Democratic Values Need Constant Maintenance, and That Tells You Who Is Eroding Them

Here is a fact everyone in a representative democracy knows and almost nobody thinks about. Democratic values have to be maintained. Teachers are told to instil them. Journalists are praised for guarding them. Civil society organisations exist to defend them. There are foundations whose entire purpose is to keep them alive, and every one of these bodies describes its work in the vocabulary of protection, as though the values were a fire that would go out if nobody fed it.

Ask why. A value that a society actually held would not need a priesthood.

When the Erosion Happens

Look at when the values slip. It is never a random walk. It happens at specific, predictable moments: a war, an attack, a pandemic, a financial collapse, a wave of crime real or reported. Whenever there is a conflict or a disaster or a large enough problem, the freedoms contract. Detention without trial appears. Surveillance widens. Speech is restricted in the name of security or health. Emergency powers are granted and then kept.

Some of this comes back afterwards and some does not, and the part that does not is how the level drifts downward over decades between the moments when it is deliberately pushed back up.

So the pattern is: the values erode from above whenever an excuse is available, and are restored from below by sustained effort. That asymmetry is the whole subject of this post.

Who Does the Eroding

The people who take advantage of the emergency are not random. It is the higher levels of the system: the government, the security establishment, and the business interests close to both. Each of them gains from a population with fewer rights. A government with emergency powers is easier to run. A security service without oversight is more comfortable. An industry whose critics can be silenced is more profitable.

None of them needs to be villainous for this to happen. They need only to act on their interests when the opportunity arises, and the emergency is the opportunity. I have argued elsewhere that organisations are steered by their interests rather than by the people nominally running them; this is that argument applied to the state.

Who Does the Maintaining

And who pushes back? Teachers, at their own initiative, sometimes against a curriculum written by the very government whose reach they are teaching children to limit. A free press, which the state tolerates and periodically tries to tame. Writers and artists, whose culture tends to be critical of authority for the same structural reason that authority tends to be critical of them. Private citizens with time and stubbornness.

Every one of these is outside the apparatus of government, or inside it and acting against its grain. We have arranged for the defence of democratic values to be done by amateurs, while the erosion is done by professionals. The professionals have budgets, continuity, and the law on their side during every emergency. The amateurs have evenings and weekends.

That we win as often as we do is remarkable. That we lose ground steadily should surprise nobody.

What the Fluctuation Proves

The level of democratic values in a society is not a constant. Graph it over a century and you get a line that dips at every crisis and recovers, partially, in the calm afterwards. The fluctuation is the evidence.

If the values were held by the system itself, the line would be flat, or would move only when the public deliberately moved it. Instead it moves when the government is given a reason to move it, and moves back when the public has spent enough effort to force it back. That is the signature of a system that is at best indifferent to the values it claims as its foundation and at worst opposed to them, held in check only by outside pressure.

A representative regime, in other words, is ambivalent toward democracy. It needs the appearance of it for legitimacy and it is inconvenienced by the substance of it at every difficult moment. Both halves of that are structural, and neither is fixed by electing different people.

The Design Requirement

The conclusion I draw is a design requirement rather than a complaint.

We need a system of government that is stable with respect to its own values: one in which the machinery of government does not gain from eroding them, so that the erosion does not have a constituency inside the state. That rules out any arrangement in which a small group holds the emergency powers and the public has to take them back afterwards, because such a group will always find the emergency.

The arrangement that meets the requirement is the one in which the public itself holds the decision. A population does not vote to strip itself of rights in order to make itself easier to govern; it has no interest in being easier to govern. It may make mistakes in a crisis, and it will sometimes vote for measures it later regrets. But it will not make the systematic mistake, the one that recurs at every emergency because someone profits from it, and it will not need a priesthood of teachers and journalists to remind it afterwards of what it believed.

Values that have to be maintained by volunteers against the people in charge are not the system's values. They are the public's, on loan, and returned only under protest.