Some of these rules are formal. A president or prime minister allows the judiciary to investigate wrongdoing by members of his government instead of firing the prosecutor. He puts up with critical coverage in the press instead of shutting down newspapers or persecuting journalists. When he loses an election, he leaves office peacefully instead of clinging to power.
But many of these rules are informal, making it less clearcut when they are violated. The government does not rewrite electoral rules months before an election to maximise its chance of winning. Political insurgents do not glorify authoritarian rulers of the past, threaten to lock up their opponents or set out to violate the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. The losers of an election refrain from limiting the scope of an office to which an adversary has been elected in their last days in the job. The opposition confirms a competent judge whose ideology it dislikes rather than leaving a seat on the highest court in the land vacant, and strikes an imperfect compromise about the budget rather than letting the government shut down. [...]
In the US, and many other countries around the world, that is no longer how democratic politics works. As Ignatieff put the point, we are increasingly “seeing what happens when a politics of enemies supplants a politics of adversaries”. And the new crop of populists who have stormed the political stage over the past decades shoulder a lot of the blame for this. [...]
Citizens are less committed to democracy than they once were; while more than two-thirds of older Americans say that it is essential to them to live in a democracy, for example, less than a third of younger Americans do. They are also more open to authoritarian alternatives; two decades ago, for example, 25% of Britons said that they liked the idea of “a strongman ruler who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”; today, 50% of them do. And these attitudes are increasingly reflected in our politics: from Great Britain to the US, and from Germany to Hungary, respect for democratic rules and norms has precipitously declined. No longer the only game in town, democracy is now deconsolidating. [...]
As I argue in my new book, The People vs. Democracy, we will only be able to contain the rise of populism if we ensure that the political system overcomes the very real shortcomings that have fuelled it. Ordinary people have long felt that politicians don’t listen to them when they make their decisions. They are sceptical for a reason: the rich and powerful really have had a worrying degree of influence over public policy for a very long time. The revolving door between lobbyists and legislators, the outsized role of private money in campaign finance, and the tight links between politics and industry really have undermined the degree to which the popular will steers public policy.
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