After the promise of the Third Wave, democracy is in crisis worldwide. The rapes and mutilations of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the crackdown on freedom of speech in Saudi Arabia, and the efforts to quash dissent and limit electoral competition in South Africa all point to serious flaws in democratic governance. In the United States, Donald Trump’s smear campaign against the press has contributed to growing public disaffection with politics and widespread anxiety about the future of liberal democracies.
Whether or not democracy’s retreat is terminal, the three exogenous crises it faces call for more systematic factoring into explanatory accounts of its dynamism and decay. Their interaction with democracy has been far more nuanced than the standard line suggests: in some cases, they offset rather than reinforce one another, and in others, they fuel a more positive dynamic of democratic renewal.
These broader understandings also offer a way out of the stalemate that has characterized many analyses of today’s democratic ills. Rather than a freestanding, political phenomenon, democracy’s crisis is the specific political strand of a broader, inter-realm conflict. The imperatives of capital accumulation erode, over time, the legitimacy and efficacy of democratic public powers on which it depends. Hence, democracy’s crisis is no “natural disaster”: it is an inherent feature of capitalism. To understand it, we need to move beyond the narrow horizons of politicism. Only then can we grasp how democracy’s present travails fit into the broader contours of our social order.