Democratic Accountability Wrap
Thinking about the fall of Liz Truss and the entrenchment of Xi Jinping
The past week provided an illustrative contrast between a system with democratic accountability and a system without it.
Liz Truss, having launched her government with a catastrophic economic plan of unfunded tax cuts (and spending hikes), was forced to resign, becoming the shortest-serving British Prime Minister in British history. Xi Jinping, on the other hand, has—among his other achievements—deliberately crashed his country’s real estate market, doubled and trebled down on an economically and socially destructive zero-COVID policy, alarmed the dominant superpower to the point that it is now deliberately acting to cripple a key industry for China’s future, and more generally presided over a dramatic diminution of hope for the future for Chinese people at almost every economic level. For these accomplishments he has been rewarded with a level of power and control over the country unprecedented since the days of Chairman Mao, including a previously verboten third term in office that presages his serving as leader for life.
The contrast suggests, on its face, the inherent superiority of democracy. But it’s worth remembering that Liz Truss also came to power democratically: she was voted in by her party’s members after their previous leader, Prime Minster Boris Johnson, resigned due to his unpopularity after scandals related to his flouting of pandemic rules that his own government had promulgated. And Johnson himself was elected on a platform—finally getting out of the European Union by whatever means necessary—that struck much of the British great and good as rooted in the worst instincts of mob psychology, two parts xenophobia and one part delusions of grandeur. From the perspective of the staunchest Remain voters, building Europe was a heroic project whose rejection only revealed their fellow Britishers to be small-minded and small-souled. I rather suspect that the Tory party members who elevated Truss specifically because she promised to enact the program that led to her rapid downfall feel somewhat similarly about the most recent turn of events, and wish they could tell the bond market to kiss off as bluntly as they told Brussels (and, for that matter, Belfast) to do so. And before anyone gets too excited about the idea that the Tory Party’s latest blunders will finally usher in a Labour-led utopia, ask yourself how, exactly, a Labour government is going to simultaneously tame inflation, prevent recession, and provide for Britain’s energy needs. Whoever leads Britain through its current mess will have a thankless job, and they are unlikely to be thanked by the voters for doing it.
The dispiriting Truss saga, then, is not an aberration; it’s what democracy looks like, a lot of the time. Discontent with what democracy delivers isn’t just sour grapes on the part of the losers. Rather, Democracy is, by design, an inherently anti-heroic form of government, one that forces would-be leaders of great nations to pay more attention to the price of gasoline than to fighting climate change, achieving racial justice or, well, protecting democracy itself—or, for that matter, making America great again, whatever that might mean. That doesn’t mean citizens of a democracy are relentlessly sober pragmatists; they still have dreams, and would-be leaders in a democracy pander to them regularly. So a Johnson can get elected in part by peddling a fantasy of a Britain liberated from foreign interference; a Truss can get elected in part by promising the world’s least-likely free lunch—and they can both be turned out quickly if they don’t deliver the goods. The rise and fall are two sides of the same democratic coin.
The Chinese experience of the past forty years, meanwhile, illustrates the two sides of a very different coin. Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping were opposites in most ways, but they were both heroic leaders, the one winning a brutal civil war against extraordinary odds and then utterly transforming the society he conquered, the other radically reforming the system he inherited and setting his country on a path to true superpower status. Mao was also responsible for the deaths of over 100 million Chinese, and for the near-annihilation of traditional Chinese culture; Deng, meanwhile, was the leader who made the decision to crush China’s nascent democracy movement at the very moment that the Soviet bloc was collapsing and its successor states were embracing democracy. His choice was not a difficult one. Deng, and the rest of his party, believed strongly that democracy would be disastrous precisely because China needed the heroic leadership of the party to achieve its destined greatness—even if the party was to lead it in directions diametrically opposed to the vision of its founders.
For over thirty years, it looked like they might have been right. China’s economic development from 1979 through 2012 was nothing short of awe-inspiring. The whole world came to admire aspects of the Chinese model, and a good part of that admiration related to China’s ability simply to do rather than jumping through the manifold hoops of sclerotic democracy. When Xi Jinping first took the helm, it looked like he was going to lead China from being an economic powerhouse to being a geopolitical one, using open-handed economic diplomacy and aggressive military modernization to convince much of Asia that a Chinese future was inevitable, and they had better get on board. Instead, he proved himself an utter mediocrity—but the same structures that made heroic leadership possible made it possible for a mediocre would-be hero like Xi to take full personal control of the country, and insulate himself entirely from any accountability. China now runs a very real risk of blundering into catastrophe, just as surely as Russia has, and for very similar reasons. And this, too, is the other side of the same coin that, under Deng, came up heads.
From where I sit, the choice of coin isn’t difficult. I’ll happily choose the defects of democracy any day, with the inevitable Trusses that result. And I don’t worry that democracy makes heroism impossible. Even if government in a democracy inherently tends toward cringe, the private spheres of science, art, business, religion and movements for social change offer ample scope for an individual to leave their mark on history—and drama’s vitallest expression is the common day anyway.
But I don’t kid myself that all good things go together. Democracy isn’t the best system—it’s the worst, except for all the others. The others, meanwhile, can have a run of good luck and/or good management, and with the leverage a more authoritarian system provides give any comparably powerful democracy a serious challenge. The reason not to follow them is not that democracy will inevitably succeed, but that ditching democracy actually worsens the odds of success. I hope we can remember that as our own perpetually unsatisfactory government reorients to face the challenge of an increasingly authoritarian, and increasingly mediocre, and yet still burgeoningly powerful China.
On Here
Only one post On Here in the past week, about whether the Fed can fight inflation effectively all on its own or needs help from fiscal policy—and, if it does, what the implications of that fact might be for political design. As I note at the end of the piece, this is ultimately another question about democracy and accountability, because one of the questions we’ve decided to insulate from democratic accountability is the job of “beating inflation”—we’ve made that the responsibility of the independent and meritocratic Fed. If the “optimal” strategy for achieving economic stability involves similarly insulating big chunks of fiscal policy from democratic “interference,” the implications are decidedly unsettling.
But regardless, figuring out where and when the accountability points in a democracy ought to be—what happens at the state or local level and what at the national; what’s decided by appointed officials and what by electeds; whether and when the courts should defer to the elected branches when vice versa—these are the real challenges of democratic design. They deserve—in a democracy, they demand—serious and substantive debate.