13 March 2022

Whose democracy are we mourning?

The far right, the far left and the far wrong

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We’re all tempted to blame bad things always on other people because we evade responsibility ourselves. That’s a natural human tendency. So, if you’re a Democrat in particular, being able to say, “Oh, the reason we lost isn’t because we have fundamental flaws in our messaging or we’re totally corrupt, or we nominated a shitty candidate that everyone hated who nonetheless reflects the core values of our terrible party. It’s because Trump cheated and this autocratic villain manipulated everything.” It relieves Democrats from responsibility and guilt".

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‘Over the past  decades’, Sandel writes, ‘meritocratic assumptions have deepened their  hold on the public life of democratic societies. Even as inequality has  widened to vast proportions, the public culture has reinforced the  notion that we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get. It  is almost as if globalisation’s winners needed to persuade themselves, and everyone else, that those perched on top and those at the bottom  have landed where they belong’ (Sandel 2020, p.90). 

As Sandel brilliantly illustrates in his book, the economic system we’ve embraced so readily and decorated with a dogmatic stature, has stripped of dignity and social esteem professions which we nonetheless came to call “essential” two years ago, but which continue to be economically unfavourable and looked down upon. The crude conclusion which the so-called developed part of the world seems to have come to almost by accident — that democracy cannot exist without capitalism, is namely one of the main drivers behind the erosion of democratic values, the crises we experience with disturbing regularity, and the unviability of a shared future.

Professor Sandel makes a very compelling case in his attempt to explain the rhetoric of rising as he calls it – the meritocratic idea that you can make it if you try; that education and effort, not political will, is the key to dismantling social inequalities.

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‘When the richest 1 percent’, he maintains, ‘take in more than the  combined earnings of the entire bottom half of the population, when  the median income stagnates for forty years, the idea that effort and hard work will carry you far begins to ring hollow. This hollowness  produces two kinds of discontent. One is the frustration that arises  when the system falls short of its meritocratic promise, when those  who work hard and play by the rules are unable to advance. The other  is the despair that arises when people believe the meritocratic promise  has already been fulfilled, and they have lost out. This is a more  demoralizing discontent, because it implies that, for those left behind, their failure is their fault’ (Sandel 2020, p.112).

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For millions of voters, this was not a choice between Biden and Trump — it was a referendum on Trump, and Biden’s name on the ballot was a stand-in for “No!”

It really doesn't take much to see what Trump truly represents — from the sheer arrogance he seems to be so proud to exude through his appalling hypocrisy to the vindictive and obviously manufactured prosecution of Julian Assange (which Biden, despite his alleged belief in justice and free speech) has taken up with horrifying rigour. We shouldn't forget though, that as ludicrous as Trump’s conduct in public office was, he didn’t directly create the corrosive socio-political climate he inherited, he simply exacerbated the heritage of social neglect, corruption and warfare which both his democratic and his republican predesessors worked so hard to build. 

In 2018, Joe Biden gave a speech at the opening of The Copenhagen Democracy Summit, an annual conference founded by Denmark’s former PM and former NATO General Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen (a red alarm on its own!). On May 10th 2021, the fourth Democracy Summit convened around the same lofty rhetoric we’ve been hearing at Davos every year.

Judging by the conversations during the Summit, the way the international political elite see their role in promoting democracy around the world is, as argued before, by political window-dressing, futuristic nonsense, and geopolitical games, particularly designed to crush the authoritarian villains China and Russia — a process which, in my opinion, has nothing to do with protection of human rights and everything to do with securing the economic and political dominion of the democratic West (turbocharged by the US).

In an interview for the Swedish Radio programme Konflikt, Mr. Rasmussen had the audacity to call USA’s military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (2001 – 2011) a success, despite the fact that, as Konflikt’s reporter Anja Sahlberg rightly pointed out, they sawed even more chaos, lawlessness and new forms of violence. Rasmussen’s comment is quite telling of the kind of democracy we have been sold by the international political elite, yet, not utterly shocking, given that moral restraint is not what makes for a successful career in politics nowadays.

In a conversation with the historian Yuval Noah Harari, Michael Sandel put forward an interesting aspect of liberal politics during the Covid crisis, which may have bypassed the public attention – the way science was used as an instrument to progress on the political scene. As he explained, the frivolous use of the slogan “I believe in science, I follow the science” on the part of liberals and democrats, is worrisome not because we shouldn’t trust science, but because this argument is deprived of political responsibility. As Sandel observed, those who demonstrably doubt the legitimacy of science (by refusing to wear masks or get vaccinated), do so not because they are ‘scientifically illiterate’, to use his words, but rather because they fundamentally distrust the elites who govern them (I’d argue with very good reasons).

