In the annals of modern democracy, 2016 has been pretty eventful. For some in Britain and the US, it has been a great year: in this version of events the will of the people, in the form of votes for Brexit and Donald Trump, has smashed triumphantly through the complacent expectations and blinkered preoccupations of a political elite.

For others, though, electorates have delivered results that will be self-evidently harmful both to citizens of these nations, and to stability in the wider world. There has been a distinctly authoritarian streak visible, too, from leaders of democracies including India and Turkey. Demagoguery, the scourge of democracy, has reared its head. According to this view, security – the bottom-line responsibility of government – seems imperilled, particularly in the US, where fears grow that internationally agreed measures to alleviate climate change may well be overturned, and loose words from a verbally incontinent incoming president could spark who-knows-what consequences.

Under these circumstances, some might silently hanker after the rule of philosopher kings or wise guardians – the trained statesmen and stateswomen suggested in Plato’s thought experiment, the Republic – rather than the emotionally erratic people, motivated by anger, frustration and fear. Anger, indeed, was the keynote of 2016: when the world’s most furious Twitter troll has been elected to the presidency of the US, rationalism looks to be in short supply, and Thomas Hobbes’s notion that man is at heart an unruly morass of passions and desires gains traction.

The word democracy derives from the Greek demos, people, and kratos, grip. That grip has recently seemed violent and uncomfortable to some. In these disturbing circumstances, headlines have begun to ask whether democracy is in crisis, a question that political scientists have been mulling over for some years, with thinkers such as Colin Crouch wondering whether we are moving into a “post-democratic” era. Professor Crouch’s idea is that we may be entering a phase in which the energy is ebbing from the democratic process, in which turnout is largely on the wane, and in which democracy may become, increasingly, a shell from within which a socioeconomic elite actually runs things. If you accept that line of thought, Brexit and Trump certainly look like howls of protest.

A decade of decline for democracy A decade of decline for democracy

Claiming precise parallels between our modern democracies and those of ancient Greece is a fool’s game. Today’s representative democracies are very different from their distant ancestors, the direct democracies that developed in different forms in the Greek world, notably in Athens, in the 5th century BC. There, an assembly of the adult male citizenry (a minority of the population, since women and slaves were excluded) voted on, for example, even intricate matters of foreign policy. That meant every vote was effectively a referendum (though a referendum, it is worth noting, with checks and balances, since the measures voted for could be revised through the people’s law courts). Most officials, too, were chosen by lot; and then there was ostracism, a rarely invoked method by which politicians could be ejected from the city state for a decade.

And yet it can often be illuminating to think with the debate-loving Greeks in mind, not least since they bequeathed to later thinkers the earliest examples of political theory in action, back in those moments when democracy was newly minted. The very first comes courtesy of the historian Herodotus, a native of what is now the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. Recounting the deposing of a usurper on the throne of Persia in his Histories (c440BC), he sets forth a debate between the leading conspirators, who discuss what form of government they should choose. (It is an imagined scene: this is the atmosphere of Greek debate transposed to a Persian court that was not about to abandon monarchy.) Each of the three plotters speaks up for a different form of government – democracy, oligarchy and monarchy. In defending democracy, using the then current catchword isonomia, equality before the law, the plotter Otanes says: “It is government by lot, it is accountable government, and it refers all decisions to the common people.” Megabyzus contends, on the other hand, that democracy is a kind of mob rule, and “there is nothing more stupid or given to brutality … the approach of the general populace is that of a river swollen with winter rain: they rush blindly forward and sweep things before them”. An image that might ring bells in 2016.

The Athenian Michael Gove

An even more telling episode, perhaps, is that narrated in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, the conflict between Athens and Sparta that wore on between 431 and 404BC. In 427, the Athenians debated what to do about the town of Mytilene on Lesbos, which had revolted from their alliance. They voted to kill all the male citizens of the town, and to enslave the women and children – and duly set off in the ship of the day, a trireme. But overnight they thought better of it and held a second debate. The hawkish Cleon, who turns out to be a distant intellectual ancestor of the pro-leave campaigner Michael Gove, and indeed of Mr Trump, speaks out against experts. “As a general rule states are better governed by the man in the street than by intellectuals,” he says. On the other side, Diodotus urges the citizens to reconsider their fury: “Haste and anger are, to my mind, the two greatest obstacles to wise counsel.” The second referendum delivers a different result. A second trireme is sent out to Lesbos, and, miraculously, overtakes the first. The Mytilenaeans are spared.

Democracy back from margins

Despite the intriguing persistence of these discourses of anger and expertise, there is no glib comparison to be drawn here. No second referendum on Brexit will be offered, no trireme sent out to Brussels in the nick of time. The most productive way of comparing Athens of the 5th century BC with our modern democracies is by way of difference. As Professor Paul Cartledge, author of this year’s Democracy: A Life has pointed out, democracy was a way of life in 5th-century Athens. It was not something that others got on with while the rest attended to their own business; it was Athenian culture as much as it was its system of government.

It has never, of course, been quite that in Britain; but at the moment it can feel that politics is less a part of citizens’ culture than it ever has been since the franchise was fully extended in 1928. The decline of industry and the reduction of the importance of trade unions have not helped. There have been signs of a kickback – the passionate engagement in Scotland in the run-up to the 2014 referendum, for example, and the growth of movements such as Momentum, and, briefly, Occupy. And yet if our democracy is to function as something more than a shell, it needs to be stitched back into citizens’ lives. Democracy will never be quite our way of being, as it was for the Athenians, but we must find ways to bring it back from the margins. A properly functioning everyday democracy is one in which people have the chance to participate in shaping public life – and who take the opportunity to do so. That, sadly, is not quite where we are in 2016.