This should not distract us from the thesis of the book and the questions it raises. David Runciman argues that democracy is threatened by new sorts of predicaments. Military coups d’état are passé. Even Trump (or, I would add, his successor) doesn’t represent the main danger; the new threats are subtler. Even people who subvert democracy, like populists do, believe or pretend that they are defending it. An environmental or nuclear catastrophe could end democracy, but a technological takeover is more likely.
Democratic failure / Runciman goes from a “minimal definition” of democracy as that which chooses its political leaders via regular elections, “which remain the bedrock of democratic politics,” to a more general and fuzzy one that includes such features as “democratic legislatures, independent law courts and a free press.” What about other individual liberties? Perhaps democracy also includes those, or perhaps not. The word “liberty” is absent from the book, although the less committal “freedom” occurs once every 15 pages or so.
Runciman believes that democracy is undermined by the decline of representative democracy and the rise of populism, which revolves around the idea that “democracy has been stolen from the people by the elites.” If democracy worked well, he believes, there would be no populist backlash. Working well implies providing a “collective experience.” This so-called collective experience is more difficult to pull off in the absence of war—or, at least, of a traditional war, not waged by drones—and when great social reforms have already been accomplished, decades ago. In the Progressive Era, democracy was able to tame populism because of social reforms and World War I. In Runciman’s view, war also has the benefit of reducing wealth inequality (because wealth is destroyed) and thus keeping populism at bay.
Runciman argues that referenda provide only the appearance of democracy, while elected representatives can manage the inconsistent, unrealistic, or inefficient demands of the electorate. Pure democracy is “reckless” and “terrifying.” But he also admits that representative democracy implies more power for the politicians and the experts.
At any rate, he writes: “The threat to democracy is not manipulation. It is mindlessness.” Both pure democracy and technology are fueling mindlessness.
One reason why modern democracy tends to destroy itself, argues Runciman, is a tension between individual dignity and “collective benefits.” Individual dignity is better satisfied by pure or direct democracy, but such democracy’s inconsistent or irrational policies compromise the “collective benefits” of efficiency and economic growth. The resulting mess is easily exploited by populist leaders who sell “identity politics” as a booster to individual dignity. (In return, the populist leader gets more power for himself.)
Voters are not interested in big issues. Large risks like environmental catastrophe and nuclear war become difficult to control rationally. (It’s unclear why those dangers wouldn’t give us some good “collective experience.”) People grow more frustrated:
Modern democracy is riddled with holes. Many people do feel neglected. Their views seem to count for little and their representatives often appear uninterested in hearing them out. Contemporary populism feeds off this sense of disconnect.
How Runciman would reconnect people is unclear. How would representative democracy reconnect what it has disconnected? And how can populism and the mob do it?
How Democracy Ends neglects other promising explanations for people’s growing frustration under the all-powerful democratic state. Standard public choice theory explains how organized interests game the system. Anthony de Jasay presents a different but astute theory. In his 1985 book The State, he argues that the more the state responds to sectional demands, the more it frustrates other parts of the public, and the more it must intervene to respond to the latter complaints, and so forth in a cascade of ever-frustrating interventions. Everybody is both helped and hindered by the state, which fuels growing discontent.
In de Jasay’s perspective, authoritarian democracy is unstable because it is essentially unlimited—that is, responsible for everything and everyone. For Runciman, democracy seems to be a value by itself—perhaps the ultimate value—and only its subversion is dangerous. Democracy has failed; long live democracy!
Zuckerberg and Leviathan / A strong thread runs through How Democracy Ends that questions the new technologies represented by computers and robots. “Politics,” writes Runciman, “needs to regain a measure of control over these machines and over the people who currently control them.”
In his view, “the network” undermines democracy. This network is made of the computers that connect people with others, people with machines, and machines with machines. This interconnectedness becomes essential to people’s lives. Social networks provide “a sense of belonging” that substitutes for the state and enhances tribalism. Leviathan itself—the all-powerful state—is a machine, as Thomas Hobbes imagined. There is often something guru-like and vaporous in Runciman’s descriptions.
Yet the Cambridge professor recognizes that digital technology has reinforced Leviathan more than it has fulfilled its original promises of liberating individuals from the powers that be. It also intensifies voters’ cognitive biases through “fake news” and the isolation of individuals in partisan silos, as any regular user of social networks can observe.
Participation in social media may resemble ancient direct democracy, but without its built-in controls: “Twitter is sometimes described as being like the Wild West. But really it is the closest thing we have to democracy of the ancient world: fickle, violent, overpowering.”
Reading Runciman on technology, I was reminded of Jacques Attali, a French economist who was an adviser to socialist president François Mitterand in the 1980s. In a 1978 book titled The New French Economy, Attali argued that “self-surveillance capitalism” was replacing the free market ideal, and that only socialism could prevent this new totalitarianism. He warned that pocket calculators were the prelude to surveillance by electronic devices. In my first book, From Liberalism to Anarcho-Capitalism, published in Paris in 1983, I mocked Attali’s dramatization of the pocket calculator, but perhaps he was on to something.
Runciman sees the danger of mass surveillance but, just like Attali, he does not realize that the state is the problem. The author of How Democracy Ends thinks that Mark Zuckerberg is “a bigger threat to American democracy than Donald Trump.” Really? He views Leviathan as a potentially good machine that can regain control of the private and corporate machine: “Leviathan still has life left in it.” Franklin D. Roosevelt was the face of “Leviathan in action,” he writes approvingly. We need an activist democracy again:
If American democracy found the strength to face down corporate titans like Standard Oil at the start of the twentieth century, why shouldn’t it take on Google and Facebook today?
