People Won’t Care About Democracy If Democracy Doesn’t Care About Them

In the summer of 1989, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay that seemed to map out the contours of the world to come in each sentence. Just a few months after the publication of “The End of History”, Fukuyama’s argument for the final triumph of the west’s heady cocktail of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy, the Berlin Wall was torn down, and humanity faced the “prospect of centuries of boredom” now that the big economic, political and ideological questions of the twentieth century were settled. Unless something (or someone) could shake things up.

Last week, Fukuyama wrote another article, pointing to Donald Trump’s second election as “inaugurating a new era in US politics and perhaps for the world as a whole”. Fukuyama admits that when Trump won for the first time in 2016, he, like many liberals, dismissed his victory as an “aberration”. People voted for Trump as a protest, they didn’t really know what they were doing and anyway, he lost the popular vote. But this time, with his sweeping victory in both the electoral college and the popular vote, and with the Republicans also controlling the House, Senate and the supreme court, Trump’s reelection forced even Fukuyama to admit this was “a decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism”, the politic he once so confidently presumed would own the future.

While he often gets critiqued for his grand narrative of the 20th century, many in the west fell victim to the same hubris. Some even remain in its clutches. The US Democratic party, for instance, was so buoyant about the inherent value of its own personal brand of liberal democracy that it neglected to make any concrete offering to their electorate other than to defeat the danger of big, bad Trump. On the official Democratic party website, Trump was denounced as an “existential threat to our democracy”. In speeches, Harris described her opponent as a demagogue who wants “unchecked power”. But in anchoring their entire campaign on the risk that Trump posed to the order they created, Harris and the Democrats overpriced the importance of the abstract notion of democracy to a populace trying to eke out a living in late-stage capitalism. People are invested in democracy, sure – but that investment starts to wobble as prices rise at the petrol pump or grocery store.

The end of history, the conclusion of the cold war and the resolution of the big ideological battles of the 20th century were meant to usher in a new age of prosperity for all. Yes, the rich would get richer, but they would do so as part of a rising tide that lifted all boats. Instead, a tsunami has crashed through life in the west in recent years, especially following the 2008 financial crash, leaving many families drowning in a wreckage of housing insecurity and in-work poverty. With millions of people feeling the acute pain of eroding living standards, fragmented communities and downward economic mobility, they have abandoned the faith they once held in the ability of the core institutions of liberal democracy – politicians, elections, the media – to save them from this death spiral.

In the midst of such a state of emergency, the importance of democracy is not what it once was. For example, a recent Gallup poll taken before the presidential election found that only 3% of Americans thought that “democracy” was the most important problem facing the country in 2024. By contrast, 22% thought the biggest issue was immigration and 15% pointed to inflation.

Things are falling apart, and the centre cannot hold. Prices are rising, wages are stagnant, services are being cut and, for many, the feeling of security feels like a half-remembered dream. Parents are witnessing their offspring struggle to maintain a lifestyle that they once took for granted. These trends are only set to accelerate with the growth of automation, machine learning and robotics all taking place, new technologies that could benefit humanity as a whole but are currently likely to benefit only the fortunate asset-owning class as wealth inequality is entrenched.

In this turbulent environment, it is understandable why many Americans view a strongman like Trump as a form of protection, rather than as a threat to something as abstract as democracy. If we look around the world, it is not an uncommon story. The horror of liberal commentators when faced with Trump may be buried not in what is happening but where it is happening. You can almost hear an audible gasp of “This shouldn’t be happening here!” Maybe in Lagos, maybe in Bogota. But not in the USA. Not in the shining city on the hill.

Yet when a country in Africa, Asia or Latin America was being torn apart by huge wealth disparities, spiralling sovereign debt or divisions between ethnic communities, the emergence of a strongman would be relatively unsurprising. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte – these guys make sense. Their countries are “developing”, “emerging” and still politically immature. Whisper it but they might even need a strong hand to keep them in check. When liberal commentators see draconian political leaders gain power in the global south, such events are naturalised, seen as evidence of the racial and civilisational backwardness of people still unready to rule themselves.

Yet just like in the global north, the emergence of anti-democratic strongmen in the global south is directly linked to the relationship of the state to transnational capital. In these countries, the structure of the global economy meant that the state’s primary beneficiaries weren’t its citizens but a transnational investor class. Their leaders had become clients of that class rather than servants of the public. As states like the UK and the USA morph increasingly towards a similar type of clientelism, the emergence of leaders like Trump, leaders who offer less democracy in return for marshalling more of the state’s disciplinary power against “enemies within” – migrants, racial and sexual minorities, dissident journalists or academics, labour unions – are likely to become the norm.

Such leaders are not undermined by social division. They feed off it. They implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) tell the population “Not everyone is going to make it”. With confidence in the inevitable progress of humanity declining, this rings true to many voters, truer than the liberals who just keep promising that if you work a little bit harder, tighten your belt, say your prayers and eat your vegetables, everything is going to be alright. Instead, leaders like Trump peddle in the register of what I call lifeboat politics: we are in choppy waters, not everyone will survive, focus on saving yourself and your family. Presenting a state of permanent emergency, lifeboat politics justifies the creation of internal scapegoats who can then be thrown into the sea- after all, it was their fault the boat is sinking in the first place, they should never have been allowed on.

It’s the language subtly communicated by leaders like Javier Milei or “El Loco” (the Crazy One), who won the Argentinian presidency in 2023, and Narendra Modi in India, who won a third consecutive term (albeit in a much tighter result) earlier this year. But these figures are now increasingly common in Europe and North America, as evidenced by the successes of Matteo Salvini and the Northern League in Italy, Marine Le Pen and the National Front in France, Andrzej Duda in Poland and Viktor Orbán in Hungary and now, the return of Donald Trump. Their emergence disrupts any remaining notion that we should have blind faith in the salvific power of liberal democracy – and in the notion that the world is divided into places where crises should happen, and places where they should not.