Democracy's Crisis of Legitimacy

In politics as in Road Runner physics, it’s the realization that you’re standing in mid air that causes the fall.

Given all the ground I’ve covered on this blog so far, I’m now in a position to summarize and synthesize my various observations and arguments about the current state of liberal democracy. We know the symptoms: polarization along demographic and cultural lines, the rise of authoritarian populism and “woke” social justice radicalism, a “post-truth” media environment, and a global democratic recession. But what is the exact nature of the malady, and what are its major contributing causes?

It was sometime during the spring of 2016 that I came to realize that American democracy wasn’t just going through a rough patch — it was at risk of falling apart altogether. Donald Trump, a wildly unfit con man with no prior political experience, had just sewn up the Republican nomination, and Bernie Sanders was pushing Hillary Clinton to the limit on the other side — despite the fact that he was a 74-year-old avowed socialist who wasn’t even a member of the Democratic party. With these parallel developments, I saw that the country had crossed a line – from a democracy with more than its usual share of dysfunctions to one in the throes of an outright crisis of legitimacy.

Étienne de La Boétie, a French aristocrat and close friend of the essayist Michel de Montaigne, once wrote an essay of his own about what he took to be the great mystery of political order: why the many obeyed the few. Here’s one especially vivid passage:

You sow crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows—to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.

La Boétie called it “voluntary servitude,” the Chinese had their mandate of heaven, and we talk about collective action problems and focal points and multiple equilibria. However we in the present day try to reduce the phenomenon to tractable social science, there is still a sense of magic about the fact that a single person can compel millions to do his bidding. The invisible fetters of political authority bind as surely as ones made of steel — until, in an instant, the magic spell is broken and authority vanishes.

On December 21, 1989, such an instant was caught on camera as Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu delivered his final public address at a mass rally in Bucharest. Remember how Wile E. Coyote could stay suspended in mid-air above the abyss until the moment he finally looked down? Here we get to see that moment for Ceaușescu. At about 1:20 into this video, some disturbance in the crowd attracts his attention; he looks confused as he tries to go on speaking, the camera wobbles, security goons come into the shot and say something to him, and then the screen goes blank. Ceaușescu would continue the speech, but within 48 hours he would be captured trying to escape the country. On Christmas Day he and his wife were tried, convicted, and executed.

In his classic account of the subject, Max Weber identified legitimacy as the magic ingredient that makes political order possible: “The basis of every system of authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief, a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige.” According to Weber, there are three sources of legitimacy: tradition, or faith in the way things have always been done; charisma, or faith in an individual leader; and finally, rational legality, or faith in a system of abstract rules.

In the spring of 2016, we were witnessing a breakdown in the American system of rational-legal authority. Over the course of the 21st century, public trust in government had continued its long-term slide: after rising during the 90s boom and peaking after 9/11 at 60 percent, trust in government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time” had tumbled all the way to 18 percent by 2016.

As a libertarian, I had long been heartened by the downward trend in trust. I thought that people had previously overestimated the amount of good that government could do, and that their disillusionment would ultimately lead to demands for smaller, simpler, more modest government.

Looking back, I can only cringe at how deeply mistaken I was. When people were telling pollsters that they no longer trusted government, what they had lost confidence in — what they were in the process of giving up on — were established institutions and governing elites. They hadn’t given up believing in power, and wielding it on their team’s behalf, and they hadn’t given up on following leaders. The erosion of trust wasn’t the path forward to Libertopia; it was the path backward to reliance on cruder, simpler forms of political authority. Rational-legal authority was gradually disintegrating, and people were reverting to charisma. Enter Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders: two anti-system outsiders, one with no connection at all to the political establishment and the other with decades of radical, oppositional positioning, both of whom found enthusiastic followers precisely because they put themselves forward as bulls in a china shop.

You can object to the parallel I’m drawing between Trump and Sanders, but parallel isn’t the same thing as equivalent. (In early 2020, when it appeared we could be heading for a Trump-Sanders showdown, I told people that if it came to that I’d crawl over broken glass to vote for Sanders.) The point is that Sanders’ rise, every bit as much as Trump’s, was a sign that critical masses of Americans had given up on “normal” and were desperately searching for some, for any, alternative. To paraphrase Chesterton: when people stop believing in constitutional government, the problem isn’t that they believe in nothing; the problem is that they’ll believe in anything.

