Democracies have always presented themselves as beacons of human progress. In 431 BCE the statesman Pericles declared that Athens’s democracy was “the school for all Greece,” while over the past two centuries democracy warriors everywhere have measured their countries’ success or failure by comparison with Western models: American, British, French, Swedish. It’s harder to do so now that these formerly self-congratulating democracies are doing battle with new and older demons.
Today, millions of people around the world crave freedom from authoritarian rule. Yet when they hear almost daily that the liberal heartlands are plagued with inflation, strikes, high crime rates, gun violence and voters who care little about truth, many of them doubt that democracy is the best alternative.
In 2024 more people than ever before are voting in national elections in countries containing nearly half the world’s population. But even where elections are not just window-dressing for authoritarian rule, today’s voters worry that deep-faked misinformation, rigged electoral procedures or outright fraud might drown out their already small voice. And even where authoritarian-leaning candidates suffer apparently legitimate defeats, the fear that they and their supporters might reject election results loomed ever larger — not least in the world-leading democracy, the United States.
“So many people I know are giving up on democracy,” said my new friend Vaibhav when we met travelling through Xinjiang in western China last summer. He worked at an international bank in Hong Kong, and lived there through the pro-democracy protests in 2019–20 and the strict lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of the sceptics were Vaibhav’s colleagues from East Asian countries and his native India.
Feeling helpless about politics but wanting to do some good in the world — even bankers worry about losing their souls, Vaibhav insisted — they focus on what they call “development”: improving technological know-how, winning new markets and beating their rivals for the sake of country as well as company. “They think we should give more power to technocrats, or to leaders who offer a clear vision for our country.”
Other doubters were still reeling from the results of controversial popular votes in Britain, the United States and beyond. If democracy can’t deliver leaders or policies that command widespread trust, they ask, how can it help us navigate dangerous global rivalries, brutal wars, climate disaster and digital technologies that mislead citizens and split them into warring camps?
The spread of global pessimism about the superior merits of democracy can be deeply unsettling for people whose political mindsets were configured during the cold war. Growing up in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, I was taught that democracy was unquestionably the best kind of government ever invented, getting better and better each decade. For the time being, it was locked in a life-or-death struggle against authoritarian regimes that controlled most of our neighbours in East Asia and up to the western borders of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. But while it was almost impossible to envision how that might change, small signs of resistance fuelled hope.
In 1993, a few years after Soviet-backed communism fell in Europe, I went to work in Warsaw. Although my official brief was to teach anglophone political philosophy, I was more interested in discovering what my students thought about the changes they were living through. Apart from membership of NATO and probably the European Union — affording protection from a humiliated Russia — what did they expect from the new order of liberal democracy? Did it look as good to them as its local and foreign champions said?
We discussed a new book by the American political philosopher John Rawls. When you debate policies and laws in democracies, he wrote, you should make a point of appealing to “public reasons” — respect for everyone’s freedom, for example, or to the common safety of the union — not just make arguments that resonate only with people who share your narrower concerns or ideological repertoire. Could this be our future? My students’ eyes twinkled with friendly irony. “Maybe that’s what people are like in Britain or America,” someone said. “Lucky them.”
Sometimes I took the tram home with a student called Agnieszka. She would race from our classes to tutor schoolchildren in English and German or write articles for a local newspaper, sharing her earnings with struggling parents. Marcin taught English and sometimes drove a taxi. Małgozata’s mother was a nurse in a badly underfunded hospital; privatisation had already cost her father his long-time industrial job. She worked at a cinema and night cafe. How did they manage all that and demanding university studies? Shrugs. That’s life.
My older Polish friends were as relieved as I was to wave goodbye to old ideological-isms. But we were unsure what to think about the brave new world of -isations: “liberalisation” and its sub-isations, chiefly “privatisation” and “democratisation.” Privatisation meant putting industries and agencies that had been owned by the state — housing, food production and distribution agencies, gas and electricity, transport — under private or partially private control. Democratisation meant replacing the one-party state with a pluralist, multi-party, representative system; redistributing power between the big cities and Poland’s staunchly independent countryside; establishing the rule of law, freedoms of speech and press, with church and state separate yet mutually respectful.
When we did speak of two other big -isms, capitalism and communism, it was with a wariness about being dragged back into the either/or, good versus evil ways of thinking about politics that had dominated our younger lives. State-based communism had lost the cold war and was probably tainted forever by its authoritarian exemplars. But did that vindicate capitalism? And was its way of producing and distributing social goods suited to democracy?
As a student, I had an acquaintance who is now an eminent member of the British government. The purpose of democracy, he said, was to protect individual freedoms. Since capitalism left people free to engage in trade and industry for profit, of course it supports democracy like no other economic system. But almost no one I met in Poland shared his confidence that weakly regulated private competition could be good for democracy. Most thought about privatisation much as they thought about God: let’s try to have faith that it eventually rewards the industrious and virtuous, even if we see zero evidence that it does.
