Western liberal democracy now works like an elective monarchy

One of the biggest historical misconceptions about the institution of the monarchy is that it was created to ensure hereditary succession in political office. However, at least in the European world, monarchy’s initial logic was not about handing over power to a single family. It was primarily about the need to personalize authority for reasons of both effectiveness and accountability. Heredity was inherent not in the monarchy but in the body that initially appointed or elected kings – the class of warriors, nobles, or landowners who were everywhere and always obsessively preoccupied with the passing down of their privileges to their descendants. 

Until the beginning of modernity, when kings concentrated political power and tried to escape control of the nobles, monarchy was a peculiarly democratic institution, in the sense that the king was always considered accountable to an elite that at least formally, and in some cases very literally, had placed him on the throne. Even after they lost their privileges, the nobility kept alive the notion that they constituted the ‘political nation’ of a country, a micro-democracy whose membership was confined to a select few. It took centuries for this ‘political nation’ to gradually extended from the aristocratic to the bourgeois class and eventually to all citizens. 

What we experience today in Western liberal democracies however is the reverse process. The effective ‘political nation’ is shrinking, from the electorate as a whole to a set of self-selected elites, operating much like a modern aristocratic oligarchy in politics, economy, and culture. This liberal nobility demands that political leaders, formally voted in by all citizens, be accountable only to them; one of them but never above them. And like the aristocrats of older eras, its members expect that their privileges and positions will always be passed down in a real hereditary fashion. Elected kings may come and go, but the oligarchy always remains.

We can see how our political systems have morphed into a post-modern revival of the elective monarchies of the past in recent developments in the US and the EU. Within days, the two most important female politicians in the two largest Western powers won two critical political battles. Ursula von der Leyen won a vote in the European Parliament and was re-elected as President of the European Commission. Kamala Harris appears to be winning the Democratic Party's nomination for the presidential election in the USA following President Biden's decision not to run again. However, both processes raise questions and highlight extremely worrying trends about the functioning of democracy in the West.

The Harris case is the most visibly problematic. Her effective coronation by Biden and the Democratic Party establishment is evidently done under the pressure of time and Trump. Still, it bypasses any notion of internal party democracy, aided and abated by the chilling endorsement of mainstream media in the US. We may forget, but the Democratic Party actually conducted primary elections, which Biden, as the sitting president, had easily won. The timing of his resignation and the rallying around Harris means that, for the first time since the 1970s when mass primary elections became the norm for the two major parties in the US, one of them is selecting a candidate who is not already president without any internal debate or contest. Amazingly, Harris has, within five years, found herself on the verge of the presidency without winning the trust of voters once. As a candidate in the 2020 Democratic primaries, her campaign collapsed before she even stood in a single state. Nevertheless, she was chosen by Biden as his running mate and now has been named as the Democratic candidate by acclamation. 

The von der Leyen case is slightly different, as her re-election as president of the Commission took place according to EU rules. As the candidate of the largest political family after the European elections, the European People’s Party, she gained the approval of EU government leaders and then survived a narrow vote in the European Parliament. The European elites like to present this process as the democratic legitimization of the new Commission, but the reality is quite different.

First, one cannot ignore the context in which the vote took place. On the one hand, MEPs were told that, amid the war in Ukraine and uncertainty in the USA, the EU could not afford a political crisis. On the other, it was made clear in no uncertain terms to them that von der Leyen was the only alternative on the table and that if she lost, the EU would be headless. Of course, this was logically and constitutionally absurd – had von der Leyen lost, the governments would simply have to nominate a new candidate. Von der Leyen’s desperate effort until the last moment to secure the votes of MEPs reflects more the complete lack of enthusiasm towards her rather than any democratic nature of the process. 

The farce of von der Leyen's re-election had started months before the vote in Strasbourg, with her nomination as ‘lead candidate’ by the EPP. Supposedly other political families (the socialists, liberals and greens) would do the same, but they all picked comically colourless and uninspiring candidates, some of whom even unabashedly admitted that the final outcome of the process should be von der Leyen’s re-election! Von der Leyen's contempt for democracy was such that she did not even subject herself to the judgment of her own party’s voters, refusing to join the CDU list for the European elections. 

One commonality between Harris and von der Leyen then is that both reflect how democracy is understood today, especially by the political camp that presents itself as defenders against populism: as a formality that serves only to produce ex-post legitimization for pre-cooked choices imposed from the top and presented as the only alternative in the face of enemies, crises, and threats. Even worse, democracy is a necessary evil, a bump in the political calendar that must be dealt with as painlessly as possible before political systems return to the normality of daily management until the next crisis (which they usually produce themselves).

More than this however, Harris and von der Leyen’s anointment is a testament to the power of the liberal nobility, the real ‘political nation’ that determines political outcomes. In the United States the speed with which the Biden administration unwound after the infamous debate with Trump was astonishing. Within a matter of days the entire Democratic Party apparatus withdrew its support from a president who had already won a popular primary to be the candidate. Next to them, Biden lost the trust of multiple ‘donors’, whose views and wishes were transmitted constantly to the media but always remained anonymous. And of course, we all knew Biden’s days were numbered when none other than George Clooney called on him to step down.

In Europe, von der Leyen did not enjoy the loud support of a unified elite class. Rather, in a union still fragmented along national lines, the actor with real sovereign powers over von der Leyen, the effective ‘political nation’ of the EU, are the leaders of the 27 national governments that make up the EU. It is they who ultimately confirmed her in the post of president of the Commission for another five years, making only token reference to the result of the European election. The European paradox is that these national leaders control the leader of the supranational bureaucracy which at the same time oversees, sanctions and constrains what national governments can do, allowing them to escape the scrutiny and frustrate the demands of their voters. Thus, European voters do not elect in any meaningful way the president of the European Commission, while national elections are almost meaningless when most big decisions are made in Brussels.

Μuch like in the Europe’s ancient and medieval past, in our post-modern elective monarchies today true power lies with an oligarchic aristocratic class – a liberal nobility in politics, economy, culture and media – placing in office hapless and weak elected leaders. The mission of these leaders is merely to give a face to the political system, create the illusion of accountability and work hard to safeguard the privileges of their patrons. Because these leaders nominally have to enjoy the support of the broader citizenry, they win electoral contests through a combination of fear and blackmail, evoking external threats, internal enemies and a constant sense of crisis. In this sense, what appears as the system’s bug – populism – is ultimately its failsafe switch, providing the perfect foe for the new nobility to perpetuate its dominance.