I’m focusing on the United States here, but similar dynamics have been playing out in Europe. We’ve seen drops in political and social trust; the rise of authoritarian populist parties; declining fortunes for the established parties of the center-right and especially center-left; protest movements that take to the streets; and polls that show a growing longing for strong, decisive leaders unconstrained by elections and legislatures.

If the proper diagnosis for this condition is a crisis of legitimacy, then what is the condition’s etiology? In navigating this time of troubles, it would be helpful to know exactly where democracy’s foundations are weakening, so that we can direct our efforts to where they will do the most good.

What are the possible reasons for this legitimacy crisis? I see three broad alternatives. The ongoing withdrawal of public support for established institutions and governing elites could be in reaction to sustained and serious failures by elites to govern effectively and wield their power for broad public benefit. Or perhaps elites aren’t doing especially badly now, but in our current media environment their failures have become much harder to sweep under the rug, so public awareness of elite failure is now greater than it once was. Finally, instead of the problem being that elites are either actually or apparently less trustworthy, it could be that the public is simply less trusting than it used to be. If cultural changes have diminished the public’s capacity for trust, democratic legitimacy will erode regardless of how well or poorly elites are doing.

The correct answer, I’m afraid, is all of the above. Our present discontents are a kind of perfect storm in which things are going wrong on every front. On the bright side, this means that there are multiple angles from which efforts to shore up democracy can be pursued.

I’ve been making the case for the connection between elite failure and our political troubles for years now. Here’s me (writing with Sam Hammond, Steve Teles, and Will Wilkinson) back in 2018:

Today, faith in America’s political and economic institutions is badly shaken by their undeniable failure to measure up — not to other countries, but to our own past. Dragged down by the Great Recession and its aftermath, economic growth during the 21st century has averaged only half the pace sustained throughout the 20th. Productivity growth has been anemic, and new business formation is in long-term decline. At the same time that the economic pie has been growing more slowly, the slices have been getting more unequal: The rise in income inequality over recent decades has ensured that the benefits of growth, such as it is, have gone mostly to a narrow elite at the top of the socioeconomic scale.

Combine the effects of slow growth with those of high inequality, and the result is nothing less than the fading of the American Dream. Back in 1970, over 90 percent of 30-year-olds were making more money than their parents did at that age; by 2010, that figure had fallen to 50 percent. And as of 2017, only 37 percent of Americans expected their kids to do better than they did.

These bare statistics only hint at the depths of our disillusionment. The failures of American government, business, and society have registered like a succession of gut punches: the miserable quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan; the greed, folly, and outright criminality of the housing bubble; and the devastation of the opioid crisis, leading to a shocking decline in life expectancy for three straight years.

With this pileup of disappointments and betrayals, the American electorate’s confidence in governing elites and established institutions has been coming unglued.

I think this case is rock solid. The 21st century has seen a truly dismal string of negative shocks, economic disappointments, and political failures, so it should come as no surprise that public frustration has boiled over. And not only in America: the situation in Europe is similar. Economic performance has sputtered badly, especially during the austerity that followed the Great Recession. The refugee crisis in the middle of the last decade added fuel to the fire, as it appeared to many that elites were eager to take on new charges even as they were failing to take care of the people already there.

The connection between our unmet policy challenges and our deepening political woes has been a central theme of the Niskanen Center’s work since I arrived there. And of course, it makes perfect sense for a policy shop like Niskanen to highlight this connection. Our primary mission is to effectuate policy change, not just through public-facing research, but also through intensive engagement with policymaking elites. So if we have a strong argument that policy change can not only address important specific problems, but also help to quell the backlash against the very elites we talk to, of course we’re going to want to stress that. Our job is to be persuasive, so if we can tie specific and sometimes obscure policy fights to higher political stakes, that makes our job easier.

