Editorial 2: Democracy’s early warning system
Context
Now beset by a rising tide of strong-armed rulers and demagogues worldwide, democracy is also the best check on their unrestrained power. Those who resisted the Emergency understood this.
Rising despotism
- Amidst the worsening global commotions, triggered by factors ranging from imperial power rivalries, unending wars, border closures and trade and tariff disputes to pandemics, genocides, extreme weather events, collapsing banks and citizen disaffection, a new kind of despotism with thoroughly 21st-century characteristics is everywhere on the rise.
- Despotism is key to understanding global threats to democracy—from authoritarian states like Russia, China, and Iran to rising demagogues in Hungary, Mexico, Israel, and the US.
- These leaders challenge power-sharing democracies, undermining democratic values and fueling attacks on democratic institutions worldwide.
- Despotism is a unique form of rule that defies traditional political norms. It is a pseudo-democratic system led by rulers skilled in manipulating people’s lives to gain support and obedience.
- The outcome is a powerful, top-down pyramid of authority that maintains millions of loyal supporters at home and garners admirers internationally, allowing despotic regimes to sustain and expand their influence with deceptive ease.
Despots in Alliance
- The spread of despotism is alarming, with authoritarian leaders forming powerful alliances.
- Donald Trump’s May 2025 tour of West Asia exemplified this, as he was warmly welcomed by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. Lavish ceremonies, fighter jet escorts, and grand honors highlighted their solidarity.
- Amid the spectacle, trillion-dollar business and defence deals were signed, including plans for a joint nuclear energy program and AI chip imports.
The True Value of Democracy
- Democracy is much more than popular self-government based on free and fair elections. It is to recognise the need to rein in any form of power that harms lives by bringing hardship, sorrow and indignity.
- To be a democrat is to believe that Democracy is a shape-shifting way of protecting humans and their biosphere against the corrupting effects of unaccountable power.
- This is its radical potential: Democracy is the defiant insistence that people’s lives are never fixed, that all things, human and non-human, are built on the shifting sands of space-time, and that no person or group, no matter how much power they hold, can be trusted permanently, in any context, to govern the lives of others.
- This was surely the wisdom and sentiment motivating those people from many walks of life who bravely resisted Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule between June 1975 and March 1977.
- They understood that democracy is a means of damage prevention. It’s an early warning system, a way of enabling citizens, and whole organisations and networks, to sound the alarm whenever they suspect that others are about to cause them harm, or when calamities are already bearing down on their heads.
Conclusion
Democracy brings things back to Earth. It serves as a reality check on unrestrained power exercised by strong-armed despots and demagogues backed by “the people”. It is the best means so far invented of ensuring that those in charge of organisations don’t stray into cuckoo land, wander into territory where misadventures of power are concealed by lies, silence and weaponised nonsense.