While privatisation made already well-connected ex-communists and foreign émigrés stupendously wealthy overnight, my colleagues worked several jobs to pay rent and other bills that their deflated salaries could no longer cover. Some worried that the gap between winners and losers in the privatisation stakes would threaten the delicate work of democratisation. Students spoke of relatives who lived outside the big cities, predicting that insecurities among older and rural voters would make it easy for political entrepreneurs to blame urban and “cosmopolitan” elites and bring out toxic strains, of nationalism.
When I’d go back West and report these conversations to people in Britain, France or Germany, I was struck by how quick some were to dismiss these concerns. Newly liberalising populations had a low tolerance for competition and the insecurities it bred because communism had spoiled them, said one inheritance-rich (West) German friend; expecting government to check growing inequalities was a bad paternalistic habit.
I found even less interest in asking how Western-guided processes of democratisation and privatisation raised concerns about national identity and local control. There was a more convenient explanation for nationalism in postcommunist lands: an old cliche that “Western” democracies have something called “civic” national identities — saturated with rational, individualistic values and open to the world — while “Eastern” peoples have “ethnic” nationalism, a relic of bygone provincialism that global liberalisation was busy washing away. We in the “West” got so used to contrasting our self-flattering free-world mentalities with less enlightened ones elsewhere that many failed to see how similar we all are: in our progressivist communist-or-liberal utopianisms, nostalgic nationalisms and fears of being left behind in hypercompetitive societies.
Few of my Polish friends were surprised when an alternative to liberal democracy emerged in Central and Eastern Europe. Hungary’s liberal-turned-sour leader Viktor Orbán dubbed it “illiberal democracy”; liberal commentators preferred “populism.” It burgeoned after the global economic crash of 2008, then spread westward where it found a warm welcome in the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands and other countries around the world. This came as a shock to many in the liberal-democratic West, where most people had accepted gaps in wealth and political influence as normal — even as they or their neighbours were tumbling gown the security ladder.
The easy explanation for illiberal populism in liberal democracies is to see it as a top-down phenomenon, the work of stunningly successful political manipulators who distort rather than reflect reality. Top-down accounts do tell an important part of the story, the part about the narratives people buy into when they support illiberal policies. A trademark populist trick is to blame false culprits — usually immigrants and ethnic minorities — and offer unrealistic cures for voters’ discomforts. Pointing the finger at the even more vulnerable gives anxious supporters an illusion of power by putting them in the same “We’re So Great” camp as successful businesspeople and rich elites — even when these routinely reject policies aimed at checking social inequalities.
But voter manipulation is just the upper layer of a more complex story of the material and psychological insecurities fanned by weak regulation and widening social gaps. You no longer need to be a diehard leftist to talk about the intense competitive pressures of weakly regulated markets and how they produced a handful of super-wealthy individuals who — through media ownership and campaign funding — acquired disproportionate political influence.
In the United States, only the wealthiest families grew richer after the Great Recession began in 2007. From then to 2016, the median net worth of the richest 20 per cent increased by 13 per cent, while that of less wealthy families decreased by more than 20 per cent. It became increasingly evident that a small percentage of citizens in many liberal democracies had far easier access to the prerequisites for a secure existence — housing, education, food, healthcare — and that competition among the wealthy for the best pickings of these goods was driving costs sky-high for the rest.
The connection between these multiple insecurities and illiberal nationalism isn’t always straightforward. Current anxieties about national identity and control have deep, emotional histories in most countries, which makes them highly user-friendly for opportunistic elites. But as I learned from living in Poland and Japan, these anxieties can’t always be dismissed as irrational tribalism.
Identifying with groups not only gives most individuals a sense of social anchoring in times of change; it’s also a key resource for enhancing our sense of power — however illusory — in high-stress situations. Identity concerns loom large when the less equal combine to fight for their share, or when the previously more-than-equal fear falling.
The older powerhouses of liberal democracy were born to the tune of high-flying rhetoric, and their disproportionate global power encouraged overconfidence. People struggling to bring forth or salvage newer democracies aren’t so confident. For two and a half centuries, people from a handful of English-speaking countries and Western Europe have been telling the rest of the world how to do liberal democracy. Now we need people in struggling new democracies to tell us how not to do it. They often have a clearer sense of democracy’s great advantages, but also of the obstacles that can spring up and weaken even well-crafted institutions — material inequalities, clashes between hyper-progressivism and tradition, and gaps between ruling elites and the rest.
To motivate people to keep striving for democracy, we need to go behind modern ideologies and recover some core concerns that democracies are supposed to address. The first founding story of democracy on record has none of the heroics or optimism of most modern founding myths. Rather, it’s a cautionary tale about how hard it is to do democracy right, and how easily it gets subverted if you’re not vigilant.
