Democracy dies in impunity: the necessity of drastic electoral punishment

The Washington Post got its motto wrong. Introduced in 2017 after Trump’s election, “Democracy dies in darkness” purports to explain both the problem and the cure in an age of “populist” politics. The people, it suggests, the great mass of the uneducated “deplorables”, don’t know what they’re voting for – both because they’re stupid, and because “demagogues” like Trump have “lied” to them. So here comes WaPo to shine a light into this whole nasty, dark world of the revolt against the establishment, to provide the “correct” view of the world – and thus save democracy. 

But, aside from being self-serving in its self-righteous signalling, the Post’s slogan is false. What is really killing democracy is not the sophistry of demagogues on all sides, or the lies, the fake news and the propaganda. These have been part of politics since its ancient beginnings. No, the agent of “democratic death” in our modern age, executing its lethal purpose slowly but surely, is political impunity.

Systemic impunity of the political establishment is the fundamental reason why democracy is dying almost everywhere. In plain terms, this phenomenon refers to the fact that the main establishment parties – usually falling under “centre-right” and “centre-left” labels – are never fully swiped off the political stage no matter how big their failures. Think of the most expensive and outrageous disasters in recent history, from the 2008 financial crisis to the enormities seen during Covid-19, from the socio-cultural devastation to the deliberate flooding of the West with migrants. Yes, governments have changed, “populists” have gained in the polls. But the so-called mainstream forces always cling to power, or at the very least retain enough representation in national parliaments to perpetuate the Ancien Regime and the thinking of its elites – even when “populists” do end up running the country for a short while.

The big parties are never truly held to account, i.e. fully punished at the ballot box, even for enormous breaches of trust and colossal mismanagement of policy, for bringing their countries to their knees – as we see now across much of the West – and for racking up national debt. At most they replace their top leadership to placate an exasperated public in the short-term, but then carry on. In almost all cases, they always remain the “mainstream” choice of a cumulated majority of the public. 

The political magic trick at play is simple but hard to beat. In order to fully eject the corrupt, ultra-incompetent and self-righteous establishment from its positions of power there has to be an alternative political force that presents itself for election. To convince, and to propose real solutions to the vast structural problems now faced by our societies, such a political force must be radical. But if it is radical, the establishment parties simply cry “wolf” and scare the voters into giving them yet another chance – irrespective of their policy-crimes – in the name of the national interest and “common sense”. 

In today’s “democracy”, a big party can preside over the worst possible scandals, corruption, waste of public money, mismanagement of public affairs and indeed the fleecing of its own population through higher taxes and more public debt – and still find itself back in power next time around, after a (usually brief) period in opposition or perhaps even as leading the opposition. 

When the day of the vote comes, fingers are pointed at the “radicals” – these days, almost invariably called names like “fascists”, “extremists”, “pro-Russians” or “anti-Europeans” – and, voila, all is forgiven. The mainstream paladins of democracy give a sigh of relief that “light” has once again triumphed over “darkness” and that the future remains “bright” under their public-spirited “care”. They may even perform that all-too-familiar ritual of the “pouring of the ashes” on their heads, pretending that they’ve “heard the message” the voters sent them and they repent of their mistakes in government – with the reassurance that now they’ll try hard to “reform”.

Of course, polarising the debate into a “good/worthy” vs “evil/unworthy” is only the macro strategy – and by now a classic one, used all the time in France, for example, for keeping out the so-called “far Right”. Beyond this, though, the establishment parties are also expert at rigging the game at more tactical levels, paying off key voter constituencies via preferential policies or shaping and dominating the political discourse across the mainstream media. 

This self-replicating pattern and formula that keeps the Ancien Regime in power everywhere, under the “standard” post-war, postmodern dispensation, applies, with slight differences, in almost all liberal democracies. These catastrophic parties of government have now become so astute at gaming “democracy” that they often manage to cling on for several consecutive terms of office, like the Tories in the UK or Trudeau’s abominable liberals in Canada. In the US, this has been the case with both the Democrats and the Republicans, until Trump’s MAGA movement succeeded in taking over the GOP from within – and even then, it has been an uphill battle against the entrenched GOP old guard.

