David Runciman is a professor of politics at Cambridge (as of 2023), who teaches and writes about history and politics. He began to review and write for the London Review of Books in 1996, and was one of the hosts of the Talking Politics from 2016 to 2022. In his academic writing, and in his public intellectual writing, he discusses the history of ideas, theories of politics, and the effects of technology on politics. How Democracy Ends discusses modern ideas about democracy, and the social and technological conditions for elective, representative democracy as a system of government. His approach to writing about political theory and history is to discuss theories about the world and to discuss event that others have reported and written about.
In How Democracy Ends he explores the association between prosperity, modernity, techology and the idea of government by elected representatives. He refers to recent books including How Democracies Die (2018) by Levitsky and Ziblatt. Runciman engages with ideas accepted but not well understood in America and other capitalist societies, and with Marxist and other contending ideas. ( )

The short book version of a talk, that comes from a podcast, that I couldn't wait to read. ****, I'm a parody.

Not with a bang but with a whimper. Somewhat impressive to predict that the American coup wouldn’t be military, but rather would be from the civilian side. Runciman argues that democracy can rot even when there are regular elections, independent courts, and a free press, though I think he understates just how nondemocratic the US is in electoral terms—not just the Electoral College, but felony disenfranchisement combined with racist distribution of who gets convicted of felonies, gerrymandering, voter ID, closing polling places and purging voters who move often (and are thus more likely to be poor), the fact that North Dakota gets the same number of senators as California, etc. “The battles to expand the franchise have been largely fought and won” seems to me vastly too optimistic. I have to believe that elections conducted under different circumstances would be a lot freer and fairer.

Also, at this point, I can’t agree that violence merely “stalks the fringes of our politics and the recesses of our imaginations, without ever arriving centre stage” when the POTUS praises a representative for assaulting a journalist. Even if most of the violence that Trump talks about is imaginary, it’s not in the recesses but in the contolling obsessions of our minds, and it has real effects. I think his position on this is not unrelated to his presentation of the Trump vote as being about education—“Whether or not someone went to college is a more significant determination of how they are likely to vote than age, class or gender.” Notice any salient characteristic missing? Runciman doesn’t seem to want to get too caught up in race, because American racism is so distinctive and he also wants to talk about Brexit and Macron, but I think that’s a mistake. He’s more persuasive with a slightly different take late in the book: there’s still plenty of violence, but it’s tailored to particular groups and not noticed by most not directly subjected to it, a situation that suits those inflicting the violence just fine. “At the same time, the shadow of some unspeakably violent cataclysm hangs ove the entire country…. One false move and we could all be dead. Trump embodies this phenomenon. He deals in two kinds of political violence: the low-level, attritional variety that manifests in personal abuse; and the threat of nuclear Armageddon.”

Runciman also argues that the catastrophes we now face, like climate change, have paralyzed rather than mobilized us (contrast WWII), partially because of the dangerous affordances of new information technology. Runciman is trying to diagnose multiple societies, though, and he points out that Greece might be a more standard example—still much richer than it was when it was under military rule, and also much more elderly, both of which make violence/government collapse less likely. “One reason its high youth unemployment has not proved more destabilising is that there simply aren’t that many young people in Greece any more.” A military coup is unlikely, but what has arguably occurred is a different, secretive coup—control by the international financiers who benefit from keeping Greece immiserated. Those kinds of coups don’t want or depend on troops in the streets; they benefit from being hidden—things just don’t work the way they used to, and it’s not clear why or who if anyone could change the situation, and people who say democracy isn’t working are accused of hysteria and of being just another special interest group, or told to calm down by anonymous plotters in the NYT editorial pages.

When Runciman discusses the alternatives to democracy, he doesn’t find any that are more appealing. I liked his analysis about the way in which authoritarian regimes try to offer personal (economic) benefits plus collective (ethnonationalist or nationalist) dignity, as opposed to democracy’s personal dignity through equal citizenship and collective benefits in overall economic growth. I did not follow him when he argued that mature democracies with stagnant wages hadn’t really turned against democracy because voters haven’t endorsed “anyone threatening to take away their democratic rights,” they’re only excited by the prospect of taking away the rights of “people who don’t belong.” Pretty sure that’s what many democratic destructions look like. Ultimately, though, I agree that while democracy may not be the least worst form of politics, it’s the best of the possibilities when the government is at its worst. “More fires get started in a democracy, Tocqueville said, but more fires get put out, too.” ( )