On the Hollowed-Out Discourse of “Democracy”

What we talk about when we talk about the death of the liberal order

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Puppets by Paul Klee named the Ghost of a Scarecrow, Electrical Spook, and Mr. Death

Last weekend, there was a brief, imperfect symmetry between events in Serbia and Turkey. Since I’ve been offline for weeks, I only learned about it when I got a message from a friend in Belgrade asking me what was happening in Istanbul. The city’s privately-owned Bilgi University, known for its liberal-leaning politics, had been shuttered by presidential decree. (President Erdoğan then abruptly reversed this decision on Monday morning without apparent explanation). That news came just one day after an Ankara court’s provisional decision to remove Özgür Özel as the head of the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), the main opposition outfit here. The directive clears the way for the return of former CHP chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, now widely derided as Erdoğan’s “controlled opposition”. Police forcibly entered CHP headquarters in Ankara last Sunday, firing off teargas and rubber bullets.

Then, on Sunday night, a journalist friend in Turkey sent me a message asking about what was happening in Serbia. Some 1,400 km away, tens of thousands of people had been on the streets of Belgrade demanding early elections and protesting against the government of Aleksandar Vučić. The Serbian police responded with stun grenades and tear gas.

It was, as one commentator here put it, “a bad weekend for democracy”. All week, I felt like I should comment on the imperfect symmetry that a few people had pointed out, but every time I tried, I failed. I could not force myself to use the rote language, which read like bullet points on a grim NED report. Indeed, I couldn’t put the words together without experiencing profound distress. I should have lamented the erosion of “democratic norms”, and the parallel process of “democratic backsliding”. I should have invoked the “rule of law”, the decline in media freedoms, and appealed to the US or EU to “do something”. But I find this language strangely lacking, so much so that it actually makes me feel ashamed to use it. To be clear, I am not disparaging anyone who does; in the past, I have used this language myself. It’s possible that this is the only conceptual framework currently available to us. But that doesn’t change the fact that something is off about it, that something is wrong. And I want to try to understand why.

Most commentators on foreign affairs acknowledge that the liberal order is in trouble, dying, or perhaps even already dead. There was a time when this would have been treated as some kind of fringe Duginist conceit; now it’s approaching mainstream consensus. Funeral orations and laments for the liberal order have been delivered everywhere from the Financial Times to the Atlantic Council to podcast interviews with Yuval Noah Harari in Davos. Sometimes people call the liberal order by other names: the rules-based order, the US-led order, the Western-led order, Western hegemony. But a rose by any other name would be the same rotting organic matter: the precise name we use for it isn’t important; what is important is what we mean when we talk about it and the fact that we’re calling it dead. When we invoke this dying liberal order, what we mean, at least in part, is the project of globalized liberal democracy, and the underlying assumption that the rest of the world would eventually adopt our system. After the events of 1989, we were told, Western liberal democracy was triumphant and history was over. But we all laugh at this “end of history” idea now. How foolish Fukuyama was; how naive. We know better.

But we’re not just calling time on the liberal order. The fundamental assumptions of that order are now being questioned in unprecedented places. Once again, there was a time when such talk was confined to anti-imperialist reading groups and associated more with the rantings of seemingly unhinged taxi drivers in places like Serbia or Uganda. But lately, many mainstream commentators, scholars and even liberal political leaders like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (of all people!) have been wrestling publicly with the reality of what the US-led order was and what it meant. They are acknowledging that it was, at a minimum, highly flawed, hypocritical, and unequal. Some go much further in their criticisms, as I do. But whatever your personal evaluation of the liberal order, you probably agree that it has become acceptable to dissent from it in polite company and in respectable newspapers.

How does this relate to Vučić and Erdoğan? The problem is that when we criticize leaders like them, we immediately default to the rhetoric of liberal democracy–the legitimation ideology of the supposedly defunct liberal order. And this, for me, creates a terrible discordance. When those of us who prognosticate about the demise of Western liberal hegemony abruptly start sounding like Vaclav Havel in 1989, we are attempting to have it both ways. So which one is it? If the liberal order is dying and was always horribly unequal (or worse) anyway, then why are we judging leaders according to its criteria? Can we declare the Church an archaic institution riven with superstition and reaction and then continue chastising any misbehavior as “sin” and demand perfect obedience to God?

I don’t think there’s any better evidence that we’re in a transition than this. There is an emergent, acknowledged crisis of faith among the liberal democratic brethren, and yet, we still lack an alternative system of belief or normative framework for navigating the world. When we encounter leaders whose behavior we dislike, we still describe it in terms of deviance–from a model we no longer fully believe in ourselves.

I’m guessing that some will try to counter this argument by saying that the reason the liberal order is in trouble is because of external attacks from its opponents–men like Erdoğan and Vučić. But I don’t think that’s true. I think they are very much a product of that order, and, in a way, represent a kind of crude culmination of it. After 1989, the Western liberal democrats who came to observe elections and otherwise administer democracy in states “transitioning” from communism prescribed plural elections as the apex of political progress. All that mattered were market economies and plural elections; everything else, it would turn out, was negotiable.

There was also another chink in the liberal democrats’ armor. While they claimed to venerate the sanctity of the “free and fair” election, they never really believed in absolute openness. Their “get out the vote” campaigns were always intended to bolster a specific candidate or party, and they took great care to engineer the desired electoral result. They provided extensive training and PR for their chosen candidates, and funded the “free and independent media” that boosted them and excoriated their opponents. In short, the liberal democrats believed that elections should be “free and fair”, but never so free and fair that a real left-wing or anti-systemic challenger could win. In this way, “electoral authoritarianism”–plural elections without a level playing field, the kind of system that Vučić and Erdoğan have cultivated–constitutes a mutated, degraded form of US-led liberal democracy rather than a radical break with it.

I have no new verbiage to dispense nor any particular prescription for what to do here. Like everyone else, I will have to continue employing solemn NED democracy report jargon, but I will not be surprised when such outmoded, uninspired language continues to yield uninspired results. Meanwhile, I think it’s important to remember: liberal dissonances are always heard and exploited, even when they are not acknowledged or even considered in the West.