The conventional response to our democratic malaise (interlude):- tl,dr: “let’s do some incremental tinkering”

(3183 words, 8 Dec 25) 

Last time, I discussed the malaise afflicting our democracies (Si apre in una nuova finestra), including the general survey evidence indicating there is grave and great democratic disenchantment with our democracies in many, many countries. And the fire spreading quickly from the edges remains authoritarian illiberalism (usually blended with regressive nationalism). This authoritarian illiberalism/regressive nationalism combo is treated as a serious cure for what ails us by far too many (even though the historical outcomes of implementing this alternative are anything but benign).

This deep democratic disenchantment has generated lots of responses, including liberal-democratic reform programmes, all in various states of articulation and development, and all ostensibly attempting to rescue democracy from a slide into autocracy.

Create your own steady.page here. (Si apre in una nuova finestra)

caveats

1.      In the analyses that follows, I’m being deliberately ecumenical: different camps diagnose differing failure modes for democracy, but you’ll see their claims are often complement rather than compete with each other;

2.      Some of these camps have a principal focus that might be economic, institutional, informational, and/or civic.

3.      This is my read of the current landscape (your mileage may vary; please comment below), and their proponents might regard my summaries as too broad brush stroke.

OK, so next, let’s summarise and analyse the eight or so families of ideas (yes, eight!) aimed at renewing democracy out there at the moment:

abundance/supply-side

This group wants to make life much less zero-sum by dramatically expanding the material and infrastructural pie for all (and, really, who can object to that?). In its popular form (“the abundance agenda”), the democracy failure mode claim is simple and indeed important: when housing, energy, transit, and goods are scarce and expensive because of policies and laws chosen by lawmakers, the feed-through is that democratic politics becomes a combat arena, where the fight is over the division of a fixed-size pie. And this pie is fixed, despite changes in demand driven by demographics, research and innovation, concentrations of wealth and inequality, education, or whatever. Under abundance people are supposed to become happier and more content with democracy, secure in the knowledge that succeeding generations will do better than the current one (which is getting the raw deal). The restitutional hope is that if resources are made plentiful to all, then the culture of grievance and narrative of loss and hopelessness loses oxygen and dies off.

One early (contemporary version) of this thinking was Derek Thompson’s piece The Atlantic (2022), and it sparked adjacent strands—Ezra Klein’s ‘supply-side progressivism,’ Tyler Cowen’s “state-capacity libertarianism,” and a broader “progress studies” revival. Although these strands disagree about the size and locus of the state, they share one thesis: you must pair growth with competent, execution-ready government. Even libertarians now argue that free markets require high state capacity to build and maintain complex systems (transmission, ports, pharmas, chips) at speed. Critics worry about environmental risk or capture, but the centre of gravity has shifted toward “build more, faster, cleaner.” Klein and Thompson have even articulated this at length in their book Abundance. To be honest, it’s hard to argue with much of this kind of thinking: democracies have been failing to deliver housing, infrastructure, jobs, even dignity and security at the scale needed. But this is not enough by itself; people want and need things other than material security (I’ll do a members only book review of Abundance in the future).

shared-prosperity constitutionalism

A second family argues that without broadly distributed gains, abundance alone won’t stabilise democracy. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s Power and Progress is good example: the central claim is obviously correct – our new technologies do not automatically benefit the many. Their answer is a focus on ensuring our institutions steer technology toward ‘good jobs’ and civic bargaining power, or you will amplify inequality and status threat (which provide the raw materials for a possible authoritarian backlash; I think it’s more complicated than that, tbh).

This line of thought focuses on increasing worker power, productivity inside firms, and developing “pro-human” AI complementing the efforts of workers rather than replacing them – roughly, the focus is growth with design constraints keep the polity governable. Economics Nobel Laureate Acemoglu recently articulated these ideas at length in a feature piece in the Financial Times (Si apre in una nuova finestra): his diagnosis is spot-on, if incomplete, but his solution falters – we need some sort of ‘“pro-worker AI” (but what is that? idk). The piece is generally lacking on the implementation details – perhaps they will follow in good time – but, reader, we’re increasingly out of time!

