But what if we want a king?

Not Abraham Lincoln. (‘The Coronation of Napoleon’, Jacques-Louis David)

On a winter afternoon in 1863, in two very famous minutes, Abraham Lincoln expressed the hope that government of the people, by the people, for the people, would endure.

These days, though, the people don’t seem sure that they agree.

To be fair, democracy has peered gloomily at itself since the first Athenian lost the first election and held the first press conference to denounce the fake lamestream wax-tablet media. Every new generation that arrives in a democracy will invariably discover new ways in which it is failing them, and the criticisms now fill volumes.

For radicals like Malcolm X, modern democracy is ‘nothing but disguised hypocrisy’. Even moderates and centrists, who haven’t experienced the violence and alienation meted out by democracies, and who believe that a democratic system is preferable to all others, will admit that it is fundamentally flawed, not least by its reliance on human nature.

As Jon Stewart put it:

‘You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn't that long ago we were swept away by the Macarena.’

It's also a very short goosestep from Stewart’s gentle needling to another popular criticism of democracy whereby elitists push a kind of political eugenics; a gripe that pretends to be a legitimate critique of democracy but is in fact simply an expression of alarm at having to put one’s fate in the hands of people who aren’t members of your club.

We’ve all seen, for example, the famous quote attributed to Winston Churchill, claiming that ‘the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter’.

Of course, Churchill never said that, not because he wasn’t an elitist but because, I suspect, he probably never had a five-minute conversation with the average voter in his life.

Still, the popularity of that quote, grafted onto the brand of a famous orator to give it a veneer of political and historical authority, reminds us that for some people the real problem is not, as Malcolm X claimed, that democracy is a sham designed to keep the powerful untouchable, but rather that democracy is democracy.

Despite all these various objections, however, most people who cohabit with democracy seem to have maintained a cordial relationship with it, apparently content to agree with that other Churchill quote, the real one, that argues that ‘democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’.

But that cordial relationship seems to be is ending: in dozens of democracies, grudging acceptance is becoming distrust or even contempt.

One explanation we read fairly often is that democracies are failing to deliver, whether on their lofty promises or their basic responsibilities, making voters cynical about democracy itself, but there is evidence to suggest that the real shift is being driven not only by the flaws of democracy but also by the ambition and lack of scruples of those who seek to overturn it for personal profit.

Certainly, one only needs to open a British tabloid or watch some of Rupert Murdoch’s organ grinders’ monkeys at work to see the playbook being used by oligarchs and the populists they put forward as their puppets; a blitzkrieg of scapegoating designed to pin all the excesses of late capitalism on liberal democracy.

Are you having to work two jobs or delaying having a baby until you can afford it? That’s not because the owners of capitalism dictate policy and legislation or because billionaires don’t pay taxes. It’s because liberal democrats love globalization and gave your job to Communists in China!

Can’t afford a house? That’s not because capitalism has turned homes into speculative financial instruments. It’s because liberal democrats hate you and want to replace you so they’re flooding your country with immigrants!

Thanks to this sort of thing we are often told that democracy is under attack, as if gaslighting villains and autocratic wreckers are invading a house full of democrats who would be entirely content with democracy if they were just left alone and not subjected to so much Fox News.

But as I’ve watched the followers of modern populism open to it like a flower to the sun, delighting in its promises to roll back the gains of democracy and to restore power structures from the old world, I’ve begun to wonder if it’s time for liberals to ask whether even an idealised form of democracy is as popular as they would have us believe, or whether, in fact, a great many humans harbour in their hearts a deep desire to be ruled as subjects rather than live as citizens.

I can understand that instinct. It certainly doesn’t help that democracy can be deeply unsatisfying: as an endlessly renegotiated compromise it must, almost by definition, leave everyone feeling that they’ve had to give up something they care about in return for an outcome they’re not particularly excited about.

Perhaps this is why even many of us who claim to support democracy can only bring ourselves to do the bare minimum, getting excited about elections every few years while ignoring public consultation processes or leaving manifestos unread and petitions unwritten.

