Defending democracy in a rapidly changing world

I hate to admit it; but I am becoming increasingly obsessed and weirdly fascinated, at the same time, with the happenings in the USA. At my time of life it can’t be good for my health! I know I ought to be more concerned about what is happening over here; but knowing how much we in the West depend, for better or for worse, on an outward looking magnanimous USA and knowing also how vulnerable the U.K. is as a minnow in a pool dominated by a few powerful sharks, I fear for our democratic system’s future as the drip drip of reactionary nationalist propaganda both here and in Europe becomes a stream which, unless effective counter measures can be found, could easily become a flood. It has the potential to sweep away many if not all of the democratic gains we have made over the past few generations.

The most recent tragedy in Washington DC should be a wake up call for those, who can remember when politics, whilst often robust, were usually conducted with civility and a degree of honesty. It’s just another example of a knee jerk reaction to find scapegoats. They hadn’t even recovered any of the bodies from the Potomac River and already Trump and his cronies were blaming the Democrats and their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives for the tragedy. Instead of waiting for the results of a proper investigation to provide a definitive answer they couldn’t resist trying to score political points. How low are they still prepared to go? They are beneath contempt.

We have no right to be complacent on this side of the pond. The tragic deaths in Southport have been hijacked by the spreaders of misinformation to stir things up. After hardly half a year of a Labour government, some folks are already demanding a new regime. To listen to the Tories, you might think they hadn’t been power for the last 14 years. Until she can come up with an effective script my advice to Keri Badenoch could well be the same as PM Attlee gave to his Labour colleague, Harold Laski, back in 1946; “A period of silence on your part would be welcome”. It won’t happen, of course. It’s a pity she seems so far out of her depth, if her performances at PMQs are anything to go by. She could take a lesson from Sir Ed Davey here at least, who has clearly got a script that keeps contact with reality.

Just as Democrat administrations have generally had to pick up the pieces left by their Republican counterparts so it looks as if Labour this time has got the same task over here. On 34% of the popular vote with cynicism towards politicians of all colours at an all time high, that might be a tall order. So, where does that leave the Lib Dems, who, on just over 11%, such are the vagaries of FPTP, have ended up in third place with about 11% of the parliamentary seats.

That brings me to the latest PPB, which was big on personality and small on policy. It again featured the Ed Davey life story, and why not? Some may have viewed it as rather mawkish. Not me, as my own early life to some extent mirrored his own. It will only work for so long. I just hope that, under Sir Ed’s leadership, Labour’s feet can be held to the fire long enough for foundations to be laid. Blair failed when he had a parliamentary to die for; Starmer must not be allowed to make the same mistake, even though today his task may be more difficult. Sir Ed certainly deserves our support. He appears to be a thoroughly decent human being, with an active team and a significant opportunity to deliver. His animosity towards Trump and his support for a Customs Union with the EU alone ought to win him more friends.

Non conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic need to undertake some deep heart searching and stop fighting culture wars before it is too late. If half of young people in this country, when recently surveyed, say they would favour a dictatorship, and given the rise of ‘strong’ leaders in many countries in Europe in particular, the supporters of democratic pluralism have got some serious challenges.

* John Marriott is a former Liberal Democrat councillor from Lincolnshire.

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20 Comments

  • Mary Fulton 3rd Feb '25 - 11:16am

    An interesting article. However, even if you hate everything Trump stands for, he has been democratically elected – that is democracy working the way it should with the people able to elect the leader/policies they prefer.
    I believe the question we need to be asking is this: why are voters across the democratic world beginning to vote for parties and politicians we would view as extreme? My view is that the established political parties need to come up with credible solutions to the concerns of voters or the voters will move on to new parties who appear to be offering credible solutions. This is democracy, even if we don’t like its results.

  • The electorate are entitled to vote for whoever they wish.

    Democracy isn’t at risk just because they voted in a way that we don’t approve.

  • Democracy is also not at risk just because they voted in electorate take a different position on cultural issues from those we approve of.

    If a party’s definition of democracy is that the electorate must vote in a way we approve of and must have the same view on cultural issues that we approve of, then are we really democrats?

  • Daniel Walker 3rd Feb '25 - 12:00pm

    @Slamdac “Democracy isn’t at risk just because they voted in a way that we don’t approve.”

