Change gets a bad press these days. The long-term disruptive shifts of neoliberal economics have come home to roost for politics in the advanced liberal democracies of the world. The loosening political allegiances that accompanied those changes appear to have strengthened authoritarian populists, those who captured the popular anger directed at the change associated with globalisation and immigration and who promised resistance to ‘global élites’ while feathering the beds of oligarchs.

Medium-term changes to how the public (if there is such a single entity anymore) receives its information have also assisted those for whom pluralism is not a virtue. In the short term, the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the fears and anxieties that rapid change can produce, the lasting political consequences of which will not be known for some years.

Given all of this, from the perspective of progressive politics, change seems like a pretty bad thing – hence an evident desire to contain it: regulate social media, break-up Facebook/Meta, de-globalise the economy, and source locally, for example. Such actions are laudable, but there is also a technocratic and managerial logic to them that seeks to control uncertainty. Yet Müller asks us to embrace uncertainty as one of the core principles of democracy.

Jan-Werner Mueller, political scientist and professor in Princeton, in 2018 (photograph by Oliver Berg/dpa)

The idea of change is fundamental to a democracy, especially in a two-party system. It’s why we have ‘losers’ consent’ that allows the losers in electoral contests to ‘have their say’ while the winners ‘get their way’. However, the horizons of possibility narrowed in the 1990s when catch-all parties of the post-war era (mass parties appealing to all of the people some of the time) gave way to the cartel parties of the 1990s (professional parties mobilising some of the people some of the time). These parties made a virtue of the end of ideological contestation in politics, which they claimed was now primarily about the competent management of the economy along neoliberal lines.

This technocratic logic clashed with one of the fundamental characteristics of democracy: what Müller refers to as ‘institutionalised uncertainty’. This managerial way of treating politics steadily decreased popular participation and laid the ground for the ‘double secession’ of contemporary politics: the withdrawal of the super-rich and the disenfranchised from political participation at the nation-state level. Both had deleterious effects on the second of Müller’s core democratic principles: equality.

This chronically anti-democratic logic of the double secession has shaped politics since the 1990s. It materially benefited the oligarchs and, more recently, put the wind in the sails of the authoritarians who exploited fears on the conservative side of politics. Historically, this part is not new: given the things that super-rich conservatives don’t like (communism, taxes, regulation), they have often been ready to open the door to radical-right parties and leaders in order to defend the things they think they can live with (fascism, tax havens, deregulation).

What is a newer departure from twentieth-century understandings of democracy is the disenfranchisement of the poor and marginalised sections of electorates in liberal democracies, a sort of return to the status quo ante of the nineteenth century. Oligarchs were able to exploit anger at this state of affairs by using transnational media organisations and multinational corporate structures to influence the direction of politics beyond the reach of the mainstay of democratic politics, the nation-state. This was done by shifting blame onto key characters in the populist demonology: global élites, liberals, and immigrants.

This double secession impacted the two main pillars of democracy: parties and the media. Müller’s suggestions build on those of the progressive side of politics, calling for media operating in a mode of ‘transparent partiality’: autonomous from the oligarchs behind Fox News and Facebook/Meta, and ‘assessable’ by ordinary citizens. This would move us towards ‘real’ democracy and away from the ‘fake’ democracy that we currently have.

Following on from the diagnoses of democracy’s current ills, Müller runs through some of the current ideas and practices that might restore and, in his word, ‘re-open’, democracy. This is the least original part of this book, but nonetheless it provokes thought and, hopefully, action.

One example is restoring the idea of an Athenian-style lottery to randomly select citizens to deliberate and decide on isolated issues. This would have the advantage, if the deliberation happens quickly after the selection, of negating the unequal influence of well-resourced lobby groups on decision makers, particularly institutionalised ones like political parties.

There are some potential contradictions in Müller’s attempt to ‘solve’ democracy through what amounts to technocratic process-oriented means: providing solutions closes down the uncertainty of the process that Müller values. This might have to be a necessary or unavoidable contradiction, however. Müller is right to stress that democratic practice must be open to new forms of representation.

Democracy Rules builds on Müller’s well-known work What is Populism? (2016) and that book’s conclusion that populism is bad for democracy because it is fundamentally anti-pluralist. This is where Müller also rightly makes the case for ‘militant democracy’: the idea that, because democracy is uniquely at risk of self-abolition, it is legitimate to ban parties and individuals (no names mentioned) that don’t recognise equality as fundamental. This intolerance of intolerance would make life hard for far-right parties and those radical-right populist parties that often present far-right ideas in emollient language.

We are currently living through an era that is defined by a politics of pessimism in which the existential stakes are high and both progressives and conservatives feel that they are losing the battle of ideas. There is room for optimism (though Müller prefers hope to optimism). It’s always a difficult argument to make to cheer people up, but things have been worse. The 1930s and even the 1970s stand out as periods of democratic illness or torpor and concomitant radicalisation.

Müller’s book is a salvo for the optimists. He asks us to reclaim the uncertainty inherent in representative democracy in order to forestall the frustrations that lead to disenchantment that authoritarian anti-pluralists exploit so well. If we do so and combine this with a commitment to the hard border of equality, we can reopen democracy as an assessable and autonomous realm of equitable deliberation and decision making.