Why Does “Democratic Backsliding” Happen?

Over the past two years, one of the key buzzwords among those who follow politics has been “democratic backsliding.” From academic journals to more popular resources like Vox.com, observers are desperately trying to make sense of why it is that democratic countries are seeing their institutions and laws come under threat. From Donald Trump’s America, to Brazil, to the rise of far-right parties across Europe, this phenomenon seems to be replicating itself across the world. But why is that the case? Is the cause just the toxic power of one would-be strongman, whether Trump, Vladimir Putin, or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan? No, this would be a gross oversimplification. Is it the inherent racism of white people in Europe and North America? No, for this phenomenon is replicating itself in countries that are not white or European, such as the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte, or even arguably Japan under Shinzo Abe. The root cause of this backsliding is the fact that these democratic societies have failed to address the real (mostly economic) roots of their past demons, have allowed unchecked power to accumulate to a few elites, and then fail to offer compelling solutions for getting out of this paradigm.

A common thread that unites all of the countries that have experienced “democratic backsliding” is the fact that many of them have failed to fully reckon on a structural level with the dark aspects of their national history, and in many cases did not address the root causes of them. In the United States, the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King won the passage of key laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended the Jim Crow system that dominated in the South. However, King himself acknowledged that the work of the civil rights movement was not complete, that it would not be as long as poverty disproportionately plagued the black community, as well as other minority groups and even much of the white population. However, before his “Poor People’s Campaign” could fully launch the second phase of the civil rigths movement, he was cut down by a sniper’s bullet. As a result, the economic problems and structural racism that King and others sought to fully eliminate persists to this day. Donald Trump, whose family’s real estate business was sued by the Justice Department for perpetuating the very structural racism that the civil rights movement tried to root out in the 1970s, being President today is perfectly symbolic of the failure to address these systemic problems.

This pattern repeats itself in many other countries that have undergone backsliding. In Japan, the militarist elite was in large part allowed to continue in power as a Cold War bulwark against communism; Shinzo Abe’s grandfather Nobusuke Kishi served in Hideki Tojo’s cabinet and was initially designated a Class A war criminal by US authorities. However, he was never prosecuted and eventually became Prime Minister himself in the 1950s. Today, Abe is increasingly cracking down on domestic opposition and is well on his way to amending Japan’s constitution to remove the post-World War II prohibition on the country maintaining an offensive military force. Another example is Brazil, where the country underwent a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1988. Although the dictatorship nominally ended, many of the elites from that era reorganized themselves into the PMDB political party, which elected the first two post-dictatorship Presidents. Now, the situation in Brazil is increasingly backsliding into outright dictatorship, with generals outright threatening military coup if the country’s high court did not convict leftist presidential candidate Lula of corruption charges.

Finally, across many of these countries people have had a sense of increasing alienation and disillusionment with the political process. In the 2016 election voter turnout was the lowest it has been in 20 years. In the most recent Japanese general election turnout was the second lowest it has been in a post-WWII election. Politicians like Trump, Abe and others do offer a concrete vision to their supporters- it may be a racist, reactionary, quasi-fascist vision, but it is a vision nonetheless. By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s campaign literally offered nothing to its voters in the way of positive vision for the future. Similarly, the aptly-named Democratic Party of Japan failed miserably to deliver positive change for the Japanese people when it was elected to government in 2009 for the first time in its history. Reactionaries are not the majority in these countries, but when the only positive vision on offer is from reactionaries and progressives are silent and ineffectual, reaction will win.

So what is the way out of these situations of democratic backsliding? The answer lies in a real, systemic approach to address the legacies of the past and address systemic inequality. We are beginning to see the rise of movements that aim to address these issues in many countries, from the universal health care movement in the US, to the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, to Momentum in the UK. These movements don’t simply focus on one leader as the cause of all their countries’ problems, but want to change the nature of their systems at a fundamental level, and create a newer, more robust, democracy for their countries.