The people vs. democracy, Yascha Mounk, Harvard University Press; Rs.2,220, Pages 400 In 1944 economic historian Karl Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Troubled by the collapse of European peace twice in a quarter of a century, Polanyi sought an explanation in his unique, yet intuitive, understanding of the co-dependence between market and society. Although his work found much purchase only when The Great Transformation found its way into the syllabi of political economy courses in American universities, it is one of those strange facts of historical coincidence that at the time Polanyi was writing this work, representatives of 44 countries convened in Bretton Woods, USA to sign into existence international institutions that would, in later decades, herald neoliberalism across the world as the economic system most commensurate with liberal democracy. But in this book under review, Yascha Mounk says that even as the Bretton Woods system was being crafted to champion free markets, the gravest warning about its dangers was being crafted by Polanyi’s pen. There is a powerful connection between neoliberal economic policies and the rise of populism and illiberal democracies in many parts of the world — the US, UK, Poland, Hungary, India, Turkey, France, Austria and Italy. A political theorist at Harvard, Mounk begins by trying to explain what has happened in the contemporary West, i.e, democracy and its institutions are under suspicion of the popular mass of people. This lack of trust in democratic institutions has led, in his argument, to the “rise of illiberal democracy, or democracy without rights, and undemocratic liberalism, or rights without democracy”. Mounk locates this crisis of democracy and liberalism in recent historical events, viz, increased migration of people from the global south into western countries, the strain on European welfarism and the idea that immigrants are free-loading off citizens’ tax monies, distrust of immigrants who are racially and culturally dissimilar from the group that originally constituted the mono-ethnic bases of European nation-states, and the general idea of protecting the ‘nation’ from ‘outsiders’. Mounk also finds that in all countries where populist leaders have emerged — Greece, Poland, Austria, Hungary, the US, Sweden and so on — common traits are found in chosen leaders. Donald Trump in the US, Narendra Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, young Sebastian Kurz in Austria, Le Penn in France, Alexis Tsipras in Greece, are all cut from the same fabric inasmuch as they are self-styled strongmen committed to protecting the nation from its cultural and economic enemies, reviving its greatness, and articulating the anxieties of non-elite voters. In an excellent review of the literature, well-crafted country case studies, and convincing data on the rising vote share of right-wing parties in Europe, Mounk successfully demonstrates the deconsolidation of democracy. He also dedicates an entire chapter to social media and its polarising effect on democratic discourse and how instrumental it has been in the Right’s political campaigns around the world. While Mounk stresses that the lack of trust in democracy is linked…
