The insidious threat to democracy

Civilian and non-democratic governments have had a long interplay during our political history.

Democracy evolves slowly, ensuing from compromises. Of late a new, dangerous peril to democracy has surfaced: the threat of populism, posing serious menace to liberal and democratic thought, practice and institutions. Its insidiousness lies in its adoption of language and idiom of democracy while being intrinsically non-pluralistic and authoritarian.

Populism may be of the right or left or may be born in the bowels of barracks, but they all share commonalities: the ‘people’ are glorified above a corrupt elite, appealing to emotions, distorting facts to achieve contrived agendas for power, belief in political infallibility, millennialism, xenophobia and misogynism. Economic discontent and cultural insecurity provide fertile soil.

There is a tendency to project an imagined, higher good of a community, juxtaposing social over individual freedoms. The communal good takes precedence over an elitist establishment, while denigrated old guards often surround populists.

In the pursuit of the imagined ‘higher social good’, sacrosanct institutions of democracy like the constitution, the executive, legislature, judiciary and free press are challenged and maligned. It is only a small step from this to the so-called ‘communal weal’ becoming the preserve of an intolerant, authoritarian leadership. Any opposition is regarded as betrayal of a holy cause.

Rather than being focused on a narrative partaking of facts and evidence, competent governance, service delivery, social amelioration, freedom of expression and rule of law, the emphasis is on acquisition and retention of political power by whatever means possible.

Resort is made to use of psychological tools like subliminal messaging through TV, social media and fake news, manipulating minds and conduct, especially of the aspirational middle classes, educated but economically and politically excluded, directing discontent against minorities, towards xenophobia and ultra-nationalism.

Less rather than more democracy is conceived to be the remedy for accountability. No real effort is made for social restructuring, land reforms and redistribution of wealth. Putative reformist agenda becomes a tool for political engineering and witch-hunting of the opposition. Anti-corruption hysteria becomes a front for personal deviant malfeasances.

Democracy is castigated as an inefficient system and, in absence of serious land and tax reforms, politicians are deprecated as urban or rural boors and incompetent thieves, while other powerbrokers are conveniently kept outside the accountability net.

The purpose of such an illiberal ideology is to shake popular belief in government by the elected representatives of the people, paving way for justifying unelected autocracy and intolerant authoritarianism. Histories are distorted so that people forget that the only consensually made Constitution of 1973, which holds the body fabric of the country together to this day, was possible during civilian rule and that most of the national tragedies like the 1971 East Pakistan debacle, jihadism and aligning with the war on terror, with its deadly fallout still continuing, occurred during periods of absence of democracy.

Populism appeals to emotions, belittling reason and logic. Messiahnism and cultistism are its hallmarks. Politics is not, in this case, the art of live and let live, of consensus making and compromises. Rather, it transforms into a Manichean battle between the pure and the sinful, the forces of good and evil. Your political opponent becomes an enemy with whom no consensus is possible. It’s a zero sum battle: there is no grey area of compromise which historically has been the most transformative agent that converted, over centuries, despotic monarchies into democracies in the west.

The classic example of how populism impells unreflective impetuosity among followers in pursuit of their blind beliefs, was the 2020 attack by Trump followers, in the biggest democracy in the world, on the US Congress to undo the electoral college result, convinced that Trump was cheated out of victory. The attack by Bolsonaro’s supporters on Brazilian key buildings like the Presidential Palace, Parliament and Supreme Court, unwilling to accept his defeat, was another such instance where populist fury arrogates to itself the right to go to the extent of subverting state sovereignty and democracy.

As an example of the extreme social atomisation and polarisation that populism creates, a UK survey showed that Brexiteers would be seriously disinclined at their daughters marrying into anti-Brexit families. Such extreme fragmentation of the social consensus can have grave consequences for social peace, becoming easy grist to political and religious adventurers, with nascent violence just floating beneath the social fabric.

A populist wave spreads the world over, in Europe, USA, Latin America, Asia.

Economic crises, especially post-2008 financial crash, lead to plummeting growth, shrinkage of wage increase and enhanced wealth inequality.

Religious resurgence became a political tool as in India; fear from immigrants and cultural threat (France, Hungary, Germany, etc) became strong appeals.

In our context a sinister dimension is added: a desire for a centralised, Presidential system of government opposed to empowerment of regional cultures and aspirations. A parliamentary form of government based upon plurality is the only way a diverse country with Baloch, Sindhi, Punjabi and Pashtoon ethnicities can remain united with an equal sense of participation in policymaking and fair resource sharing.

Often dangerous allusions to autocratic, authoritarian political systems like those prevalent in Arab countries and China are made as being economically more efficient. It is questionable if in a culturally diverse country such as ours, sub-nationalities feeling excluded from a system of fair distribution can lead to sustained economic growth.

The separation of Bengal is a telling story.

How can these incipient dangers to democracy be repelled? Education, press, media and intellectuals have a critical role to play in protecting liberalism and democracy.

The intelligentsia must lay bare the manner and methods populism recruits: fake news, intense social media propaganda, spread of hero worshiping, invoking chauvinism, nationalism, mythologing religious appeal and nostalgia for a grandiose, ideal past, like the MAGA slogan in Trump’s USA.

In 1933 Wilhelm Ropke expounded upon the responsibility of liberals to expose the threat Nazism held out to democracy. In the same vein in 1967 Noam Chomsky in his article, ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’, reiterated why it was the highest moral duty of intellectuals not only to expose but push back against the dangers to human freedoms and welfare posed by suppression of truth, justice and reason, the essential liet motifs of liberalism and antidotes to populism.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 26^th, 2023.

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