Democracy Rules review: What is Populism? An intriguing book that leaves an odd taste

Democracy Rules by Jan-Werner Muller (Penguin), £20.

Five years back, around the annus questionabilis of 2016, Populism with a capital “P” was all the rage. Bookshops, both real and online, were full of handbooks on the phenomenon. The outsize egos of Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Erdogan and Orban bestrode the headlines. One of the best guides was a slim volume, What is Populism? by the Princeton politics professor Jan-Werner Müller.

Now we have the sequel from Müller, a no less urgent essay, Democracy Rules. Democracy is in trouble, he argues, bent out of shape almost everywhere you look, and skill and expertise are needed to fix it. Bestriding the opening pages are the new oligarchs and demagogues, the “elected autocrats” led by – you guessed it – the likes of Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Erdogan, Orban and their breed.

Democracy Rules, just released, is stimulating and important in that it is very much a tract of the times. But it raises more questions than answers, and the answers themselves range from the practical to the quirky and downright eccentric.

Müller ranges through options for democracy, from Aristotle to the present day, and concludes that the survival of western democracy depends on improvement in two areas: the makeup and functions of parties and improvement of media and the press of all kinds.

Not much space is given to government and the state, the rules of governance, good administration and justice. There is almost nothing about the biggest challenge to all polities across the world – the chronic presence of pandemics, climate and environmental revolution, and the stresses of population change and migration.

On press and the media – on which he seems to have little direct experience of the management and mechanisms – his answer is more control and regulation. This applies to all media – newspapers, broadcast stations, as well as fringe broadcasters and social platforms. We all need to be told how to do our jobs better. 

Our performances need to be “assessable“, plucking an antique term from Lady Onora O’Neill, grande dame of political and moral philosophy. And who should be assessing the heirs of Grub Street? The likes of Lady O’Neill and Jan-Werner Müller, no doubt.

This is where crude reality comes crashing in. The month this book is published, July 2021, has been a particularly bad time for the big freedoms of press and politics. The rights of association and assembly, discussion and debate, broadcast and publication have been under attack across the planet. 

In mainland China and Hong Kong protest is now treason. In Russia, Alex Navalny is reported to be mortally ill, and in Belarus, the cops are cracking down once more. Opposition leaders are being arrested – again – in Brazil. One of the main demands of the advancing Taliban is that all pluriform politics, elections and the judiciary are cancelled in Afghanistan.

Nearer home, we have journalists being targeted, tracked and exposed by the Pegasus phone spyware made by the Israeli NSO group and exported under a license from the Israeli military to 40 regimes of a less than democrat mien. Among those targeted and hacked are Roula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times and correspondents of the New York Times – the tracing and tracking of Jamal Khashoggi and his fiancée are very likely to have lured him to his death.

In America, the freedom of expression issue has an almost comedic twist with the case of Andrea Dick of New Jersey. A Trumpista irriducibile and fundamentalist, she has taken to proclaiming by banner and poster her dislike of Joe Biden and all his works. A district court judge ordered her to remove several banners on the grounds of obscenity. Here arise faint echoes of the 2017 Oscar-winning movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, only this time with tragedy in art and fiction being followed by farce – satire maybe – in reality.

The offending flag reads, “F**k Biden – and f**k you for voting for him!” Ordered to take it down, Dick stated: “It’s my First Amendment right, and I’m going to stick with that.” The mayor of Roselle Park, Joseph Signorello III, Democrat, said: “This is not politics in any way. It’s about decency.”

This week the New York Times weighed in with a full-page editorial castigating the judge and upholding the right of Dick to fly her banners – however crude the language. The Times recalled a Supreme Court ruling in 1971 upholding the right of a Vietnam draft protester to wear a jacket with a message described by his lawyers as “not actually advocating sexual intercourse with the Selective Service.”

The Times states pithily: “The strength of First Amendment protections depends on public support. History shows that when faith in the value of free speech is eroded, the freedom is soon eroded, too.”In advocating monitoring of the media and making it more “assessable”, Müller seems to glide over the risks to freedoms of expression, whose protection is enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

 This came to the fore in the publication of the Pentagon Papers, documents that spelt out the incompetence of the conduct of policy and operations in Vietnam by the whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg in 1971. The Nixon White House wanted him condemned and jailed forever as a traitor. In 1973, the Supreme Court upheld Ellsberg’s right to publish; it was in the public interest declared in the First Amendment.

The Ellsberg case is considered possibly the most crucial invocation of the First Amendment in American history, a landmark in the story of press freedom. Yet Müller makes no mention of it at all in Democracy Rules or of the Watergate story, which raised many similar issues.

This all has an ominous echo in reports that press freedoms are likely to be curbed in a new version of the UK’s Official Secrets Act under consideration by the Home Secretary. Op-ed articles by Sean O’Neill in The Times and Duncan Campbell and Duncan Campbell – the former investigative reporter and his crime correspondent friend of the same name – report in the Guardian that Priti Patel wants virtually to abolish the public interest defence, the fundamental First Amendment freedom. 

Campbell and Campbell say the consultations on the new bill suggest “there is not now a distinction in severity between espionage and the most serious unauthorized disclosures.” Journalism, the discussions suggest, can cause “far more serious damage” than a spy.

