The death of democracy

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Lord Sumption is an author, medieval historian, barrister and former senior judge of the UK Supreme Court. For this exclusive live event, he joined UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers to discuss the decline of democracy, Donald Trump, authoritarianism and the vexed question of immigration.

Freddie Sayers: In 2022 you wrote: “The transition from democracy to authoritarian rule is generally smooth and unnoticed.” Looking at the United States today, how close to that description do you think they have come?  

Jonathan Sumption: Well, I wrote those words well before the last presidential election, and I was astonished at how quickly my concerns were justified. The United States is currently a fascinating example of the mechanics of democratic decline.

It has certain peculiarities which it does not share with many other states. In particular, it has an executive president who is constitutionally answerable to nobody. He’s not answerable to Congress, except by way of impeachment. He’s only subject to control by Congress so far as he depends on congressional grants of taxation, and the entire executive machinery is answerable only to him. That is a uniquely powerful situation, which is matched only really by one European state, namely France. It means that if the presidency gets into the hands of somebody who does not accept the basic conventions of democracy, they are in very serious trouble. 

And now, the presidency has fallen into the hands of someone who has the three critical identifying characteristics of totalitarian rule: a cult of personality; the total identification of the state with himself; and a refusal to accept the legitimacy of dissent of any kind. The only force that is capable of limiting what such a president does is the judiciary. But that takes time, and it’s not at all clear that the judiciary will end up by standing up for the Constitution rather than the President. So it is a very dangerous state of affairs.

FS: You’ve suggested that democracy is not simply made up of the technical exercise of votes of the masses. It is also made possible by a particular political culture. 

JS: Democracy requires two things. One of them, the easy bit, is an institutional framework. You need elections, courts, civil servants. But you need a culture which accepts diversity of opinion, which recognises that the function of any workable democracy is to accommodate differences of opinion and interest, which are inevitable in any large citizen body. And for that to work, you have to have institutions which command confidence that transcends differences about particular issues. That is a purely cultural construct, and it is what has sustained democracy during its relatively short existence. 

Democracy, let’s not forget, is something that dates from the second half of the 19th century. Women didn’t get the vote in most countries until well into the 20th century, but I think something recognisable as mass democracy can be seen in Europe and North America from the 1860s onwards. And it has been sustained by a great deal of good fortune — democracy was born in a period of rapid economic expansion and European and North American domination of the world. 

These conditions are now disappearing. It’s quite important to remember that democracy is not the default position of mankind. The default position of mankind is some form of autocracy based on a claim to authority derived either from God or from ideology. And we can forget God for the moment, but ideology is clearly the sole source of legitimacy in the eyes of those who voted for President Trump.

FS: Well, he did win the election. 

JS: That’s the interesting thing. There are Trumps in every society. The really sinister thing about Trump is that though he has been perfectly explicit about what he wants to do, a majority of Americans appear to want it. Now that is, I think, a symptom of the serious cultural disintegration of the democratic ideal, and without the culture that sustains democracy, it won’t survive. 

FS:  I think you’d find people across the political spectrum agreeing with you. Where they would differ is whose fault Trump is, and how we got into this situation. The difficulty is that the populists, the people who by your account show the latest respect for democratic institutions, feel like they’re the only true democrats, because they actually represent what people want. They feel that they’ve been thwarted for decades by elites and obscure processes that have failed to deliver what they asked for. 

JS: Most democracies are suffering from a crisis of expectations, and this is to some extent inherent in the whole notion of democracy. A mass electorate will always look to democratic politics to vindicate its expectations. The expectations of electorates have progressively risen, as the power of the state has risen. And what we have seen over the last 50 years is a sense that either the state can’t deliver, or else that it can only deliver at the expense of other goods. 

Clearly, in most countries, the most significant expectation relates to the economy. But the state actually has very limited control over economic events. It can certainly avoid creating problems, but it’s also possible that it cannot deal with fundamental economic changes. Sometimes people think that the state can do this by essentially insulating itself from the rest of the world. But that’s never been successful. 

