Is corruption inborn in democracy?

(Part 2)

Part One of this column* looked into how acutely vulnerable Philippine democracy to corruption. And explored this colossal corruptibility of liberal democratic institutions, a century old in this country, to then ask whether there is in fact something about democracy that yields easily — or actually produces — its own corruption.

The proposed answer: No, but.

Which is to recognize that the freedom guaranteed by democracy guarantees it for the entire citizenry; but that, therefore, also guarantees it for bad actors who have increasingly upped their ability to usurp the legal system that should have curtailed greed.

Democracy’s guarantee of freedom unexpectedly guarantees the freedom to think to subvert freedom. This sentence, particularly in the case of the Philippines’ democratic project, is no mere semantic curlicue. The corrupt and corrupted political landscape is very real indeed — concrete, as the Marxists will say. (Today’s United States is an even more horrific example.)

Still, as the previous column observed, democracy managed to sustain its idealisms and restrain its innate corruptibility through most of the 20th Century. Despite the century-old, incrementally more awful histories of criminal leaders using democracy against itself, the threat was not existential until this past decade of the 21st Century.

Today it is clear that democracy may not hold as majority culture and politics globally. In the Philippines as in the US, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela, even Austria, Italy, and also India, Pakistan, Bolivia, Brazil, Nicaragua, and many others, at least one of three pillars of a democratic state is listing badly.

They lack adequate representation, or strong enough protection of human rights, and the constant ascendance of the vaunted rule of law. Either one, two, or all three have been thrashed (however differently and unevenly) by corrupting agents arrogating the freedom to foist impunity on the weak.

New data from the Global State of Democracy Indices “documents a troubling trend: more than half of all countries assessed have declined in at least one key aspect of democratic performance over the past five years.”

The conservative Brookings Institute writes: “…there are more closed autocracies than liberal democracies in the world. Nearly three-fourths of the world’s population lives in an autocracy.”

SURVIVING PREJUDICE
Why this is happening now and not sometime earlier in the 20th Century — why democracy’s weakness, indeed democracy’s suspicious intimacy with corruption, did not succumb to ruin decades ago in different parts of the world — gives political scientists and historians wide berth for analysis.

One or the other specialist points to the vastly increased human migration as a possible tipping point. Still others take up a new elitism that survives from old forms of racisms, suprematicisms, and nostalgically remembered castes. Of late, the concentration of power in top executive (top of the food chain) personae appears to be driven by wishful thinking of a return to a world where some are simply thought superior to majorities.

In fact, increasing migration as contributory to democratic decay may be recognized for its core idea of white suprematism.

Surviving prejudice also manifests in other explanations. Incremental voter disenfranchisement — which is the other side of sweepstakes vote buying — at core pivots on the idea that the multitudes are not fit for self-governance. The old colonial attitude seems truly hard to kill off.

Then again, some explanations emerge from new political phenomena. Terrorism operating globally is one obvious dynamic to point to. Fear on the ascendant, many societies start to pray to strongmen.

Then again, there is the success of China, an unapologetically autocratic world, in raising hundreds of millions of its citizens from poverty to constitute a vast middle class. To many in the world, Deng Xiao Ping’s and even Xi Jin Ping’s China is worth emulating.

Anti-elitisms — such as Donald Trump’s promise to drain the swamp or French anti-Macron, populist sentiment — cluster around the willingness to let go of democratic guardrails to knock down the establishment. With this establishment are, unfortunately, the institutions of a free press, an above-board and august judiciary, and guardians of rigorous education.

Populist sentiment can be and is in fact often anti-democratic. Ironically enough. The multitudes have been known to choose political alternatives inimical to their welfare. And this historical matter-of-course is now a gargantuan phenomenon made possible by digital technology.

ALTERNATIVE REALITIES
All of the above explanatory approaches to figuring out democratic decay are fed by the one totalizing change that human beings have never before had to face. The alternative to organic intelligence — machine intelligence, even in its “infancy” — has already overdetermined the outcomes of cultural clashes.

What is true is now every bit contestable and impeachable, nearly always exposed to attack by weaponized alternative realities. What is true is usually whatever the disinformation campaigns succeeded in forcing on target demographics.

Study after study, of recent vintage and of consistent integrity, maintain that democracy is being battle-rammed big time by autocrats. Democracy’s degradation is deliberate; at the largest scale that can be bought by the dirtiest, biggest monies; sophisticated in the deployment of digital architectures; and incessant.

Yet even without the massive disinformation campaigns, digital technology by its very character will mitigate against democracy.

To the question posed by The New York Times about ChatGPT “hijacking democracy,” only a couple of weeks after this app was launched, the answer zeroed in on the changes imminent in lobbying. At the time of the Opinion piece by Nathan E. Sanders, a data scientist, and Bruce Schneier, a security technologist, in January 2023, the authors wrote: “Generative AI threatens three central pillars of democratic governance: representation, accountability, and, ultimately, the most important currency in a political system — trust.”

According to the present issue of The Journal of Democracy (October 2025), the situation is much more dire.

“The most problematic aspect of generative AI is that it hides in plain sight, producing enormous volumes of content that can flood the media landscape, the internet, and political communication with meaningless drivel at best and misinformation at worst. For government officials, this undermines efforts to understand constituent sentiment, threatening the quality of democratic representation. For voters, it threatens efforts to monitor what elected officials do and the results of their actions, eroding democratic accountability.

“A reasonable cognitive prophylactic measure in such a media environment would be to believe nothing, a nihilism that is at odds with vibrant democracy and corrosive to social trust. As objective reality recedes even further from the media discourse, those voters who do not tune out altogether will likely begin to rely even more heavily on other heuristics, such as partisanship, which will only further exacerbate polarization and stress on democratic institutions.”

All this was unexpected, except by the most prescient information technologists. The imminent reorganization of bodies of knowledge and experience — not the least of which is democracy — is changing what it is to be human.

Whether democracy will remain an order for a particular kind of humanity, is by no means certain.

*Part 1 can be read here: https://tinyurl.com/272s4w3b

Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.