Democracy and its discontents
Trump’s media appeal
A reader in the US, who knows about the strong position of the Murdoch media in Australia, has drawn attention to a New York Times article by Jeremy Peters Where Fox News and Donald Trump took us.
It’s largely about how initially Trump was an audience-grabbing asset for Fox News, but over time he became something of a liability. The close relationship between Fox News and the Republican party has some parallels in Australia, but the situation Peters describes is less about a relationship between the Murdoch media and a party on the right, as the relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump himself.
Of more general relevance is Peters’ description of Trump’s appeal – his nose for grievance-oriented political rhetoric, and his ability to channel rage and resentment. He was able to appeal to the masses because the people who hated him – the “elites” – were also the people the masses didn’t like, or could be encouraged to dislike. (Anyone who has followed German history can see some chilling similarities with the politics of the 1930s.)
Democracy in retreat
The Economist Intelligence Unit has published its Democracy Index 2021: the China challenge. It’s a story of democracy in retreat. The EIU marks down countries that have imposed strong Covid-19 controls on movement and vaccine mandates, but the retreat started well before Covid-19 appeared.
Its assessment of countries is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. In all these categories, apart from “political participation”, there has been a fall, most starkly in “civil liberties”. The rise in “political participation” is explained, in part, by the rise of small and often populist-based parties. (Not everyone would agree that this is an advance for democracy.)
The greatest overall threat to democracy comes from the economic success of the Chinese authoritarian state-led capitalist model. In what could be sound advice to the Australian government and its bellicose defence minister, the authors suggest that the best way for the US and its allies to avoid war and to preserve the best of the western enlightenment legacy is to:
focus their energies on rejuvenating their political system so that they can provide a desirable alternative model to that of China. Far better that the US and the world’s democracies demonstrate the advantage of their system of government by re-democratising their politics, rather than by trying to isolate or contain China.
It provides rankings, and as with many other rankings the Nordic countries (Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark) and New Zealand occupy positions #1 to #6. We come in at #9, just behind Ireland and Taiwan, and equal with Switzerland. France and the USA are well down the list, and are classified as “flawed democracies”. In positions #165 to #167 are North Korea, Myanmar and Afghanistan.
The report is free, but you have to go through a convoluted process to get it from the EIU site. There is also a short summary on The Economist website – A new low for global democracy – but you may be up against a paywall.
Does power corrupt or do the unprincipled seek power?
Lord Acton’s statement “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely” is well-known. A more complete context of his quote is in a letter he wrote about the behaviour of clerics during the Inquisition:
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
That carries a hint of a two-way relationship: maybe bad men and women seek out high office? (His use of “men” can be excused: he was writing long before Margaret Thatcher was elected.)
On Late Night Live Phillip Adams interviewed political scientist Brian Klaas on the question Does power corrupt, or do the corrupt seek power? Klaas asserts that the relationship definitely is two-way.
Klaas considers the means by which people navigate their way to positions of power, particularly “performative” processes – interviews and elections – in which he or she can make a quick impression on recruiters and electors. These are perfect opportunities for the disciplined psychopath to perform and impress. He also suggests that our reptilian brains, which haven’t fully evolved to the needs of modern society, are attracted to the “strong man leader”, Trump being a case in point.
While we have elaborate mechanisms of performance management to keep factory workers and delivery drivers in check, we need similar mechanisms to keep in check those who occupy positions of authority. (18 minutes)
Klaas is author of Who gets power and how it changes us.
Human insecurity – Covid-19 is only the latest unsettling development
Over the last 30 years there has been a trend towards improvement in the UN Human Development Index, with a setback in the last two years because of Covid-19. If we examine specific aspects of human wellbeing more carefully, however, a worsening level of insecurity is revealed. In its report New Threats to Human Security in the Anthropocene the UNDP states:
It is not hard to understand how Covid-19 has made people feel more insecure. But what accounts for the startling bifurcation between improvements in well-being achievements and declines in people’s perception of security?
Even though over those 30 years people worldwide have been leading healthier and more prosperous lives, a sense of unease has taken root and is flourishing. The report reveals that six out of seven people all over the world—including in the wealthiest countries— were experiencing high levels of insecurity and becoming less trustful of one another and of institutions even before the pandemic. Mistrust of government is one such manifestation.
It traces the roots of this insecurity, including stresses on the planet’s resources (particularly climate change), economic inequities within countries, and the distributional consequences of structural change.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict explained: war without firearms
The war between Russia and Ukraine has been underway for some time, writes David Kilcullen in Open Forum: Russia’s secret war against Ukraine. In light of the way Russia pursues conflicts with other nations, it’s a mistake to consider that a war starts only when guns start firing and bombs start dropping. He describes the warfare Russia is currently pursuing as “pre-combat shaping” that “seeks to de-stabilise, disrupt and coerce adversaries, divide allies politically and economically, force concessions through intimidation, and achieve goals that would otherwise require open warfare”. The tanks may never roll into Ukraine if Russia achieves its ends through these means.
There are many ways to achieve, through cyber-attacks, what bombing did in earlier times. A country’s energy supplies, food distribution and communications systems can all be crippled.
Kilcullen doesn’t rule out the possibility of a shooting war: he goes into detail about what such conventional warfare would look like. But the main inference from his article seems to be that we give the enemy a huge first strike advantage if we think of warfare only in terms of military firepower. Clausewitz may say if he were writing today that “firearms are warfare by other means”.