rule-of-law groupings

A third family are the centre-right and liberal actors who spend their time naming abuses, litigating, and hardening legal and procedural guardrails. There are a quite a few of these: in the US, think of The Bulwark’s anti-authoritarian conservatives who track norm breaches on the right; Lawfare’s institutionalists who document legal pathways and where courts must draw the line; and litigation shops that contest voter suppression and executive overreach. Their operating premise is that modern forms of autocratisation and incipient authoritarianism are generally incremental, slow, and happen via procedural manipulation, politicisation of law enforcement, suborning courts, and through disinformation and misinformation (‘flood the zone with shit’ as Steve Bannon put it). The rule-of-law groupings offer a tried and tested means of resistance to democratic backsliding: a slow slog, case-by-case, court-by-court, procedural-test-by-procedural-test. Their strengths are their vigilance and specificity: they focus precisely on what they can protect and advance under specific statutes.

Their value also lies in the fact that they de-monopolise pro-democracy identities, by policing their own coalition’s excesses, signalling that constitutionalism is a shared, not partisan, commitment. that makes later bargains on rules and restraint feasible. But this is also one of their weaknesses: this kind of ‘watchdog’ politics can be negative and ‘elite-coded’ because it is costly in time and money, depends on the ultra-committed, and it tends to avoid policies discussing material or other kinds of improvement in democracy more generally. These groupings also find themselves marginalised or boycotted, too (because they’ve left the tribe!).

There’s also larger point of failure here, though: the Bulwark types tend to rely a lot on expressing moral outrage again the transgression of democratic norms. However, norms are just that – they are norms (whether social, procedural, legal, political) , not something hard-wired into the law or firm-wired into our brains, and which everyone obeys – but we can stop obeying them! Norms move and change all the time under normal circumstances; smashing them might be shocking, but that might be it. And some people (maybe even many people) might agree that certain norms need smashing! Sometimes, the outrage is the point!

electoral, legal, and constitutional plumbing

A fourth family focuses on attempting to redesign legal and political rules and laws so minority takeovers are rendered much harder to execute and maintain. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt popularised the idea that democracies now die by legal means (court-packing, rule-bending) rather than via the mobilisation of tanks in the streets, so informal norms like forbearance, loser’s consent, and mutual toleration must be reinforced alongside formal changes that support the even-handed rule of law (this might be politically - moves toward more-proportional elections and multi-party competition to reduce all-or-nothing stakes, perhaps by ranked-choice or single-transferable voting, or legislative changes ensuring appointments are non-partisan ones based on merit).

These proposals are technocratic, and they’re meant to change incentives, not vibes. They are important: I will develop the point later that expressing ranked preferences is a cognitively preferable state of affairs: being forced into a binary choice, a this or that one outcome causes dissonance for those who are not true believers. A ranked choices outcome of some sort is preferable for a variety of cognitive and political reasons.

information environment

A fifth family grouping is concerned with our information consumption. One branch focuses on platform governance—the EU’s Digital Services Act regime, which compels “very large online platforms” to assess and mitigate systemic risks and to open their algorithms and data to regulators. Another is the local news revival: some empirical work ties the collapse of local reporting to a more general development of cynicism and polarisation (perhaps because common shared knowledge is splintered and no longer easily available). Some funders, NGOs and even individual journalists have built vehicles to restore civic information as infrastructure, and to provide deep reporting on what is happening on local councils or whatever. The theory here is straightforward: resilient democracies depend on reliable shared facts and watchdog capacity at the local level; information is thought of as a public good.

However, it needs to be said out loud is that the EU’s approach to wanting to be the world’s regulatory superpower has been a complete epistemic, economic, fiscal and cognitive dead-end, resulting in the EU having basically few-to-none, major-scale, info-tech giants. It’s been a bizarre way to tackle the challenges of the future. Scaling companies from within makes complete sense if the EU wants autonomy to manage its own infotech in its own interests.

Imagine the following circumstance: you’re an employee for a giant US tech, processing EU data. The US government using it’s national security laws sends you a secret order, which you must keep secret to transfer data on some person, persons or entity, and will prosecute you to the full extent of the law if you reveal this legal request. What will you do? Obey your government? Of course you will. Axiomatically. Without question, for to whom do you owe your identity and loyalty? Not the outgroup across the water. You don’t want to end up as Edward Snowden, living in Moscow. You will ignore EU regulations, because of course you will. And there is nothing the EU can do about it. Worse – the EU will never know about it. And even if they do, there’s little they can do about it, if we are honest about it.