Western democracies, having been the unquestioned economic leaders of the world for about 150 years, are in a position where they are facing competition from low-wage economies with relatively high standards relative to their past. That means the leadership of the West currently depends on highly advanced technological fields. The problem is, that leadership is itself fairly vulnerable. China is capable, with a moderate delay, of matching most Western technology.

FS: So there’s a kind of expectation gap. 

JS: Not just an expectation gap — it produces a big shift in the proportion of national income, which is in fact being earned by a relatively small number of people. Now that is a source of very serious dissatisfaction. 

FS: So the economy is a driving force behind this decline and disillusionment? But countries have become poorer in the past. The Seventies in this country was not a period of great wealth and exuberance, yet it didn’t result in the same threat to democracy.. So I wonder what else is going on?

JS: What is happening is that people will say that the political system — not just the individuals — is failing to deliver the progressive improvements we expect in our lives. Therefore, the theory goes, we must turn to some alternative source of authority. Now, there are various candidates: but by far the most significant alternative source of authority is the notional strong man. Just look at Hansard’s 2019 poll, which suggested that 54% of a very large sample would like to see Britain ruled by a strong man unbound by rules.

FS: I feel I have to push back a little here, because the 2019 example is an interesting one. The people who would have answered that poll had just endured three years of what felt like a democratic decision, Brexit, being thwarted by a complex system of politicians and lawmakers that refused to act on what they had voted for.

JS: That is completely untrue. The problem about the referendum in 2016 was that it answered the question of whether people would like to leave the European Union, but it did not say what should come next. Rather like the Scottish referendum, we were all voting for something the exact consequences of which we simply could not know.. Now, the politicians who objected to what Boris Johnson was trying to do were not objecting to leaving the European Union. They were remainers, certainly, but they did vote almost unanimously for the motion authorising Theresa May to give the Article 15 notice. Even so, they were not prepared to endorse whatever Boris Johnson thought might be a good relationship to have with the European Union after we’d left. 

FS: Let me throw another example at you: the vexed question of immigration. In the end, that does feel to many voters like it’s something the government should be able to control. And, in your book, you also describe it as a prerequisite for a functioning democracy.

JS: I describe the need for solidarity, which is clearly undermined by mass immigration, and is certainly one of the causes for the decline of democracy. Immigration became a problem in this country when it started occurring on a quite a large scale in the late Fifites. Now that was a quite deliberate political policy. It took a very long time to pass the Commonwealth Immigration Act, which was the initial source of the problem, and I think you can justly blame politicians for that.  

Currently, the problem is that being an island, far from being an advantageous position when it comes to keeping out intruders, is actually much more difficult. You can erect a physical border barrier at a land border, which you can’t do in the middle of the sea. Australia was able to tow boats away to Indonesia, because there are international waters between Indonesia and Australia. But there are no international waters in the English Channel: there is a notional halfway line. 

The main problem about immigration currently is not illegal immigrants, it is that the government has admitted a much larger number. The proportion of illegal immigrants to immigrants – it fluctuates – but it’s much less than 10% most of the time. The rest of the 90% percent are people who have got visas and they come here to work because we need them economically. Now we could perfectly rationally take a decision that we weren’t going to issue any visas for anybody, however skilled, however valuable, or we could take a slightly less extreme version of that and say: ‘Well, we’re we’ll have criteria which are highly restrictive, and we’ll admit people who have a great deal to offer, but perhaps no one else…’

FS: That would probably be the most popular position if you asked in an opinion poll. 

JS: Yes, it probably would. But the difficulty is that one would then have problems about how to staff care homes. The only way you would be able to staff them without large numbers of immigrants is to pay them more. If you paid them more, the cost would ultimately fall on the social services in a high proportion of cases, that would lead to an increase in taxation. Now, I make these points not in order to say, well, we can’t stop immigrants. Of course we can, and probably should, at least to some extent. But all of these policy options have payoffs. There’s a cost, not just in money terms, but in terms of other policies that we attach great value to.

