How Democracy Ends by David Runciman review – what Trump and Corbyn have in common

“Democracy dies in darkness” runs the slogan on the Washington Post masthead, but if democracy really is dying around us, its demise has never been so loudly heralded nor so brightly lit. Even before Donald Trump’s emergence as a presidential candidate, it was clear that the global trend away from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones had slowed down; his rise was accompanied by a barrage of authors’ warnings that we are heading back into the 1930s. Never have the last days of Weimar seemed so worthy of study. Historians have developed a nice sideline in self-help manuals for a life of underground resistance to tyranny.

David Runciman’s bracingly intelligent new book is both a contribution to this debate and a refutation of it. How Democracy Ends shares the widespread sense that representative democracy is not doing well, but argues powerfully against screaming fascism at every turn. History, as Runciman states at the outset, does not repeat itself. The challenge he sets himself is to use the past to see what has happened to democracy today, in particular to diagnose its ailments, without assuming that the only alternative is the one imprinted on our collective memory.

That memory, after all, is a short one. The ancient Greeks may have invented democracy but they felt deeply ambivalent about it, regarding it as just one of the phases in the political cycle. It was not until the start of the 19th century that a democratic wave began to emerge again, in the Americas and briefly in southern Europe, and not until the second half of the 20th that representative democracy in the sense we have known it spread around the world. In that relatively brief span of time, it was fought over by liberals and socialists, rejected – in its “bourgeois” form – by communists, and smothered by dictators who could rarely decide whether what they were doing was superseding or perfecting it. After the second world war, parliamentary democracy got a new lease of life. When the cold war ended, the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to leave democracy as the only game in town. By the beginning of this century, most political scientists, especially but not only in the US, had come to believe that liberal democracy was the new normal, something to which the entire world should aspire. The crushing of the Arab spring, and the rise of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, could be written off as backsliding in polities whose democratic roots were shallow. It was the 2016 US presidential elections that, in a single moment, changed an implausibly rosy (and complacent) outlook, replacing it with an equally implausible pessimism.

Runciman says democracy is in a funk, for reasons that go far beyond Trump, but that unless we can stimulate our political imaginations to understand the new ways in which democracies can fail, we will not appreciate the scale of the problem before us. He identifies three contemporary challenges in particular. The first, paradoxically, is that levels of political violence have gone down. This means that, in such places as the US or Europe, democratic failure is not likely to happen in the old-fashioned way, through a military coup d’état. Those will still occur elsewhere, but the stability of democratic institutions suggests it is more likely that democracies will be undermined invisibly, from within.

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A corollary of this is the spread of conspiracy theories. It becomes harder and harder to detect what is actually happening and to tell the difference between fear and reality. Runciman draws the contrast between the situation in Greece in 1967, when there was a very visible military coup with tanks on the streets of Athens, and 2015, the year of the referendum on whether to accept the European commission’s bailout deal, when some have argued the Greek government caved in the face of what amounted to a silent coup by its European partners. It becomes harder to say what is a real coup d’état and what is normal politics.

A second challenge is posed by the way we respond to the existential threats that surround us. In the past, Runciman argues, societies were galvanised by such threats: one need think only of the mass mobilisation that occurred around nuclear disarmament or the international response in the 1970s to rising pollution. World war itself created a sense of collective action; but the dwindling of mass conscription makes that unlikely in future. And today people seem paralysed when threatened with global warming or a nuclear accident: the prospect of catastrophe leads not to collective action but passivity.

Then there is the impact of the digital revolution, which is undermining democracy in numerous ways. We simply don’t sufficiently understand the impact of current forms of communication and information gathering. The problem with huge corporations such as Facebook is not their malevolence, nor the danger that they might rival states. They are run by people who are principally interested in profits not politics, and they are far less legitimate and more hierarchical than the political systems that govern us. But the modes of communication they encourage make a mockery of democracy for other reasons. They encourage instant gratification when democracy presupposes a capacity for frustration and patience. They encourage a pretence of authenticity, making politicians seem even more fake and contrived. The politicians who flourish are the ones who play along. Populism is the natural condition of democratic politics in the age of Twitter. The most successful democratic politicians are the ones who try to turn parties into social movements – the one thing Trump, Jeremy Corbyn and Emmanuel Macron have in common. The trouble is that this can work for only so long.

As one would expect from an analyst of conspiracy theories, Runciman sees the basic problems as rooted not in nasty internet Machiavellians but in good intentions and weak wills. He thinks we can overdo the threat posed by surveillance mechanisms. The real erosion of democracy comes when it falls into the hands of attention-grabbing narcissists who turn it into a constant struggle for advertising space. The problem of the Trump presidency is not that there is an evil plot to take over America; it is that nothing is being done to tackle all the very real policy issues confronting the country, as policy-making is drowned out by the frenetic pace of the news cycle. Meanwhile gun violence, the opioid crisis and all the other urgent social ills are ignored.

How Democracy Ends is a wonderful read and contains much good sense. It is fond of the contrarian position, overfond perhaps. After all, behind the noise and fury of Twitter-era politics, real struggles of interests are still taking place. But what Runciman captures well is the sense of living in an age in which democracy is taken for granted and thus allowed to disintegrate from within. He goes further: it is not just that it is taken for granted, it is that the “battles are all won”. It is now the preferred political system of elderly populations muddling through, and this is hardly a recipe for restoring democracy’s lustre. If all that holds it in place is the sense that the alternatives are worse, then what happens when people no longer believe this to be the case?