In the wake of a healthcare emergency and economic distress, some people rather naïvely fall back on scientific research and factual data to reassure themselves that they are doing the right thing. They seem to be forgetting that science, while being essential for any (democratic) society to flourish, should by no means be accepted at face value: its credibility can be undermined and moulded to fit a given narrative, which sometimes leads to murky corporate interests.

The fact that the international political elite continues to successfully evade responsibility for deep-rooted problems like corruption and climate change (the latter of which became a signpost for their alleged efforts towards sustainable development, as if we just woke up to the climate crisis six years ago), hiding behind hypocritical strategies like UN’s Sustainable Development Agenda for 2030, is rather revealing that good intentions and power often cannot live under the same roof.

The economist and former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis put it succinctly in his book Adults in the room (2017):

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‘As  I have frequently observed, there is a widespread belief in Europe’s  north that the continent is populated by hard-working law-abiding  ants on the one hand and lazy tax-avoiding grasshoppers on the other,  and that all the ants live in the north while mysteriously the  grasshoppers congregate in the south.The reality is much more  muddled and sinister, corruption takes place across borders, in both  north and south. It involves multinational corporations whose  connections to the deep establishment are not contained by national  boundaries either. Part of what prevents us from tackling this mighty  network is a refusal on the part of the establishment to acknowledge its true nature’ (Varoufakis 2017, p.417).

Varoufakis’ book, which provides a detailed account on his negotiations with the so-called troika (The European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank) back in 2015, is a great testament to the behind-the-scenes extortion tactics that appear to take place at these influential organisations, whenever someone dares to threaten their inner circle of interest, be that a domestic or a foreign party.

The Coronavirus pandemic was not a hoax, but the way national and transnational public institutions (mis)handled and took advantage of it certainly is. Perhaps that’s not a side effect of crises like the one we’re currently living through, but the very desired result.

Naomi Klein called this phenomenon disaster capitalism more than a decade ago in her book The Shock Doctrine (2007), tracing its roots back to the 1960s and 1970s, when US intelligence, aided by academic research in human psychology and economic theory, decided that they could do with sovereign states literally whatever they pleased by not ‘asking countries if they wanted the US version of “free trade and democracy’, as Klein put it, ‘imposing it with Shock and Awe military force’ (Klein 2007, p. 30). Apparently, they were not wrong. 

The testing ground for the shock doctrine was Latin America in the 1970s (Chile and Argentina), however, the free market shock therapies spread successfully even to democratic countries like the UK, sweeping across former Soviet satellites in Europe, and ending up in the Middle East after the 9/11 attacks. 

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‘The original disaster, Klein writes, - the coup, the terrorist attack, the  market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane - puts the entire  population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the  bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies  much as the blaring music and blows in the torture cells soften up  prisoners. Like the terrorised prisoner who gives up the names of  comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up  things they would otherwise fiercely protect’ (Klein 2007, p. 46).

That sounds terrifyingly familiar in the post-pandemic world where entire populations obediently give up the autonomy of their decisions, the privacy of their personal life, the independence of their opinions and the sanctity of their physical and mental freedom without blinking, let alone asking why.

When Italy went into another crazed lockdown in March, the country’s PM Mario Draghi addressed his compatriots: ‘I'm aware that today's restrictions will have consequences on the education of your children, on the economy and on everyone's mental health, but they're necessary to avoid a worsening of the situation that would require even stricter measures’.

In other words, the global cooperation Guterres and Schwab had in mind when they were promoting unity against the common threat of the virus, was not about adequate repurposing of public spending into genuinely addressing the consequences of the pandemic and strengthening the healthcare systems that bore its brunt. It was about locking people up physically in their homes and mentally in the madness of the digital space, suspending rational debate and inciting fear to the point where reason became a war zone.

In the shock therapy of the Covid crisis, while people are so terrified and disoriented that they can barely collect their bearings, governments use the situation to pass on regulations which, under “normal” circumstances would be unimaginable. Just as the never-ending “War on Terror” (which crashed and burned few months ago as if following a badly-written script, leaving more devastation and despair than it descended into), this “for our own good” politics, is normalising all sorts of rabbit hole scenarios, where it’s almost impossible to tell if we should draw the line at any point whatsoever.

The Spectator's magazine editor Fraser Nelson raised a very important question in an episode of the Coffee House Shots podcast: where does government nudging end and institutionalised harassment of the public begin, referring to the introduction of vaccine passports, which are essentially, as he called them, bio ID-cards. If a government keeps vaccination passports, he argued, as a condition for people to participate in civic life – to go outside, socialise, even get a job, when the threat is clearly over, we are not talking about freedoms, we are talking about basic rights turned into privileges.

