Gasping for Breath: Democracy à bout de souffle?

Abstract

In 1947, Winston Churchill looked out on the ruin in which Europe lay after the experience of totalitarian rule the continent had just survived and famously remarked: “Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” (1). This commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of SubStance’s founding offers an opportunity to reflect on the perils of our contemporary world where we are seeing actual and aspiring autocrats assailing democratic rule with a vigor not seen in the Western world since the interwar years. Here in the US, concerns about the erosion of democratic norms and institutions have been heightened by the Ubu-esque ambitions of a singular political personality who has worked intently in recent years to bend a 246-year-old constitutional republic to his will. Upon closer observation, though, it becomes clear that democratic principles and the notions of equality and social solidarity that undergird them have been eroding for decades. These values are now being openly spurned, not just on the margins of political life but in the mainstream as well where, in some quarters, minority power-grabs are the order of the day and a whiff of autocracy hangs in the air. Is it not time to ponder whether the aspirations that spurred the imagination of masses of youth the world over a half century ago have been slowly but surely asphyxiated by an emboldened far right whose ambition over the past five decades has been to quash the “spirit of ‘68” and its expansive vision of what life in a true democracy could be? With respect to the topic at hand, clarity of historical hindsight reveals that at the very moment SubStance and other like-minded sites of inquiry were setting out to challenge orthodoxies of all intellectual sorts, the seeds of this now resurgent authoritarianism had been planted and were already beginning to sprout. The rupture in the status quo which the generation of ‘68 introduced was impelled by its fervent desire to reinvent democratic life and to imagine bold new forms of human emancipation, expression and collective