Michael Ignatieff: The crisis of liberal constitutionalism - 1

According to the 'civilised' west, democracy is the best form of political governance and capitalism is the best form economic governance.

Together, democracy and capitalism are supposed to ensure that the will of the people is reflected in the election of governments. The will of the people is also reflected in the economic policies that such democratically elected governments pursue to ensure economic growth and prosperity.

That is the theory. In practice, of course, that isn’t how either democracy or capitalism have ever worked.

Late capitalism is a term that has been frequently used to describe the economic inequities that capitalism has succeeded in creating in societies that have an abiding faith both in democracy and capitalism.

Two recent films expose the ills of both democracy and capitalism.

Officials Secrets (2019) exposes the hypocrisy of democratic consensus in the way the United States of America and the United Kingdom – both pillars of liberal democracy – lied, concealed facts and generally took the world for a ride to justify the second invasion of Iraq (2003).

Based on the 2017 Panama Papers expose, Laundromat (2019) dwells into the nefarious operations of the offshore tax havens that give a legal avenue to the rich to avoid (not evade) taxes. The film is a glimpse into the murky world of offshore holdings, hidden financial dealings of fraudsters, drug traffickers, billionaires, celebrities.

All of these worthies were connected to Mosscak Fonseca, a Panama law firm with offices in more than 35 locations globally, and one of the world’s top creators of shell companies – the corporate structures used to hide ownership of assets.

Western democracies have a great deal to explain for their falsification and outright fabrication of facts (about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) to wage a war on Saddam Hussein that resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths (check this: Iraq Body Count).

Western capitalism thrives on economic neo-colonialism, and questions are being raised about its efficacy now only because rampant automation is causing widespread job losses in western democracies.

I frequently remember Winston Churchill when I'm bemused by western hypocrisy. Churchill, responsible for the genocide of Bengalis in 1943, had famously said, “History will judge me kindly, because I intend to write it myself.” 

Western democracies, and especially their leaders, often get away with murder and worse because they determine the contemporary narrative of the world that becomes tomorrow’s history.

Therefore, while we roundly (and justifiably) condemn the likes of Slobodan Milošević, we are unwilling to judge Bush Jr or Blair by the same exacting standards.

Similarly, no institutional efforts are being made anywhere to rein in the untrammeled run that technocracy has over global economics that is resulting in unimaginable income inequities everywhere in the world.

The world’s richest 1 percent, those with more than $1 million, own 45 percent of the world’s wealth. Adults with less than $10,000 in wealth make up 64 percent of the world’s population but hold less than 2 percent of global wealth. The world’s wealthiest individuals, those owning over $100,000 in assets, total less than 10 percent of the global population but own 84 percent of global wealth.

In his lecture earlier this week at the Munk Centre, Michael Ignatieff (Democracy versus Democracy: The crisis of liberal constitutionalism) spoke about the failure of liberal democracies to deliver on fundamental promises. 

He spoke both the trust deficit (bordering on resentment) that masses living in democracies have developed in democratic institutions, and the economic subjugation of the vast majority of the global population.

Ignatieff spoke about the challenge that populist democracy is posing to liberal democracies with specific reference to North America and Europe. 

The distinction between populism and liberalism is populism defines democracy as rule of we the people, which is basically majoritarianism, whereas liberal democracy tries to create a nuanced framework for democratic institutions to engage in interplay of of checks and balances. 

Liberal democracy, Ignatieff explained, “Is a system built for conflict, for disagreement. The whole point of this system is that politicians resent the power of the judges. The judges push you back to defend the empire of law from the empire of politics, the media sits there and drives the politicians crazy and I have the scars to prove it. And this conflictual system is the very essence of any system that has any chance of protecting our liberties, as individuals. And the legitimacy of this system is conditional and performative at any moment in democratic life.”

According to Ignatieff, conflict is at the heart of liberal democracies. “We may sit around a table over dinner and think this is not going well. We’re at loggerheads. We’re fighting with each other. The Parliament is standing up to the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister is riding roughshod over Parliament. The media are driving everybody crazy. The judges are interfering too much. We will take sides in these institutional conflicts that are built into the heart of democracy and at any given moment we will think this system is losing its legitimacy, the conflict level that we are having to live through here is just too high for our health. And our democracy is at risk.”  

People who experience the strengths of liberal democracy such as freedom of choice often despair at its inherent conflict, Ignatieff said, and then emphasized that a liberal democracy is, in fact, a “conflictual system constantly in tension, constantly in crisis. And that it seems to me is both its glory in its strength and its resilience.”

