ALFP e-magazine issue 1: Democracy
Free Media and Democracy in the Age of Elected Demagogues Kunda Dixit (Nepal) Editor and Publisher, Nepali Times / ALFP 2006 Fellow
A lot of us are worried today about the challenges media and democracy face in South Asia and around the world. Truths that we thought were self-evident are being challenged. New technologies are making the press irrelevant. The media business model has collapsed. The erosion of press freedom is eroding democracy. In South Asia in the last five years, we have seen the rise of the alt-right. In the world’s largest democracy with its long tradition of freedom of expression, trolls and vigilantes are on the loose – silencing journalists with threats and even death. The Philippines elevated a self-confessed death squad gang leader to the office of president. Turkey’s elected president has unleashed a draconian crackdown on dissidents. After Brexit there has been a rise of the wrong right across Europe. Just when we thought America’s president couldn’t tweet anything more shocking anymore, he surprises us every morning. Western democracies come with a design defect: they permit the unrestricted freedom to express the most extreme and despicable views. Populist politicians use this to stoke xenophobic fears about migration, crime, and terrorism. The mass media can be manipulated to whip up voters at election time. Democracy has been used to elect demagogues. Despots have learnt to exploit the disarray within the traditional democratic political establishment, and their lack of accountability and chronic failure to deliver development and services. And once they are elected to power, they proceed to dismantle the very institutions of democracy that got them there. Germany saw all this happen in the 1930s. In a recent op-ed Jochen Bittner of the German newspaper Die Zeit called the present worldwide anti-democratic wave “Orderism”—it is based on fear of disorder and chaos. It offers stability over freedom. He compared Orderism to the promises of utopia under Communism, and said “it is merely a fig leaf for tyranny.” The enemy of Orderism is liberal democracy, and in this Putin, Trump, Duterte, Erdogan and others have a mutual admiration society. In South Asia, there has been a yearning for strongman rule that stems from an unaccountable elite that has rigged the system to get elected over and over again. Dynastic politicians and reckless rulers have contributed to political instability and democratic decay, and South Asians envy the order they see in East Asia.
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