Death by a Thousand Cuts

The Slow Demise of Democracy

Matt Qvortrup

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110713435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Fascism & Totalitarianism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Putting the current crisis of democracy into historical perspective, Death by a Thousand Cuts chronicles how would-be despots, dictators, and outright tyrants have finessed the techniques of killing democracies earlier in history, in the 20 th Century, and how today's autocrats increasingly continue to do so in the 21 st. It shows how autocratic government becomes a kleptocracy, sustained only to enrich the ruler and his immediate family. But the book also addresses the problems of being a dictator and considers if dictatorships are successful in delivering public policies, and finally, how autocracies break down.

We tend to think of democratic breakdowns as dramatic events, such as General Pinochet's violent coup in Chile, or Generalissimo Franco's overthrow of the Spanish Republic. But this is not how democracies tend to die – only five percent of democracies end like this. Most often, popular government is brought down gradually; almost imperceptibly. Based in part on Professor Qvortrup's BBC Programme Death by a Thousand Cuts (Radio-4, 2019), the book shows how complacency is the greatest danger for the survival of government by the people. Recently democratically elected politicians have used crises as a pretext for dismantling democracy. They follow a pattern we have seen in all democracies since the dawn of civilisation. The methods used by Octavian in the dying days of the Roman Republic were almost identical to those used by Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán in 2020. And, sadly, there are no signs that the current malaise will go away.

Death by a Thousand Cuts adds substance to a much-discussed topic: the threat to democracy. It provides evidence and historical context like no other book on the market. Written in an accessible style with vignettes as well as new empirical data, the books promises to be the defining book on the topic. This book will help readers who are concerned about the longevity of democracy understand when and why democracy is in danger of collapsing, and alert them to the warning signs of its demise.

Chapter One: The Theories of Democratic Breakdown

First then, it is clear that if we know the causes by which

constitutions are destroyed we also know the causes

by which they are preserved.

Aristotle¹

Democracies, Karl Popper noticed, are countries, the “governments of which we can get rid without bloodshed”. The philosopher went on to observe that in these, “the social institutions provide means by which the rulers may be dismissed [peacefully], and the social traditions ensure that these institutions will not be easily destroyed by those who are in power”². The question in this book is if the currently existing democracies have ‘social traditions’ that are strong enough to withstand those who may want to destroy them. Or, are we witnessing a period of what the political scientist Larry Diamond has called, “Democratic regression”?³ To answer this question the book looks at histories of earlier democratic breakdowns to answer the question: when is democracy in danger of withering away?

One of the most conspicuous facts about demagogues is that they often have followers who follow them without a hint of criticism and believe that these individuals have an almost supernatural ability to ‘make their countries great’. This is nothing new. In fact, one of the earliest sociological analyses, written at the beginning of the 20^th century, focussed on this.

In his famous book Economics and Society, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864 – 1920), wondered why people obey orders and accept that others rule over them. In traditional societies – under feudalism and in certain tribes – the reason was tradition. One group of people, say, the elders or the chiefs, had always ruled, and people living in these societies, just accepted traditions, “by virtue of the sanctity of age-old rules and powers”⁴.

But as societies became more modern, they also tended to become more rational, based on expert-knowledge, technology and decisions by governments were based on legal rules, which themselves were established by “those elevated to authority”, but it was “fundamentally domination through knowledge”⁵. This society is characterised by ‘the rule of law’, and by rational arguments which were ultimately based on scientific or rationalised knowledge. Weber himself was one of the experts. Trained as a lawyer, and a full professor at a distinguished university, he was not a man of the people. And, yet, he was aware that the purely rational-bureaucratic state could appear stale, and he accepted that in “bureaucratic organisations, the holders of power … have a tendency to make use [of their knowledge] to increase their power still further”⁶. It was under these circumstances that a third type of rule could emerge. Sometimes the people, or more commonly a segment of them, would place their trust in, what Weber called, ‘Ein charismatischer Führer’ – “a charismatic leader”. Readers who do not speak German might misinterpret this term. The noun ‘Führer’, in English (and other languages), has become synonymous with the Third Reich. That, however, is not the case. In German the word, while used by the Nazis, has no such connotations and means simply ‘leader’. Yet, Weber’s Charismatiker (to use a synonym) was an extraordinary personality; someone who for sometimes irrational reasons was able to spellbind and mesmerize his followers.

This charismatic leader was not necessarily an extraordinary individual, “What is alone important is how the individual is … regarded by those subjects to charismatic authority, by his ‘followers’ and ‘disciples’.” In part, people would follow this individual because he – in their eyes – had performed a miracle, but that was not, said Weber, the essential matter. Rather, for those who choose to follow a charismatic individual, the reason for the devotion stems from “the conception that it is the duty of those subject to charismatic authority to recognize its genuineness and act accordingly”. And, he went on, “psychologically this recognition is a matter of complete personal devotion, arising out of enthusiasm, or of fear and hope”⁷.

There are more than superficial similarities between this portrait of the ‘charismatic’ leader and modern-day leaders like Trump. The followers of the 45^th President of the United States too were – in many cases, at least, driven by ‘personal devotion’, which as motivated out of ‘enthusiasm’ (like at his rallies), and ‘fear’ (of losing livelihood and status), and the ‘hope’ that this extraordinary leader will use his magic powers to save them.

