The Rot of Democracies - Elliot Cohen

 

Liberal democracy, as widely observed, is in retreat around the world. How much more can it take before it's in rout?

Tribalism is sweeping America. We have in our own "progressive" ranks some who obsessively demonize the other side. Conservatives, they routinely argue, must be destroyed.

In his recent column in The Atlantic, Eliot Cohen, warns that American tribalism could bring the world order crashing to the ground.

Cohen worries that: The latest poll results from the University of Virginia Center for Politics, in which about three-quarters of Joe Biden and Donald Trump voters say that representatives of the opposing party are “a clear and present danger to American democracy,” and that censorship should be introduced, the First Amendment to the Constitution notwithstanding.

Grim stuff, as the journalists David French and Robert Kagan both have argued in powerful essays that raise the specter of civil war and the collapse of American democracy. The available data tend to support their views, although arguably these essays underplay the resilience of the American political system. But there is enough going on in the United States and abroad to make one think of the interwar period, when, as Yeats wrote in his famous “Second Coming,” “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

Let us stipulate that, at the moment, no Hitlers or Stalins are on the prowl in the world. But that is not the point of analogizing the present to the interwar years. There are thuggish regimes and ruthless dictators, to be sure, and they are armed with tools of repression that the totalitarians of almost a century ago could only dream about. It is, however, the rot of democracies that is more troubling, and in this respect the interwar period still has its lessons.

In that time, whose living memory has vanished with the passing of the older generation, cancel culture was real; George Orwell, among others, felt it. On one side, intellectuals infatuated with communism, or who were simply following the dictum that there are no enemies on one’s left, felt comfortable preventing critics from being able to publish or even getting jobs. On the other side, a minority, now somewhat forgotten but important at the time, became infatuated with toxic forms of nationalism, and not only among the future Axis powers.

...In short, liberal democracy feels as though it’s in a pretty bad way, and in many places, it is. No competing advanced ideologies as comprehensive and lethal as Nazism or communism are on offer, although that could conceivably change. What is certain is that dictators, whether Xi Jinping or Ayatollah Khamenei, Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, have at their disposal devastating weapons of precision repression and murder. The repeated and generally successful crushing of dissident individuals and movements in their countries and elsewhere is remarkable.

...We have yet to experience the full external shocks of climate change, and we have yet, for that matter, to see what will happen when someone again lights off a nuclear weapon in anger. It was not without reason that Churchill spoke of the possibility of the world sinking “into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” It all could happen, and if the first half of the 20th century has anything to teach us, it is that calamitous misfortune and horrifying deeds can occur, a lesson viscerally absorbed by the statesmen who attempted to piece the world back together in the first decade after World War II.

...It is no coincidence that at one of the bleakest moments in 1940, when Britain looked as though it might very well succumb to Nazi invasion, Churchill could speak of “the New World, with all its power and might” stepping forth “to the rescue and liberation of the Old.”

Churchill could pin his hopes on the world’s biggest economy and its liveliest (if turbulent) democracy, the United States. The problem today is that there is no United States behind the United States. If America succumbs to its internal divisions, to its preoccupation with partisan feuding and its desire to withdraw from international politics, the world order, such as it is, will crumble.

...We know that freedom around the world, measured in various ways, has been in decline for a decade or more. What Roosevelt and his enlightened Republican opponents—including their 1940 presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie—understood is that American liberties would be profoundly less safe in an illiberal world. It is not clear that American politicians, or large swaths of the American public and its elites, grasp that today.

In my experience, Canadians today, even those who see themselves as politically engaged, view our democracy as somehow healthy, secure and immune.  Yet how often do we rebuke those who fan the flames of tribalism and see those in other camps, with different views, as somehow second-rate and to be dominated by those of purer thought? How does that end?