Democracy in Decline?

by Josef Ernst*

Stalling or even declining economic growth are central to understanding the broader crisis facing the Western world.

Due to a shrinking room of maneuver for socioeconomic redistribution, many people feel that their sense of justice has been profoundly disrupted.

Justice is a complex and often elusive concept. While it is grounded in the law, it extends beyond legal frameworks and, in our contemporary world, often manifests itself through social programs that are designed to promote equality.

Further complicating matters politically, the notion of justice is frequently invoked by those who feel wronged. And yet, such feelings are inherently subjective and open to dispute. There is no universally binding standard for justice, making it a deeply personal and contested idea.

What is just? What is fair?

Would it be more constructive to consider fairness as a factor of social cohesion instead? Fairness, unlike justice, is guided by an internal moral compass.

People generally understand fairness intuitively — those who diligently get up to work view it as unfair when others shirk the same responsibility, and vice versa.

Fairness does not exclude unfairness but acknowledges it. Rather than being based on negotiated claims, it operates on the notion of personal accountability.

Justice, in contrast, involves formal agreements and entitlements, such as internal and external security for citizens.

Disruption causes paranoia

Misguided feelings of justice often fuel a paranoid style of politics, one that blames others for a perceived decline in societal conditions.

This scapegoating eventually targets not just specific groups but everyone, fostering resentment and division.

The troubling U.S. sample

That is perhaps the overriding concern that the current political path of the United States presents to the rest of the world.

At best, that is confusing to many people around the world, as they perceive the United States as being a rich country.

What about Europe?

Currently, Europe grapples with two significant issues: The impact of uncontrolled immigration and the multitude of misunderstandings stemming from justice being conflated with an unconditional sense of entitlement.

Unresolved as these issues are, they have led to a dangerous political constellation where longstanding truths have become ambiguous, and our understanding of the past appears increasingly elusive.

Accordingly, our lives are overshadowed by a sense of bewilderment and a desperate search for direction. We are grappling with the aftermath of the pandemic, a war nearby and misguided domestic policies that prioritize the collective redistribution of public wealth while often demonizing entrepreneurship.

Democracy in neglect and the growth of bureaucracy

The causes and consequences of these developments vary among European countries. At its core, Germany has faced considerable strain since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The public sector’s constant expansion has outpaced private enterprise. Little wonder then that the German economy has registered economic decline for the past two years.

Even so for Germany, as for other EU countries, the era of economic complacency and well-meaning but overreaching state control appears to be drawing to a close.

Why Trump, Musk and Milei resonate elsewhere

While status-quo minded people in Europe may be abhorred, the rhetoric of political figures such as Donald Trump and his anti-bureaucracy envoy Elon Musk, as well as Argentine President Milei, give a powerful voice to this anti-bureaucracy sentiment – unreasonable as it may seem to European elites for now.

The reason why this anti-bureaucracy sentiment is gaining ground everywhere is that the government sector increasingly appears as an island onto itself. Many detest it because it tends to reward the public sector insiders, while not delivering for the rest of the population.

Democracy at risk: By whom – and from where?

Two broader questions emerge: What does it take to salvage democracy? And exactly who is putting it at risk?

Democracy, by its very nature and embodies freedom. Freedom for its part requires tolerance.

A democracy is truly free when there is unrestricted space for the exchange of arguments and counterarguments. However, after decades of individual disempowerment in favor of increasingly fragmented special interest groups demanding public recognition — going far beyond the framework of LGBTQ+ and similar movements — public discourse has become lopsided.

The ”I” vs. the “We”

Democracy was originally designed to protect the individual from the state. Yet, we now find ourselves in a situation where the individual is adrift unless integrated into a collective “we” to provide a sense of belonging.

The question is who the “we” exactly is. The political reality is that there are contending “We’s” who are increasingly diametrically opposed to one another in terms of values, goals and accepted practices.

The collective vs. the individual

In public discourse, the collective “we” is viewed as asserting rights and seeking justice. Individuals meanwhile demand fairness, particularly in areas not explicitly covered by original legal statutes, such as security and justice.

It actually does not help that, over decades of social engineering, the democratic negotiation process has grown increasingly complex.

It has led to a heightened reliance on experts and scientific solutions for addressing certain issues. Even so, their wisdom, knowledge, reliability and relationship to truth are increasingly contested.

The traditional belief that experts should be on tap rather than on top has been disregarded. The state’s imposition of doctrinaire views on science undermines democratic principles by delaying the essential interplay of argument and counter-argument inherent to scientific inquiry.

Laws are not set in stone

The barriers to discussing public issues have been heightened by an ever-expanding bureaucracy that, through its very existence, seems to legitimize its objectives in a Kafkaesque manner.

This ignores the fact that rights are relative and not immutable. They are open to debate. Laws are not set in stone but can be changed and political discourse must be based on a give-and-take.

Democracy dies when it is converted into an exclusion game by insiders who are increasingly viewed as hijacking the very idea of democracy for their own ulterior partisan purposes.

*Journalist and corporate communications expert

*first published in: theGlobalist.com