Future historians will have an interesting task to work out. The modern era in Europe, ushered in contemporaneously with the industrial revolution, overturned the divinely sanctioned feudal order that preceded it. The theology of politics needed a reset.

The industrial revolution settled on the paradigm of democracy as its new universal ideal. It took time to understand how the new theology could work. By the 21^st century, it had bred a new Manichean order that divided the world into good (democracy) and evil (autocracy). US President Joe Biden predicated his entire foreign policy and general worldview on that binary opposition. It had the advantage of pre-emptively justifying various forms of international aggression.

In a soberly pessimistic article for Unherd with the title, “How Western democracy died, Real change is an illusion,” Thomas Fazi analyzes the historical processes that have led us to the current network of social, political and economic crises the “free world” is now counting on the “stable genius” in the White House to solve.

With the political ideology built around the idea of a government “of the people, by the people and for the people” firmly implanted in the average citizen’s mind, modern democracies count on the ritual of programmed elections, crafted to produce moments of high drama by the media, to hide from view the diminishing role of those expendable quantities we call “people” in the practice of democracy.

A new largely self-selected elite, endowed with deft management skills, is formally elected at regular intervals to defend the inertia of a system solidly built to respond to interests largely unrelated to the needs and wishes of the people. The most obvious but far from unique example of this collection of interests is the US military-industrial complex first described, with great foreboding concerning the future of democracy, by US President Dwight Eisenhower.

At one point, Fazi invokes “Carl Schmitt’s ‘state of exception’, whereby constitutional safeguards are suspended to impose decisions unachievable via normal democratic channels.” Schmitt was the critic of the Weimar Republic’s dysfunctional parliamentary democracy. With the rise of Hitler, he recommended “democratic dictatorship.”

Despite the opprobrium attached to his endorsement of Naziism, Schmitt’s writing has remained broadly influential in the field of political theory. It was Schmitt who insisted that contemporary political concepts should be thought of as “secularized theological concepts,” an observation potentially useful today to help us understand the pseudo-moral reasoning generously deployed in contemporary propaganda.

Fazi goes on to cite Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who “emphasized over 20 years ago, the state of exception has now become a permanent condition in Western states.” Fazi calls this a paradox, which, if permanent, can no longer be deemed a state of exception. It “becomes the rule.” The danger should be obvious. “If elites manage to entrench their control through increasingly authoritarian means, the West will enter a new era of managed democracy — or democracy in name only.”  

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition: 

Managed democracy:

A sophisticated form of oligarchy that replaces belief in the virtues associated with the “will of the people” with a newly instilled faith in the innate capacity of a group of efficient managers whose deep understanding of the system obviates the need to consult their uncomprehending citizenry. 

Contextual note 

If democracy is dead, what’s the date on its death certificate? And why didn’t anyone — or at the very least the media — appear to notice? 

“As far back as 2000,” Fazi reminds us, “political scientist Colin Crouch coined the term ‘post-democracy’ to describe the fact that, even though Western societies boasted the trappings of freedom, they had increasingly become a meaningless facade. Elections, Crouch argued, had become tightly managed spectacles, orchestrated by professional persuaders who operated within a shared neoliberal consensus — pro-market, pro-business, pro-globalisation — and offered voters little choice on fundamental political or economic questions.” 

At one point, Fazi stops to focus on an interesting concept that has emerged to describe the reality of today’s democracies: “post-politics.” Democracy isn’t the only moribund patient. Politics itself will soon be waiting for burial. “This strategy of depoliticising democracy birthed what some have called ‘post-politics’: a regime where political spectacle thrives, but where systemic alternatives to the neoliberal status quo are not just repressed but foreclosed.”

The process is now visible thanks to the recently discovered power of our leaders to brand all forms of unorthodox thought, whether true or false, “disinformation.” Branding leads to censure. Exercising the power to foreclose anything that challenges the status quo doesn’t just constrain democracy; it also undermines it. The very idea of politics, understood as human decision-making, ceases to exist. It’s as if we are living within the confines of a neoliberal machine capable of self-government and requiring little or no direct human input. The only human skills required are pulling the right levers at the appropriate moment. As we enter the age of AI, we cannot discount the idea that the system could conceivably attain total autonomy. Some call it the matrix. 

It isn’t just democracy that has expired, but human agency itself in government. The art of politics — decision-making affecting the common good — has been replaced by what I’m tempted to call “interest management” rather than Fazi’s “democracy management.” Whether the official form of government is democracy, monarchy, timocracy (military rule), oligarchy or tyranny, politics for Plato and Aristotle was the story of a group of people governing their community. Post-politics leaves the people aside in favor of focusing only on economic forces.

How often do we hear and accept the idea that markets make decisions? Pushed to its extreme, that literally means living people no longer have a direct role to play in collective decisions. Not even the elite, who nevertheless profit from it.

Historical note

History has become engaged in a major transitional period. Two patently avoidable wars — in Ukraine and the Middle East — are raging, in which democracies are not only involved but whose stakes their supposed leaders believe to be existential. These conflicts highlight the absurdity of a post-political (dis)order. Have we, along with our democratic leaders, asked ourselves the following questions? Do our citizens’ nations want these wars? Do we know whether they feel they’re benefitting from pursuing them? If they had been given the choice, what would they have preferred at the outset: an excess of diplomacy or an excess of destruction?

We don’t know the answers to those questions because nobody in the political order of those democracies asked them before committing. We do know that occasions for diplomacy were rebuffed, most obviously in the case of Ukraine. The weakening of democracy and the disappearance of democratic reflexes appear to be major factors in the widely lamented death of diplomacy.

Few will admit that democracy and diplomacy have finally given up the ghost. They haven’t fully expired, and some hope that with the right treatment, they can revive. But they resemble a terminal patient surviving on life support. Their vital functions are compromised. The coordinated reflexes of taking the debate to the people (democracy) and privileging negotiations when faced with the prospect of open conflict (diplomacy) have given way to a form of institutional inertia that now precludes serious human intervention.

The US hasn’t declared a war, as its constitution requires, since World War II. That hasn’t stopped it from fomenting and actively supporting wars in every corner of the world. Diplomacy only kicks in when the conflict has ended, and most of the conflicts never end.

Fazi calls his readers’ attention to what he calls “the EU’s escalating techno-authoritarian regime.” The populations of European democracies are beginning to realize that they have no say in determining or even influencing many of the most significant policies (especially foreign policy). Instead, an executive committee of unelected managers in Brussels, led by the twice-anointed Queen Ursula Von der Leyen, has increasingly usurped the theoretical sovereignty of the nations.

What governing skills do these executives claim to have? It’s a toss-up between exercising the tools of “managed democracy” (i.e., managing other people’s democracies) and “post-political” decision-making (following the dictates of identified “interests”). It all boils down to what Fazi calls “the exhausted model of elite-managed liberalism.”

The vaunted “rules-based order” instituted in the aftermath of World War II has discarded or perhaps simply misinterpreted most of its rules. Instead of rules, it’s all about balancing random forces (interests) that can only be understood and managed by a small number of largely self-selected people. That is the new world order. Its long-term or even medium-term stability appears increasingly doubtful.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.