Democracy, with all its peculiarities, is the dominant form of government in a large part of the world. From its origin in ancient Greece to the multiple variants in which it exists today, the story of democracy has been one of endurance. This has been in spite of great pessimism about its future. Plato bemoaned its lack of “excellence" and the Bolsheviks dubbed it a sham. In fact, just look around the world today and you sense admiration for China’s non-democratic model that seems to deliver everything democracies can’t. Can it be concluded then, that through its long, arduous journey, battling the Great Depression, two World Wars, possibility of Armageddon in 1962 and the 2008 financial crisis, democracy has gone from strength to strength?

David Runciman, author of The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present, would say no. Democracy, he would say, has managed to go from crisis to crisis and that is about all it is capable of. He is not the first writer to think that. His book, inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville’s ruminations on the American variant, is a cautious but optimistic take on democracy in the 20th century.

The thing about democracy, Runciman argues, is not its supposed transparency or effectiveness as compared with non-democratic regimes. If anything, authoritarian systems are more effective in dealing with sudden crises. Their ability to respond quickly and resolutely is much higher than democracy and for obvious reasons. The coordination costs involved are much less than in seeking democratic approval. Yet, over the longer term, democracy has “depth" that eludes authoritarian governments. One only has to view the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and East European countries to realize how brittle non-democracies are. Democracies, in spite of their messiness, still wade through troubled moments. Their great weakness, however, is their inability to learn from past crises.

The Confidence Trap illustrates this point by viewing crises across the world. Every 15 years or so, from 1918, the world faced a crisis which at that point seemed all-consuming. During the last few months of the Great War, US president Woodrow Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy. He wanted the victory of the Allied powers to be seen as a victory of democracy over autocracy. Yet the reason democracy won was not due its intrinsic merit but its ability to transform itself into an “autocracy" when the need arose. The Allies started using more chemical weapons, suppressed information about a deadly flu pandemic, and dispatched more and more troops for the war. In contrast, the Germans were out of ideas and there was no question of changing their leadership because no matter how bad things get, autocrats have “to remain in character".

The trap, according to Runciman, is a democracy’s confidence that it will survive. Because democracies know they will survive, they never learn from past mistakes and therefore they keep making more mistakes. Brinkmanship, instability, lack of foresight, short-termism, impulsiveness, all oft-cited weaknesses of democracy which bring it close to drowning, are also what keep it afloat. As Runciman says, “democracy is trapped by its own success".

All democracy has to deal with is another election, maybe a change in leadership, and ultimately it will just muddle along till the next crisis comes.

India is a good example here. The book looks at India’s war with China in 1962 and how Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru underestimated the Chinese threat. India paid the price for it but its democracy survived. Writing from India one can say that we learnt a lesson. But have we? Later events disprove that conclusion. India, as other democracies, is unable to understand when a crisis is nearby or when steps should be taken to avoid it. The country’s slow economic unwinding over the past decade, not very dissimilar from the economic crisis that erupted in the West in 2008, amply proves this.

Runciman does not deride or applaud democracy. He holds up a mirror to his reader and says this is democracy: same as you. Impulsive, fickle and focused on short-term goals. Nothing more, nothing less. Runciman also does not prescribe a way to get out of the confidence trap; if anything he illustrates that there is no escaping it. And that is the basic truth about democracy that everyone needs to accept.

He ends his book with an image that says it all. Taken from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the image is one that “invokes the idea of democracy as a river flowing through history. We are afloat on a rickety craft…knowing the difficulties doesn’t tell us how to steer. But it is better to know".

Gayatri Chandrasekaran is a copy editor at Mint. Comment at views@livemint.com

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