There is a particular kind of political deception most dangerous precisely because it does not look like deception at all.
Elections have continued to take place and political parties still compete for power, yet in many countries, the very institutions of liberal democracy that were designed to restrain political authority are being absorbed by the very forces they were meant to constrain and gradually becoming extensions of the parties themselves.
But what is emerging from this deviation does not exactly fit the classical, 20th century model of fascism.
Political Scientist Steven Levitsky coined the term ‘Competitive Authoritarianism’ where elections persist in a hybrid regime but those in power bend the rules to stay there. Which, in this case, comes close to describing the democratic backsliding.
But what if it’s neither? Across the globe, what is actually emerging in many nations within their political climate might be better understood as political oligarchy, hiding behind the facade of democracy.
Within political oligarchy, power concentrates so densely at the top that its effects on ordinary citizens become functionally indistinguishable from authoritarian control, regardless of what the constitution says.
This is the quiet coronation of dystopia. And we are attending the ceremony without quite knowing it.
To understand how this transformation sustains itself, one must understand the raw material it runs on: morality.
Political oligarchs do not hold power through just sheer force alone. Instead of using coercion, they use the more cunning mechanism of power: manipulation.
They sustain this particular mechanism through the systematic exploitation of moral language. Morality, tradition, religion, and culture – the deepest organising principles of social life – are weaponised as instruments of political segregation.
Citizens are sorted into the virtuous and the deviant, the patriotic and the treacherous, not based upon any genuine ethical grounds, but according to whatever grounds best serves the consolidation of elite power.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of slave morality finds its most disturbing modern application here.
Nietzsche’s slave morality refers to a system of values created by the weak to cope with the oppression done by master morality.
On the contrary, master morality is a system of values forged by the strong, that measures actions by their ability to produce power.
Today’s political oligarchs denounce the moral economy as redundant and declare the political economy as more relevant.
But the hypocrisy in this claim is evident when politicians gain enormous utility from the very populations they claim to serve through, again, morality, tradition, religion, and culture while the general population is quietly betrayed.
The trade-off is, by design, inequitable. And yet it is legitimised at every turn by the same moral language it exploits. The crime is dressed in the victim’s own language.
Nietzsche’s other defining provocation – the Death of God – has been quietly operationalised by the modern political class.
Here Nietzsche’s idea is not to be perceived as literal.
When politicians propose policies or promise to fulfill miscellaneous demands of citizens in their political campaigns, they invoke hope inside of the people that they are meant to serve, no matter how ridiculous or unrealistic those policies or demands may sound at times.
Individuals find comfort in that hope as they adhere to the belief that their democratically elected leader has the power to positively affect their future.
But at the back end of it, this psychology demoralizes the citizens into thinking that politicians are the only ones who have the power to bring about any tangible change and the citizens, as individuals, are powerless.
This reinforces the idea of slave morality here.
This is where politicians evolve from operating behind the veil of master morality into truly becoming Übermensch – self-legislating sovereigns who create the values by which they are then judged.
The deeper danger lies in what happens to institutions under these conditions. Polyarchy becomes plagued with weak governance and weak political institutions that end up serving politicians instead of citizens.
By incorporating bureaucracy, judiciary system and military in violent and corrupt means, political parties BECOME the political institutions thus losing their accountability and legitimacy.
As a result of that, politicians truly turned into omnipotent entities which led to the extinction of the question: “To be or not to be?” and emerged with a statement that said, “We have to be”.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave describes a captivity that requires no visible shackles.
Modern day politicians indulge in reenacting similar theatrics of The Allegory of Cave where they cast shadows through weak governance, latent coercion and manipulation on the citizens who are the prisoners in a nation akin to the cave.
Citizens mistake these projections for reality and end up forming their political beliefs based upon these shadows that were deliberately created to keep them in the dark.
The role of apathy is what makes this modern version of allegory extremely dangerous. People in large numbers are increasingly growing indifferent towards engaging in democratic processes worldwide.
The reason behind this political disengagement is that large portions of the citizens are content with looking at these projections as long as their individual liberty is not directly threatened.
As a result, individual liberty ends up being an oxymoron in this context. Because even though citizens retain formal rights, they end up losing the institutional checks and balances that would allow those rights to be meaningful choices.
Here, elections determine which faction governs, but cannot challenge the underlying arrangements that make governance unaccountable.
Democratic systems continue to function formally while drifting toward oligarchic control.
When contemporary politics is stripped from any moral rhetoric and failure of political institutions, it reveals itself as a game. A game that is played between political factions, where the general population serves as pawns.
The rule of law is bent and molded in this game, instead of being overthrown, to serve those with the leverage to shape it.
Whereas, for the citizens living in a condition akin to Allegory of The Cave, prison break is frowned upon.
Individuals believe what they think the norm is to believe and the norm is set by the political oligarchs. People fear what they do not understand and politicians abhor people who start to understand.
This resembles somewhat to the 3 realms of Dante’s Divine Comedy; the game itself is Inferno (Hell), politicians purge through the sacrifice of the general population in the purgatory for them to reach THEIR envisioned Paradise (Heaven).
Ultimately, the thin line starts to wither away between the ones who cast the shadow and the ones who are held captive in the cave due to the usage of moral rhetoric, institutional capture and latent coercion by politicians.
If democratic societies fail to diagnose this quiet transformation, they will find themselves in a political order in which only a handful of warmongers, businessmen, banks and politicians thrive without contest while the vast majority will bear the costs in their livelihoods, rights, and the futures of their children.
The writer is a student of the Department of Development Studies at Dhaka University.