Far better that the EU had focused on creating opportunities for large European info-tech instead. Not having done so is a profound cognitive failure with deep and meaningful real-world consequences: an incapacity to imagine that the world would be anything other than it is, that the US, for example, would release a NatSec Strategy basically saying ‘you’re on your own’, to Europe (forget the past eighty years), and by-the-by, say ‘stop regulating our infotech companies (or there will be trouble (Si apre in una nuova finestra))’. That last link is to a story that US officials are thinking of deliberately targeting EU officials who implement EU law regarding infotech transparency. Such targeting efforts might, of course, be rescinded if there is a change in the US government – but they may not be.

Leaving the threat on the table might suit a muscular US Democratic party, for example, intent on deepening the US’s tech strength. An assumption that there will be forthcoming goodwill in a new administration is a foolish one: it is deeply suboptimal to think the US government will support foreign entities over its own. The only sustainable solution is an independent European infotech sector – one that is muscular, strong, and capable.

And of course this is possible. The modern tech sector, Web 2.0+, is an invention of the last twenty years. Things can change quickly. But this one is on Europe itself to get right, not the US.

civic participation and deliberation

A sixth family include those concerned with ‘get-people-registered-to-vote’ and then ‘get-out-the-vote’ efforts, which ofc are great and important endeavours, for the right to vote was hard-won and is easily lost. There is also a slowly-developing strand of important participative, legitimising, cognitive-logjam breaking form of institutionalised citizens’ assemblies and deliberative polling to defuse identity-loaded conflicts and build legitimacy for hard trade-offs. These have worked very well here in Ireland (generally!), but they can work, and have worked, in many other parts of the world as well. I will argue later that these forms of involved citizenship tap into deep wellsprings in our neurocognitive and affective make-up. There is quite a decent academic and policy literature on deliberative groups and deliberative assembly, which I’ll take a look at later on in this series.

To be clear: citizen’s assemblies aren’t silver bullets: they won’t kill the various werewolves who want to destroy democracy. They work well when tethered to real power and clear remits, and when they sit inside a learning-oriented administrative state. And they play several key cognitive functions: they allow information and points of view to be surfaced that otherwise would stay hidden; they allow norm assessment among members of the assembly. In the latter case, citizens may hold views they assume are non-normative, but they may discover that they aren’t, in fact. Finally, citizen’s assemblies allow for a persuasive element: individual policy attitudes may not in fact have deep cognitive representations, and may actually, under conditions of peaceful debate allow people to gracefully change their minds – because they encounter ideas from their fellow citizens which, on reflection, are ones they are in fact comfortable with, having considered them.

anticorruption and external pressure groups

A seventh family is concerned with the outward-facing flank of democratic defence. These include NGO’s such as Transparency International or indeed government-empowered or international institutions sanctions regimes designed to help liberal democracies raise the cost of kleptocracy and human-rights abuses, or to ensure the drying up of cross-border financing propping up authoritarians and corroding domestic institutions. The EU has delivered many such sanction packages since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example. When coordinated with criminal enforcement and financial-transparency reforms, these tools can both harden the democracy’s perimeter and signal solidarity to reformers abroad. But governments are often loath to bed down such laws: the UK, for example, has seen many massive foreign donations to small, noisy, political parties.

micawberist politicians

The last family, and I suspect the biggest one, believe “something will turn up (to rescue us).” And so very often it does! We forget how in times of adversity and need we can change outcomes by bringing fresh thinking to bear on the problems we have. Europe 1945 was destroyed, starving, with its physical infrastructure devastated but Europe in 1955 was embarking on the ‘trente glorieuses’, or the three decades of dramatic economic growth and reconstruction which rebuilt physical and social infrastructure and strengthened our democracies. What turned up was the far-sighted Marshall Plan to pay for this reconstruction, the initiation, deepening, and broadening of what ultimately became the EU, and much more besides.

Political micawberism is essentially the ‘cognitive miser’s’ approach: waiting for something to happen, rather than thinking through the steps needed toward actively making something happen – waiting for events to turn, a favourable wind to arise, and taking it from there. This is not necessarily a bad approach: economies across the world are littered with failed and wasted attempts to pick winners, or national champions, or attempting to dominate the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy. This doesn’t mean you can’t plan, however! You can, as Singapore, China, and others have shown, but in very different ways. And what turns up might be bad – a pandemic, a war, a housing bubble, or worse.

How do these strands relate to each other? And where do they clash?