On our minds: Myanmar’s uncomfortable lesson for America. |
Who Keeps Democracy Alive? |
 | | Doctors at a hospital in Yangon, Myanmar, expressed their opposition to the military coup on Wednesday by raising three fingers in a defiant salute from the “Hunger Games” films.The New York Times |
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If you grew up in the United States, or any of the world’s established democracies, you almost certainly learned an essential truism of democracy that is not really true. |
Democracy, your teachers probably told you, comes from the people. Brought about, safeguarded, and daily renewed by the citizenry who are that system’s ultimate overseers. Government by and for you. |
But the events in Myanmar this week, and the United States in the weeks before, hint at something that rarely gets mentioned in flag-waving after-school specials: that democracy exists at the pleasure of the political elites, who install and uphold that system for precisely as long as they believe it’s in their interests to do so. |
When political scientists talk about “elites,” they’re not using that word in the colloquial sense of a rich aristocracy. Rather, they mean the governing class, whose members might vary society-to-society but generally include officials, judges, lawmakers, generals and business heads. Maybe also religious leaders, labor unions, media organizations, domestic security chiefs and the like. |
“The actors who are responsible for bringing democratic political competition into being” are, in practice, the elites who already have a direct say in how things are run, said Tom Pepinsky, a Cornell University political scientist who studies transitional democracies. “And that’s not everybody.” |
In Britain, democracy was installed through mutual agreement among the monarchy, titled nobility and, later, the wealthy merchant class. In the United States, it was the colonies’ dominant landowners and military officers who decided on the new system. In Venezuela, the elites made it explicit, signing a formal pact among one another to permit and protect democracy. |
Citizens matter. But grass-roots organizing, protests, even armed revolt don’t, in themselves, impose democracy. Rather, they put pressure on elites to do so, implicitly offering stability if those elites will usher in honest elections and all that change that brings. |
“Nobody has to believe in democracy for democracy to exist,” Mr. Pepinsky said. “People may come to democracy because they’re in a stalemate” with one another, or with citizen groups, or by simply concluding that “it’s a lot less costly than repressing people.” |
Even full-on revolutions, in practice, replace (some of) the old elites with new ones, who then go on to install democracy, or don’t. See: Napoleonic France, Leninist Russia, theocratic Iran, Arab Spring Egypt. |
But this implies the inverse: If it’s the elites who institute democracy to better their own positions, they can take it away for the same reason. |
Which brings us to Myanmar. To a political scientist, the country’s 10-year journey from hopeful democratic opening to military coup fits within a familiar story. The country’s ruling elites — military officers, mostly — decided that partial democratization would bring them a better deal. They’d get improved domestic stability, foreign investment and relations with the West, while keeping power vestiges like a guaranteed 25 percent of seats in parliament. In exchange, they handed off some power to new elites, including elected lawmakers and the bureaucracies they oversaw. |
But those elites never formed a consensus on how things would work. The new elite, particularly Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the nominal civilian leader, mostly rejected the expectations of the old. And the old found that the bargain hadn’t paid its expected dividends. So they called it off, withdrawing their democratic experiment in a coup. |
“There was no question that this was possible,” Mr. Pepinsky said of the coup. “I don’t think you can overestimate how different it is to live in a place where the military has ruled, where you’ve had a general in charge.” |
Which is exactly why, he added, “it’s really instructive to contrast what happened there to what happened here.” |
Maybe the American readers see where this is going. The United States’ democracy is one of the world’s oldest and, until recently, generally considered one of the most stable. One reason for that: Its ruling elites, from county clerks and small-town mayors up to the Supreme Court and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are broadly bought into the democratic system. |
But, in the last few months, a meaningful subset of the country’s ruling elites — lawmakers, bureaucratic officials, even the president — sought to overturn the voters’ power to choose leaders. |
Their plan collapsed when they failed to recruit other governing elites. The president sought to persuade members of the judiciary, party leadership, state legislatures and state bureaucracies to participate. Had a critical mass gone along, there would have been little to stop them. |
“I’ve been floored by how much of this really does depend on 535 people,” Mr. Pepinsky said, referring to the number of lawmakers in Congress. “It had not been a question of whether or not they supported democracy in a real internal sense — that had never been the stakes.” Now, he said, maybe it is. |
It was a harsh lesson in the true basis of democracy’s day-to-day survival. Beneath all the laws and norms, all the democratic tradition and civic pride, when it really comes down to it, in a country of 330 million, it’s a few thousand people, in some scenarios maybe a few hundred, who decide whether or not democracy persists. |
Most of the time, citizens in established democracies don’t have to confront this, which allows for dressing up democracy’s harsher truths with the window dressing of civic pride and national tradition. But in countries like Myanmar, where democratic transitions are more recent, more tenuous, and more openly challenged, there tend to be, in my experience reporting abroad, fewer illusions. |
“A well-functioning, orderly democracy does not require us to actively think about what sustains it,” Mr. Pepinsky said. “It’s an equilibrium, everybody is incentivized to participate as if it will continue. So we just don’t have to think about it.” |
- Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, set among swashbuckling Royal Navy ships during the Napoleonic Wars, reproduce some sensations we might all be missing: open horizons, a sense of adventure and travel, the camaraderie of a collective mission. So does the 2003 film adaptation of the first novel in the series, Master and Commander.
- The Lancet, one of the world’s pre-eminent medical journals, surveys what lessons can be learned from China’s seemingly dramatic successes containing the coronavirus.
- Whether or not you’ve watched Derek DelGaudio’s Hulu special, this 2017 tale of spy-versus-spy magician espionage at Mr. DelGaudio’s shows is pretty entertaining.
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