    No, but it is at risk when they vote into power some people who are not democrats and don’t see democracy as a thing to be valued, and so are willing to stack the deck in their favour while they’re in power.

  • Sorry just realised I got my words all out of order.

    I meant to say that democracy isn’t at risk just because the electorate hold views that certain cultural matters that we disapprove of.

    Sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting “culture wars” to try and shut down debate we find uncomfortable is the exact opposite of democracy, and will just leave the door open to reform.

    Like it or not it is clear that we as a party are out of step with the electorate on some cultural issues. Unfortunately that’s democracy. We can’t force the electorate to hold our views but we can try and persuade them in a way that does not come across as sanctimonious or hectoring. If needs be we have to meet the electorate half way. If we can’t do that we may let reform in.

  • Alex Macfie 3rd Feb '25 - 12:18pm

    @Slamdac: Democracy is at risk when people vote to put in power someone who aims to overthrow it. It happened in Germany in the 1930s, and it appears to have happened in the US last November.
    There is a legitimate debate to be had about the extent to which a democratic system should tolerate groups that aim to overthrow it. Over-tolerance will invite its own demise.

  • Craig Levene 3rd Feb '25 - 12:28pm

    Effective counter measures is making a difference in people’s lives. All too often progressive politics has failed to deliver real change , & concerns surrounding immigration are ignored, or voters being labelled thick racists etc. Trump’s America first policy, resonates with a significant number of the US electorate. Under globalization across the West you have hollowed out towns and communities and progressive Social Democrats have lost so much of the socially conservative vote , to such an extent voters turn to billionaires & ex commodity brokers. No good fearing about the loss of democracy – it’s a smokescreen for the lefts failures..

  • Tristan Ward 3rd Feb '25 - 12:56pm

    As has been pointed out, it’s not democracy at risk (except to the extent there is a US president who seems to support those who tried to overturn the result of an election he didn’t like).

    The reality is that LIBERAL Democracy is at risk – the kind of democracy that invokes due process, private property rights, the rule of law, free markets/free trade, human rights, representative democracy, rational enquiry and so on to achieve its ends.

    I suspect the problem the liberal democracies have had is that most of them have been run ether by conservatives or social democrats since (say) 1945 who pay lip service to liberal democracy rather than truly understanding it.

  • I think a text book example of Liberals being out of step with public opinion is the trans debate.

    Most people are happy for people to identify however they choose, but draw the line at biological males playing in women’s sports and sharing women’s changing rooms, and children being given puberty blockers for gender dismorphia.

    There is a reason why trump spent millions and millions on “Harris is for they/them, trump is for you”

    We can either meet the electorate half way or we can stick our fingers in our ears and shout “transphobe, no debate!” But look how that worked for Kamala Harris and the democrats.

  • Joseph Bourke 3rd Feb '25 - 1:52pm

    America has long suffered from the endemic corruption of big money in politics. The key issues are laid out on the https://represent.us/ website. The saving grace for the US maybe its federal system where States retain control over the admininistration of the electoral process.
    The USA was demoted from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy” in the Economist Intelligence Unit rankings in 2016 and in 2023 was ranked 29th behind most of Western Europe, but not so different from Britain in that year. That will likely change under the 2nd Trump administration.
    Norway remains the most democratic country, a position it has occupied for 14 years. (All five of the Nordic countries are among the top ten.) Afghanistan is at the bottom for a third consecutive year. The Taliban, unsurprisingly, score close to zero in most of EIU’s measures of democratic health.
    I share John Marriott’s view that non-conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic need to undertake some deep heart searching and stop fighting culture wars before it is too late.
    There are those living today who were born in the 1930s when ‘beggar thy neighbour’ tariff policies deepened, extended global economic depression and paved the way for the rise of fascism and WW2. George Santayana’s 1905 adage “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” remains an apt warning from history.

  • Alex Macfie 3rd Feb '25 - 4:48pm

    ISTM that it’s mainly the (far) right who are stoking the culture wars, as in the OP’s example of the Trump administration and allies blaming the plane crash on DEI initiatives without a shred of evidence (as well as falsely claiming that the pilot was a trans person). What are opponents supposed to do, if not contest such falsehoods? are the claims just a “particular view on cultural issues”? What next? Were the falsehoods about the identity of the Southport killer merely a “particular view on cultural issues”? And does contesting it with the truth mean one is intolerant on cultural issues?

