On The People vs. Democracy

Yascha Mounk's The People vs. Democracy, published in 2018, offers one of the sharpest diagnoses of why liberal democracy is under strain, and the argument turns on a distinction most people never notice: that the system we casually call democracy is actually a marriage of two things that can come apart. It is liberal, meaning it protects individual rights, the rule of law, and the limits on power, and it is democratic, meaning it translates popular will into public policy. For most of the postwar era these two elements traveled together, and we assumed they were inseparable. Mounk argues that they are now pulling apart, and that the divorce is the crisis of our time.

He gives the two halves names. On one side is rising illiberal democracy, or democracy without rights, the politics of populist movements that claim to speak for the real people against corrupt elites, win elections, and then attack the institutions that constrain majority power, the courts, the press, the protections for minorities, in the name of the popular will. On the other side is undemocratic liberalism, or rights without democracy, a politics in which important decisions are increasingly removed from popular control and handed to courts, central banks, technocrats, and international bodies, so that the system protects rights and follows rules but leaves ordinary citizens feeling they have no real say. Each side feeds the other: the more decisions are placed beyond democratic reach, the more credible the populist charge that the people have been shut out, and the more populists win, the more the defenders of rights seek to insulate institutions from popular majorities.

This framework illuminates a great deal that otherwise seems contradictory. It explains why populist leaders can be genuinely popular while genuinely threatening liberal institutions, and why technocratic defenders of those institutions can be genuinely right about policy while feeding the resentment that empowers their opponents. The health of the system, Mounk argues, depends on holding the liberal and the democratic together, on a politics that both respects rights and remains genuinely responsive to the people, and the danger lies in letting either half consume the other.

Mounk also examines the forces driving the strain, economic stagnation and rising inequality, the transformation of the media environment, and anxieties over rapid social and demographic change, and he considers what might be done to renew the bond between liberalism and democracy. His proposals are debatable, as such proposals always are, but the diagnostic framework is the lasting contribution.

The book belongs in this library because it gives a reader the conceptual tools to think clearly about a confusing moment, to see that defending democracy and defending rights are distinct tasks that must be pursued together. It sits with How Democracies Die, Twilight of Democracy, and the other modern works on democratic strain throughout this collection. The People vs. Democracy is in copyright and widely available in print and digital editions. Read it for the crucial distinction between the liberal and the democratic, and for the argument that a free society must keep them wed.