I think one of the problems about an absolute anti-immigration position is that its advocates are not really honest about this. They don’t say: there are pluses and minuses in all areas of public policy, and particularly in this one. They say it’s just a lack of determination. It’s not just a lack of determination, it’s a lack of attractive options. 

FS: Do you feel like alongside those more policy based issues, do you feel that we made an error in the past 50 years by buying into an idea that nation states were less important, and that we should all live in more of a global community, allow people to mush around between borders and more generally devolve power upwards to international institutions and somehow that the decline of democracy is connected to that?

JS: Well, it’s connected to that in the sense that whenever you remove policy decisions to a more distant level of decision making, you inevitably make it more remote and people more resentful about results that they don’t like. I don’t think it was a mistake to advocate globalised trade. I don’t think that British governments ever have advocated globalised migration patterns, although many of the actual results look like that, but I don’t think that was ever a conscious decision.

But describing all of this as just globalism as your question implies, I think, fails to make some really quite important distinctions. The critical distinction is between international arrangements which govern the contents of our domestic law, like the ECHR, and international arrangements which govern our relations with other states, like the EU treaties. Internationally, if we want a benefit, we sometimes can’t get it, except in cooperation with other countries.

To my mind, access, without friction, to a consumer market of 450 million people is a very considerable benefit. It’s not capable of being achieved except by cooperation with the rest of Europe. Therefore, the EU treaties are a classic example of a benefit incapable of being obtained except by agreement with other countries. That’s a form of globalisation which I wholly accept. The ECHR is different because the ECHR achieves absolutely nothing that we can’t achieve domestically on our own, if there is a democratic mandate for it. Indeed, clearly, the object of the ECHR is to hold us to standards which we may not accept democratically, for which there may be no mandate. To my mind, the ECHR therefore cuts across lines of democratic accountability. It is totally unnecessary, because we can have whatever human rights we like. As a matter of domestic legislation, we don’t need the cooperation of any other country in order to have them, and it produces serious disadvantages, constitutionally and in many particular fields of policy.

FS: I’m going to quote you again. You wrote: “Democracy is fragile. It requires what political philosophers from Aristotle onwards have called virtue.” What does that mean? Why are we losing virtue?

JS: What I was referring to, and what I think Aristotle, and many Roman philosophers in the Aristotelian mode believed, was that public affairs required an ability to support what was in the public interest irrespective of what was in one’s own interest. Now that is a highly ideological position. It’s a big ask, and very few democratic societies have actually achieved that. But I think that we have reached a stage where, unless we are prepared to do that, we will see the end of democracy and its replacement by something which may at the outset, be received with tremendous enthusiasm, but which we will grow to dislike even more intensely than we dislike the present setup.  

A good example of this, which exemplifies many of the problems I’ve been talking about, is the extent to which there is a complete divergence of interest between the younger generation and the older generation in most Western countries, but very emphatically in this one. The age at which people are able to afford to buy a house has increased dramatically. At one point in London, it was 39 and a half. The tax and benefit system is skewed towards older people. The ‘triple lock’, which I think is indefensible in moral and economic terms, is a huge benefit to the older generation, which consists of more assiduous voters, and it has to be said, more conservative voters and is a significant factor for why conservative governments have been in power for longer than any other party. 

People of university age now leave university with debts of at least 50,000 pounds, a millstone hanging around their neck, something which is liable to deter applications in the longer term. Climate change is an issue which primarily affects people who are going to experience the consequences of climate change for much longer than I will, since in 20 years time, statistically, I’m very likely to be dead. 