Nelson was right to suggest that granting the government extensive license  to do whatever necessary to contain the spread in an emergency like a global pandemic can be justified, provided the public can guarantee that those extra powers would be relinquished once the emergency has passed; something that, as he reminded us, and as we are still witnessing to this day, didn’t and isn't happening when the infection levels decrease considerably and a huge portion of the population has already armed itself with natural immunity through recovery or has been vaccinated. 

Back in February, Stephen Bush wrote for the New Statesman that we shouldn’t be worried about vaccine passports in the UK because they would enable the society to go back to domestic “normality”, while the main concern internationally should be the slow vaccine-rollout in the Global South. Oddly, Bush seems to be putting Westerners’ freedom to go on holiday trips too high on the priorities’ list when there are much more dystopian scenarios threatening democratic societies if we legitimise vaccine passports and tracing apps too hastily. Not to mention that such measures resemble awfully well China’s social credit system which Western democracies used to severely condemn in the pre-pandemic times. 

Furthermore, the pre-pandemic normality we all seem to be so nostalgic about is just as " normal" as the normality that's being shoved down our throats right now. 

In August 2020, Christopher Caldwell wrote for The New York Times: ‘In a society that respects science, expertise confers power. That has good results, but it brings a terrible problem: illegitimate political power can be disguised as expertise’ (a paraphrase of the French philosopher Michel Foucault). In the article, Caldwell analysed the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the Coronavirus outbreak, rather defending Agamben’s view on the asymmetries of power between authorities and citizens, which sharpened dramatically during the pandemic. 

”Biosecurity” now’, Caldwell continued, ‘serves as a reason for governments to rule in terms of “worst-case scenarios”. This means there is no level of cases or deaths below which locking down an entire nation of 60 million becomes unreasonable’. 

Not surprisingly, Agamben came to be harshly criticised for his stance on how public authorities addressed the crisis in his home country and elsewhere. 'Agamben is puzzled by the term social distancing', Caldwell wrote, ‘which appeared simultaneously around the world as if it had been prepared in advance’. What’s puzzling about the expression, according to Agamben, is that it’s not “physical” or “personal” distancing, as it would be normal in a medical situation, but “social” distancing, which also implies emotional separation. This, I think, oddly misaligns with the "solidarity and togetherness” which our politicians were eagerly promoting in the height of the pandemic.

In the State of Exception volume (2003), part of the book Homo Sacer, Agamben provides an interesting commentary of the way in which  democratic nations tend to use emergency situations, whether factual or fictitious, to create a ‘no-man’s land between public law and political fact’ (Agamben 2003, p. 10). A state of extreme situations (a state of necessity) requires the implementation of measures that are outside the constitutional law, in that sense, illegal, while the sovereign preserves the right to alter what should be regarded as lawful and right.

As the Italian philosopher writes, ‘the modern state of exception is a creation of the democratic-revolutionary tradition, and not the absolutist one’ (Agamben 2003, p. 18). While in medieval history transgressions of the law in a state of emergency (usually caused by necessity) were justified by the very same state of emergency (being a precedent, an exception), in modern history, the exceptions are increasingly being inscribed within the juridical law (the constitution), and the necessity to act to protect the common good, becomes the end, not the means. Effectively, the lines between what’s inside and outside the law — what’s the norm (the law) and its application, become blurry.

As Agamben pointed out, in the former case, ‘as long as the two elements remain correlated yet conceptually, temporally, and subjectively distinct…their dialectic – though founded on a fiction – can nevertheless function in some way’ (Agamben 2003, p. 208). However, when they are joined together in the state of exception, and it becomes the “normal” state of  rule, ‘the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine’ (ibid.).

That assimilation between the law and the necessity (the exception), is dangerous because giving extensive powers to governments in emergency situations, which they go on to preserve and translate to the “normal” situation, is what turns democracies into autocracies. This transition, Agamben emphasised, is usually well-known to politicians and jurists, but ordinary citizens remain completely oblivious to it. 

Just a few months ago, vaccine mandates were a fiction from a dystopian novel, and our politicians were reassuring us they would never materialise. Today, they are widely accepted in democratic countries like Australia, France, Italy, Germany, the US, and are quickly spreading to the politically weaker parts of the world. 

