Democracy and the rule of law as election framing
Trump being elected again would be a terrible thing. For the United States and the rest of the world. Trump is a chaos agent and hates democracy and the rule of law.
Democracy and the rule of law as election issues
Most Americans who have any civic sense at all would presumably think both democracy and the rule of law are good things. Unfortunately, a not-insignificant number of Trumpistas think democracy should be democracy for their version of real Americans, something like the herrenvolk democracy the states of the segregated South had from roughly 1880-1965. And rule of law means to that the law should rule over those people, not over narcissistic white billionaires who hate the same people the segregationists hate. (That could also be called “rule by law” rather than the “rule of law.”)
But democracy is a constructive form of free government because it gives people a way to hold the government responsible for its actions and get it to address their needs, real and sometimes imagined. Simply having votes between different parties and candidates becomes only a formality if they are no more than personality contests in which substantive policies are never up for serious discussion and change.
The late philosopher Agnes Heller wrote in 2017 about how the rise of fascist movements in the first half of the 20th century anticipated the more recent rise of what Hungary’s Vikor Orbán calls “illiberal democracy”:
All the leaders of all totalitarian parties saw liberalism as their greatest enemy. However, with the exception of the National Socialists [Nazis], they did not fight against or even abolish the term "democracy" because of this, instead they illiberalized democracy, just as Viktor Orbán does today. Thus, like fascism with the fascist state, the Communist state was regarded by Bolshevism as the true, real, substantive democracy, compared to the liberal democracies, which were understood as untrue and merely "formal democracies" – and thus as enemies of true, illiberal democracy.1 [my emphasis]
As she observed elsewhere: “The term ‘illiberal’ is not new; Mussolini described his project with the same word, adding to it, at the beginning of the twentieth century, that liberalism is out of fashion, and is dead.”2
The “liberal” part of liberal democracy includes the rule of law, individual rights, and institutional limits on governmental power, e.g., separation of powers including independent courts, federalism, individual rights.
But even in liberal democracies, there are conflicts - or contradictions, if we want to be Hegelian about it - between democracy (even liberal democracy) and economic liberalism. Severe inequality puts real limits on democracy, and can destroy it, along with the liberal governmental institutions. Radical deregulation of business practices, dropping limits on the role of private money in political campaigns, corporate control of media, the “freedom” to pollute the environment, allowing unrestricted racial and gender discrimination: these can all undermine democracy and liberal political/governmental institutions. And they do so in reality.
Liberalism as it developed particularly in the West grew up alongside nationalism, which often contained strong ethnic and racist elements, which also conflict with liberal democratic practices and institutions. The fact that liberalism developed very much in connection with nationalism is also important for understanding the history of Zionism, which is currently much discussed in the context of the Gaza war.
Democracy and the rule law for … what?
The ritual of going to vote may be a pleasant experience for people showing up at the polling place every couple of years. But the right to vote is important because voters need to vote for something, for things they need, and to protect all the rights they should have a citizens of a liberal democracy.
Chris Ogden recently reminded us that the current year with a large number of elections taking place - including EU Parliament elections, the US Presidential election, Indian and Russian parliamentary elections - could wind up being a year of “democracide,”3 a concept that has also been used by others, including Clifford May of the liberal-interventionist Foundation for Defense of Democracies.4
Ogden focuses in particular on the ever-evolving topic of media influence on elections. It’s an important theme, but one that is also often subject to superficial and conspiracy-theory spin. But how people get their news is continually changing, and learning to use sources critical involves some awareness of that:
The interplay of social media, Big Tech business models and GenAI will increasingly influence the political sphere, especially in national elections and referendums. This promotes changes from previous electoral interventions, whether it is Russia's interference in the 2016 US presidential election or the disinformation campaigns in the 2016 Brexit referendum in the Great Britain. Even before GenAI, a 2019 study by Oxford University found that in 70 countries, governments or political parties had used social media to spread propaganda during elections.
In April 2021, investigators also revealed that Facebook employees "repeatedly allowed leaders and politicians to use the platform to deceive the public or harass opponents, even though the wrongdoing had been previously called to their attention." The fact that fake accounts inflated the popularity of politicians in India is just one example among many. Indicative of the magnitude of the problem are the 26.5 billion fake accounts removed by Facebook owner Meta between 2018 and 2022. In 2022, almost one in five Twitter accounts was classified as fake.
Novelty can be challenging and sometimes dangerous. But voters and political parties always have to adapt. It’s not the first time that has been the case: the printing press, radio, television, mimeograph machines (extra points to anyone who knows that those were!), and e-mail all had to be incorporated into political life. “Phone banking” was just not a thing back when Abraham Lincoln was campaigning for the US Presidency.
Issues matter
Campaign techniques change. But politicians have always had to find ways to connect abstract concepts to particular concerns. In American and European politics in 2024, protecting democracy is an important framing. But the abstract concept of Democracy is not some aesthetic icon to admire. Not to throw shade on the literary talents of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson - who themselves were very much focused on real contemporary conflicts - but democratic politics has to effectively address specific issues and conditions that people face.
