Democracy is under threat all over the world. One of the most elaborate multidimensional measures of democracy, the v-them Institute in Sweden, notes that today, 72 percent of the world’s population lives in autocracies and only 13 percent in liberal democracies, with 42 countries autocratizing, moving further and further away from democracy, in the last year.
However, such an approach takes a snapshot of current features, fails to recognize the different ways in which regimes have become undemocratic, and generates unrealistic attempts to push regimes towards democracy.
Some regimes do not respond because they are platypuses.
In biology, phenetic classification means that we can look at different organisms and categorize them based on a snapshot of their characteristics: birds have beaks; mammalian lactate; reptiles can be poisonous. However, the platypus has a beak, lactates, and is poisonous. Phenetic categorization doesn’t always work.
By contrast, cladistic or evolutionary approaches trace the branching tree that begins with single-celled organisms and develops into contemporary birds, reptiles, and mammals. The platypus may have some characteristics of birds and reptiles, but its evolution follows the path that forked to become mammals, so the platypus belongs to the family of mammals.
When thinking about regimes, it would be prudent to trace evolutionary paths. In particular, the branching tree to consider is left or right inheritance from different governments.
Ideal typical left-wing governments come from revolutionary and anti-colonial histories, rose to power on promises to redistribute wealth and help the poor, were linked to labor and other lower-class social movements, and opposed patterns of racial exclusion, ethnic, gender and other .
Typical-ideal right-wing governments trace their origins to colonial powers, rose to power on promises to support international capital and its local allies, were linked to business associations and landed elites, and supported dominant group identities against minority populations.
Countries do not go one way or the other at random. The history of regimes is traced by critical junctures, decision points when social forces come together to institutionalize a choice for the left or right strand of evolution.
The countries that take the path of the left do so because groups of workers, peasants, women, indigenous people and minority groups unite around anti-colonial and transformative projects. Countries that take the right path do so because colonial elites, domestic elites, and dominant identity groups are moving toward the correct evolutionary strand.
Some of these governments may evolve over time and accumulate similar non-democratic characteristics. This tempts us to characterize them as equally undemocratic and seek similar responses, but their division at a past critical juncture is important when we think about how to steer them away from undemocratic rule today.
For example, our increasingly precise measurements tell us that countries like CubaNicaragua, Venezuela, the Philippines are flawed or undemocratic, as was apartheid in South Africa.
The phenetic approach looks at shared characteristics, such as unfair or uncompetitive elections, restrictions on civil society, and attacks on the press, and might even view them as similar in their degree of nondemocracy. However, to approach them with similar responses would be a mistake.
I mention apartheid south africa intentionally, as is the case many use to support the notion that comprehensive sanctions and international isolation can work.
Yet extensive sanctions and international isolation have done nothing to push Cuba toward democracy, even after more than 60 years of a brutal embargo. The US currently applies sweeping sanctions to more than 35 additional countries, causing dramatic humanitarian suffering but not democratization.
The reason is that apartheid in South Africa found its origins on the correct evolutionary path. The sanctions isolated the regime from precisely the community that defined its evolution: Western governments and capital, domestic elites, and dominant white racial groups.
On the contrary, while sweeping sanctions destroy economies and result in needless deaths in places like Cuba and Venezuela, the isolation of the West has had no impact on the democratization of these countries. They may exhibit similarities to right-wing dictatorships, but their evolutionary path lies on the left branch, and politics must be sophisticated enough to recognize the difference.
Non-democracies that trace their origins to the correct evolutionary path may find themselves pushed toward greater democracy if their Western benefactors stop supporting them, but non-democracies that trace their origins to the left do not.
For countries that trace their origins to the evolutionary path of the left, attempts by the US and other Western governments to isolate them play into the hands of leaders who use sanctions to burnish their anti-Western credentials, even if they have long since given up. to lead anti-colonial policies. struggle. Furthermore, they can point to Western isolation as the cause of economic collapse and population suffering, even if they have long ceased to represent the poor.
Too often, the US is under the mistaken impression that the path to democratization lies in moving from the evolutionary path of the left to the evolutionary path of the right. However, a platypus will never become a reptile. A non-democracy that traces its origins to the evolutionary path of the left will not democratize by shifting to the right.
A country that has deviated from the evolutionary path of the left democratizes by deepening its transformative project and embracing the lower-class groups that place it on the path of the left to begin with. International solidarity can support these social forces, denouncing the deviations from the evolutionary path of the left, mobilizing the main supporters who are the source of legitimacy of such governments. This strengthens the truly popular movements in these countries and pushes them towards the evolutionary path of the left and democracy.
Unfortunately this rarely happens for two reasons. First, part of the blame must lie with the international left, which is hesitant to criticize governments that trace their origins to the evolutionary path of the left, even if they have strayed. However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine should be a lesson: the international left must be sophisticated enough to criticize both the US imperial project that surrounded and threatened Russia and the immediately genocidal Russian imperial project that seeks to seize Ukrainian territory.
The second part of the blame lies with the US government and foreign policy, which is too fearful of popular left-wing movements and too easily seduced by potential right-wing allies.
Take Nicaragua. Once a beacon of revolutionary transformation, the Nicaraguan government has assumed the worst characteristics of a patrimonial autocratic regime. A 2018 uprising by students, women, peasants and workers opposed attempts to restrict pension benefits and could have pushed the government to the left and towards democracy.
However, the movement quickly captured the imagination of the US foreign policy establishment, which saw in the protests an opportunity to steer Nicaragua on the right evolutionary path. As a result, the Nicaraguan government responded with repression and portrayed the opposition as puppets of the US empire.
The US government has a role to play in pushing governments back toward democracy, but only in regimes that have emerged from the correct evolutionary path. For such governments, US pressure and sanctions would remove vital support and could push them back to democracy. This is what happened in South Africa; the US-aligned apartheid state suddenly lost the support of its main benefactor. Similar US pressure to democratize could work in other countries already on the right evolutionary path, such as Poland, Israel, and the Philippines.
Instead of ineffectively lobbying countries that have followed the evolutionary path of the left and, in the process, causing serious humanitarian damage, the US should focus its democratization efforts in places where its support plays a critical role, such as those countries that have followed the right path.
A platypus can’t turn into a bird, but it might look more like other mammals.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
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