If you think the United States is the only country plagued with conspiracy theories that threaten societal cohesion and democracy as a whole, you're wrong.
Almost three-quarters of Republican Party supporters in the United States believe Joe Biden is not the legitimate president of the country. Overall, 15% of the American population support the claim by the militant right-wing conspiracy conglomerate "QAnon" that the United States government, business, and media are "controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who sexually enslave children all over the world."
Let's turn to Germany. According to a newly published representative poll by the Allensbach Institute, a third of all Germans believe they live in a "sham democracy" in which "citizens have no say."
Are we living in a sham democracy?
This view is shared by 28% of people in the west of Germany, 45% in the east. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that, in the eastern federal states, far fewer people are connected to German political reality than in other parts of the country. The refusal to get vaccinated or wear protective masks resulted in excess mortality of 47% in the eastern state of Thuringia last year, and 49% in neighboring Saxony.
Things don't look any better for Germany's European neighbors, either. In January of this year, 57% of the French population believed that their country's democracy did not function properly, while in the United Kingdom, 34% of people maintain that they have "absolutely no say" in political matters.
These surveys are not directly comparable, but they do reveal a trend: dissatisfaction with democracy. Broadening the horizon to include the countries mentioned, one sees that it's always the the same criticisms: lack of economic participation, the withholding of individual rights, anger at out-of-touch elites.
Loss of trust in democracy
In his 2017 book "The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics," the British author David Goodhart drew attention to the fact that traditional, rural milieus and their enlightened, urban counterparts were increasingly at odds with each other.
Indeed, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama says that in both the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump, the most decisive factor was population density. In places where few(er) people lived spread out over a wide area, they were more likely to vote for Brexit, or Donald Trump, than people in densely populated regions and cities.
It was also Fukuyama who, in his book "Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment," demonstrated that loss of economic participation leads first to anger, then to rejection of the democratic model of society. According to this reading, the neoliberal ideology that many democratic governments have embraced over the past two decades is responsible for the loss of trust in democracy.
The causes lie deeper
There is certainly truth to this, but the explanation falls short. Because economic discontent didn't only lead to rising anger at the democratic system and a determination to overcome its false economic ideological premises, but also to the radical rejection of modern science, whose rational basis and findings form the backbone of contemporary society. The trajectory from "I am doing badly economically" to "My government consists of a ring of criminals who enslave children around the world" is not an obvious one, to put it mildly.
In order to overcome this crisis of democracy, it is no longer enough simply to eliminate economic inequalities and readjust opportunities for participation. We must also find out why it is that tribal, nationalistic, and supposedly religious conspiracy theories and notions of superiority have been able to take the place of rational, secular science.
Because, based on the surveys referred to here, we may conclude that not only is democracy increasingly being rejected as a form of state and government, but with it the entire modern worldview and concept of humanity. And after this, there can be no turning back. The rejection of democracy as a cipher for hatred of the world will never turn out well.
Alexander Görlach is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and a Research Associate at the Internet Institute of Oxford University. Having spent time in Taiwan and Hong Kong, this region became his core topic, in particular the rise of China and what this signifies for the free world. He has held various positions at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge.
This article has been translated from German.
Edited by: Andreas Illmer