The low voter turnout of less than 42 per cent in the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration district council election last weekend was a cause for concern. Voter fatigue is not conducive to developing a genuine representational governing body. The most common response to the question of why those absentees did not go to the polling booths was: "These politicians, they all turn out bad, just the same as always."
To take some comfort, in the United States - the self-proclaimed acme of liberal democracy - except in the last general election, when "Change We Can Trust" Obama fever swept across the nation, statistics have shown that half of all eligible voters never bother to exercise their civic rights on election day. And there have been reports that more people vote for the next "American Idol" than they do the next US president.
Democracy's discontents are complicated and extremely difficult to tackle. The problems of governance under the democratic system are harder to handle because they are wrapped under the cloak of the legitimacy of elections - more ironically especially if they are free and fair.
Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), an Austrian-born economist and political scientist who coined the term "creative destruction" of capitalism, contended in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that democracy was a process by which the electorates identified the common good, and then elected politicians to carry this out for them.
The fundamental problem, Schumpeter correctly pointed out, was that this is never the case. He argued that people's ignorance and superficiality allows politicians to manipulate voters and to set their own agendas and policies that are not meant to serve the welfare or interest of the people who elected them, but of the politicians themselves.
Schumpeter was not alone in voicing one nightmare of political democracy; many political scientists have also contended that the worst problem with democracy is what happens after elections. Many of those elected into the office via a free and fair electoral democratic process often turn into corrupt tyrants, dictators, plutocrats, oligarchs, and even mass executioners of dissenting elements.
With increased democratic failure and the resulting disenchantment, is democracy heading to a necropolis, then?
In his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued the opposite. He contended that the advent of Western liberal democracy is the final form of human government - the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution". That is, all roads of government, despite their setbacks and detours, will eventually lead to liberal democracy.
Even his sympathetic critics now call Fukuyama's theory "an empirical exaggeration". However, Fukuyama's theory will make more sense if we dissect the word "liberal democracy" into two distinct notions whose linkage is never unambiguous - "liberalism" as in "constitutional liberalism" and "democracy".
Liberalism and democracy are connected but they do not always necessarily and automatically go hand in hand. Democracy without liberalism is called "illiberal democracy" and it is a growth industry as the two strands of the Western political fabric - liberalism and democracy - are coming apart in the places they have been adopted around the world
Without being too pedagogic, democracy is nothing more than a process of selecting a government via, ideally, an open, free and fair election. Governments produced by elections can be inefficient, corrupt, shortsighted, irresponsible, dominated by special interests, and incapable of adopting policies demanded by the public good. Even if this sounds familiar to us in Thailand, we are not unique. Those qualities of governments may make them undesirable, but do not make them undemocratic.
Constitutional liberalism, on the other hand, is not about the procedures of selecting a government, but about the government's goals stipulated and carried out pursuant to the written spirit or traditions of the highest law of the land - the constitution.
Important tenets of liberalism are the rule of law, equality under the law, impartial courts and tribunals, separation of religion and state, the rights to life and property, the protection of civil rights and liberties, including those of minorities, checks on the power of each branch of government, and freedom of religion and speech. A constitution codifies the standards of behavior for government regimes. It is the reason why it has been said that the Western model of liberal democracy is symbolised more by the impartial judge than by mass plebiscite.
In different parts of the world and on various levels in the Western hemisphere, we are seeing a democratic identity crisis. Tension between democracy and liberalism has become more evident in the US. Fewer and fewer Americans still believe in the power of their elected politicians. The trend now is to have more faith in the power of lobbyists representing special interest groups, NGOs, think tanks, the press and private enterprises, than in the government.
The attempt by the US and the European Union to spread democracy worldwide in a cookie-cut manner further erodes the value of this form of government. The rise of the new world power - the state-capitalist China - which has seen only one permanent political party for decades and yet is now providing enormous economic prosperity and tangible well-being for its citizens - has made many developing nations think twice about which political and ideological path they should take.
However, in the final analysis, it is more often true than not that when people achieve a certain level of economic progress, they yearn for something more than a nice house, a fancy car and financial security. Authoritarianism in the early stage of economic growth may be attractive, but once the economy reaches a certain level of advancement and complexity, the hold of a strong centralised authority breaks down. The tensions regarding the scope of governmental authority begin to increase.
So, maybe it is man's destiny to be constantly in search of the right and just form of government, given its fallacies, ironies and shortcomings. But to say that the deterioration of liberal democracy is a sign of its own demise is perhaps, in the words of Mark Twain on his own death, "an exaggeration".