# Progressive Summary # Structured Notes # Rough Notes Democratic Fatigue Syndrome: - low voter turnout - high voter turnover - declining party membership - governmental impotence - political paralysis - electoral fear of failure - lack of recruitment - compulsive self-promotion - chronic electoral fever - exhausting media stress - distrust - indifference Diagnosis: - populism - it's the fault of politicians - technocracy - it's the fault of democracy - direct democracy - it's the fault of representative democracy - this book - it's the fault of electoral-representative democracy # Quotes > Democracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, dictatorship, despotism, totalitarianism, absolutism and anarchy: every political system has to achieve a balance between two fundamental criteria, efficiency and legitimacy. Efficiency is all about how quickly a government can find successful solutions to problems that arise, while legitimacy is about the degree to which people give their assent to the solution. To what degree do the people recognise the authority of the government? Efficiency is about decisive action while legitimacy is about support, the two criteria usually existing in inverse proportion to each other. A dictatorship is undoubtedly the most efficient form of government (one person decides and that’s it) but it rarely enjoys much lasting legitimacy. The reverse, a country that engages in endless consultation with all its residents, no doubt nurtures support for the government, but at the expense of its ability to act. > Politics has always been the art of the possible and now it has become the art of the microscopic. The inability to address structural problems is accompanied by the overexposure of the trivial, fuelled by our insane media that, true to market logic, have come to regard the exaggeration of futile conflicts as more important than any attempt to offer insight into real problems, especially in times of falling media revenues. > Democracy has become comparatively toothless but at the same time noisier. Instead of sitting mumbling to themselves in a corner, disconcerted by their own impotence, modest about their limited room for manoeuvre, today’s politicians can, indeed must, shout their virtues from the rooftops – elections and the media leave them no choice – preferably with fists clenched, legs stiff and lips together, since that looks good and makes them appear effective. Or so they think. Instead of meekly recognising that the balance of power has changed and going in search of new and more worthwhile forms of government, they keep on playing the electoral-media game, often against their own best interests and those of the citizens who are starting to find it all a bit tiresome and whose trust is not likely to be won back by so much overwrought and transparent hysteria; the efficiency crisis only exacerbates the crisis of legitimacy. > Anyone who puts together low voter turnout, high voter turnover, declining party membership, governmental impotence, political paralysis, electoral fear of failure, lack of recruitment, compulsive self-promotion, chronic electoral fever, exhausting media stress, distrust, indifference and other persistent paroxysms sees the outlines of a syndrome emerging. Democratic Fatigue Syndrome is a disorder that has not yet been fully described but from which countless Western societies are nonetheless unmistakably suffering. > That politicians are careerists, money-grabbers and parasites, that they’re profiteers, that they’re out of touch with the common man and that we’d be better off without them. The slogans are familiar enough and populists make use of them daily. According to their diagnosis, the crisis of democracy is first of all a crisis of political personnel and our current rulers form a democratic elite, a caste completely divorced from the needs and grievances of the average citizen. No wonder democracy is in trouble! > > It’s a discourse that in Europe is verbalised by seasoned leaders such as Silvio Berlusconi, Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, but also by relative newcomers such as Beppe Grillo in Italy, Norbert Hofer in Austria, and parties such as Jobbik (Hungary), the Finns Party (previously known as the True Finns) and Golden Dawn (Greece). In the English-speaking world we have seen the spectacular rise of figures like Nigel Farage and, of course, Donald Trump. According to them the remedy for Democratic Fatigue Syndrome is relatively simple: better representation of the populace, or rather more popular representation of the populace, preferably in the form of a larger vote for their own populist parties. The leaders promote themselves as direct representatives of the people, as the voice of the underbelly, the embodiment of common sense. They claim that unlike their colleagues they are close to the man or woman in the street, that they say what they think and do what needs to be done, and that the populist politician is at one with the people. > > That all this is questionable in the extreme we know well enough, because there’s no such thing as one monolithic ‘people’ (every society has its diversity), nor is there anything that could be described as a ‘national gut feeling’, and common sense is the most ideological thing imaginable. After all, ‘common sense’ is an ideology that refuses to recognise its own ideological character, like a zoo that sincerely believes it is an example of unspoilt nature. The notion that someone can be at one with the masses in some organic way, at one with their values and unfailingly conscious of their fickle yearnings, is a belief that tends more towards mysticism than politics: no deep current exists, only marketing. > > Populists are political entrepreneurs trying to gain as large a market share as they can, if need be by deploying a little romantic kitsch. It is unclear how, once they have gained power, they intend to deal with those who think differently, since democracy gives power to the majority while retaining respect for the minority – otherwise it degenerates into a dictatorship of the majority that will make us even worse off. > Simply dismissing populism as a form of anti-politics seems to me intellectually dishonest. At its best populism is an attempt to tackle the crisis of democracy by increasing the legitimacy of representation. Populists want to combat Democratic Fatigue Syndrome by means of one simple but drastic intervention; fresh blood in Parliament, a blood transfusion, as complete as possible, and the rest will take care of itself. Opponents wonder whether this will do anything to increase efficiency and doubt if government will improve because a few new people have been taken on board. To them the problem is not the people who staff our democracy but democracy itself. > ‘People would rather thrust power at someone who does not want it than someone who does,’ note the authors of the influential Stealth Democracy. Most citizens want democracy to be like a Stealth bomber: invisible and efficient. ‘Successful business people and independent experts, though not necessarily empathetic, are perceived to be competent, capable individuals not in pursuit of power. That is enough for many people, or at least it is better than the kind of representation they believe they are receiving now.’ > Every modern nation state has given itself a technocratic slant by removing competences from the democratic arena and depositing them elsewhere. The power of central banks and constitutional courts, for example, has grown markedly. It seems governments have thought it sensible to take crucial tasks such as monetary supervision and constitutional reform out of the clutches of party politics and the electoral calculus that goes with it. > There is little point in regarding technocracy as taboo, if only because new states often start out with a technocratic phase, as for example the Fifth Republic of Charles de Gaulle in 1958 or Kosovo in 2008. A state does not always emerge by democratically legitimate means and after a revolution power is always in the hands of an unelected elite for a transitional phase. The trick then is to organise elections or a referendum as quickly as possible, so that the trust-gauge can start rising and legitimacy can be created a posteriori. In the short term a technocracy can give fresh impetus, in the long term it is not a viable form of government. Democracy is not just government for the people but government by the people. > Because the First World War and the crisis of the 1920s were commonly seen as the outcome of nineteenth-century bourgeois democracy, three leaders inveighed bitterly against the parliamentary system: Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler. Nowadays it is often forgotten, but fascism and communism were originally attempts to make democracy more vital, based on the idea that if parliament was abolished, the people and their leader would be better able to converge (fascism) or the people could govern directly (communism). Fascism quickly degenerated into totalitarianism, but for quite some time communism continued to seek new forms of collective consultation. It is worth dusting off Lenin for a moment. In his famous State and Revolution of 1917, he advocated dispensing with parliamentarianism, noting that ‘Parliament is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the “common people”’. He conveyed Marx’s view of the process of holding elections in a sentence that would not have been out of place in New York or Madrid: ‘The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in Parliament.’ For the development of his alternative he took inspiration from the Paris Commune of 1871 (the source of the word ‘communism’): 'The Commune substitutes for the venal and rotten parliamentarism of bourgeois society institutions in which freedom of opinion and discussion does not degenerate into deception . . . Representative institutions remain, but there is no parliamentarism here as a special system, as the division of labour between the legislative and the executive, as a privileged position for the deputies.'