Democracy is regarded by many as the best form of government, but, as the saying goes, democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right most of the time. Democracy was introduced as an antidote to monarchy, some of whom were cruel and vengeful such as Richard III, Macbeth, and King Lear. These three were immortalised by Shakespeare.
Shakespeare on Tyranny
In Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, renowned scholar Stephen Greenblatt analyses how Shakespeare explored the psychology of absolute power and the mechanics of tyranny. He sheds light on how demagogues exploit social divisions, weaponise lies, and manipulate their way to the throne. Tyrants are often deeply insecure, narcissistic, and infantile people. Their rise is typically fuelled by a populist appeal to the grievances of the forgotten or disenfranchised. Greenblatt highlights that tyrants rarely rise or rule alone. Their power is heavily reliant on opportunistic advisors, cynical sycophants, and a fearful public that chooses to accept obvious lies to maintain the status quo. Shakespeare's plays suggest that democratic and civic institutions are dangerously fragile. When political classes fall into disarray, society can easily fall prey to a ruthless usurper.
Modern Democracies and Tyranny
Two Harvard professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, explain how democracies can breed tyrants in their book, How Democracies Die. They argue that modern democracies are dismantled gradually by elected leaders rather than through coups d'etat, even though that is how democracy dies in a few countries, with Pakistan being a prominent case study. As the Brookings scholar Stephen Cohen once put it, the army is the largest political party. It not only dismantles a democratic government through a coup. It contaminates the political culture so deeply that even when democracy is restored, it remains under the control of the military resulting in what is euphemistically called a hybrid regime.
Lessons from History
This point was vividly brought out in some really enlightening conversations I had with Ayesha Jalal, author of The State of Martial Rule, Pervez Hoodbhoy, author of Pakistan: Origins, Identity, and Future, and Shuja Nawaz, author of Crossed Swords. It is also brought out by Aqil Shah, in The Army and Democracy, and Ishtiaq Ahmed, in The Garrison State. Three of the four army chiefs who seized power in a coup, Ayub, Zia and Musharraf, created a myth of indispensability by saying that they had saved the country from certain destruction. A third, Yahya, overthrew his boss, Field Marshal Ayub, promising to hold free and fair general elections, and ended up presiding over the breakup of the country.
The Fragility of Democratic Institutions
For democracy to work, many ingredients must fall into place. The people who get elected must be honest and competent. They cannot win by making false promises to the electorate. They must abide by the laws of the country. They must respect and safeguard the social and political institutions of the country, be able to tolerate criticism, and allow freedom of speech to prevail. They cannot label anyone who criticises them as being unpatriotic or, worse, committing treason. They cannot create special police forces to arrest their opponents. Nor can they impose on freedom of thought at universities.
The sad reality is that individuals with oversized egos can get elected by making false promises. All they need is the gift of language to attract crowds at their rallies, billionaires to fund their election campaigns, and social media such as podcasts and posts on the Internet to attract millions to vote for them. That's when democracies turn into dictatorship. Once in power, such dictators can be hard to depose.
The Case of Adolf Hitler
The worst example is Adolf Hitler. It is often forgotten that he was elected to the high office of Chancellor on 30 January 1933. He did not seize power in a coup, as happened in many other countries. Instead, he was appointed by German President Paul von Hindenburg following a series of backroom political negotiations with conservative elites who believed they could control Hitler and his movement. This appointment marked the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship. How did this come about? The Nazi Party capitalised on severe economic instability and widespread anger over the Treaty of Versailles. In the July 1932 elections, the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag, though they lacked an absolute majority. Fearing political deadlock and civil unrest, President Hindenburg, influenced by his son, conservative politicians like Franz von Papen, and prominent industrialists, reluctantly named Hitler chancellor.
Then came the grand finale. Once appointed, Hitler began to dismantle Germany's democratic institutions, one by one. Following the Reichstag fire in February 1933, he convinced Hindenburg to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended civil liberties. Shortly afterwards, the Enabling Act was passed, granting Hitler near-absolute dictatorial powers. From that point on, Hitler's position as the absolute ruler was confirmed. The Gestapo was created and given the task of eliminating all his political opponents. Soon enough, he declared himself as the Fuhrer of the Third Reich and stated that it would not remain confined to Germany but extend far beyond its borders. That expansionist strategy triggered what would soon be known as the Second World War. It ended in 1945, with Hitler committing suicide, knowing that the Red Army of the Soviet Union had entered Berlin.