    And so-called “cultural issues” are subjective. Not so long ago, racial equality would have been considered what we now call a “cultural issue”, with the question of whether people of different racial backgrounds should be living side by side and given equal rights in law was a matter for legitimate “debate”. Now racism is not even considered a valid PoV as far as our impartiality laws are concerned.

  • Alex Macfie 3rd Feb '25 - 7:21pm

    “half of young people in this country, when recently surveyed, say they would favour a dictatorship”

    Mark Pack has a critique of that survey in his Week in Polls blog
    https://theweekinpolls.substack.com/p/gen-z-democracy-and-a-problem-with

    In a nutshell, it’s a one-off survey by a non-accredited pollster and contradicts others (from accredited outfits) that indicate higher support for democracy among “Gen Z” than among “Millenials” showed at the same age as “Gen Z”. There are no poll details, but we Yes Minister showed how leading questions can be used in surveys to get the answers the surveyor hopes to get.

  • I’m not sure a foreign aid department is an essential component of a democracy.

    Whilst I do not agree with the policy , it would be perfectly democratic for a party to run on a policy in the Uk to close down the Department for International Development and reduce the UK’s aid budget to zero.

    And then once elected to do exactly that.

    That would not make the UK any less of a democracy.

    I think that as Liberals we need to let do of the notion that a country is only a democracy if the electorate vote in the correct way.

  • Alex Macfie 3rd Feb '25 - 8:49pm

    @Slamdac: Whoever said it was? What’s undemocratic is not any of the policies per se, it’s the concentration of power in the hands of one person and a few unelected individuals around him.
    You need to let go of the notion that liberals only say Trump is undemocratic because they disagree with his policies.

  • Joseph Bourke 3rd Feb '25 - 9:28pm

    For much of its history American presidents have been selected to run for office by party elites – a distinguishing feature of a Republic versus pure democracy. That system has worked well enough over the past 250 years. However, with the increasing reliance on primaries for selection of candidates the most extreme candidate tends to come to the fore.
    That was the very danger that the fourth president, James Madison, warned against.
    Madison distinguished between democracy and a republic by stating that in a democracy, the people directly govern themselves, while in a republic, they elect representatives to govern on their behalf. This representative system in a republic helps to mitigate the dangers of factionalism and ensures a more stable and just government Madison and the Perils of Populism
    “This fraught election year has highlighted our political divisions. And yet it has also revealed an area of profound agreement. On both the left and the right, among Republicans and Democrats, a simplistic view of democracy has become pervasive. Populist democracy has had an indelible resurgence, and not just in America. If no one has gone quite so far as to insist vox populi vox Dei, there has been a deep reluctance, particularly among elected representatives, to question the putative voice of the people. Few have been willing to venture that an election year is a chance to educate the public mind rather than simply gauge it.”

  • Daniel Stylianou 3rd Feb '25 - 9:34pm

    @slamdac it is at risk though, isn’t it? Do you really not think democracy was at risk before Biden’s inauguration, when there was a literal insurgence in the US capital because the last democratically-elected president refused to accept he had been beaten? And there’s absolutely nothing to prevent that happening again.

    What I would say to the author however, is that this is wrong. “ but knowing how much we in the West depend, for better or for worse, on an outward looking magnanimous USA and knowing also how vulnerable the U.K. is as a minnow in a pool dominated by a few powerful sharks …”

    The ways in which the UK depends on the US has gradually declined in recently years, and though the UK may not have the military force it once had I fail to see how we’re as weak as the author suggests.

  • John Marriott 5th Feb '25 - 10:52am

    LDV editors like the authors of articles to contribute (is it like keeping spinning plates in the air?). I have so far refrained from commenting as comments, both relevant and tangential, seemed to be flowing nicely. I’m particularly chuffed that Mr Bourke, given his encyclopaedic knowledge of liberalism both past and present (but unfortunately NOT the future) in its various forms, has agreed with something I said! It’s two days since anybody commented so I reckon it’s time to hit the road. I really must get out more… but now there’s Gaza….what next?

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