The Input of Democracy
So far we have confined our considerations to some problems concerning “good government,” the second of the perennial reasons for the crisis of democracy that we mentioned at the outset.
Reference here is to the radical structural modifications in the world capitalistic system—transition from the postwar period of growth benefiting the advanced capitalistic countries to neoliberal globalization creating difficulties for almost all the countries that had enjoyed the most success in the earlier period. However, interacting with this structural change on the output side is another—which has been particularly emphasized by the political analysts and commentators (namely a change on the input side)—of the forms of democratic participation and the ways in which the parties and governments respond to it. It is a change that has come about gradually, but by now, it is hard to see how the results could be reversed. This change has led from the great ideological mass parties of the postwar years to Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair’s Cartel Party (1995), then to the media-dominated parties, geared to fight in the “democracy of the public” (Manin, 1995), and more recently to the great burgeoning of parties and movements with marked demagogic-populistic features, and increasing demagogic-populistic contamination of the traditional parties themselves.The party that the older among us have known, the ideological mass party led by an oligarchy formally legitimized by a process of associative democracy (in reality not very democratic at all, as Robert Michels (1911) observed over a century ago), is not and cannot be the arena within which the opinions of the great mass of citizens are formed and the electoral intentions of most of the voters emerge. It has been eroded by virtually irresistible social, economic, cultural and technological transformations: the loosening of bonds and of the territorial, religious and cultural distinctions, which, as from the nineteenth century, had generated the traditional parties, together with a profound change in the class structure and the declining credibility of the ideological narratives that revolved around it.
At the same time educational levels have risen sharply and society is subject to increasing individualization and fragmentation in terms of both interests and values pursued, while the mass media have grown to extremely powerful proportions, starting with radio, then the still-dominant television, and now also the Internet and social media. All these have played a part in bringing about, even in the most traditional parties, the transition from the oligarchy produced by associative democracy—remarkably stable as long as things went well—to the pronounced personalization of leadership. In short, the voters in their homes have become a nebulous “public,” before which the party leaders (and more generally the political entrepreneurs) display their merchandise, with the hope of getting them to buy it, thereby getting their votes. That this entails risks of populism, demagogy and plebiscitary practices is beyond all doubt. But it is equally clear that there can be no going back to the (let me repeat, hardly very democratic) oligarchies of the mass parties, based on marked sociocultural rifts, ideological narratives (that used to be convincing) and, in the postwar years, an economic context of strong and steady growth.The sociopolitical transformation processes I have outlined were already to be seen in the more advanced capitalistic countries well before the end of the boom years and the advent of a globalized, neoliberal system. Few, however, talked then of a crisis of democracy Indeed, in the early 1990s—when Soviet communism was collapsing and before the negative social effects of neoliberalism and globalization began to make themselves felt seriously—public opinion was very different, showing a peak in the self-confidence of liberal democracy. Liberal, democratic capitalism had triumphed against its historical enemy, economic growth seemed to be going ahead without any significant snags and even the decline in voter turnout and ideological mobilization was seen more as a sign of a rational attitude on the part of the citizens than of a pathological disaffection for democratic politics.
In short, it was the End of History, as Francis Fukuyama (1992) entitled his bestselling book.4 This complacent attitude on the part of the political, economic and intellectual elites at the end of the millennium was destined to be short lived, and the turning point came with the American financial crisis of 2007-8 and the recession it caused worldwide.The United States emerged from this crisis fairly soon, but the recession put an end to the self-satisfaction of the previous two decades and provoked widespread critical reflection on the negative consequences of financial deregulation and globalization. Reflection dwelt not only on the macroeconomic and financial aspects of the neoliberal system— the illusion that the financial markets can be self-regulating without needing the intervention of the public authorities—but above all on the growing distortion in the distribution of income in favor of the wealthier classes. The distortion had set in well before the crisis, as from the 1980s, but the major critical attention and political reactions came later on. This change in attitude inevitably led to renewed and redoubled criticism of the functioning of democracy, captured by the interests it should be regulating and indifferent to the living conditions of the classes it should be representing and defending: thus, the classical conflict between capitalism and democracy On the left and the right alike, dissatisfaction with the policies of the elites—who had entrusted governance of the economy to technicians and the (alleged) experts—skepticism about policies of moderation and compromise and the attraction of the more extreme positions became rife in the years following on the Great Recession, and their consequences are still evident today. In the nomination process of the US presidential election, Bernie Sanders represented dangerous competition for Hillary Clinton on a quasi-socialist platform in the Democratic Party, while Donald Trump actually succeeded in obtaining the nomination of the Republican Party on a platform of extreme right-wing populism, and then in winning the presidential election. Such protagonists, such political outcomes had hardly been imagined in the times of the End of History.
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