This is the miracle of liberal democracy, as un-miracle-like as it seems. And how is this miracle effected? By the democratic winner and his fervent supporters being so kindhearted so as to let the losers and especially their leader(s) just be? Instead of making good on their election campaign promises of “locking her (him, them) up”?
At least two things are at work here: the checks and balances of a well-conceived and constructed, as well as entrenched liberal democratic system, and the fact that the extremely polarized electorate (as portentous as that alone should normally be of an impending apocalypse for the Girardian) is actually divided almost perfectly in half. The seeming equal strength and equal fervor of the adversaries makes the possibility of anything even close to fulfilling those election promises highly unlikely. Thus societal extreme yet equal polarization becomes another bulwark against a possible systemic destruction, on top first of all of the separation of powers, or the three independent branches of government, and consequently, their ability to mutually hold one another in check. (Paradoxically, especially if that is accompanied by a free media, and ideally fortified by a functioning subsidiarity principle, it fosters appreciation for the system in society and in effect becomes conducive to mutual trust.)
Should we thus be dismayed – or rather encouraged, as inappropriate as that word might seem here – by the ongoing display of electoral equal polarization, e.g., in recent American elections: in Alabama, with its aura of scandal, acrimoniousness and accusations of fraud, all leading to election complaint filing and unwillingness to concede defeat; and in Virginia, a vote recount and the need to resort to lottery drawing to break perfect vote equality, all that to bring or break perfect equality in the state’s House of Delegates?
Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man posited (to trivialize its thesis a bit) that liberal democracy is the pinnacle of mankind’s ideological development in terms of societal systems. From this lofty summit mankind can only backslide, at its peril, into some suboptimal, formerly tried system of governance. One thing that might prompt people to do that would be boredom supposedly intrinsic to the system. Well, equal deep societal polarization is anything but boring. Liberal democracy need not die of boredom after all.
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But liberal democracies can and occasionally do backslide. And it is not boredom that is operative then. Yet it can certainly happen from within the system, as it did with the Weimar Republic in Germany. It takes the unabashed, and too feebly opposed, dismantling by those in power of the edifice of a system of checks and balances that underpins liberal democracy, not necessarily an outright attack on electoral democracy as such, not initially at least. Today it can happen even within the confines of a multistate structure that has been erected around liberal democratic values such as is the European Union (the ongoing case of its members Poland and Hungary).
Should we then be really encouraged by displays of deep equal polarization in Western societies, seeing in it yet another bulwark against the threat of, let’s say, an autocracy that is not as farfetched to imagine as the goal of some democratically elected leaders in the West? Well, alone it is too volatile and unstable a phenomenon to substantially contribute to a peaceable societal equilibrium. But in conjunction with a tradition of a liberal democracy undergirded by checks and balances, it can be viewed on one hand as just that, i.e., a bulwark, and on the other hand, when seeing it also as a threat to social stability, as something society will be able to withstand – while also uncannily profiting from it.
This does not detract in the least from the value of the three branches of liberal democratic governments being legitimized in the strongest possible manner, that is through an electoral process. Ideally, to enjoy an indisputable democratic legitimacy, each branch should be legitimized separately, i.e., independently of the other branches, and directly. Directly in a democracy can only truly mean – in an election. From this standpoint the general election even of the members of the judiciary would be preferable to that conducted by the judges from among their peers, the latter arguably still being preferable to a system of executive nomination subject to legislative confirmation, or any variant thereof, which is the norm in many liberal democracies.
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Returning to the nitty-gritty of liberal democracy as it is currently playing out, we can witness deeply-seated suspicions on the part of observers when in an ostensibly democratic system elections return candidates who get, let’s say, around seventy percent of votes or more. That suspicion is usually fully justified in terms of those elections being either stacked or otherwise unfair. Such results do not normally happen in properly functioning liberal democracies, there is no way for them to be such in a nation-wide poll, even in a two-stage two-way election. In fact a result as modest as 58%-42% is currently considered as a landslide victory by many theorists.
There are many current examples of nearly equal polarization in Western societies, most clearly pronounced and discernable in two-party, zero-sum political systems, or situations resembling them, like referenda. We’ve seen it in Great Britain with the Brexit vote, and even in a country claiming to aspire to be part of the EU, vide Turkey with its 2017 constitutional referendum. In other democratic electoral systems, members of grand coalitions formed in the face of this polarization, whether to counteract it or just to be able to form a government, as is the case with Germany, tend to gradually lose their supporters to the more extreme forces. The latter seem to benefit at least as much from the polarization dynamic as from their embracing valid political causes. Based on all that, it is only natural to predict that come next French presidential election we should witness even deeper polarization than during that of last year, and its eventual winner’s margin of victory nowhere near a veritable landslide figure observed then.