Instead of criticizing corporations, online advertising, and “the consumerist madness” à la John Kenneth Galbraith, Runciman should focus on the danger of Leviathan. Information and surveillance are dangerous when they can be used by the state for coercive control. Of course, the state can be captured by private interests, but the problem is the state, not the private interests. The power of advertising is nothing compared to the state’s prisons.
Libertarianism to the rescue / Runciman idealizes democracy as a system of government. He thinks that “collective decision-making works better than any individual’s choices if our biases are allowed to cancel each other out.” That’s a big “if.” He generally ignores voters’ rational ignorance—the fact that an individual votes blind because the process of gathering and analyzing information is not worth the cost when he has only one vote. “Every vote counts,” Runciman echoes. A single vote may count to boost individual dignity, but not to change election results. The author of How Democracy Ends does not seem to see how voting and mindlessness fit together.
He ignores the problem of aggregating preferences among different individuals. He throws around the word “we” like bread at the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, ignoring the demonstration (notably by Kenneth Arrow in his 1951 seminal book Social Choice and Individual Values) that, at least in most cases, collective values are either meaningless or totalitarian. He also ignores public choice analysis.
Ideally, Runciman seems to believe, democratic politics should control everything. But he does not explain how that would not be the dictatorship of the mindless. Representative democracy does not solve the problem for the simple reason that the representatives are elected.
Sometimes the reader will be puzzled by Runciman’s economics. For example, he does not seem to know what “public goods” are, since he wants them to be “equitably distributed.” By definition, a public good can be consumed by everybody once it is provided to anybody. Perhaps he is not using the expression in its technical sense. Or perhaps he is thinking of “public goods” that are only such for part of the public, but this opens a Pandora’s box and an explanation would have been welcome. Then again, he may just be speaking in catchy formulas.
He blames economics for supplanting “the messiness of political life” by “the clean lines of perfect competition and efficient markets.” With due respect, his own argument would have been less messy with some cleaner modeling.
I am puzzled by a remark he makes when contrasting his ideal of slow-moving, thoughtful representative democracy with the addiction and superficiality of social networks. He claims that “buyer’s remorse is relatively uncommon in the world of online commerce because there isn’t time for it.” This looks hopelessly Galbraithian, again. According to the National Retail Federation, 15–20% of items bought online are returned, which actually fuels a whole industry that purchases returns for reselling (at Dollar stores, for example) or recycling. One would like to be so easily reimbursed when not satisfied with public services. Many would like to be able to change countries as easily as they switch from Amazon to Walmart.
After briefly discussing Robert Nozick’s anarchist utopia, Runciman dismisses it, perhaps because he does not find it practical. But there are more practical versions of this ideal. In his 1969 In Praise of the Consumer Society, the late French philosopher Raymond Ruyer wrote that “real anarchism, feasible and realized, as opposed to mere emotional statements, is simply the [classical] liberal economy.”
If he studied libertarianism more carefully, Runciman might realize that democracy is just an imperfect means of managing public goods, changing the political guard when necessary, and restraining the state. Democracy should not be imagined as a way to choose coercive moral values. In Law, Legislation and Liberty, Friedrich Hayek wrote that “democracy is basically a negative value which serves as protection against despotism and tyranny.”
Contra Runciman, politics is not a panacea, “political emptiness” is not a terminal disease, and it is not true that “only politics can rescue politics.” Private and voluntary activities would beneficially replace a large part of politics. If the rule of the mob, the rule of the experts, and the rule of the politicos are all fraught with great dangers, which Runciman might concede, the problem must be the rule itself or its scope, not who happens to rule. The solution is to severely constrain state power.
What about tyranny? / Philosophers or political scientists usually imagine that democracy ends with some form of tyranny. Jean-François Revel, author of the 1983 book How Democracies End, saw communist totalitarianism as the danger. For de Jasay, democracy ends in state capitalism, where the democratic state monopolizes both political and economic power. This state will ultimately terminate electoral competition because it is inconsistent with economic management: the workers cannot decide their own salaries at the ballot box.
Tyranny is quiet in Runciman’s book. The word “tyranny” appears only four times in the body of the text—including once as “corporate tyranny.” To be fair, another occurrence refers to Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority.” Runciman admits that “pure democracy is a terrifying thing. It’s all too easy for the crowd to turn on any individual who displeases it.” Indeed. But perhaps he should name tyranny as the danger.
The book’s conclusion is anticlimactic: at some point in the future, democracy ends or perhaps it does not end; and there is no solution to this non-event. The last two sentences of the book (before a science-fictional epilogue) read: “This is not, after all, the end of democracy. But this is how democracy ends.”
More to the point, Runciman suggests, democracy will have changed but, in most places, will have remained democracy of a sort. It will reign over a nonviolent and dull society of old people going through the motions of voting occasionally. They will find partial dignity in the network, but many governance problems will be unsolvable. Addicts and suicide deaths will be numerous, as prefigured in many advanced societies of today.
Let me complement the description. Individuals—if we can still call them such—will smile and be happy, like in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. They won’t have much choice anyway. Why doesn’t Runciman call this tyranny? Not Facebook “tyranny,” but real tyranny from Leviathan, even if it is softer than in George Orwell’s 1984. Runciman brings us close to this, but he stays fixated on Zuckerberg against the good Leviathan.
I would agree that Facebook’s “community” gibberish and standards à la Mrs. Grundy often look like the Brave New World. But Leviathan’s power is the real danger. It’s much easier to disconnect from Facebook than to close one’s account with the state. How Democracy Ends may help ask the right questions, but it does not provide useful answers.