Dr Simon Longstaff of the Ethics Centre argued that the requiremenent to get fully vaccinated (whatever meaning the government ascribes to that status this week) should be seen as a conditional, rather than a mandatory restriction. He compared conditional vaccination (if you want to get a job, go to the supermarket or attend a public event, then you need to be vaccinated), to the requirement to get a license if you want to drive a car or wear safety equipment before you enter a mine. I see three major flaws with such comparisons: 1) unlike driving, getting employment or supplying food, are not matters of free will, these are "choices" most people make out of necessity, i.e. the alternative is for them to starve and not be able to sustain themselves or their families, and that is not a reasonable alternative; 2) it's absurd to compare wearing a seatbelt/passing an exam to obtain a license, to injecting a substance in one's body - the implications are fundamentally different, and 3) conditioning participating in society and keeping one's basic civic freedoms on undergoing a medical procedure is a coercion tactic which truly democratic societies should strive to avoid, even in the context of a pandemic. 

One might say that introducing mandatory Covid-19 vaccines is no different to mandatory vaccination campaigns we've had in the past, like the vaccine for measles, for example. Still, countries with high level of vaccination require PCR-testing before someone enters their territory on top of a Covid-19 vaccine, we've never before had such policing of ordinary citizens' vaccination status and such atrocious silencing of (scientific!) voices that speak a logic that deviates from the official "truth". The "pandemic of the unvaccinated" narrative quickly dissolved when we all saw that being double or tripple-jabbed does not mean one cannot contract or transmit the disease. 

The frantic pursuit of a zero-Covid strategy, especially in highly vaccinated contries (where the fully-vaccinated recently found out that they were not really fully vaccinated without a booster shot), apart from making no sense, also demonstrates, as Louise Perry put it 'the dangers of single-mindedness more generally: if you set your sights on one goal, you can end up destroying everything standing in your way' (creating a precedent to suspend our democratic convictions and infringe on basic human rights).

To claim that the pandemic was a planned conspiracy to submit and oppress the entire world with any degree of certainty would be dangerous, but to not see the way in which public authorities and private corporations capitalised on the misery of the situation, would be fatal. I find it unconvincing that our politicians are just incompetent and that is why the handling of the pandemic has turned into the healthcare and socio-economic catastrophe that it is.

We simply have too many examples to draw our conclusions from: impunity for powerful individuals, horrible wrongful convicions, malicious prosecutions, politically motivated double standards (none of which are single occurences, by the way). What they all have in common is the deliberate refusal, not incompetence, of those in power to admit their guilt, be that at the cost of causing collateral damage to completely innocent people. 

The vaccine virtue signalling which culminated in the public display of one's vaccination status: on social media, in Zoom meetings, in casual conversations, isn't helpful, either. Suddenly, sharing one's health record with complete strangers became a way to show solidarity and responsibility.

Stemming from this, Covid-19 vaccine proponents started using the derogatory term "anti-vaxxers" to shame those who are hesitant or unwilling to get the jab. Interestingly, even people who get vaccinated but nonetheless criticise vaccine mandates, get picked out as anti-vaxxers. Balancing individual freedom with public welfare is indeed a morally complex question. The utilitarians among us would be hard-pressed to give a choice to the individual when the common good is at stake. In practice, though, Sweden, one of the countries where masks, lockdowns and vaccines were a matter of recommendation throughout the pandemic and where people were trusted, instead of forced to act responsibly, produced the same results in terms of vaccination - 72% fully vaccinated  compared to 74% in France (as of Jan 3rd 2022), which was one of the first countries to impose draconian vaccination measures to contain the disease. Strikingly, the death toll in France is reported to be 123,372 per 100,000 people, while in Sweden it's estimated at 15,297 per 100,000 people (as of Dec 30th 2021). 

 We should also be careful when criticising mandatory vaccination on legal, instead of moral grounds because 1) whether mandatory vaccination is inscribed in the constitution is irrelevant to its moral rightness -  not everything that is legal is morally right, and 2) in a democratic society, giving governments unrestricted power to act in our alleged best interest, means surrendering completely the instruments to question illegitimate authority if and when it presents itself.

