Democratic decay: Irreversible?
Yes “decay” as in tooth decay. The rot can begin inside or outside, slowly, and then a tipping point arrives, quickening complete tooth loss.
At the risk of annoying political scientists (who would much prefer complexity, for good reason), “decay” in this instance is a good word for gathering accurate metaphors. Tooth decay, thought decay, building decay, atomic decay, and so forth. An integrity flipping into disintegration. Typically producing pain.
Democracy, the word, is harder to pin down. There are many ways its integrity is added up. One well-regarded group, the V-Dem Institute, measures fidelity to five principles: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian.
Through this optic, democracy degrades with any surrender of universal suffrage, self-determination, freedom of expression, inclusive practices, systems for dialogue, and equality.
Other democracy watchers look to the relative strength of public law. Fixed on the legal infrastructure, they measure outlaw behavior tolerated by the citizens.
A cultural perspective, on the other hand, looks to the mental and emotional embrace of decentralized governance. How much citizen empowerment is exercised: this is the core culture to be monitored.
Often, what’s obvious at the surface is financial and moral corruption. But the deeper corruption is the decay of a system securing human equality.
BODY BLOWS
Whatever the lens — no matter how differently observations are refracted — decay is felt physically. Forced disappearances, fear of speaking out, unjust imprisonment, and all extra-judicial violence are physical experiences.
The masked-men ICE raids on immigrant workplaces in the United States and ICE rendition of suspects to El Salvador are full-bodied abduction. So is the dehumanization of an enemy (criminals/immigrants) a repetitive tactic, e.g., the Philippine 21st Century tokhang campaign’s subhuman addict, the subhuman communist in mid-20th Century Pinochet’s Chile and Suharto’s Indonesia, and the subhuman black man in apartheid South Africa.
But even as an abstraction, democratic decay is felt as body blows. When nearly an entire Senate mangles Constitutional dicta, citizens are whacked in a collective solar plexus. Filipinos committed to democracy feel very smacked indeed, right now, by the cynical, pseudo-legal delays of the impeachment trial of the Vice-President for corruption.
The blow is compounded by a kind of body-forward experience of what can happen next. For the Philippines, what presumably follows the chipping away at Constitutional order are self-censorship of speech, avoidance of suddenly dangerous discussion spaces, and buy-in into a culture of political docility. Filipinos can see the future when democratic decay clicks in; and that future can be felt — strangely, in a physical way — now.
A Duterte 2.0 will have mortal implications for many.
INVISIBLE ROT
Not for the Americans. One strange thing the matter about Americans during Trump 2.0, viewed from the Philippines, is how seemingly undetectable democratic decay is to half the US population. Despite brutal Trumpian action on immigration, wholesale decoupling from scientific reason, and brazen alignment with the world’s dictators, the MAGA hordes appear to think they still live in a US shaped by its libertarian Constitution.
This slippery slope is more visible to most Europeans. Having already plunged into democratic wipe-out in the 20th century — the fascist interludes in Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the entire Eastern Bloc, and the conquest of France, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium by Nazi Germany — the signals are clear in these parts.
No matter how close France, for instance, gets close to extreme Right electoral success, the actual stakes are front and center of popular discussion, which in turn drives political action. There is no blindness to what opposition leader Madame Marie Le Pen promises. Similarly, Romanians were not unaware of the stakes when they moved to annul the initial win of right-wing Calin Georgescu, on charges of Russian interference, and ratifying the election of centrist Nicușor Dan to their presidency.
On the other hand, the 248-year-old United States has not had a political and cultural experience of constitutional corrosion. Until now. Certainly not as severe as it is already happening today. A dangerous unknowing has been permeating the US experience since 2024: unacknowledged racism as the value system underpinning anti-DEI policy, unrecognized autocracy driving the criminal use of presidential powers, obscured health status of the would-be emperor.
Perhaps the greatest danger facing the US right now is its lack of “inoculation” against its transformation into a fascist state.
DEMOCRACY’S SHELF LIFE?
It is no longer uncommon to encounter discussions asking pointblank: has democracy just about exhausted itself? In familial, cross-national, intra-nation chat groups, there is a hue and cry about the erosion of democratic institutions: the academia that was to “level the playing field,” an impartial justice system, a neutral armed forces, governance as a system of checks and balances, and a fair, impartial media environment.
These have given way to autocratic decision making wherever pro-democracy fronts have so much as paused from the sheer difficulty of sustaining all these necessary institutions. And this wherever is everywhere by now. There is no clear answer, except for the experience — or memory — of life as a freely thinking individual and group, equal to all other individuals and groups.
The only clear idea is the recollection of joy in that life.
Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.
