In 1841 the Scottish writer Charles Mackay published a prescient survey of the dangers of what we now describe as a herd mentality. “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” warned that men “think in herds; it will [also] be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.” History, he argued, showed that “whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly.”
Is there a better way to describe the passions which have surfaced on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years? And yet, for most of us, liberal democracy, seems too entrenched to be challenged by its old foes. Totalitarian ideas, and the righteous men who espoused them, cost so many lives during the twentieth century that we tend to think they have been irretrievably consigned to the dustbin of history. A century ago, just after the end of the Great War, there was a similar sense of inevitability about European democracy.
The collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian empires led the influential scholar and politician Viscount James Bryce, to write in 1921 about the “universal acceptance of democracy as the normal and natural form of government.” Shortly after Bryce wrote those words, key European nations were entranced by Fascism and Communism. The rapid spread of these ideas would not have taken Bryce completely by surprise. In 1899 while acting as Britain’s ambassador to the United States, he had retraced Alexis de Tocqueville’s travels during the composition of “Democracy in America”. Reflecting on the social equality that had so impressed Tocqueville, Bryce asked himself whether it remained intact: “Clearly not as regards material conditions,” he concluded: “Sixty years ago, there were no great fortunes in America, few large fortunes, no poverty. Now there is some poverty (though only in a few places can it be called pauperism) and a greater number of gigantic fortunes than in any other country of the world.”
A century later, neoliberal economics pushed this inequality to unsettling extremes, setting the stage for many of the upheavals of our time. In 1994 the political scientist Edward Luttwak warned that the “completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people” was opening up a vast political space for a “product-improved Fascist party, dedicated to the enhancement of the personal economic security of the broad masses of (mainly) white-collar working people.” A few years later, however, such cautions had been forgotten, swept aside by visions of a digitally networked future. The crowd was reinvented as a benign political force. “None of us is as smart as all of us,” went one catchphrase; others spoke of the “wisdom of crowds.”
During the last ten years, such optimism has been replaced by an awareness that digital platforms can weaponize a society’s social and political divisions. This, in turn, has led to a dangerously oversimplified form of populism in which patently impractical political promises have been taken seriously by an increasingly impassioned electorate. The Brexit referendum, for example, presented voters with a binary choice which has since proven impossibly difficult to implement. As the economic historian Robert Skidelsky points out, “The main obstacle is not the complications of negotiating new treaties, but rather the judgment by those in charge of Britain’s political life that the costs of an emphatic withdrawal are too great.” American politics is rife with comparable simplifications about border security, gun safety, healthcare, taxes, trade and foreign policy. This has produced an embattled atmosphere in both countries that only seems to get worse with each passing month.
None of this bodes well for fledgling democracies like ours. As the Bagehot column in the latest issue of The Economist notes, “[t]he great achievement of parliamentary democracy [was] to take politics off the streets”. Since the turn of the century, however, crowds have begun to push it back there, reasserting themselves through mass protests, social media tweetstorms and other provocations, not just in Britain and Europe but in many other parts of the world. In such circumstances it has become more important than ever that parliamentary democracies offer meaningful alternatives to the angry populism – on both sides of the political spectrum – that now threatens to become the new norm.
