The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and Its Implications for Western Democratic Theory
These are depressing times for people living in Western liberal democracies. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, liberal democratic values have ceased functioning as public standards against which Western political leaders could reproach each other and be held accountable by their people. While the violation of liberal democratic values by influential political leaders is not new in the West, it is unprecedented that elected political leaders publicly and blatantly disavow liberal democratic values. Many observers interpret these events as a clear symptom of the downfall of liberal democracy; liberal democratic values are indeed losing ground in Western politics, and it is unclear how this trend can be reversed.
The ratcheting down of liberal democratic principles has brought to the fore important questions about the future of the academic field of democratic theory, which a Western-liberal orientation has long shaped. A key issue is whether contemporary debates should continue to focus on institutional innovations. In recent years, Western democratic theorists have produced innovative proposals to renovate their institutions, but how feasible and desirable are these proposals in the current political context, where democratic institutions are at their weakest point and can be weaponised by populist leaders in power? As the saying goes, “you should fix the roof while the sun is shining”. So, meaningful institutional reforms will likely succeed during political stability, not crisis.
Instead of institutional innovation, democratic leadership is a timely and more feasible topic for normative studies. As the personalisation of democratic politics is taking deep roots and undemocratic political leaders are gaining popularity among the electorate, it is crucial to understand how political leadership can be democratic. Equally important is understanding how democratic societies should nurture civic leaders who can influence collective political visions and publicly contest political leaders in office. Proposals to strengthen democratic leadership can be implemented even in times of crisis because they do not require major institutional changes. However, they can shed a new light on the political agenda that democracy’s defenders should advocate for.
When is Political Leadership Democratic?
Unique to democratic leadership is the dispersion of political influence and informal political authority across multiple political actors. In contemporary democracies, this dispersion is mainly visible through the interactions of four political actors: political leaders in office, citizens, civic associations, and civic leaders. Democratic leadership also tends to open its participation arenas to previously excluded social segments. This openness contrasts with ‘distributed leadership’ forms, which encourage different individuals to participate in the definition of the collective project pre-designed by top leaders.
How should political leadership then be dispersed and open? Here, I suggest taking inspiration from Confucianism, an intellectual tradition that originated in China more than two thousand years ago, for which political leadership has always been a central concern.
Rethinking Democratic Leadership Through a Confucian Lens
The Confucian masters were unyielding in their belief that achieving the ideal political order ultimately rested on people’s voluntary acceptance of leaders’ authority and cultivating proper human relationships between the leaders and their people. However, traditionally, Confucian political leadership had never been democratic. For pre-modern Confucian thinkers, the entire responsibility of political leadership fell on the shoulders of the ruler and the morally cultivated persons who assisted him. Yet, the Confucian emphasis on ritual-meditated reciprocal social relationships can inspire a unique conception of political leadership in which co-leadership is a primary component in the life of its members.
Confucians view the social relations in which individuals are situated as partly constitutive of the self. Unlike atomistic conceptions of the self, the Confucian ideal person is social, and cultivating particular social relations facilitates mental, emotional, and ethical development. Responsibilities for moral transformation of the parties involved in social relations are often unequally distributed, where some individuals (e.g., parents) bear a higher duty of care than others (e.g., children). In Confucianism, moral responsibility towards others’ cultivation is viewed as a precondition for self-cultivation, where one can fully realise oneself only by supporting others. For the early masters, ritualistic practices (li 禮) were a crucial means to ensure that social relations were conducive to moral growth. In their view, rituals were communicative networks through which individuals could create, maintain, and enhance their social relationships to achieve harmony (he 和). While Confucian moral transformation is a social project, it also requires self-motivation, individual effort, and reflexivity—a critical attitude towards themselves, their social context, and ritualistic practices.
Thus, this possibility of autonomous action, on one hand, and the perspective that moral transformation is a social project, on the other, enable a reinterpretation of Confucian social relations as venues for political leadership. Because Confucian social relations are geared towards achieving shared goals through the cooperation of different parties, they reflect the idea that leadership is a social process aimed at providing and realising solutions to common problems. Confucian ritually-mediated social relationships can represent dispersed and inter-nested centres of leadership in which multiple individuals collaborate towards collective goals and presuppose the parties’ ability to influence each other. Significantly, the moral duty of the most cultivated individuals to facilitate others to develop themselves allows for recasting the higher-responsibility bearer within the social relation as de facto civic leaders vested with leadership responsibilities towards the less morally cultivated. Civic leaders can operate from multiple societal spaces as social relations can develop across various social spheres.
Three Advantages of Using Confucian Resources to Rethink Democratic Leadership
First, the emphasis on rituals (li 禮) stresses the need for public rules to regulate political leaders’ behaviour and public engagement, which have become absent in today’s Western politics, and these underscore the crisis facing liberal democracies with problematic leaders. So, Confucian emphasis on rituals can bring about respectful public contestation with valuable input to the definition of collective directions that enhances political leadership.
Second, the Confucian view of social relations invites us to consider as loci of democratic leadership social sites that many Western democratic theorists view as ‘private’ and apolitical, such as the family. While attention to the development of democratic leadership in civil sites (such as neighbourhood groups) is not uncommon in the field, political leadership in the family sphere remains largely underexamined in democratic theory. This conception of leadership dispersion bears implications for a political agenda that supports nurturing society’s open and dispersed loci of leadership. Minimally, it requires ensuring citizens have a variety of means to become effective civic leaders by investing in schools, ensuring socio-economic opportunities for low-income families, and experimenting with urban design.
Third, using Confucian resources to rethink democratic leadership addresses the state of the field of democratic theory. The crisis of liberal democracy unfolds when students are increasingly curious about approaches to democratic theorising that develop outside Western intellectual traditions. Thus, scholars in Western democratic theory must collaborate with colleagues working on democracy in non-Western traditions, perhaps starting with the scholars active in the burgeoning debate on Confucian democracy. This will move the field’s research agenda away from institutional reforms and liberal values. Still, it can lead to a better understanding of how democracy can survive in a globalised and polarised world.
Authors
Elena Ziliotti
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/732986