Now I entirely accept that historically, very few societies have had virtue in that sense, and those Roman politicians who extolled virtue very frequently did not practice much of it themselves. However, we are now reaching a situation in which we may have to make an uncomfortable choice. Do we actually want our democracy to succeed or not, and if the alternative is an authoritarian society, the alternative to virtue, then, for my part, I think that the alternative is a lot worse. The trouble is, I think that most people will not tend to agree with that, unless they have experienced an authoritarian society in all its unpleasantness. I mean, my knowledge and views about authoritarian societies are entirely vicarious. They derive from a serious study of history, not just the history of the Middle Ages, but all, certainly all, European history and North American history and, as you know, people know remarkably little about history. 

FS: Another account of why virtue is in decline, which is very politically current, and a lot of people talk about, is that the Christian underpinnings of our society, which has been synonymous with the success of liberal democracy over the last centuries, have eroded away, and people no longer have a shared set of values on which to base all of these other things. Do you have sympathy with that view? 

JS: Yes I do. There’s a theory that our political values are historically derived from Christianity. I would put it the other way around. I would say that Christianity has historically derived its values from social instincts of one kind or another that have existed for many centuries. Christian values are not uniquely Christian. They are essentially the values of any aspirational society which is governed by considerations other than brute force. 

I don’t think that the decline of the Christian churches necessarily means the decline of the values for which the Christian churches stand. I do think that those values have declined, but that’s for a variety of other reasons, completely irrelevant to the status of the Christian churches or of Christian practice. 

 
FS: So you don’t feel that suspicion of the strong man, rejection of the ‘Caesar’, the desire to look after the weak, to put others ahead of yourself, all of which was part of the revolution of Christianity as distinct from earlier religions, have a unique role?

JS: I think these are important values. I think that they have suffered not a total eclipse, but a decline. I don’t see any reason to believe that this is irreversible, even if it may well be that the decline of organized religion is irreversible.

FS: That brings me nicely to looking ahead to what might come next. You’ve been studying this for a long time, and you’re a keen observer of it… 

With your knowledge of history and watching what’s happening at the moment, what do you think the most likely outcome is for Western societies? What happens next?

JS: Well, all prophets are wrong, and I would particularly like to be wrong about this prediction. I think that what will happen is that we will have an imperceptible move towards a more authoritarian style of government, which will accelerate after it’s gone a certain part of the distance. It’s what’s happening in a rather shorter time frame in the United States at the moment. I think people will wake up to the unpleasantness of the state of affairs that that will usher in.  

One problem is that the replacement of democracies by authoritarian regimes is particularly difficult to reverse because the democratic machinery which once enabled anything to be reversed will, by definition, have decayed. Ultimately, however, the overwhelming majority of a society wants will happen, however slowly. It’s always possible to dispose of autocracies. Many states have done so, and we will too, but we will go through an unpleasant period in the interim. It will affect my children a great deal more than it affects me.

FS: Do you think it will affect your grandchildren and great grandchildren? How many years should we set aside for the rejuvenation? 

JS: I wouldn’t be willing to try predicting that. I think it’s a very long term. Institutions can be changed. You can have a statute to change institutions straight away. But the culture on which any kind of institutional change depends, if it’s going to succeed, is a much slower affair. The process of reverting from strongmanism to a more cooperative form of government will be equally slow.

FS: What is sobering is that you don’t seem to have any confidence that we can do much to effect a change sooner than that? So what should we do? What should we do in this decade or in the next two decades? What should we be fighting for to try to either slow the decay or reverse it?

JS: I think that we should reduce our expectations of the state. I think that we should have greater respect for the political process, because you can’t have democracy without politics, or politics without politicians. I think that we need a much more cooperative and empathetic view about interests which conflict with our own. Now, these are all profound cultural changes which are a big ask, historically people have tended not to adopt things that undermine their personal interest. I accept that entirely. I’m not saying that they’ve got to acquire a completely new morality, but I am saying that if they don’t, they’re going to get something very unpleasant instead.

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