The blast that levelled Beirut’s port on August 4 was not caused, as conspiracy theories have alleged, by a terrorist attack, nor a nuclear device, nor a missile. It was due to the detonation of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate which the port authorities had seized from a Russian ship six years earlier. The underlying cause of the disaster – which claimed 150 lives, wounded 5,000 and will cost billions in damages – was kleptocratic negligence, the outcome of governance “hollowed out by factionalism, sectarianism, corruption and lack of democratic accountability” in the words of the Guardian columnist Simon Tisdall. Even the wholesale resignation of the Lebanese government will not fix these problems since the new government will have to rely on many of the corrupt figures who have just stepped down.
Lebanon’s crisis – it was already in the middle of a serious economic downturn – is sadly characteristic of the Middle East. Throughout the region, foreign governments have used proxy conflicts to advance their interests. This has crippled Yemen, unsettled Iraq and left several other Arab countries perilously close to political ‘failure’. To some extent this is due to America’s lack of leadership, which has created a power vacuum; but it is mainly a product of the ‘Arab winter’ in which entrenched political elites have reasserted control of their fiefdoms and engaged in foreign adventurism which has stifled any chance of democratic reform. Aspirations of a progressive Middle East have dwindled to new lows. The recent celebration of Israel’s non-annexation of Palestinian is reflective of these deflated expectations. As one former Israeli ambassador told Thomas Friedman, Netanyahu “basically generated an asset out of nothing, [something] which Israel could then trade for peace with the UAE. It was peace for peace, not land for peace.”
The political dysfunctions evident in Beirut have become more noticeable in other countries, particularly during the pandemic. The needless loss of life in Brazil, India and Mexico have exposed the fragility of democratic governance and it strongly suggests that the virus’s impact in Russia and Turkey is far worse than official figures would suggest. Even within mature democracies, institutions have failed to prevent deep lapses in governance. Fumbling responses in Britain and the United States have revealed amateurism, cynicism and bureaucratic ineptitude at levels that would have been barely conceivable at the start of the year.
Two days ago, on Twitter, Jelani Cobb, a journalism professor at Columbia University, wrote: “As a young person I imagined that powerful, wealthy, elite institutions (and the people who run them) could do whatever they wanted with impunity. But Trumpism has highlighted something I noted years ago: the amount of deference and cowardice in these places is staggering.” Shortly after Cobb wrote those words, President Trump admitted that he was opposed to funding that would enable the United States Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots for the election. Remarkably, this statement failed to produce general outrage. Nor have many similarly anti-democratic gestures by the current administration. US politics seems to have reached a point at which both major parties discount or dismiss important facts, arguments and actions, irrespective of their merits, out of pure partisanship.
Democracies decay faster than we like to admit, often because political differences weaken the social fabric. The historian Anne Applebaum opens “Twilight of Democracy”, her chilling account of Europe’s creeping authoritarianism, by recalling a jovial New Year’s party that she and her husband held in Poland on the eve of the millennium. Within a decade, the optimism of that evening, its sense of democratic momentum, had vanished. Today, Applebaum writes, “I would … cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year’s Eve party. They, in turn, would not only refuse to enter my house, they would be embarrassed to admit they had ever been there”
Poland’s decline became noticeable in the rise of the Law and Justice party which “slowly came to embrace a different set of ideas, not just xenophobic and paranoid but openly authoritarian.” When it took power with a slim majority, in 2015, the new government “violated the constitution by improperly appointing new judges to the constitutional court … [and attempting] to pack the Polish Supreme Court … [and it] took over the state public broadcaster … firing popular presenters and experienced reporters. Their replacements, recruited from the far-right extremes of the online media, began running straightforward ruling-party propaganda, sprinkled with easily disprovable lies, at taxpayers’ expense.” Worst of all: “There was very little pretense about any of this. The point of all of these changes was not to make government run better. The point was to make the government more partisan, the courts more pliable, more beholden to the party.”
Corruption, racism, authoritarianism and propaganda can all resurface in democracies, often at terrifying speed. As Cobb observes, their return only requires “deference and cowardice” in people and institutions that ought to know better. The prolonged absence of principled resistance to the subversion of democratic norms – as Applebaum has shown in a recent Atlantic essay on the Republican party’s craven submission to Trump – shrinks the political distance between Beirut and Warsaw, or Moscow and Washington, and it leaves democracies unsure of themselves and dangerously receptive to the appeal of authoritarian leaders.