almost case of Slovakia, Poland before the recent elections. Political science also seems to judge along these lines, and 'How Democracies Die' is the title of a successful 2018 book by Levitsky and Ziblatt. It has to be said that some scholars have recently questioned democratic backsliding, calling for judgements to be based not on perceptions of experts and political scientists but on objective factors that measure the democratic nature of countries.

The truth, of course, is that no one knows how it will turn out. Perhaps in twenty years' time we will discover that the crisis was only a momentary setback and that democracy still has driving force and soft power. However, it would remain to be explained why we have been witnessing this dangerous retreat for a few decades now. Here there are basically two explanations: one monist, which recognises a single cause behind the phenomenon, and another pluralist, which sees many independent causes and reasons.For the first way of looking at it, the real and only one responsible for the crisis is neo-liberalism. Beginning with the liberalist revolutions of Reagan and Thatcher, the idea that economic inequality was not a problem gradually passed. Only borderline poverty is, and this is to be combated not by taxing the super-rich, but by incentivising them to produce by making them pay little tax, so that something 'rolls down' in favour of the last ones too (the famous 'trickle-down economics').

Such an approach is said to have caused widespread suffering among the middle class, who became afraid and followed those who rode that fear. In other words, neo-liberalism is the architect of the plutocratic drift of our democracies and thus of the alienation of entire masses of citizens from traditional politics, with the well-known and consequent phenomena of personality cult, distrust in the traditional institutions of democratic life, conspiratorial approach to problems, and populism.This is a strong explanation, based on an undeniable phenomenon (the exponential increase in economic inequality even within our countries) and which, by identifying a single culprit, satisfies the natural need to bring complex phenomena back to a manageable and tractable order.

Many, however, believe that the problem is more complex and involves a profound transformation, also beginning in the 1980s, concerning the way in which the market and the real economy have changed, incorporating aspects of our lives that were previously foreign to them. One thinks of Michel Callon's 'agential' theory of the market, but also of Zuboff's well-known 'surveillance capitalism', where the new commodities are the behavioural surplus that each of us produces simply by connecting to the network.