The most prominent issue the European far right groups are using to incite fear and to promote hatred of liberal democracy is immigration, including refugees. Obviously Republican insurrectionists in the US, like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott who is currently channeling the evil spirit of John Calhoun, are also using the immigration issue to undermine the US system of democratic governance.5
Recently a more-or-less clandestine meeting of radical-right “identitarians” in Germany, including a notorious Austrian xenophobe named Martin Sellner, was reported by an investigative news organization called Correctiv, promoted a concept the radical right is currently using, “remigration,” a term that has been used for decades in a specific practical sense but which they have now repurposed to mean ethnic cleansing. Including expulsions of German citizens who don’t meet the identitarians’ criteria of being sufficiently German, or Aryan, or whatever.
News of the gathering sparked massive pro-democracy demonstrations in Germany, followed a few days later by such demonstrations in Austria. And pro-democracy politicians made a specific issue out of it:
News of the [quasi-clandestine far-right] gathering sent shockwaves across Germany at a time when the AfD [the far right Alternative for Germany party] is soaring in opinion polls, just months ahead of three major regional elections in eastern Germany where their support is strongest. The anti-immigration party confirmed the presence of its members at the meeting but has denied taking on the "remigration" project championed by Sellner.
But leading politicians including Chancellor Olaf Scholz [Social Democrat], who joined a demonstration last weekend, said any plan to expel immigrants or citizens alike amounted to "an attack against our democracy, and in turn, on all of us". He urged "all to take a stand – for cohesion, for tolerance, for our democratic Germany".
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser [Green] went so far as to say in the newspapers of the Funke press group that the far-right meeting was reminiscent of "the horrible Wannsee conference", where the Nazis planned the extermination of European Jews in 1942.6
Deutsche Welle reported7:
Democracy needs abstractions and symbols - but also specific policy issues
It’s not enough for pro-democracy parties to appeal in an absract way to the value of democracy and the rule of law. They also have to push back directly against the demagoguery and false claims the xenophobes make. And it simply does not work for center-left parties to adopt me-too-only-nicer positions on issues like immigration. Yes, they do have to manage immigration issues in a competent way. “Hey, we hate immigrants, too, but we’re marginally more polite about it than the drooling-at-the-mouth xenophobes” - that just validates the position of those elements who really are looking to commit “democracide.”
In the German case, Scholz and Faeser prior to this had been playing the tough-on-immigration stance just like Joe Biden has been doing for basically his entire Presidency, and Obama more-or-less before him. It’s not defusing the xenophobia. The Texas Governor is even now doing a clown-ass attempt at staging a Fort Sumter moment.
Pro-democracy parties have to fight for democracy and the rule of law by fighting for positions that strengthen democracy and promote the real interest of ordinary people. They have to take democracy seriously by practicing it seriously by debunking the anti-democracy talking points and building popular constituencies using policies that are not just “MSNBC liberal” feel-good abstractions. And they also have to recognize that far right parties look in particular radicalized conservatives8, i.e., those adhering to nominally conservative parties, to help bring them to power. This is also not new. It was the formally conservative President Paul von Hindenburg who appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in 1933. He had other choices, and he chose Hitler.
In the US elections this year, the Democrats have potent issues to motivate voters, including protecting abortion rights and supporting union organizing. Defending the right to vote against Republican election-suppression measures is also a potent way to link abstract Democracy to more immediate democratic concerns, e.g., not allowing armed goons at polling places or drop boxes to intimate minority voters.
Heller, Agnes (2017): Von Mussolini bis Orbán: Der illiberale Geist. Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 8:2017, 73. My translation from the German.
Heller’s comparison of the Communist and fascist conceptions of democracy can certainly be questioned more closely. While Communism traces its ideological roots back to the radical democracy and utopian socialism of the early 19th century, fascism including the Nazi version had its ídeological roots in the anti-democracy, reactionary tradition of Franz von Baader and Edmund Burke. As she notes, the Nazis did explicitly reject the whole concept of democracy. Soviet Communism did claim to be the truest and highest form of democracy, while the Nazis viewed their system as a definitive rejection of the “Jewish” notion of democracy. See: Kolnai, Aurel (1988 [1938]): The War Against the West. New York: Viking Press.
Heller, Agnes (2017): Review: The Rise of Illiberalism in Europe: A Discussion of Péter Krasztev and Jon Van Til's "The Hungarian Patient: Social Opposition to an Illiberal Democracy". Perspectives on Politics 15:2, 543.
Ogden, Chris (2024): 2024: Das Jahr des "Democracide"? Makroskop 01/24/2024. <https://makroskop.eu/02-2024/2024-das-jahr-des-democracide/> (Accessed: 2024-27-01). My translations from German.
May, Clifford (2013): Guilty of democracide. National Post (Canada) 07/12/2013, A17. <https://nationalpost.com/opinion/clifford-d-may-guilty-of-democracide> (Accessed: 2024-27-01).
Choi, Matthew & Downen, Robert (2024): “Hold the line”: Republicans rally to Abbott’s defense in border standoff with Biden. Texas Tribune 01/25/2024. <https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/25/greg-abbott-border-republicans-joe-biden/> (Accessed: 2024-27-01).
Germany: 250,000 march in protests against far-right AfD. Le Monde 01/20/2024. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/01/20/germany-over-100-000-march-in-protests-against-far-right-afd_6450503_4.html> (Accessed: 2024-27-01).
Huge demonstrations across Germany against the far right. DW News 01/20/2024. (Accessed: 2024-27-01).
Strobl, Natascha (2021): Radikalisierter Konservatismus.Eine Analyse. Berlin: Suhrkamp.