All that said, there’s more to the story than elite failure. Yes, elites have performed poorly, but it’s also true that their mistakes and transgressions are much more likely to become public knowledge than in the past. It’s harder for the powers that be to maintain public trust when, to an unprecedented extent, they must conduct their business under a harsh and unsympathetic media spotlight.

My colleague Matt Yglesias also explored this topic recently on his “Slow Boring” Substack. In the old days, when there were only a few distribution channels for getting a story to national attention, collusion among a relatively small group of news organizations could ensure that a story stayed buried. But in today’s wide open and highly competitive media environment, “you can’t actually stop a given piece of information from reaching people just by having ‘mainstream’ outlets ignore it.” And “because informational blockades don’t work, outlets are under strong competitive pressure to not ignore things, even if that is their inclination.”

I agree that the increase in media competition has had the effects that Matt describes, but I don’t think that the proliferation of competing media voices was the main driver of the heightened scrutiny to which governing elites are now subject. The breakdown of the cozy mutual back-scratching between the press and politicians occurred in the 60s and early 70s — think Pentagon Papers and Watergate — well before the arrival of talk radio, cable news, or the internet.

The way I see things, this shift occurred because of cultural change within the journalism profession. As journalism professionalized and newsrooms became dominated by the college-educated, the “adversary culture” that was spreading like wildfire among the highly educated came to shape the news business as well. Journalism’s now-explicitly adversarial stance toward people in power was an outgrowth of that larger adversary culture. But once that shift in journalistic culture took place, I agree with Matt that the ramp-up in media competition acted as an accelerant.

But increased media competition didn’t just reduce public trust in government by exposing leaders’ untrustworthiness. The bigger impact, as I’ve argued, was to contribute to the public’s declining willingness to trust anybody in authority. This is the third, and in my view most important, factor contributing to the present crisis of democratic legitimacy. The problem isn’t just that elites have screwed up royally, or that their screwups are now more visible. More fundamentally, the public on whose trust the viability and stability of democracy depend have been losing their capacity to offer that trust. This is rot at the deepest foundations of democratic legitimacy.

Here again, cultural change has been the prime mover, but the contemporary media environment has made things dramatically worse. Mass acceptance of what I call the romantic heresy — the knee-jerk hostility to authority and hierarchy of any kind — made its deepest incursions in the more liberal precincts of American society, but consumerism’s post-60s rebellious spirit ensured that the whole country was affected to a greater or lesser degree. Then, with the reorientation of politics to focus primarily on cultural divisions and the contemporaneous consolidation of both cultural and economic power within the same set of highly educated coastal liberal elites, the adversary culture made the jump to the right.

The increasingly competitive media environment took the divisiveness of the adversary culture and the politics of culture war and turned it up to 11. The new, right-wing media counter-establishment has led the way, conducting a nonstop scorched-earth campaign against half the country. I mean, if you were deliberately trying to provoke a crisis of legitimacy for government based on peaceful transfers of power, it would be hard to top convincing tens millions of Americans that the last presidential election was stolen — and that the party that committed the larceny also happens to be run by Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Meanwhile, the toxic polarization of culture-war politics is a ratings bonanza for mainstream media, so they collude in undermining democracy by amplifying that toxicity for commercial gain.

The present crisis of democratic legitimacy — the breakdown in public acceptance of democracy’s rational-legal authority — is thus pervasive. It reflects problems within the governing elites, problems within the general public, and problems within the institutions that mediate between government and the public. No element of the system is living up to its responsibilities, so no wonder the mess we’re in.

None of this means that things are hopeless. On the contrary, I believe that the legitimacy crisis will eventually pass. The good news about democracy is that you don’t need everybody on board; a majority will suffice. And with just a few significant governing successes, or at least a lucky stretch of good times, we could see at least a partial recovery in public trust levels. The authoritarian populist backlash, which has pushed us over the brink into this crisis, may burn itself out; sheer exhaustion with the incessant conflict and melodramatics could be enough to bring politics back to something resembling normalcy. Nihilistic extremism is still a minority taste in the United States, and Europe as well; we don’t need a miracle to keep it that way.

Of course, surviving its legitimacy crisis doesn’t mean that democracy will be capable of rising to the challenge of the permanent problem. At the very least, though, it preserves the possibility.