Dr Jack Corbett
Australian National University
Historians, a colleague of mine is fond of saying, do not predict the future, they only predict the past. History should, in theory, provide lessons for the future but as David Runciman’s latest offering The Confidence Trap illustrates, democracies aren’t very good at learning their lessons; when it comes to crisis democracies tend to support that other cliché about history: it repeats (although not always in the ways we expect).
Aside from being eminently readable, The Confidence Trap is a timely contribution for all the obvious reasons. As outlined recently by Matt Wood on this blog, public confidence in democratic government has reached record lows. On the back of the 21st century’s first major crisis – the GFC – and in the face of one of its greatest challenges – climate change – this shouldn’t really come as a surprise. We are all anxiously watching and waiting to see how things pan out. Can democracy meet these challenges? Can we find a way out of this mess? Will democracy emerge from this ‘moment of truth’ triumphant or defeated?
If history is an accurate guide – and Runciman is cautious about whether it should be – the answer is neither. Democracies, he argues, don’t face ‘moments of truth’; this is why they are durable. They sidestep them, wriggle through them, lurch from one extreme to the other in order to avoid them and ultimately, in the absence of a grand strategy or any propensity to learn from their mistakes, they muddle through. This is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of democracy: its flexibility enables it to find a way but in the long run (over)confidence in the capacity of that same flexibility to meet any challenge breeds complacency, which means we are left unprepared for the crisis moment. It is the recurrence of this cycle that is the essence of the ‘trap’.
This view of democracy in crisis flies in the face of much conventional wisdom (if you don’t want to read the whole book you can find a summary of the main arguments here). Since antiquity, the assumption has been that democratic government, with all its talk of freedom and equality, only has superficial appeal. Underneath the surface it is chaotic, irresponsible and prone to the worst excesses of mob rule. Runciman turns this argument on its head. Democracy isn’t seductive on the surface; on the surface it is all the things its detractors claim: messy, petty, without a clear sense of where it wants to go or how it might get there. On the surface, democracy is a ‘confidence trick’ and its inability to respond decisively to crisis exposes this endemic failing. But, he argues, there is much more to democracy than what the humdrum of day-to-day politics permits us to see. History tells us that democracies aren’t bad at responding to crisis, they are actually very good at it, and it is this capacity to muddle through against all the odds that illustrates this perverse strength (although exactly how it does so remains somewhat of a mystery as politicians in particular tend to stumble on the right choices for all the wrong reasons). And yet, the very muddled way that democracies deal with current crisis sows the seeds for future calamity: the upshot is that democracies tend to win the day but miss the lesson.
The Confidence Trap makes this argument through a series of case studies drawn from the last century starting with 1918 (the end of the First World War) and ending with 2008 (the GFC). Along the way we take in 1933 (the World Economic Conference), 1947 (creating the post Second World War world order), 1962 (the Cuban Missile Crisis and others), 1974 (inflation, economic uncertainty, political unrest) and of course 1989 (the end of the Cold War). No doubt some political scientists will question the case selection – defining what constitutes a crisis, Runciman argues, is part of the problem for democracies who are faced with a cacophony of competing naysayers – which focuses almost exclusively on politics in the ‘great powers’ (predominantly America but Russia, Britain, France, Germany, India, China and Japan all get a moment in the sun), just as some historians will no doubt take issue with his brief treatment of the crisis events themselves. But, this misses the point of the book and in particular the freshness of the argument.
To guide us through this history of crisis Runciman relies on Tocqueville. It is Tocqueville, he claims, who best understood the paradoxical nature of democratic government. When he first arrived in America, Tocqueville observed much in the day-to-day practice of democratic politics to satisfy the worst fears of its critics; everybody was living in the moment with little care for the future. But, he changed his mind once he peered beneath the surface. Democracy wasn’t a ‘confidence trick’. It was the real deal, and would remain so as long as people had faith in what democracy could achieve. The problem is that once that faith was established democracies tend to become fatalistic and overconfident. The capacity of democracy to consistently survive crisis emboldens its populations who believe that, when the time comes, they will find a way through anything, leading to complacency and inertia.
So what does the confidence of democracies in a crisis tell us about the crisis of confidence that currently besets many democratic regimes around the world? The answer, in short, lies with the promise of history. Where much of the current literature on democratic disenchantment focuses on what is new about anti-politics in particular, this book provides an insight into what it constant. To that end, its contribution sits with other recent works – John Kane and Haig Patapan’s The Democratic Leader and Stephen Medvic’s In Defence of Politicians for example – which also focus on the traps and paradoxes endemic to this way of governing. We are naive, these authors tell us, if we think we can avoid crisis of confidence, as this type of hypercritical introspection is one the perverse strengths of democracies: it shakes up the system without breaking it. The best we can hope is that this knowledge can afford us some perspective (although The Confidence Trap even remains sceptical about this).
Runciman, we can infer, would see much of the current disenchantment with democracy as a typically democratic problem: it’s a symptom of the ‘trap’. We have every reason to be confident in democracy at the very point in history when it appears to have seen off its greatest rival (the autocracy of the Soviet Union) and is on the march around the globe. And yet, paradoxically, we remain anxious and uncertain. That’s the problem with muddling through: democracy is never confronted with its ‘moment of truth’. This means it is never defeated, but it never really wins either. We may have survived yesterday’s crisis but, the naysayers claim, this success is setting us up for the next fall.
The emphasis on muddling through won’t be unfamiliar to many readers of this blog. In many ways this is the argument that Bernard Crick (who curiously doesn’t rate a mention in The Confidence Trap) is most famous for. Perhaps the reason for his omission is that whilst Crick consciously sought to defend democratic politics, Runciman does not. In this sense his analysis lays claim to being clear-eyed, albeit in a slightly resigned way. But ultimately his equivocality about the future prospects of democracy lets us draw our own conclusions. History is, after all, better at predicting the past.