How democratic backsliding begins

And how easy it would be to pull back from it

• Can leaders refrain from polarising rhetoric?

• And below, a straw poll on election-day enrolments.

Democracy is in retreat globally. According to Freedom House, “the percentage of people worldwide living in Free countries has been in decline for much of the last two decades”. There’s a corresponding rise in authoritarian leadership and oppressive government.

In case you’ve been following the conspiracy theorists and want a reality-check, however, Freedom House ranks New Zealand as one of the most free countries on earth. Their recent NZ report was done pre-election 2023. It expressed concern about racism and discrimination, so there’s still more work to do.

One of the early symptoms of democratic backsliding is political polarisation. The United States has a bad case of it. Of course there are strong and passionately argued differences in a democratic society, but polarisation becomes a problem when opposing camps refuse to recognise one another as legitimate. For example, people deny the legitimacy of a lawfully elected leader or they won’t negotiate with opponents for fear of being ostracised by their own allies. A symptom of polarisation is people accusing opponents of being criminal, insane, unfit for office or beyond the pale of civilised society, and hence trying to rule them out as legitimate players in the political contest.

And that’s starting in Aotearoa New Zealand. Let me give a couple of examples.

In talking about the gas shortage recently, Mike Hosking on NewstalkZB blamed the Ardern government. He went further, though, to say about her time in office: “We have rarely lived through such chaotic, bordering on criminal, negligence.” And he bemoaned the fact that many of Ardern’s “fellow travellers … are still in Parliament”. Their resounding electoral defeat hasn’t satisfied Hosking’s appetite for revenge, so he questioned Labour’s legitimacy.

From the other side of the aisle, a recent tweet from Prof Joanna Kidman accused the Luxon government of hating children and asked, “Is this a government or a death-cult?” Her university was “in discussions” with her about that one.

In a democratic society we enjoy freedom of speech. I was recently reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, and, on his release from prison, he observes: with freedom comes responsibility.

Liberty is not a licence to do or say whatever we want. For instance, it may mean refraining from attacking opponents when we have an advantage over them. Mandela set a great example.

Although NZ’s situation is different, the principle that freedom entails responsible self-restraint still applies. Accordingly, the two statements above (from Hosking and Kidman) are not responsible uses of freedom of speech (nor freedom of the press nor academic freedom). They’ve each denied the legitimacy of freely elected parties that lawfully formed governments: the Ardern government in Hosking’s case and the Luxon government in Kidman’s case.

Now, I’m not the thought police, so it’s no problem if you mutter such things under your breath. But it’s different when people with authority and prominence in society say them on a loud-hailer.

Kidman and Hosking had some reasonable points to make. Kidman was critical of boot camps for young offenders. Hosking was critical of gas production. They had valid concerns, but, in stating them, they went much further: they tried to deny the legitimacy of elected decision-makers, using language that even implied criminality.

Such things are said on X and elsewhere daily, of course. The Ardern government was, according to some people, a fascist dictatorship. It’s a worry, though, that a university professor and a prominent broadcaster can stoop to polarising rhetoric in public. And these aren’t isolated incidents. The present government has been accused of genocide, no less, by some members of parliament. A dean of law expressed the hope that a KC would go away and die.

If people with authority and leadership in society are setting that kind of example, then they’re helping to erode democracy through political polarisation. That’s how it starts.

It would have been easy for each of them, however, to have found more reasonable language with which to criticise the policies they don’t like.

Democracy thrives on free critical thought and debate. But some of us have crossed a line by trying to rule out people or parties that were democratically elected and that have played by the rules of the constitution. It doesn’t take much effort to rethink the words that we’re about to use, and to pull back from that spiral of polarisation. Academics, broadcasters and politicians are all skilled enough to make that choice.

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The Politics Happens newsletter aims to set an example of critical and balanced analysis of leaders, parties, policies and events.

The previous post on whether to allow unregistered eligible people to enrol on Election Day stimulated lively comment, so I wondered what more readers thought.

This dramatic image is of a brawl in the Turkish parliament, lifted from:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/photos/politicians-attack-18782445