Are good institutions enough? - III

Democracies need not always die because of military coups. Democratic governments may die at the hands of elected leaders. They may be killed quickly as at the hands of Hitler, or they may erode slowly, in barely visible steps that nobody will notice. The latter is more probable since the end of the Cold War. Most democratic breakdowns now are caused by elected governments themselves by slowly  strangling democratic institutions. Examples include Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia.

If constitutional rules were enough, then figures such as Perón, Marcos, or Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas would have been one-or two-term presidents. But this did not happen. All of them came to power under what were thought to be well-designed constitutions which contained an impressive array of checks and balances that should have reined them in. The constitutional and legal safeguards can be easily manipulated by a determined authoritarian leader. Why? 

Constitutions, no matter how well-designed, will always have countless gaps and ambiguities. No set of rules can anticipate all possible contingencies or prescribe how to behave under all possible circumstances. The rules can only be general and are subject to different interpretations by different people. What does “advice and consent” or “crimes and misdemeanours” mean? If constitutional powers are open to multiple readings, they can be used in ways that their creators didn’t anticipate. Also, the written words of a constitution may be followed to the letter in ways that undermine the spirit of the law. 

When electoral route is used to throttle democracy, you don’t get the usual signals about the death of a democracy like the president being killed or sent off into exile, the constitution being suspended, tanks in the streets etc. On the electoral road, constitutions and other well-known democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. All the outward show of democratic processes will be maintained. 

Each individual step that seems to undermine democracy seems minor — none appears to truly threaten democracy. Elected autocrats will tell you their efforts are aimed at making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process. Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. There will be nothing that will set off the  alarm bells of a majority of people. Those who protest against government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. 

Government actions to subvert democracy often seem legally correct and will be approved by parliament and the supreme court. Key players who might threaten the government like opposition politicians and  business leaders who finance the opposition are bought off or enfeebled. Would-be  autocrats often use security threats — wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify antidemocratic measures. For such leaders, a crisis represents an opportunity to begin to dismantle the inconvenient constitutional constraints. Over time, what was once seen as abnormal becomes normal.

Institutions alone are not enough to check elected autocrats. Whether the autocratic leader subverts democratic institutions or is constrained by them will depend on democratic norms. Norms are shared codes of conduct that are widely accepted within a society. These norms are what make a constitution work smoothly for a long time. Because they are unwritten, they pass unnoticed and we can be fooled into thinking they are unnecessary. But their absence can prove dangerous. These norms prevent political parties from acting in such a fashion that the whole system is endangered. One such norm is that rival political parties don’t regard each other as enemies. 

Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not work. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. The courts and other neutral agencies are packed with their sympathizers, the media and the private sector will be bought or bullied into silence. In the electoral route to authoritarianism, the very institutions of democracy will be used to kill it. With the courts packed and law enforcement authorities brought to heel, governments can act with impunity. In How Democracies Die, the authors give four warning signals, any one of which indicates danger: 

when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game,

2) denies the legitimacy of opponents,

3) tolerates or encourages violence, or

4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.

Are good institutions enough? - II

A common example of how fallen moral values of a society can lead to horrendous consequences is the holocaust. Many people have tried to analyze how, in a society that was once regarded as the pillar of Western civilisation; in a culture of law, order, and reason, industrial scale murder of millions of people could have taken place? How could large numbers of people willingly tolerate the mass extermination of their fellow citizens? Within a couple years of Hitler coming to power, he was hailed as a great national statesman. So what if Jews were being discriminated against? The economy was doing well, right?

Hannah Arendt published a book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in which she pointed out the general pattern of how ordinary people become brutal killers. One of the aims of employing the word banality was to show that great evil did not require abnormal, monstrous people. They could be achieved by ordinary people carrying out routine activities. These activities were not murderous in themselves. They consisted of office work such as organising transport, deciding how many Jews should be deported and to where. 

Adolf Eichmann had the task of regulating “Jewish affairs and evacuations” in the Nazi regime. He knew perfectly well the train destinations and understood that the Jews were to be killed, and how they were to be killed. But he had a curious idea of duty: if he did not see Jews being killed, his activities were not responsible for the crimes. He was ready to do anything to advance in the Nazi bureaucratic grades. He had carried out orders to the best of his ability and experienced no regret. 

Efficient production of evil depends on each person specialising in a part of the process. This diffusion of responsibility makes it easy for people to use their remarkable powers of rationalisation to wash their hands off any responsibility for the resulting monstrosity. At no step was there a protest. Over time, criminal activities had become routine and criminal orders were implemented without revulsion. Arendt recognised that Eichmann was the perfect example of the modern man devoted to carrying out efficiently what he had been tasked to do without being burdened by feelings.

It is rare to find Nazi documents in which such bald words as "extermination," "liquidation," or "killing" occur. The prescribed code names for killing were "final solution," "evacuation" and "special treatment"; deportation was called "resettlement" and "labor in the East". The function of such clichés and stock phrases is to protect people against reality. In ordinary language, they would be called lies. Eichmann easily accepted and internalized these "objective" Nazi rules which deprived them of their emotional content. 

Eichmann believed his inhuman acts were marks of virtue. He would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do. Arendt had little sympathy for the excuse repeatedly used by Nazis criminals: “I was a cog in the machine”; “I obeyed the orders”; “anybody would have acted the same way”… etc. She insisted that “obedience and support are the same."

None of the various "language rules," carefully constructed to mask the truth, had a more decisive effect on the mentality of the killers than the first war decree of Hitler, in which the word for "murder" was replaced by the phrase "to grant a mercy death." If the creeping normalization of hate speech is not opposed at the very beginning because they still seem “below the threshold” of concern to many, it may escalate into unimaginable violence given the "right" kind of leader. 

The Nazis were elected but the democratic institutions were unable to keep them in check. The reason was that the values of the people manning these institutions slowly got aligned with Nazi views. There were physicians, engineers, military leaders, etc. who were in support of the Nazis. Many prominent scientists and engineers built the Nazi war machine and helped Hitler to come close to world domination. German physicists and engineers built solid and liquid-fuel rockets, worked on developing an atomic bomb, invented nerve gases such as sarin, produced a cruise missile (the V-1), and much more. 

Doctors tested new drugs on the prisoners, presenting the results to a scientific conference. By 1939, around two thirds of all German doctors had some connection or other with the Nazi Party. Nazi racial hygienists were among the top professionals in their fields. Academics in every field gave support to the Nazi regime.  Many university faculty used party membership as a method of advancing their careers. In short, the most educated, privileged and respected people were Nazi sympathisers. There has been no evil in history that has failed to find support among many of the great and the good.