One might consider Weber as prescient when he wrote that, for the followers of the charismatic leaders,

Charismatic domination means a rejection of all ties to any external order in favor of the exclusive genuine mentality of the prophet and hero. Hence, its attitude is revolutionary and transvalues everything; it makes a sovereign break with all traditional or rational norms⁸.

But, in fact, he was just writing about leaders, who shared the same traits that always characterise these politicians. The followers of Lenin in Weber’s day were rather similar to those who put their trust in Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, Turkey’s president Erdogan, and the former US President Donald Trump.

From the outside, this devotion to the charismatic leader could and would appear irrational, especially when contrasted to the rational-bureaucratic state where everything is “bound to intellectually analysable rules”⁹. For those who see it as their duty to follow the charismatic leader, the virtue of his leadership (and it tends to be a man) is that his “authority is specifically irrational in the sense of being foreign to all rules”¹⁰. Hence all rational arguments fall on deaf ears, and the charismatic ruler is always given the benefit of the doubt by his followers and viewed with incomprehension by his opponents. When he has not performed miracles, or just not delivered, there is always an excuse, and the reason is always conspiracies against him. Hence those who follow a charismatic leader – whether a religious prophet or in this case a politician – seek affirmation. And, hence they select information that is congruent with their previously established perceptions. In the words of a recent study, “populist voters self-select media content that actively articulates the divide between the ‘innocent’ people and ‘culprit’ others”.¹¹

To ignore this appeal – and to be blind to the rather uninspiring system of a rational bureaucratic state governed by experts – is something established democratic politicians (and those who endorse this system) do at our peril. To understand why countries, fall prey to demagogues, and sometimes go on to become dictatorships, we need to appreciate and empathize with followers who bring would-be tyrants to power. This does not mean that we have to agree with them, let alone concede to their demands. Empathy, it has been said, is the ability to step into someone else’s shoes and then step out again¹². If we just say that those who follow a charismatic leader are unintelligent, if you do as Hilary Clinton, who publicly stated that “you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”, then you are likely to miss the point and suffer the consequences.

But why is it that some people feel tempted to follow a charismatic leader? Weber hinted at the answer by saying that they do so out of “enthusiasm” or of “despair and hope”. But he did not elaborate.

Others who have written about demagogues and despots have answered this question. And the recurrent theme is hurt pride. Like today, many coups and overthrows of democracy, whether the ones in Ancient Athens and Rome, or more recently, like in the past century, were often instigated by individuals who claimed to speak on behalf of the people.

The breakdown of democracies – or, as they used to be called, republics – is not a novel subject of inquiry. The great minds who have pondered the issue range from Plato to Hannah Arendt, and in between the likes of Aristotle, Alexander Hamilton and Karl Marx, to name but a few.

Many of them were not optimistic. “Democracies”, wrote James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 10, “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention”, and he later went on, “they have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths”¹³. Whether the process was slow or fast, was generally contentious. Some – and the Fourth President of the United States was one of them – believed that the process was swift, and that republics would soon fall prey to demagogues. Madison would have been pleasantly surprised that the American republic has lasted over 240 years.

James Madison was a keen scholar, and he was well-versed in the classic theories of earlier democracies. One of them was developed by Aristotle – the one-time tutor to Alexander the Great (356 – 327BC). Citing examples of how democracy had been brought down in Rhodes, and of how Thrasymachus had brought down the democratic government in Cyme (present-day Kimy in Greece), the ancient Macedonian philosopher concluded that breakdowns of democracies were caused by “the insolence of the demagogues”, and that “the largest number of the tyrants of early days have risen from being leaders of the people”.¹⁴

One of the things that writers – philosophers as well as political scientists – focused on when writing about these populist demagogues was that they appealed to a particular segment of society, namely those who felt they were left out and somehow forgotten by the so-called ‘elites’. Hannah Arendt found, in line with contemporary social scientists, that the ones who vote for demagogues tend to be the ones who come from “apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention”¹⁵. That those who supported Brexit and voted for Donald Trump in 2016 fit the bill may not go unnoticed, but it is premature to draw conclusions about this yet¹⁶.

Needless to say, one cannot equate the past with the present, but the similarity is striking. But, perhaps more importantly, Arendt went on to say, “What convinces the masses are not facts, not even invented facts”¹⁷.

But the problem in dictatorships – and in societies that are governed by demagogues who may become tyrants – is that the leaders of these states wilfully distort facts, create confusion, and thrive on the uncertainty thereby created. Some scholars using quantitative methods have even found evidence that voters cherish, what they call “the authentic appeal of the lying demagogue”¹⁸.

Democracy cannot exist in such societies. At least not in the long run. For these systems of government are based on “the forceless force of the better argument”, as the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has called it¹⁹. The idea is that we all through rational debate, facts and evidence, test propositions, and then vote for parties whose ideas win approval in the court of public opinion. These parties’ policies are then implemented by elected representatives²⁰. Their policies, in turn, are tested in the real world. Come election time two to five years later, there is a debate about whether the government’s policies have worked. And, if the discussion reveals that the government has not done a good job, then it is booted out by the voters. Democracy is a system where you can change the government without violence but by voting.

It has been widely believed that the barrier to progress was knowledge. W. E. B. Du Bois, the great African American writer, believed that “the ultimate evil was stupidity”, and that, “the cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation”²¹. Yet, in many ways, it seems that the opposite is true in the cases when countries have succumbed to dictatorships. In fact, it coul...