WHAT a difference 20 years make. I am thinking of Richard Holbrooke. Before he became familiar to us as the diplomatic face of the Af-Pak operation during the American intervention in Afghanistan, he was worried about the appropriateness of democracy in illiberal countries. With reference to the upcoming elections in Bosnia in 1996, he posited the following dilemma: What if elections are free and fair, and those elected are racists, fascists, and separatists?

What, indeed, now that the shoe is on the other foot? Americans have elected, for the second time, a man we can identify with so easily — indicted for a crime and one even his supporters won’t deny is a liar, a racist, and a sexist. Someone who believes elections can be stolen, refuses to concede, and incites an insurrection to overturn the verdict. Someone on record telling voters that if they elected him they would never need to vote again.

As long as such unpleasant outcomes occurred elsewhere, Americans were generous enough to restore decent governance with recourse to benevolent regime change. Of course, the offenders need not only be racists, fascists, and separatists; anyone who wouldn’t play ball with the Washington Consensus was a legitimate target — how could anyone be decent who refused to play ball with the inheritors of the Enlightenment? But how does one enact regime change at home? Mr Holbrooke is no longer around to offer a remedy for the new dilemma pressing in from all sides.

The bottom line is that the modern democratic experiment is in deep trouble.

In its hubris, America never put in place a guardian institution to nip such nasty domestic outcomes in the bud, or negate them in the national interest by nabbing offenders, locking them up, or sending them into exile. In grave enough situations, a guardian institution could even save the country by dividing it into more manageable units. Alas, such blessings are reserved only for the divinely chosen, and America, with its lack of sufficient faith, thinking a mere Electoral College would suffice, is paying the price.

America is not the only country facing this comeuppance; almost all those who were so recently proclaiming proudly the end of history are now sprouting leaders intent on kicking away the electoral ladder once they have used it to clamber to the top. The stark bottom line is that the modern democratic experiment, less than 250 years old if one dates its beginning to that of the oldest democracy in 1789, is in deep trouble.

Why may this be so? In terms of a palpable phenomenon, certainly because democracy has failed to deliver what the majority of voters expected from it. Opinions differ, but 1976 is a good year to date the beginning of the discontent that has been festering ever since. Right or wrong, there is the growing sense that the system as it exists is unresponsive to the needs of the majority and that the only way forward is to turn it upside down, even if it takes unsavoury characters to do so.

Leading up to this outcome are less obvious causes. Most important is the transformation of the political equality of one-person-one-vote to the oligarchic inequality of one-dollar-one-vote. Over the last century, the economy evolved under capitalism from small owner-operated firms without market power, to giant transnational corporations with more muscle than many countries.

The year 1976 was when the state ceded its regulatory control to the free market dominated by corporate power. And, in 2010, the American judiciary removed all limits on the use of corporate funds to influence elections.

Add to this glob­alisation, the financialisation of capital, and the removal of controls on its mo­­­-

vement. Industrial jobs started to disappear across bord­ers in search of low wages, while inequality went thro­u­­gh the roof at home. Not surprisingly, the number of people with tenuous connections to the economy, living from pay cheque to eroding pay cheque, began to grow. All they had left was the vote and an anger ready to be tapped by those promising to restore the past. Countervailing appeals to sustain the status quo in order to “save” democracy rang hollow, because democracy could neither put food on the table nor restore the loss of dignity.

Here, then, is the supreme irony. After decades of being told that East Asia would surely become like the West, the transition is headed in exactly the opposite direction. The West is becoming more statist and authoritarian by the day. Liberal democracy is under siege and ceding ground.

It was only the prescient few who could discern what was coming; who went along with the pretence of democracy, all the while keeping the rudder in their all-knowing and all-seeing control.

The writer is the author of Pakistan: Clash of Ideas, Aks Publications 2024.

Published in Dawn, January 7th, 2025