“The world’s largest democracy.” This smug and self-congratulatory cliché, proudly sported by Indians over the years, just got a reality check. The 2018 report of the largest global dataset on democracy (V-Dem), has named India and the US – the two most populous democracies in the world – as the leading backsliders on democracy. They join a suitably distinguished list of backsliders from the previous year: Brazil, Hungary, Poland and Suriname.What has gone wrong? Why is it that strong leaders, who have come to hold the highest political office through free and fair elections, are today kindling anxieties of authoritarianism? In the very readable and engaging book The People vs Democracy, Harvard political theorist Yascha Mounk offers a compelling account of the phenomenon of populism, explains its causes and proposes remedies. While his main focus is on the US and Western Europe, he frequently draws parallels with countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary, with an occasional passing mention of India.The rights of minorities or the right to dissent, hallmarks of a liberal society, may not be respected in an electoral democracy. Credit: PTIMounk’s point of departure is the concern that even citizens of consolidated democracies (like the US or the UK) are now dissatisfied, not just with their governments, but with democracy itself. It is the decoupling of liberalism and democracy that is, in his view, responsible for this unravelling. If liberalism stands for individual rights and liberties and the rule of law, democracy is defined as a set of electoral institutions through which popular preferences are translated into policy. Their detachment yields variants like illiberal democracy and undemocratic liberalism. So the rights of minorities or the right to dissent – hallmarks of a liberal society – may not be respected in an electoral democracy (illiberal democracy or democracy without rights).Yascha Mounk. Credit: TwitterConversely, a democratically-elected government may enact the interests of elites rather than the people into policy (undemocratic liberalism or rights without democracy). An Indian reader of this book may reasonably aver that India has always manifested undemocratic liberalism, and often been an illiberal democracy. What is new about the present phase of populist politics in India would, therefore, require a more complex and historicised explanation than Mounk’s argument allows.Crisis of liberal democracy It is in describing the impetus for the crisis of liberal democracy that Mounk is at his sparkling best, and this is also where the resonance with our own context is most striking. In an illiberal democracy, a leader who projects himself (with a few exceptions like the estimable Marine Le Pen, the cast of characters here comprises mostly men) as an ‘outsider’ with a simple solution is appealing because citizens are disinclined to hear that problems are complicated and there is no magic bullet (sounds familiar?).This is especially so when the leader in question presents himself as the voice of the people, while all political opponents are represented as traitors (again, familiar?). The representative claim of the leader also implicitly marks out the boundaries of who ‘the people’ are. Contrary to the encompassing nomenclature, this is an in-group, united by a shared ethnicity, religion or social class. Those who are different constitute an excluded out-group whose interests deserve to be disregarded (surely very familiar?).In India, as in the US, we are used to hearing cheerleaders of populism rubbish any criticism of their leaders by playing the democracy trump (sic) card. Does the mere fact of their election entitle them to what Jan-Werner Müller calls “automatic democratic legitimacy”? Mounk believes that a democratic energy fuels populist politics though he accepts that, in the long run, populism is inimical to respect for the popular will. But if populism ultimately does have a tendency to shade over into authoritarianism, why should its democratic origins be entitled to our indulgence? The populist leader does indeed cultivate direct contact with the people, but as a largely passive audience, so that voting becomes, as Nadia Urbinati puts it, more an act of acclamation than of election.Yascha Mounk The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save ItHarvard University Press, 2018Given the geographical spread of populism, Mounk’s book provokes the question of whether the many similarities between the strategies adopted by such leaders are coincidental. It is unsurprising that all populist leaders have the same antipathy to the mediating institutions of civil society in democracy because they plausibly threaten the Leader’s monopolistic claim of representing The People. But it is uncanny that they all choose to suppress civil society by choking off foreign funding. Do populists learn from each other, or is there a secret toolkit?The explanation for undemocratic liberalism is more standard. Such politics are characterised by a shift of power away from elected institutions like legislatures to the executive (both the elected politicians and the unelected bureaucracy), to unelected regulatory agencies, central banks and courts, not forgetting international organisations and treaties. Electoral institutions themselves are hostage to capture, in the form of campaign funding and lobbying. It is hard to imagine any modern democracy without some or all of these features.PopulismMounk locates the origins of populism in three conditions. First, the popular commitment to liberal-democratic norms may have been shallow to start with, resting mainly upon people’s satisfaction with the rapid improvements in their living standards in contexts of social peace and democratic stability. The economic hardships faced by citizens today make them feel vulnerable, and the next generation fearful that they would not be able to better their material prospects.Secondly, all stable democracies were historically mono-ethnic. Today, immigration has made them multiethnic, challenging the dominance of one ethnic group, provoking demographic anxieties and consequently a rebellion against pluralism. Finally, the arrival of the internet and social media has triggered a shift from a mass media in which the distribution of extreme ideas was moderated, to a situation where fake news abounds and is amplified without gate-keepers. The same media that were valorised for their democratic potential in the Arab Spring is now seen as capable of inciting racial hatred and strengthening autocracy.In an illiberal democracy, a leader who projects