Before he faced the crowd to discuss the topic of Democracy Is Not Worth Dying For, David Runciman – the celebrated podcaster and Cambridge professor of politics – joked to me and our fellow panellist, Masha Gessen: “The answer is obviously ‘no, it’s not’ so why don’t we all just agree and go home?”
Gessen, the formidable Russian-American journalist, smiled in agreement. We were about to address the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney. Most of those in the audience had come to hear these intellectual superstars define the limits of political self-sacrifice; I cheerfully served as a bolt-on historian. Gessen described democracy as an indefinable “dream” and said they agreed with Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, (“words I never thought I’d say”) that they’d only be willing to give their life for their children.
I sought refuge in Monty Python. “What did democracy ever do for us?” I asked the crowd, echoing the scene in The Life of Brian when members of the People’s Front Of Judea wonder what the Romans had ever done for them (aqueducts, roads, sanitation, medicine, etc).
“Well, there’s the vote,” I said, a freedom that took centuries to gain. “And, um, free speech. And civil liberties. And equality before the law. And the freedom to worship and to fall in love with whomever we like.”
But, the most beautiful and obvious thing about democracy is the freedom to unelect rulers. Can you imagine being ruled by someone like Scott Morrison or Donald Trump for 40 years? Electoral democracies self-rejuvenate, injecting new blood and energy into government.
In short – and I couldn’t believe I had to say it – there’s no alternative to democracy; only ways of improving the democratic model.
***
Runciman is one of many famous intellectuals who think democracy is in palliative care: “Nothing lasts forever,” he warns in his book How Democracy Ends: “At some point democracy was always going to pass into the pages of history.” Similar alarm steams from How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. And portentous substacks (email newsletters) are ringing the doom bell.
I find their alarm unpersuasive. Modern democracy may be a beautiful aberration, a sapling in the gale of history, but its roots are strong and it has survived far worse than Trump. In 1900 there wasn’t a single country that qualified as a democracy as we understand it. Only New Zealand, in 1893, had granted women the right to vote, closely followed by Australia in 1902. Both countries have since proven remarkably trusting of democratic institutions, if not political parties.
Germany was the most democratic European country in the 1890s, as measured by universal male suffrage, but still the first world war wasn’t fought for democracy because there were no democracies as such in Europe. God, king (or kaiser or tsar) and country sent millions of young men into the trenches, goaded by a rabid nationalism that snuffed out the green shoots of democratic reform. Even the suffragettes put their campaign on hold, and not a single European woman had the right to vote for whether her husband, brother or son should die on the western front.
Fast forward a century: by 2000 there were 120 democracies, the highest number in human history, according to Freedom House. And democracy’s dream run continues for many: more than 80 countries representing about 4 billion people are holding national elections this year, with voter turnout rising dramatically and voters refusing to be gulled by Russia and other tyrannous regimes who try to addle our brains with disinformation. Look at the Taiwanese, who voted against the “China” candidate, and Turkey and India, whose “strongmen” were humbled.
And yet those advances disguise a retreat in democratic liberties. According to Freedom House, 52 countries suffered declines in democratic freedom in 2023 as a result of global conflict, acute voter dissatisfaction and mass disinformation. Today there are 63 electoral democracies against 74 autocracies, according to a Bertelsmann Foundation report. That figure may bear out the alarm of the doommongers – but democracy has a knack of bouncing back from the abyss.
***
Democracy has confounded the lessons of history and defied the determinists. It has, I’d wager, proven too successful, and that success has bred a lethal complacency. Those who take democracy for granted have never seen a torture chamber in South Africa under apartheid. Or lines of jackboots crunching human rights in the Soviet Union. Or skulls scattered across the Cambodian killing fields. Or the spy network that turned children against their parents in Mao Zedong’s China.
Democracy survived them all. Remind yourselves: democracy won the 20th century. Democratic countries prevailed over the Nazis and communists, millions of whom bled for the belief that the “iron laws of history” would inevitably lead to rule by the master race or the proletariat. They didn’t. The 20th century exposed Marxist and fascist determinism as a barbaric fantasy.
Nothing is determined or inevitable about democracy. It survives because we will it to. That’s the unaccredited beauty of the idea. We never know who’s going to rule us but at least we know we can always get rid of them.
***
So why wouldn’t we fight like blazes to preserve our democratic freedoms? Here’s another answer: democracy lacks the vital ingredient that sends all would-be martyrs, fanatics, nationalists and revolutionaries into violent animation – a vision of utopia enforced by a charismatic prophet.
The fascists had their prophet: Hitler prophesied the 1,000-year reign of the master race. The communists had Karl Marx, whose works spurred Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot to murder millions in the belief that the extermination of capitalists and the bourgeoisie would bring forward the inevitable dictatorship of the proletariat. For centuries the monarchists prophesied the divine right of kings. In the first world war, nationalist rulers all over Europe prophesied the triumph of their race.
Meanwhile, the Zionists cleave to Moses’ prophecy of a promised land, surely the Bible’s greatest hostage to fortune. The Islamists believe that, Allah willing – as transmitted by his prophet, Mohammad – they will conquer the infidels. And Christian nationalists in the US pray the coming election will deliver an American theocracy.
The idea of dying for democracy lacks the spiritual grandeur, the romanticism, the open-ended faith of revolution or martyrdom. It fails to summon the hatred that hurls the religious fanatic, the bloody revolutionary and the snorting patriot on to the field of battle. Who waged a war for a woman’s right to vote? Or equality before the law? Or the right of gay people to love one another?
Democracy has no prophet. And thank goodness. It offers no 1,000-year utopias, no enycyclicals and no promised lands. It strives for universal ideas of liberty that transcend the concepts of empire and nation and faith.
***
In Ukraine we find an exception: a people willing to fight and die for the right to self-determination as a democracy. Putin’s useful idiots in the west brand Ukraine’s pursuit of democratic freedom illegitimate, even as they enjoy the liberty to say so as citizens of open democracies.
Alexei Navalny, the late leader of Russia’s opposition, was a rare example of a man who consciously gave his life for democracy. He martyred himself for a beautiful vision of Russia enjoying the basic freedom that we do. I had hoped he would set up a Russian government in exile, along the lines of General de Gaulle’s or the Polish government in exile during the second world war. Instead, he went home and was murdered in an Arctic prison.
In the US – so often declared to be “the greatest democracy in the world” – those who despise democracy blame the electoral system for standing in the way of absolute power. They yearn for a tyrant who will punish those whose very existence affronts their idea of the proper social order – the migrant, the progressive, the liberal, the “socialist”, the homosexual. They want to be rid of the messy handover of power every few years, and they’ve shown they are willing to violently support the dream of an autocracy stacked with Christian nationalists who answer to a god and not to the people. Democracy be damned.
Paul Ham is the author of The Soul – A History of the Human Mind, out now through Penguin, and writes the Substack Who made our minds?
• This article was amended on 29 October 2024. All women in New Zealand were granted the right to vote in 1893, not just white women as an earlier version stated.
