Leave Aside Democracy Please

POLITICIANS HAVE THE habit of equating the fear of their own impending political end with the ‘decline’ and eventual ‘fall’ of their country. “I think our country is dead,” said Donald Trump, steeped in grievance and the first former president facing criminal charges and the likely Republican candidate in 2024 presidential election. Trump is not the only one who mistakes his own destiny for his country’s. Intimations of bad days make every other politician with an exaggerated sense of me-aloneness clairvoyant of national apocalypse. Prompted by the unravelling of Trump and frightened by the fraying of the political space, some zeitgeist readers highlight the deepest “crisis in democracy”—or more ominously, “the death of democracy” itself.

It’s as if one crazy politician who defies the decencies of public life and wallows in victimhood is enough to launch a national conversation on the last gasps of democracy, its inherent faultlines that continue to be made use of by the strongest and weakest of them. In the US, though, the-demise-of-democracy is a cause confined to hardcore Trumpistas in MAGA caps and those who are still disgusted by his rise and

disillusioned with the system that made it possible.

It’s also true that democracy-in-danger can be a genuine fear. Benjamin Netanyahu’s deferred attempt at making the judiciary a handmaiden of the executive has resulted in a popular uprising. The taming of the judiciary was the idea of a ruling politician who is facing corruption charges and desperate for securing his future. In the end, it was the taming of Bibi himself, and the entire episode that shook Israel only brought out the power of democracy. Bibi’s sword over the judiciary was swept aside, at least for the moment, by a civil society mobilised not by any opposition leader but by popular idealism and moral faith.

Democracy is dying for a politician who has been waylaid by the law in India too, and the death watch is being popularised by those who see in his simulated victimhood the victimhood of India itself. It doesn’t matter that this law is not written by a government paranoid about political opponents; it doesn’t matter that the independence of the Indian judiciary remains intact despite the frustrations of the executive; and it doesn’t matter that the propped-up victim is not a metaphorical Navalny but a much-indulged princeling who has created his own world untethered from the reality of his party or country. What matters is that his punishment gives another anecdotal passage for those who have been writing the decline and the sudden fall of democracy.

We all know that democracy is a displayed sham in places where the leader is chosen for eternity, and it’s a system that must be controlled to serve not what the ‘demo’ wants but what the leader-who-knows-better wishes. In such places, democracy is defined in cultural terms and projected as a rejoinder to the decayed Western idea of freedom. These are countries with a history of the enlightened ruler and a society subordinated to the wisdom of the Higher One. Such countries suffer from the insufficiency of inherited liberties. They are fertile for sham democracies and ‘elected’ dictators. That’s why, invariably, it’s not the leader who is the emasculator of democracy. It’s history. It is on the fragility of the political inheritance that the enlightened leader builds his windowless castle.

Still, the loss of faith in democracy is a subject with immense academic opportunities, and we have read through many alternatives, including the virtuous epistocracy, in which the lofty few, the knowing class, make better rulers. In democracies that have survived the worst instincts of their political class and benefited from the better judgement of their people, the doomsday-alarmism follows a different script. The argument is reduced to the size of a failed leader’s fake victimhood—or a popular leader’s mandate the alarmists refuse to accept.

There’s no perfect democracy, and it’s the imperfections that make it the most comfortable home for all of them—the originals, the fakes, and all those who have a story to tell in their pursuit of political power. Perfect systems are built on ideologies that put the pseudo-science of happiness above the waywardness of the human mind. Perfect systems feed on the fears of a people whose choices are made by the Leader.

Democracies become dysfunctional only when institutions are subverted, and the constitution is rewritten to ensure permanent power. When they are made perfect by a paranoid ruling class that abhors questions and alternative stories about the future. Democracies don’t die in the make-believe of those who have been made redundant by popular choice in politics. Crisis-fetishists see the death of democracy when the political impulses of a people disregard their dissent with a spurious social content. Democracies don’t die in the rejectionism of a few.

Those who have been swept aside by democracy are crying today for the decline and imminent death of its Indian edition, imperfect, volatile, inexhaustible, and merciless.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

S Prasannarajan is the Editor of Open magazine

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