Opinion: The main threat to liberal democracy comes from within, not from authoritarians
White supremacists at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017. By Sheri Berman March 26 at 5:16 PM Sheri Berman is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the author of “Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day.”
Let’s start with arguments about “resurgent authoritarianism.” Empirically, the evidence for this is thin. The number of democracies today remains close to its all-time high: There were 11 in 1900, 20 in 1920, nine in 1940, 32 in 1970, 77 in 2000 and 116 in 2018. Moreover, the undertow following the democratic wave that began in the late 20th century has been weak: It left many more democracies in its wake than previous waves of democratization in 1848, 1918 or 1945.
The path to liberal democracy has always been long and difficult. That countries with almost no previous experience with liberalism or democracy, such as Russia, Hungary and Poland, have had trouble constructing well-functioning democracies today should sadden but not surprise us. Similarly, the idea that new communications technologies provide authoritarian regimes with unprecedented control over their own societies lacks historical perspective: Does Xi Jinping’s manipulation of Internet access give him more control over China than Mao was able to achieve with the Red Guards? And as Facebook-inspired uprisings across the globe have made clear, communications technologies can destabilize democracies and dictatorships.
In the United States over the past decades, politics has become corrupted by gerrymandering, voting restrictions and the influence of big business and the wealthy. Education, health care and other public services have deteriorated. Society has become increasingly riven by economic, racial and geographical divisions. And the U.S. economy has developed to disproportionately benefit the already advantaged. Such trends have weakened U.S. democracy from within.
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