In 2013, I stood at a parking lot in Berlin which had been built over the bunker where he had committed suicide and pondered his beginning and his end. He exemplified the aphorism attributed to Lord Acton: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Contemporary Lessons from Political Tribalism
The world did not learn its lessons from the rise and fall of Hitler. Democracies collapsed whenever authoritarian demagogues seized the reins of power, all in the name of patriotism, confirming yet again an aphorism that has reverberated throughout history: Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. This is brought out in Amy Chua's book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. She is a professor at Yale University. In her book, she argues that in today's world, more than one nation is afflicted with the attributes of tribalism, which did not end once education arrived. She contends that humans, despite being educated and financially secure, continue to fall into primal group identities, and ignore broad, ideological narratives.
Chua argues that the so-called great powers, the bastions of western democracy, continue to make blunders in their domestic and foreign policies. For example, suffering from a complex of exceptionalism and a failure to grasp local tribal dynamics have led to repeated, costly foreign policy failures. In Vietnam, US policymakers completely misread the war through a Cold War lens of Communism vs. Capitalism, failing to realise that many locals were driven by intense ethnic and group loyalties. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US assumed that introducing democratic elections would naturally unite these countries under an American-style melting pot. Instead, the US triggered deeply ingrained, zero-sum tribal and sectarian conflicts in Iraq. America's unbridled pursuit of free-market capitalism often exacerbates tensions abroad when an ethnic minority, which she terms a market-dominant minority, controls the economy, fueling intense resentment from the majority population.
At home, the US is fracturing into hostile, competing political tribes. Historically, America functioned as an exceptionally successful super-group that united diverse populations under a shared national identity. That unity is now unraveling. Chua warns that both sides of the American political spectrum have succumbed to toxic tribalism. The political Right has increasingly embraced ethnonationalism and white identity politics, while the political Left has fractured into rigid groups based on race, gender, and intersectional grievances. Because no single group in America currently feels securely in charge, every demographic feels attacked and pitted against one another for resources and cultural dominance. As a result, democracy degenerates into a zero-sum, in-group vs. out-group war. Chua concludes that to survive its current polarisation, the United States must stop pretending that group identities do not exist. Instead, Americans must rebuild a positive, inclusive super-group identity, one that transcends diverse cultural backgrounds and that creates a shared sense of national purpose and belonging.
How Democracies Die: The Erosion of Guardrails
In How Democracies Die, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt focus on how elected leaders turn into authoritarian tyrants. They do so by eliminating the two vital guardrails of democracy: mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. They outline three main concepts that lead to the decline of democratic systems. First, elected leaders subvert democratic institutions from within, using the very legal and constitutional frameworks they were elected to uphold. Leaders incrementally erode independent judiciaries, bully the media, and rewrite election laws, maintaining a deceptive veneer of democracy while stripping it of its substance. How does that come about? One, the authoritarian democrats attempt to subvert or ignore the constitution and legitimate electoral processes. Second, they treat rival parties as existential threats, criminals, or fundamentally un-American. They lambast them day and night, in their speeches and on social media. Third, they refuse to condemn political violence and keep on praising authoritarian figures. Fourth, they curtail civil liberties by threatening or taking legal action against the free press and political critics.
Second, authoritarian leaders disregard the constitution and legal checks on their power. A functioning democracy relies heavily on two unwritten norms: political rivals should view each other as legitimate actors who have an equal right to govern, and politicians agree not to weaponise their legal or institutional power to the absolute limit, even if doing so is technically legal. Third, they view the opposition as an inveterate enemy. They do not tolerate the limits on their power which the constitution imposes on them. If judges seek to curtail their powers, they lambast the judges. All the guard rails that are enshrined in the law are weakened and eventually removed through legislation.
Conclusion: The Perpetual Struggle for Democracy
What does history teach us? It doesn't take much for democracies to die. Several ingredients must fall into place for democracy to remain a real democracy, not just a nominal democracy. The sad reality is that individuals with oversized egos get elected only too often by making false promises. Their populist demagoguery draws massive crowds to their rallies, they arm twist billionaires to fund their election campaigns and exploit social media to entice millions to vote for them. That's when the death knell sounds and democracies mutate into dictatorships, the complete antithesis of democracy, whose attributes were immortalised by Abraham Lincoln in the timeless Gettysburg Address. Lincoln defined democracy as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Sadly, even in the US, where he brought the civil war to an end, the divisions that precipitated the war still linger on.