Accordingly, it is being mooted that any unauthorised publication of official documents or other material be met with a criminal charge, with a jail sentence of two years. Sean O’Neill remarks that recent revelations on MPs’ expenses, bullying claims in the royal household uncovered lately by The Times, and publication by Dominic Cummings of Boris Johnson’s WhatsApp messages could incur automatic jail sentences under the new plans.   

Just this month, officers from the Information Commissioner’s Office raided two homes in southern England. Initially, this office was set up to protect press and media freedom of information rights. This time around, in the new spirit of secrecy, the Information Commission gang were after material that may have been recorded and leaked to The Sun in connection with the video of Matt Hancock in a clinch with his adviser and friend Gina Coladangelo – which led to his exiting the government. Victoria Newton, The Sun’s editor, said she would go to jail rather than reveal the source of the whistleblower.

The business of reporting and news seems beyond the scope of Jan-Werner Müller’s interesting and fascinating essay, Democracy Rules – though fascinating, not quite in the way intended, I suspect. It is more interesting almost in what it omits as much as includes. In media politics, it slides away from regulating and holding to account the big platforms such as Facebook, Apple, and Google as publishers of news material – and not as mere facilitators, which is now their standard get-out clause.

He has his fixations, understandable and not. They include Fox News, the Berlusconi media-politics combination and Beppe Grillo, whom he credits with building a political party from a blog – the 5 Star Movement. If only it were so simple. The whole story of Italian politics, press and media is far more complex than portrayed here. Perhaps the author knows this and isn’t letting on – but it leads to bizarre and unwarranted condescension about Italian journalism.

The air of superiority undermines the very essence of this polemic. He really should have taken the time to write at greater and more expository length about media and party politics – where the focus is disproportionately on Anglo-Saxon models in the Britain and America of the last two centuries. The likes of the Communist Party of China, or Soviet Russia, let alone the Baath party of Iraq and Syria, and the portmanteau parties of post-war western Europe like the French Republicans and the Christian Democrats of Italy don’t get a look in.

“There is no particular reason to be optimistic about democracy at this point,” intones Müller on the last page of Democracy Rules – and what he has proposed to fix this in the previous 199 pages doesn’t help lift the gloom.

He is happiest with the democracy of Aristotle’s Athens – where every voter had a chance of holding office as executive or magistracy for at least one day, he claims. Of course, that was in a city-state of a few hundred or so lucky male citizens, whose pursuit of the good life was backed by a slave economy and women whose status was second class subservience or even worse.

The problem with many forms of democracy, as Rousseau observes in his Du Contrat Social, is that it can permanently alienate significant elements of the population. The same criticism is made by the author of Trump’s mode of populism – in the end; it tends to exclude far more than it includes.

Like the ancient Greeks, Müller looks at choice or election by lot or “sortation”. Oddly, this is one of his most engaging ideas. Groups of voters and citizens were drawn by ballot, or lot, to make up the community assemblies or forums that brought such a timely social reform in Ireland under Leo Varadkar. These local forums forge ties to communities at their roots – but how do you implement their proposals?

They have to be validated by some kind of vote – a representative democratic vote. Müller suggests the best way is to put it to a referendum. Not so fast, because unless the referendum practice is much better than in the UK of late, this process would invite an orgy of ignorant, ill-informed rowing and verbal fisticuffs.

More worrying is the argument about the mainstream media and press. The essay suggests more regulation of ownership and political patronage – on which it has virtually nothing new to say. Funding is the problem. It is worrying that models of community journalism barely even rate a curt dismissal.

Good imaginative and forensic journalism is at a premium. With so many local papers closing we are in an era of “Ghosting the News”, to borrow from Margaret Sullivan’s brilliant essay on vital news that is no longer reported in the US – which I have reviewed in Reaction.

It hasn’t all vanished. A prime and heroic example is “Perversion of Justice,” a book by Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald. It is her account of uncovering the Jeffrey Epstein scandal – the setbacks, political threats and attempts to shut her down. Without her dogged reporting, Epstein could still be free. 

“An Ugly Truth” – the narration of Facebook’s battle for media domination by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang is another piece of forensic reporting and narrative at its best. The same goes for one of the best reporter accounts of Trump’s last year in office – last year to date, that is – by two New York Times writers, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker.

At times a reader of Müller’s Democracy Rules gets a sense of Clemenceau’s remark that war was far too serious to be left to the generals. He seems to be saying the same that media and reporting are too important to leave to mere hacks, reporters and editors. His lofty approach garners lavish praise from fellow Illuminati of academe across the dust jacket. But one wonders how many hours these fans have clocked up working with and understanding a serious news enterprise from the inside?

Resolving the conundrum of democracy, media, governance, and justice requires a tougher, practical and more down to earth approach. It can’t all be done from the groves of academe and the bien pensées of the world of rarefied op-ed opinion pieces.

Nothing encapsulates the odd flavour of Democracy Rules better than the last paragraph. The author quotes with approval Edward Snowden, the whistleblower’s whistleblower, “Democracy, after all, is not about trust (be it in individuals or institutions); it’s about effort.”

Reporting without trust and an understanding of truth? Chance would – or rather wouldn’t – be a fine thing.

Watch Iain Martin in conversation with Professor Jan-Werner Müller on YouTube now.