Why Democracy’s Side’s is Losing So Badly That We’re About to Lose Democracy, Why it Matters, And What to do About It
Visual Capitalist
Do you want to know why the side of democracy loses?
by umair
Why is the side of democracy losing? I’m going to break it down for you, and it’s not going to be pretty, because I’m not that guy, and none of us should be.
Let’s begin with a quote, that I think is going to make it eminently clear.
It’s about British politics, but ignore that part. It’s the message I want you to focus on.
Look at the frantic writings of their press. Here’s Allister Heath, the Sunday Telegraph’s editor: “Britain is already too far down the road to serfdom to turn back now”; “For the first time in my life, I’m now beginning to think Britain is finished”; “Middle England has been betrayed by Britain’s feckless new establishment.” His columnist Janet Daley echoed: “Betrayed voters are finally exacting revenge on our arrogant elites.” Another colleague, Sherelle Jacobs, wrote: “Britain has become a lawless country where good people have to live in fear” and “Endemic misery is pushing Britain towards a civilisational catastrophe.” That doomery reverberates among those Tory backbenchers who can’t tell the difference between their personal imminent loss of power, status and seats and “civilisational catastrophe”. The reason they are losing is because they have lost their reason.
Now. That’s from Polly Toynbee, who’s a dear friend of a friend, and I’m not here to disparage her. Let’s think about the quote above. What do you notice about it? Her contempt for all those messages is palpable. Later, she calls it “doomery.”
This is why the democratic side is losing.
We are in a civilizational catastrophe. Not just one, but a series of them. So much so that scholars and elder statesmen—all of whom are assuredly on the center and left—call it “permacrisis” and “polycrisis.” But the level of figures beneath them, the columnists, the Blinkens and Bidens, the party functionaries…they refuse to engage with this truth at all. Instead, they have something like this weird, sort of maddening, withering, total contempt for it.
What does that make the democratic side? Increasingly irrelevant.
(How I Know) We All Know We’re in a Civilizational Emergency
Why? You see, we all know that we’re in a civilizational catastrophe right about now. All of us. I’ll show you how in just a second, but first I want to make the point: the only people that won’t admit are the moribund leaders of the centre and establishment. They’re pretending we’re not, and they’re becoming irrelevant, and thus, democracy’s dying swiftly.
Now. How—why do I say—we all know it, that we’re in a “civilizational catastrophe”?
Because the message works. Far too well for us not to know it. I’ll discuss statistics in a second, but those lie beneath even the obvious level….of…reality.
We might not even “know” it on a conscious level. But it hits us with the feeling that we’re trying to bury, which is that things are going badly wrong for us, as individuals, as societies, as a world. We all know it, so intensely, that really, it’s the thing we think about—or try not to think about—most.
How do I know that? Am I just making it up? How do we really know the message works? Because it’s the entire reason the far right has risen to power. Who is it that speaks incessantly about “civilizational” whatever, catastrophe, calamity, decline, etcetera? The far right. It’s Trump who’ll say things like “we’ve become a Third World country” and so forth, and it’s European far right leaders who’ll speak of civilizational crisis.
And it works. It works so well they’ve all catapulted to power. That’s because the average person might be dumb, but they’re not stupid. We can all see that the world around us is buckling, breaking, and falling apart. And so this foolish, foolish approach of denying it, and pretending everything’s just fine and dandy—it’s destroying democracy even more than the far right, because it’s what creates the opening for it.
The Power Vacuum Left When Institutions Won’t Acknowledge Civilizational Emergency
Now. The far right, when it speaks of “civilizational catastrophe” and so forth—it doesn’t mean what, say, scholars of polycrisis do. It means: the immigrants are here to steal our land, wives, children, jobs. When Trump speaks of America becoming a “third world” country—and plenty of those are pretty nice places—he doesn’t mean crumbling infrastructure and a lack of social systems and a destroyed social contract, he means scapegoats.
So. What’s happening here? Are these just Wittgensteinian “language games”?