Another curious aspect of the vaccine debacle, is the tension between rich, highly-vaccinated countries and low-income countries where the vaccination levels are very low. Alix Kroeger recently argued that south-eastern countries have such a low vaccine uptake because of the countries’ authoritarian past of the post 1990s. While that is partially true, I believe Kroeger misremembers what past she is referring to. The communist regime in south-eastern Europe, which fell in the late 1980s was replaced by a democratic one. How democratic it really was, depends on whom one’s asking although, as Kroeger herself wrote, “Corruption was widespread. There was little reason to trust the state, for health advice or anything else”. Nevertheless, the mistrust in public authorities severely exacerbated in the post-communist era, the so-called transition to a democratic order (which strangely still cannot be completed 30 years later). It’s very tempting to blame the authoritarian past for the misfortunes of the democratic present when only half of the truth is portrayed, and sometimes salient facts get swept under the rug. I have no recollection of the communist-socialist era, I can only base my opinion on what my parents have shared and what I've read in books. It was certainly a time of little to no freedom of the press, politically motivated repressions and restricted civic freedoms. However, the government did provide a social safety net for the working class, which enabled ordinary citizens to lead decent lives and countries which are now relying primarily on foreign trade deals and imports were indeed economically independent back then. When this regime fell, and these countries were supposedly democratised, what changed was the fate of the working class. Capitalism ate up the social safety net, vital premises of the public sphere like education, employment, environment infrastructure, media were outsourced to the highest bidder, and corruption (which EU subsidies are helping thrive) discovered new highs and new lows at the same time. 30 years later, the class divide is so enormous that it feels like different social groups live on different planets, not neighbourhoods, urbanisation is rampant with no regard for snesible urban planning, the economy operates under wildly nonsensical rules, the media is populated by obedient scripters, not journalists, and the apathy of the population is so hopeless that it's really hard to see any change ever possible. 

I wonder which is worse - having a corrupt government that is open about it or living in a seemingly pristine democracy which only part of the population is entitled to; it's like choosing whether to die by drowning or in a hurricane. 

While we are searching for our lost democratic societies, I think we should spend some time to reflect honestly on whether they were ever truly democratic to begin with, how those who’ve risen to prominence, have gotten there in the first place, and what it takes for them to stay on top. After all, the democracy of elites in powerful countries is different from the democracy of the masses they govern, which, in its turn, is different from the democracy that trickles down to politically vulnerable nations, part of which nontheless have access to decent standards of living. 
Long live democracy! Long live hypocrisy! It’s hard to tell the difference these days.

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REFERENCES

1) Agamben. G. (2003). State of Exception. 

2) BBC: The 'Stomp Reflex': When governments abuse emergency powers (2021).

3) Bush, S. Why we shouldn't worry about vaccine passports. (2021). The New Statesman.

4) Caldwell, C. Meet the Philosopher Who Is Trying to Explain the Pandemic. (2020). The New York Times.

5) Covid-19 pandemic: Italy to shut shops and schools amid infection spike. (2021). BBC

6) Guterres, A. The world faces a pandemic of human rights abuses in the wake of Covid-19 (2021). The Guardian. 

7) Is Britain turning into a‘bio-security state’? (2021). Coffee House Shots. The Spectator.

8) Jacobin Magazine: The Psychology of Russiagate (2018).

9) Jacobin Magazine: For the Love of God, Stop Celebrating Big Pharma’s COVID Profiteers (2021).

10) Joe Biden is president but Donald Trump's legacy of violence looms. (2021). Intercepted.

11) Jonathan Miller. Liberté, égalité, vacciné: France’s Covid passport revolt isjust beginning. (2021). The Spectator.

12) Klein, N. (2007). The Shock Doctrine.

13) Konflikt. Demokratiernas kamp för överlevnad. (2021). Swedish Radio.

14) Longstaff, S. Vaccines: compulsory or conditional? (2021). The Ethics Centre.

15) Michael Sandel & Yuval Noah Harari in conversation. (2021). | Available online: YouTube.

16) Sandel, M. (2020). The Tyranny of Merit. 

17) The Great Reset. Episode 1 (2020). World Economic Forum. 

18) The Guardian: Biden defends move not to punish Saudi crown prince over Khashoggi killing (2021). 

19) The Nation: Fauci’s Truths and Half-Truths About Gain-of-Function Research (2021).

20) The Atlantic: The Pandemic of the Vaccinated Is Here (2021).

21) The Virus. What went wrong? (2021). PBS Frontline.

22) Varoufakis, Y. Adults in the room. (2017).

23) We need to talk about Joe (2020). Intercepted. 

24) Zurcher, A. Kamala Harris VP pick: How she could help - or hurt -Joe Biden (2020). BBC

About me

I am an editorial designer based in Bulgaria. I love animals, especially cats, tattoos, and almost anything black and white. When I'm not designing, I read, write, drive, watch documentaries, listen to podcasts, and talk to people about random and not so random stuff. 

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I'm on a mission to help truly independent journalism get to people in a comprehensive and visually-appealing format, so that they can form their opinions freely and make decisions based on  honest and truthful reporting. 

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Simply put, editorial design is the design of magazines, newspapers, books, and other media publications, be it print or digital. In other words, it's the visual representation of journalism and information intended for public use.

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