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Michael Ignatieff: The crisis of liberal constitutionalism - 2

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Citing the Brexit imbroglio, Ignatieff said, at present, liberal democracy in Britain is at its best. 

“A democracy is there to prevent a society polarizing into enemies and keeping everybody in a debate in which they’re merely adversaries. In the unwritten constitution of a democracy, there are no enemies, only adversaries, and thus far, despite the polarization in Britain, despite some of the bitterness, this it seems to me is exemplary example of democracy. Not at its worst, but actually at its best. That’s an unpopular thought. If I said that in a lecture in London, I might be laughed out of the house, but I’m sticking with it. If you like democracy, you have to like its rough and tumble.”

Talking about the Trump impeachment, Ignatieff again emphasized that the liberal democratic system has ensured that when the President of the United States stepped out of line, system has ensured that the whistle blower has the constitutional protection to perform his / her duty.

He said, “It illuminated with clarity what a liberal democracy actually is, as an institutional system.”

The President has a phone call with foreign leader and the President says something which violates his constitutional oath. “What is interesting is that they (those who think that Trump erred) then have recourse through protected legislation to blow the whistle. They’re guaranteed confidentiality. They’re guaranteed access to the Congress of the United States. The liberal institutional system worked. It protected devoted civil servants, public servants, gave them the right to go to the President of the United States and say he just crossed the line in a phone call. If the president is impeached, it will be because liberal democratic institutions did what they are supposed to do.”

Ignatieff said democracy would be in crisis if Trump was impeached but would refuse to step down.

He emphasized that, “If you love liberal democracies stop getting alarmed every time it has institutional conflict, because that is the essence of a functioning liberal democracy.”

Ignatieff turned his focus on the crisis in democracy with regard to the increasingly fraught relationship between liberal democracy and liberal professions. 

Liberal professions are academics, lawyers, doctors, journalists, and professional politicians. There is a deep association between these liberal professions and liberal democracy. These liberal professions run liberal democracy.

The lawyers and the judges run the legal system. The doctors run another pillar of a liberal democracy, which is public health care. Journalists run that entire thing called the free media, which is constitutive of liberal democracy. And academics train democratic citizens but crucially, they credential the entire elite that runs a liberal democracy.

“And one of the things that the populist challenge is making me anxious about is the erosion of trust in the population at large at the status privilege and authority of the liberal professions that keep liberal democracy going. And there is deep resentment towards the credential inequality that the liberal professions have benefited from,” he said.

The liberal professions in general, need to think about inequality. Thomas Piketty’s data on income inequality is revealing – liberal professions have done extraordinarily well from the new inequality that began to emerge from the 1970s onward. 

He said that a definite linkage exists (but has rarely been acknowledged) between inequality, the erosion of status, and the erosion of trust towards liberal professions, and declining faith and confidence in liberal democracy itself.

He said, “If you believe as I do that one of the glories of a liberal democracy is a thing called the rule of law; but at present you go to many communities across Canada and you ask, what is the rule of law mean to you? People are likely to respond by saying: It means I have no access to justice. The lawyers are too expensive. The judges won't listen. And my chances of ending up in the slammer pretty good. There is a an enormous gulf between the high minded way in which in a university we think about the rule of law, and the much crueler reality of what the rule of law looks like in an ordinary Magistrates Court or criminal law court.”

Ignatieff explained that the legitimacy of liberal democracy is performative. It’s won or lost every day in our courtrooms. It’s won or lost every day when a lawyer says, ‘You can’t afford my fees’. It’s won or lost every day when our legal aid systems don't work, it's won or lost every day in which an Aboriginal comes out thinking I can't get a fair shake and this goddamn system.

“These are the pressures on the performative legitimacy of liberal democracy that we ought to take seriously. They relate to the eroding trust that the general public has in credentialed liberal professions. And I think that has a knock-on effect in terms of the faith that people have in liberal democracy. It’s one of the reasons why people say I don't want liberal democracy. What I want is to be ruled by ‘We the People’,” he said.

Ignatieff concluded with an impassioned plea: 

“I want the doors to be open, so everybody can be put through the rigorous, relentless training that makes great universities great. I don't want to compromise any of that. But we got to make sure the doors are open. We got to make sure that everybody can get the kind of chance that my father Mike, and I got through being in these places. And I think we want as teachers to be constantly thinking about the professional ethics that we teach in the liberal professionals. If you’re in a liberal profession, you have obligations, their fiduciary obligations, their obligations of competence, their obligations of good advice, their obligations of academic excellence, but they’re also obligations of service and if we lose that we may pay a price in terms of the legitimacy of liberal democracy itself that we can barely see.”