In recent years, democracy seems to be taking sides. In political commentary, opinion columns, or even conversations with friends, after each major election, there appears to be a preferred ‘democratic’ candidate. In the case of this year’s Hungarian legislative election, many claim – with the fall of Viktor Orban – democracy has ‘won’. Similarly, a few days following Trump’s second presidential victory, the Washington Post ran a piece claiming the outcome of the election was – according to experts – ‘a significant breakdown of an already battered democracy’.
I rarely deal with children in my everyday life, however a substantial number of my cousins – with whom I am quite close – have all recently decided to become parents. In a few years, if I were to explain what democracy is to my nieces and nephews, it would be difficult to claim that democracy can lose an election. Is it not the point of an election that the people decide who leads them?
Can democracy lose an election?
Unless there is proof of rampant election fraud, no matter the beliefs and values of the candidates, democracy cannot lose an election.
Yes, in 1933, the Nazi party won 44.5 per cent of seats in the German parliament. As they did not hold an outright majority, and in order to enact laws, they formed a coalition with the traditional conservative factions.
Coalition governments are not inherently undemocratic, in fact, the modern Scandinavian democracies would claim this practice to be extremely democratic. If a majority of people desire a strongman to lead them, if they wish to persecute a minority through the passing of discriminatory laws, a democratic system ought to enable such a candidate to win an election and such laws to be implemented.
Perhaps, the critics of politicians such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, or Vladimir Putin are misguided when they claim to be opposing undemocratic figures. All three of these men have achieved the height of political power through electoral victories. None of them used physical violence or the threat of physical violence, such as a military coup d’état, to reach that power.
Liberal or illiberal?
Of course, there is a slight caveat for Donald Trump’s 6 January, 2021 rally and the events that followed. These three politicians are something I believe to be much worse than undemocratic, they are illiberal.
Liberalism is a political school of thought whose origin is difficult to trace. Professor Helena Rosenblatt traces the word ‘liberality’ back to ancient Rome and the classical age, where it indicated a form of aristocratic generosity. However, the liberal thinkers that are most credited for our modern understanding of the word lived during the European Enlightenment.
From John Lock and Immanuel Kant to Mirabeau and Germaine de Staël, these figures were often preoccupied with individual liberties and the agencing of power in the polity.
Checks and balances
Charles Louis de Secondat, the baron of Montesquieu, was an early 18th century French political philosopher. Following his travels to Great Britain, and his observations of the British parliamentary system, he began work on his main political treatise, The Spirit of Law (1748).
Essentially, Montesquieu argues for two distinct principles, the first being a balance of power between the different classes that made up the society of his time, the king, the nobility, the clergy, and the people. The second being a balance of power within the state itself. Montesquieu claims that, within the boundaries of the state, there are three sorts of power: the writing of the law, the enforcing of the law, and settling disputes of the law. He argues that these powers should be divided to provide a bulwark against the arbitrary nature of power and its historical abuses: ‘constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go’. Americans call this system one of checks and balances. In the rest of the Western world, we simply know it as the three branches of government.
Benjamin Constant was, for most of his early life, an international vagabond. He would eventually spend time in the Low Countries, Great Britain, the Swiss Confederation, France and a plethora of German states.
During his time in France, his romantic liaison and frequent correspondence with philosopher and novelist Germaine de Staël cemented his place in early 19th century intellectual Parisian society.
Private vs public
Although they were never married, they eventually became one of history’s most famous power couples. In his lecture On the Liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns (1819), Constant addresses what he observes as a fundamental shift in our relationship to society and liberty. He remarks that the ‘Ancients’ – referring to city states such as Athens, Sparta, and Rome – did not distinguish between their ‘private’ lives and their ‘public’ lives. Society was perceived as an indivisible entity in which there is no space for individual autonomy. Participation rates in the affairs of the city were much higher.
Constant perceives this as a personal sacrifice on behalf of citizens for the benefit of their city. This high participatory political culture was seen, according to Constant, as an expression of freedom and liberty, not to be governed solely by a king or a despot, but by an assembly of willing citizens.
The liberty of the ‘Moderns’ (men and women living through the European enlightenment) is depicted by our philosopher as a fundamentally private affair. He describes the creation of a space where political power is not welcome, a space of individual liberties.
According to the liberty of the Moderns, even if this political power takes the form of a democracy, there is a space where the will of the majority is not legitimate over the rights of the citizen. In Constant’s time those were freedoms such as religion and expression, in our time it has expanded to sexuality, and – within certain boundaries, such as the Schengen Area – movement.
The defence of free expression, of international law, of separation of church and state, of an intricate balance of power between equal branches of government, of individual liberties, is not now, and never was, a democratic affair, it is and will remain, a liberal one.
♦ Aiden Grandsimon was a student of politics at Sydney University.
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