himself as an ‘outsider’ with a simple solution is appealing because citizens are disinclined to hear that problems are complicated and there is no magic bullet. Credit: ReutersIn what is the least persuasive part of this otherwise fascinating book, Mounk proposes remedies following the same three-fold schema – of social media, identity and falling levels of economic well-being. First, he enjoins his readers to unify and speak the language of ordinary citizens to connect to their concerns as voters and exhorts them to give a positive message that shows their willingness to discard the status quo in favour of real change. He probably underestimates the powerlessness of a rational argument in the vitiated ‘public’ sphere of social media.Secondly, he makes an argument for domesticating nationalism through an “inclusive patriotism” that makes nationalism less exclusionary and more capable of accommodating diversity. Alas, library shelves have been heaving under the weight of such prescriptions for a couple of decades now, and social reality tends to fall far behind social theory. Despite Mounk’s adequate recognition of structural barriers to racial and religious integration, what we get are rather naïve solutions about educating citizens as true compatriots, and protecting immigrants who have already entered from ill-treatment while striving, if that is the popular preference, to lower the numbers of new immigrants.Finally, Mounk recommends bridging economic inequality through higher levels of taxation for the rich to fund higher levels of social protection for the poor, with a particular emphasis on housing. A new architecture of a modern welfare-state, with a boost to productivity, would enable people to recover a sense of their ‘earned’ identity as workers and diminish the salience of their ascriptive identities. All this, he argues, would combat the economic drivers of populism.Yascha Mounk recommends bridging economic inequality through higher levels of taxation for the rich to fund higher levels of social protection for the poor, with a particular emphasis on housing. Credit: Reuters/Arko DattaOverall, his solutions – such as the discussion on bringing down the cost of housing – seem rather specific to North America, not just wishful in that context, but also not easily generalisable.In the end, Mounk does not guide us back to the original problem of making liberalism and democracy congeal again. He places an inordinately heavy burden on civic education and activism – the renewal of civic faith through a regeneration of the civic purposes of education, creating citizens who have liberal-democratic sensibilities and are willing to take to the streets in acts of resistance against populist leaders. The remedies are earnest and well-intentioned but weak and of uncertain efficacy in the face of the challenge that confronts us. They leave one with the uncomfortable feeling that the reader is but a part of the same cognitive elite to which the fascination for populist leaders is a response.It could be argued that the enthusiasm for populism represents popular disillusionment, not so much with democracy per se, but with representative democracy and its enduring inability to channel popular preferences into policy. It is the representativeness of representative democracy, embodied in the institutional form of elected legislatures, that is being called into question – both where it has been formally successful for a couple of centuries, as also in places where it has yet to strike deep roots. In an earlier time, the same dissatisfaction with representative democracy had resulted in greater faith being invested in participatory democracy and in civil society, rather than political parties, as the agents of change. Having been there, done that, and to no avail, it is not surprising that there should be so much cynicism and despondency about the future.What appears today to be the dark side of democracy is arguably just the fulfilment of democracy’s logic, the democratising of democracy, as it were. By failing to prevent the capture of democracy by elites, by failing to untether it from its deep links with capital, by failing above all to address the incompatibility between the political equality guaranteed by democracy and the growing material inequality generated by the capitalist economy, there is a worry that we have perhaps turned the democratic project over to those that may be more or less scrupulous, more or less neo-liberal, even more, or less authoritarian, but can nevertheless speak to the demos with more powerful conviction than our enervated, hollowed-out discourse of liberal-democracy can.Is there actually cause for panic or could it be that the phenomenon of populism is not as universal or as immovable as is claimed? After all, the very same V-Dem report reassures us that global levels of democracy remain high. However, it also flags the fact that while democracy as elections is doing fine, one-third of the world’s population, and counting, is affected by “autocratisation”, or the decline of democratic attributes such as media freedom, freedom of expression and the rule of law.In countries like ours that are presently experiencing populist regimes, it is hard not to worry about the long-term consequences of the dilution of liberal norms and democratic practices. Once hate speech and fake news have overrun a polity, can it – in the event, say, of a change of government – decisively turn its back on these tendencies, and recover traditions of free speech and a respect for the norms of liberal democracy and civil political discourse?This legitimate anxiety is reinforced by Mounk’s argument that there are today lower levels of commitment to democracy, and that we cannot rely upon millennials to save us. Even more dispiriting is the survey evidence he provides on the support for military rule in a range of democracies, including India. This anxiety about levels of commitment to democracy in India is supported by a recent survey (by CSDS-Lokniti and Azim Premji University) in which over half the respondents in four large states expressed a preference for dictatorship over democracy.Overall, this report hints, in ways that cohere with Mounk’s argument about the rest of the world, that liberal constitutionalism in India, based on an inclusionary universalistic conception of citizenship, is facing a mortal crisis. How far are we from the Brechtian “solution” in which it might be easier “for the Government to dissolve the People and elect another?”Niraja Gopal Jayal is professor of law and governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.