Before Athens acquired the form of government that its founders called demokratia in 507 BCE, the main political faultline wasn’t tyranny versus the people: it was the ever-wealthier rich versus the vulnerable poor. Wealthy landowners leased property to the poor, who worked it for a living. Every so often the owners would increase their rents. If tenants couldn’t afford to pay, the rich offered them loans at high rates of interest.
The wealth gap widened. Tenants struggled, and defaulted on their debts. Athens’ plutocracy-friendly laws allowed creditors to force debtors into slavery. Eventually, poorer Athenians revolted. In the early sixth century BCE, terrified plutocrats asked a man called Solon to fix things before they got worse. He made it illegal to enslave debtors, created stimuli for a range of new trades and abolished hereditary political privileges.
This wasn’t yet full democracy, and Solon’s new deal soon failed. The plutocrats went back to exploiting their compatriots, who did what the vulnerable always do: turned to a tyrant who promised to fight their corner. Though Peisistratos confiscated some of the nobility’s lands and gave them to the poor, this didn’t lead to democracy, since the tyrant monopolised political power for himself and his family.
When a group of well-born Athenians deposed Peisistratos’s son, they realised two things. First, that very unequal societies are less stable, productive and humane than those where inequalities are held in check. Second, that you can’t trust a single class or party to do the checking in a way that seems fair to all. The reformers put all free Athenian men on a more equal footing than ever before and redesigned government into units where rich, poor and middling citizens were forced to sit together in assemblies, arguing, compromising and rotating positions by lot.
Sometimes it’s good to go back to basics, to the still-healthy roots of ideas and institutions that have grown weak and confused over time. According to the Solon story, democracy was designed as a realistic solution to a concrete problem: how to stop the endless civil strife that came from gaps in personal and social security between richer and the rest. This was common democratic sense for centuries before the modern era introduced a sharp ideological divide — initially within a broad liberal tradition — between weakly and strongly regulated markets.
Democratic freedom isn’t a condition where my private wishes can roam unchecked and I am free to acquire as much power or wealth as I can without considering how this affects others. It’s a key part of a power-sharing scheme called democracy. What makes democratic freedom democratic is precisely that it sets limits on my personal freedoms within this scheme, leaving opportunities and decent options for everyone else.
People in newer democracies often see more clearly how imbalances of power and fears of losing one’s chances in a poorly regulated hypercompetitive world can weaken respect for institutions that are supposed to channel and protect popular power: voting, traditional parties and media, judicial systems, representative assemblies. But they still want the benefits that only democracy can secure, and often have a clearer view of what they are.
Teetering precariously between democracy and tyranny, they see that the best way to tackle problems is to spread political power more widely and evenly, not concentrate it further in the hands of leaders who may or may not care about our personal wellbeing and common future. Having struggled with recent civil wars and seeing the relative peace still found in some democracies, they think that collaboration among multitudes of people can lead to more lasting successes, improve everyone’s quality of life and give individuals a far deeper sense of security than government by a few.
Today, millions around the world are taking to the streets to fight for these modest boons, risking imprisonment, torture and even their lives. A down-to-earth view of what makes democracy better than the alternatives will help us see how best to support it. Instead of going into hard battle modes for old “models,” we need to think about how to promote democratic goals with properly democratic means at home and abroad. On the global front, scepticism about older ways of doing democracy isn’t necessarily a bad thing: the hole where Western models used to be leaves room for creative thinking about what locals need and what kinds of change they can support.
It’s time to abandon the idea that people from powerful countries are uniquely qualified to design and build democracies for others. They may have money and weapons to help new democracies defend themselves. But without knowledge of local histories and sensitivities, money and weapons are useless. When outsiders promote democracy in an impatient or immodest spirit, the predictable result is illiberal, nationalist or authoritarian backlash.
We see the same urgent need to give more effective authority and voice to people on the ground inside today’s older democracies. There are organisations around the democratic world whose members advocate the creation of citizen assemblies, chosen by lot instead of personality-driven or partisan campaigns, to advise and monitor existing branches of government. By avoiding pathological rivalries among (and within) political parties, such assemblies might stand a better chance of coming up with policies aimed at narrowing the gaps in unbalanced societies. Another ancient idea is also enjoying a revival: that of citizen tribunals designed to hold current or former politicians to account for their actions.
But even well-crafted institutions can’t function without popular support. Change has to start with our own attitudes. Take other people’s beliefs and discomforts more seriously than ideologies that preach faith in the inevitable progress of whatever you think best. Work through social movements, social media and the voting booth to call for a more fully democratic regulation of market economies. Fight to take power back, of course, from democracy’s most obvious enemies — extremists, insatiable plutocrats and tyrannical leaders. But also take a more modest, closer-to-home kind of responsibility for getting our own hypercompetitive societies and psyches into better shape. •
This is Erica Benner’s contribution to Democracy: Eleven Writers and Leaders on What It Is — and Why It Matters, published recently by Profile Books and the Financial Times.
