Why American Democracy Failed
2nd September 2024
The word ‘democracy’ still enjoys considerable cachet. It is invoked with reverence by politicians as various as Nancy Pelosi and Nigel Farage. The difference is that while the populist Right lauds the democratic ideal as something from which we have strayed, Left-liberals yammer on about ‘our democracy’ in defence of an unpopular status quo, dominated by a nexus of like-minded political, media, and cultural elites. The urgency of guarding against ‘authoritarian strongmen’ is cited as the legitimising basis of this regime. Even if the people start clamouring for a stronger, more personally accountable executive, it falls to this mass of faceless mandarins to save them from their own misguided preferences.
In Auron MacIntyre’s new book, The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, the Right is given a lesson which, until recently, only the most callow, sentimental progressives needed to hear: it is a fatal error to worship warm-sounding ideals in abstraction from political reality. The left-wing rebranding of oligarchy as ‘our democracy’ is a cynical lie, but it is politically clever at a time when conservatives still lionise the democratic form of government while failing to take seriously its obvious breakdown in practice.