Israelis protesting the Netanyahu coalition’s encroachments on democracy/Reuters

Lisa Van Dusen

May 3, 2023

There has been a rhetorical trend among well-intentioned leaders to blame democracy for the ongoing global war on democracy, as though democracy was dressed too provocatively, or perhaps left its widescreen TV sitting out on the lawn. The gist of this argument is that democracy has failed to deliver, and therefore made it easier for a 21^st-century brand of surveillance-state authoritarianism to spread.

While this may serve a public good by crystallizing the need for democracy to improve its effectiveness and bolster its defences, it disregards crucial elements of the events of the past two decades.

First, the wave of de-democratization enabled by China’s belt and road economic leverage deployed across multiple datelines, by the hyper-corruption associated with that and other networks, and by the abuse of post-internet technology to double down on state abuse of surveillance and hacking as a power consolidation system does not represent competition with democracy. It represents the absence of competition, which is why, as a corrupt, geopolitical domination system, it’s so attractive to individuals who have been or would be unelectable in any functioning, un-corrupted democracy.

The prospect of attaining power absent the nuisance of fully enfranchised voters to impress, without the tyranny of legitimate public opinion polls and within the fleecy certainty of pre-ordained election results defines the post-democracy utopia that so enthralled the players who first discerned an irresistible power opportunity in the connectivity and colonization possibilities of the fourth industrial revolution.

Since then, the gradual self-selection that builds pathocracies has been refined over time and under the influence of a multinational system of quid pro quos that swap unlimited, un-democratic power for the selling-out of one’s fellow citizens. It has disenfranchised population after population in countries besieged by diversionary chaos, tactical intractability and orchestrated degradation aimed at rationalizing otherwise impossible political change.

To blame that process on the flaws of democracy is the systemic equivalent of blaming a cow for being slaughtered — the conveyor belt of industrialized deception that characterizes the new war on democracy is propelled by a contempt for humanity that manages to treat voters as a means to an end while framing them as the architects of their own entrapment. Whatever you may have heard on the propaganda street, voters generally don’t vote for their own disempowerment and they rarely vote for tyrants, which is why such enormous quantities of absolute BS have been deployed as narrative fog in this war.

Blaming democracy for under-performing creates a false equivalency between two systems whose existential distinction is that one empowers people and the other empowers corrupt leaders at the expense of people.

Blaming democracy for under-performing creates a false equivalency between two systems whose existential distinction is that one empowers people and the other empowers corrupt leaders at the expense of people. The notion that democracy just needs to try harder to compete with the lawless, cruel, invasive, exploitive, genocidal attributes of modern surveillance autocracy is not only taking the new world order propaganda ball and running with it, it delays a more effective response while people are focused on the wrong problem.

Among the differences between this world war and previous ones is that so much of the borderless power consolidation achieved this time is attributable to treason. Betrayal — of one’s fellow citizens, of one’s country, of one’s principles — has been an indispensable asset to an assault waged largely through the manipulation of reality facilitated by the performative misrepresentation of intentions, motives and beliefs as a means to an end. The entire presidency of Donald Trump is the most extreme but by no means only example of that new brand of national siege. Democracies from Brazil to Israel to South Africa to Venezuela to Zimbabwe have been seemingly, if not authentically, transformed by it.

In this context, democracy has been just one of many operational targets, from inconvenient individuals to truth to journalism and journalists to human rights to un-hacked, un-hijacked reality. Blaming those targets for their own degradation and discrediting in a war whose tactics include the obliteration of norms and the forensic excavation and weaponization of weaknesses, and whose arsenal includes mass deception, subterfuge and sabotage from within disguised as self-sabotage, is as unfair to democracy as it would be to any other aspiring-new-world-order target.

Democracy’s inherent strengths were still in evidence in America, the key geopolitical target in this war, in Barack Obama’s back-to-back majorities in 2008 and 2012. More recently, democracy prevailed in the 2020 election of Joe Biden despite a barrage of narrative warfare gambits from attacks on mail-in ballots and the US Post Office to voter fraud propaganda to the preposterous events of January 6^th, 2021. It has prevailed in America despite unprecedented levels of institutional treachery and propaganda warfare — a fact that attests to both its inherent strength and its enduring popularity among the people best protected by it.

This is neither your grandfather’s world war nor your father’s Cold War. And in a war waged by weaponized lying, every misapprehension and misrepresentation only serves the aims of the interests who started it. Democracy is nowhere near as dysfunctional or chaotic as it seems; if it were, portraying it as both would not be such a relentless propaganda theme of this latest effort to obliterate it.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor and Deputy Publisher Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.