Being ruled by a higher power, on the other hand, can not only feel supremely comforting but is also a condition we are born into and that therefore feels entirely natural: our very first experiences in life are being fed and held by the all-powerful goddess who birthed us and who decides when and what we will eat, what we will see, where we will go, even which way we’ll lie when we sleep.

The childhood that follows is, likewise, a state of being ruled by power structures over which we have virtually no control and in which our increasingly bold tests of the limits of obedience seldom risk genuinely bad consequences like banishment or death. If, as teenagers, we rage at how unfair our parents are being, the uprising is short-lived: the need to eat supper and have a clean underpants is a notorious counterrevolutionary tendency.

Even when we reach adulthood and take pleasure and pride in thinking of ourselves as independent people, many of us maintain an intimate and loving relationship with absolute, unchallengeable power in the form of religion. American evangelism and its symbiotic relationship with Trumpism is an easy example, but even those followers of other denominations and faiths, who perhaps have a less performative and more humane relationship with their god, spend many hours every week reinforcing a powerful connection in themselves between the experience of serving a mighty, unquestionable ruler and feelings of profound meaning, belonging and existential pleasure.

I could be wrong about us having autocracy baked into us, of course. The growing antipathy towards liberal democracy could just be the inevitable result of hard economic times exploited by clever propagandists.

I also think it’s possible that it might be a variation of the phenomenon that’s inspired the current surge in resistance to vaccines: just as rich societies have lost contact with the diseases that made vaccines so vital in the first place, perhaps many middle class people in the west have entirely lost touch with what real oppression feels like and therefore have no visceral understanding of what democracy is protecting them from.

Still, once you allow yourself to consider that this might be less a bitter rejection of democracy than a joyful and self-motivated embrace of the world’s oldest and most enduring form of government, some things start making more sense, such as the popularity of someone like Andrew Tate, offering boys a world in which they can be ruled (by Tate and his lack of therapy) but also rule others (women).

I think it also explains a great deal about the right’s ‘war on woke’.

Of course, the astonishingly successful demonization of ‘woke’ by conservatives over the last ten years is a topic all on its own, a twisted story in which Black Americans’ reminder to each other to ‘stay woke’ to the warning signs of racist violence or white supremacist machinations has in effect been cancelled by white people.

But what is relevant here is that at its heart, the call to ‘stay woke’ – to stay alert – offers not only a warning about violence and oppression but also an interrogation of the power that metes out those evils: simply by expressing vigilance it proclaims how little it trusts and respects the ruling cabal, and in so doing questions the legitimacy of that cabal’s power.

To people who have convinced themselves, despite all evidence to the contrary, that a world run by gods, priests and kings is more agreeable than one run by parliaments, those sorts of questions are intensely unsettling. Anyone who asks such things must denounced as a barbarian at the gate, or, if you live in the 21^st century and need to appeal to science to make your emotional reaction sound like a rational claim, they should be diagnosed as having been afflicted with and driven mad by ‘the woke mind virus’.

In this case, appeals to the objectivity and rationality of science are vital because those who yearn to be ruled can’t publicly admit it, at least not yet, having spent the last few years insisting that they are the last defenders of Enlightenment Thought™: even in a world rapidly becoming inured to the most outrageous hypocrisy it wouldn’t be a great look to go straight from loudly celebrating the hard-won rights of the individual to kissing the slipper of god-kings.

And so the aspiring supplicants will continue to shout ‘Freedom!’ like William Wallace to hide the fact that they are not yet quite brave enough to be honest about what freedom means to them: the freedom of the in-group to deny the humanity of the out-group; the freedom to speak without suffering any consequences when they call for the freedom of others to be curtailed; freedom from having to accept facts or legal judgements or listen when a woman says no.

They’ll continue to shout ‘Freedom!’ because this kind of freedom – the freedom to bend the knee, to close the eyes, and to surrender to the will of the king, knowing that he will hurt the people you want him to hurt – feels good.

So what happens to democracy when enough people decide that being ruled by royal whim feels better than having a tiny share in a clumsy consultative process that rarely listens to them?

What happens when democracy is asked to concede defeat in a free and fair election in which a majority has voted for it to be dismantled?

I suspect we’ll find out sooner than we’d like.

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