History on the march: 2016, the year tyranny Trumped democracy

“The end of history”. For the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, the end of the Cold War and the defeat of Soviet Communism marked “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” and therefore the “end of history”.

In 2016 we, who have lived our lives knowing no other form of government, are the children of that liberal democracy. We are more enfranchised than any generation before us. We are more free than any of our forebears. And yet, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that our times are marked by an unprecedented sense of frustration, of apathy and, increasingly, of anger.

And so our society is a tinder box and right across the western world we can see match-wielding demagogues prepared to pour petrol onto those flames.

Western liberal democracy is under threat. If it indeed ever had ended, history is about to be kick started into life once again.

The proliferation of democracy experienced in the western world since the Second World War in itself now poses a fundamental threat to our democratic system. This idea that democracies die when they become too democratic is not a new one. It originates with Plato, who saw tyranny emerging “out of no other regime than democracy”.

Writing of the ancient world, he argued that democracies are the perfect breeding ground for despots; that democracy leads to freedom, freedom gradually undermines order, and this creates a chaotic vacuum, preparing the ground for an opportunistic despot to emerge. The tyrant seizes power to maintain order and, he claims, to make things great again.

In the 21st Century, as our democracy has matured, our freedoms have multiplied. Culturally, economically, politically, sexually; whichever way you cut it our liberal democracy now grants us greater freedoms than at perhaps any point in human history. Our democracy is no longer confined to the ballot box. In every aspect of our lives, we now demand the freedom to choose, to shape, to define.

The freedoms we have all become accustomed to have an impact on society:

As societies become more free, traditional deference to authority withers.
As we become more free, the views within our society grow increasingly disparate.
As we have become more free, our collective comprehension has dissolved, our ability to empathise with those of a different disposition has diminished, and the consensus that previously bound our political culture has been lost.

What we’re see across the western world right now is that this excess of freedom leads to the destabilization of society.

The first manifestation of this has been the crumbling of the political center ground. In the 1951 General Election, 97% of voters cast their ballot for Clement Attlee’s Labour or Winston Churchill’s Conservatives. In last month’s local elections the two parties that have ruled this country for over 100 years could barely muster 60% of the popular vote.


Another sign that we’ve rejected the old way of politics is the rising popularity of political extremes, be that Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Syriza on the radical left, or Front Nationale, Pegida, and, of course, Donald Trump on the political right.


What we’re seeing is the rise of a type of populist politics fundamentally at odds with liberal democracy.

The passions of the mob have always been seen as a threat to democratic rule. As James Madison, the 4th President of the United States, acknowledged, democracies, “have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” But today the democratization of the media adds a lethal new ingredient into this cocktail of historical risks.
By bypassing the traditional media, the internet makes everyone with a smart phone a potential journalist and removes any editorial moderation from the discourse- a fact to which anyone here who has been on Twitter can testify.

Digital media gives each of us the power to create for ourselves a personalised news stream. But the self-selection this entails means these have a tendency to act as an echo chamber; they play to our existing prejudices, they exacerbate the polarization of opinions, and they remove all nuance from the discussion. This undermines the critical function hitherto played by a free-press in a democracy.

When we factor in the increasing fuzziness between the entertainment industry and politics we begin to see trends that threaten our democracy; the triumph of emotion over reason, of narcissism over empiricism, and of extremism over compromise.

Reasoned deliberation is at the very heart of a functioning democracy, it’s indispensable to democratic debate, and it is crumbling before our eyes.

Our hyper-democracy has made this a more emotional and a more chaotic age. And the historian within me cannot ignore the lessons of the past, which show, as Plato predicted, that chaos is fertile ground for an opportunistic tyrant.

The tumult of the English Civil War gave us the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. [Out of the embers of] revolutionary France [grew] Napoleon Bonaparte. A flailing democratic experiment in Russia [saw] the rise of Vladimir Putin. And a brief flirtation with democracy laid the ground for General Sisi’s coup in Egypt.

Into today’s political chaos, right-wing populism has entered the fray. And for the first time since the Second World War, mainstream politicians in Europe are openly flirting with authoritarianism and racism, and it’s paying electoral dividends.

So, to Mr Trump. As his challengers have fallen, one by one, to his brash, incoherent, and hate-filled rhetoric, it is increasingly hard not to see a reflection of Plato’s tyrant seizing his moment and taking control of the obedient mob.

For all its flaws and setbacks, in the second half of the 20th Century liberal democracy, allied with liberal capitalism has by-and-large brought stability and prosperity to the world. My generation is too young to remember a time when Fascism or Communism presented a genuine alternative form of government. Maybe we’re complacent? Maybe we’re ignorant of the horrors people experienced under those systems? Maybe we need reminding that our world order is not immortal?

We cannot assume the forces that have undermined democracy throughout history no longer apply.

Whatever the result across the Atlantic in November, the paradigms that have governed politics for my entire life are under threat. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, we are facing the radical possibility that this is the end of politics as we know it. Fukuyama was wrong. This is an extinction level event for the liberal world. History is once again on the march, and the death knell is sounding for democracy as we know it.