The cynical choice that the establishment parties present the electorate with, when trying to beat off the “radical” threat, is always couched in terms of the high cost of voting for the “disruptive” alternative. On one level, voters are told, there is the moral cost of supporting a “fascist” party – the hope being that voters really do fall for the regime’s smearing of its political opponents as such. On another level, the electorate is threatened – by “experts” and “opinion leaders” – with the heavy economic costs of choosing the “wrong” way, as was done in Britain before the 2016 Brexit vote. 

In that great political campaign, what remained known as the British establishment’s anti-Brexit “Project Fear” involved even having the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, George Osborne, presenting in the House of Commons wild “projections” of the economic “hit” to people’s pockets from voting Brexit, and stating that an “emergency Budget” will be required to be passed by Parliament after the vote, to forestall economic catastrophe. None of that came to pass at all – it was all pure invention done at ministerial request by obliging civil servants. (This was an outrage in itself, but one that was eventually lost among the flow of political enormities that passes through the British body politic.)

So, as far as the general application of the “standard model of democracy” goes, by the time of a crunch election when a “rebel” party or candidate threatens to truly break through, and whose victory would pose an existential threat to the regime, the pressure accumulated on the electorate to make the “responsible” choice and “reject chaos” is huge. 

But every once in a while, the people defy the establishment and the weight of mainstream political opinion, and vote to punish those in power who have gone too far, regardless of cost. This was the situation at the UK General Election this year, when the Tories had accumulated such an indefensible record of post-Brexit failure, and had so completely broken the trust of their voters, that the public voted Labour into office in a historic landslide – simply because they were not the Tories, not on the basis of their “policy programme” or anything of the sort.

It is this kind of voter behaviour – unfortunately, extremely rare across the West today – that stands as one of the last vestiges of true democratic spirit. There is nothing more democratic than to consciously choose to give a huge majority to the “ancestral enemy” (in domestic political terms), despite all the risks and knowing just how extremist today’s Left – including UK’s Labour – has become, just in order to humble and punish those who betrayed the voters’ trust, the party which broke its electoral promises. The single example of immigration will suffice: the last Tory government, elected in 2019 on a platform of reducing immigration after Brexit, presided over a catastrophic increase of it.

Unless parties of government face the real prospect of complete electoral wipe-out – i.e. disappearance from parliament – for their irresponsible and, oftentimes, corrupt behaviour, “democracy” becomes a hollow word and merely a screen behind which the “system” does its will with impunity. The greater the failure of elected politicians, the lower the chance of electoral retribution, today; but such a state of affairs is untenable. 

There is much sophisticated talk and reference to Athenian democracy in the more “enlightened” discussions of political affairs, or even to the Roman system. We presume to be the heirs of those traditions. The founding of the American Republic even drew directly from the example of Rome. But all our lip-service to the ancients usually fails to recognise one of the absolutely key elements in the success and endurance of their forms of governance: the fact that any leader and magistrate – any man of power – of Athens or Rome was personally open to prosecution and severe punishment for his activities in office. Indeed, some of the most glorious and hallowed names in Greco-Roman history, from Themistocles to Cicero himself, were held accountable for their decisions, through open trial. Thus were great civilisations built, thus they endured for centuries.

Those truly concerned about the health of democracy and about the core democratic principle of genuine accountability – paying for your mistakes in office accordingly – should remember to put their vote where their mouth is and accept (almost) any risk in order to deliver just punishment at the ballot box to those parties and politicians which have double-crossed them. This is how you “save democracy”. The alternative – where the corrupt and inept politicians get away, or indeed keep going – is not status quo, but only represents the certain and continued erosion of democracy itself and the decline and degeneration of Western societies into, at best, Old World museums controlled by our authoritarian adversaries in Eurasia. We can do better than that, but we must be prepared to pay the price and face some “discomfort” now and then.

Gabriel Elefteriu is deputy director at the Council on Geostrategy in London and a fellow at Yorktown Institute in Washington, D.C. All opinions in this article are strictly personal.