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But why should it be so? Why there should not be a nation-wide unity behind a democratically-elected political leader or cause espoused by him/her, or even justifiable expectation thereof? Having characterized societal equal polarization as yet another possible bulwark underpinning the edifice of liberal democracy, but one that is nevertheless less-and-less palatable as that polarization is growing, should we not be looking with hope to the other end of the spectrum, that of democratic victories considerably exceeding Western notions of electoral landslide? Disregarding possible concerns about methods employed, and – contra Fukuyama – seeing in it a genuinely new development that is worthy of fostering, to boot? In fact there are political theorists (to their detractors, autocracy apologists, advocates of authoritarianism or paternalist statism, if not outright communists) arguing just that, seeing it not just as a resentment-driven populist return to the past but as a new civilizational movement whose leaders in forging ahead base their decisions and actions first of all on having tried liberal democracy, with dismal results for their countries, and then deciding to replace it with a better version of the system – perhaps “guided,” if you will – that stresses local traditions and history, and that is allegedly also more conducive to societal peace.
Accusations concerning Russia’s falling short of democratic standards often pivot around election results, focusing their suspicions precisely on Putin’s margins of victory that for Western tastes are too big to be real. Rebuttals might stress that those margins testify to Russian society’s maturity as well as being the unadmitted envy of Western politicians, who can only dream of being as popular among their voters back home as he is among Russia’s. But why would then Alexei Navalny not be allowed to run in the upcoming presidential election, even though he most probably would not stand a chance of even coming close to Western landslide victory standards, of course from the losing side of the spectrum? A rather charitable possible explanation in a somewhat Girardian vein might be that enjoying veritable popularity as he does Putin wants to hold back the mimetic rivalry inherent in an openly contested electoral process. To hold it back indefinitely, if at all possible, fearing the unwholesome dynamic that this might unleash, and which he is able to witness operating in the West. All of that with as minimal use of coercive measures as possible, also with a view to maintaining a semblance of societal peace.
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Is that all enough then to start forming the basis of a wholly new system? Not by a long shot. Putin apparently needs and openly employs nationalistic propaganda and some other well-known trappings and ploys, some of them considered disreputable in the West, of older political systems that liberal democracies claim to have transcended (not entirely truthfully, but perception counts for them more than reality). Thus Fukuyama might be right after all. But does it really matter? The real battle will be fought, and decided one way or the other, at least for the time being, not on the pages of political theory books, and hopefully not on battlefields, but in the real world of economy. And yet another force might stand to win it, one that recently has been downplaying ideology while maneuvering successfully for the best economic position. Growth is where it’s at today, as in fact has always been the case in the long run.
But the mimetically-minded man tends to lose the value of growth from sight, preferring instead to embroil himself in mimetic games for mimesis sake, that being his true nature, according to Girard. And those games tend to quickly degenerate into zero-sum varieties, if they are not such from the start. So we should not congratulate ourselves too quickly even if we felt like it for this liberal democracy’s new bulwark that we might see in societal equal polarization. That one is as zero-sum as it gets. Its magic derives from the game’s effective reduction to two players only, thus the Girardian equation of everybody against one does not in effect applies in terms of violence being able to eventually dissipate in the process (which in itself is both good and bad) – as long as they stay equal in strength and equally committed to their causes.
Yet alternatives to this situation, such as would not subvert the spirit of Western liberal democracy, seem hardly practicable to the mimetic mind. The mimetic dance of protagonists symbolically embodying, seemingly alternately, two of the principal liberal democratic values, liberty and equality, has them taking turns at it with increasing frequency. The third emblematic value, fraternity or solidarity, which could mitigate societal polarization if cultivated and practiced towards all of one’s compatriots, is for all intents and purposes nowhere to be seen, or used only instrumentally, e.g., towards one’s choice victims.
Remembering also that, given a choice, virtually all humanity would make a trek to this desired-and-hated El Dorado (which fact in itself might be viewed as a practical corroboration of Fukuyama’s thesis, at least as long as it lasts; but of course the tide of trekkers into liberal democracies is not subsiding any time soon) – it is no wonder that the mimetic man was condemned by its (re)-inventor, Rene Girard, to teetering on the verge of Apocalypse.
