Starting a global conversation to restore civility and liberal democracy
‘Liberal democracy is the best system for everyone,’ says former Supreme Court judge
Civil society is disappearing. Liberal democracy is under threat. It's impossible to have a real conversation anymore. Such views now seem commonplace, almost mundane.
But the frightening realities they point towards are still with us, and intensifying. The fact that we're getting inured to hearing about them is itself an added danger.
That's why an initiative by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC) is more relevant than ever. They wanted to create an annual discussion series about matters of global urgency, with the aim of reaching as wide an audience as possible.
In early April 2024, IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed moderated the first of a new annual series called Conversations, held at Montreal's Centre Mont Royal. She was joined by three panellists who are renowned nationally and internationally in law, diplomacy, and the arts.
Luis Roberto Barroso is a Brazilian law professor and outspoken jurist. He joined the Federal Supreme Court of Brazil in 2013, and was sworn in as president in September 2023. He was instrumental in the Brazilian Supreme Court's 2023 ruling that found former President Bolsonaro guilty of abuse of power, barring him from holding office until 2030.
Former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Rosie Abella, teaches at Harvard University. She was the first Jewish woman and refugee to serve on the Ontario Family Court, the Ontario Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court of Canada. She is a celebrated expert on human rights law.
Vikas Swarup is a former career diplomat from India, and former High Commissioner of India to Canada from 2017 to 2019. His debut novel, Q & A, was adapted for cinema as Slumdog Millionaire, which won eight Oscars, including the award for Best Picture.
Here are some excerpts from their conversation.
Decline of civility
Roberto, if I could ask you: in 2021, in addition to being a judge on the Supreme Court, you were also head of the Supreme Electoral Court in Brazil when then President Bolsonaro criticized you publicly. What happened?
Roberto: He more than criticized me. He insulted me a couple times.
He insulted you?
Roberto: Now, I've had many years of psychoanalysis. So whenever someone behaves improperly towards me, I know it's the other person's problem. And, what happened then? I never took it personally. It was a institutional problem for me.
The reason why he was so upset was [that] Brazil has a wonderful electronic voting machine system that has eliminated frauds in Brazil. And he wanted to go back to paper voting to paper ballots, which in Brazil has always meant fraud in the electoral process. I opposed that fiercely. And I was invited to Congress, and I fortunately was able to convince Congress members not to approve going back to paper ballot. The president was very upset for that reason. And, now I can tell that that was probably the most important thing I've done during my time at the court. Because if, as we learned with the January 8th episode, that those people were able to invade [Brazil's] Congress to invade the Supreme Court, to invade the presidential palace, just imagine what they would have done to the electoral stations where the votes were being counted, where they thought they would lose.
So, it was a low price to pay, the insulting, because eventually democracy won in Brazil.
Vikas, as a diplomat, you've had a front-row seat to the spread of this kind of thing around the world. And I wonder, you know, the targeting of people, the targeting of institutions. You've seen a number of examples. What sticks out in your mind as one of the starkest examples?
Vikas: So now, I would say that the biggest threat facing democratic institutions comes from your giant neighbour to the south. The United States is rightly regarded as the motherlode of democracy. And yet there is no advanced industrial democracy in the world today that is more ideologically divided and more politically dysfunctional than the United States today.
There is extreme political polarization. It has gone even beyond red versus blue, rural versus urban, to resemble almost something tribal in character. And as a result, the two political parties are unable to agree on anything from healthcare to climate change to women's reproductive rights, to even aid to Ukraine. On top of that, one party refuses to accept defeat in an election which, to my mind, undermines the very basis of liberal democracy and can only lead to further erosion of trust in democratic institutions and processes. Three years ago, the January 6th attack on the U.S. Congress, I think exemplified the dangers of such an approach.
Thirdly, we are seeing that the power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion, with an activist Supreme Court, which has become totally partisan itself and many of its recent judgments, many commentators are saying, reflect more the ideological leanings of the justices than the broader public interest.
And finally, you have a concerted effort by some politicians and states to restrict access to voting to pass laws which particularly targeted minority groups and marginalized communities.
The outrage economy: 'angertainment'
Social media has not only made conversation difficult, but it has even led to people killing other people – I mean, Facebook and Rohingya...
Vikas: Absolutely.
So how do you come back from that?
Vikas: Yeah. So it's going to be very difficult. I mean, I start my new yet to be released novel with the sentence: 'The most valuable thing in the world is not money. It is attention.' So, you see, when we had the agricultural economy, the most scarce thing was land. When we had the manufacturing economy, the most scarce thing was labour. When we had the knowledge economy, the most scarce thing was information. But now we have a surfeit of information. What we are lacking is attention. And because we are living in this attention-based economy, the business model of the attention-based economy is social media.
All these Big Tech companies, they are surviving entirely on the basis of our clicks and our likes, which will grab the most eyeballs. So it is the outrage economy. Malcolm Turnbull, the former Prime Minister of Australia, he called it 'angertainment.' That is what we are living in. And because social media algorithms are designed to promote this kind of content, it's going to promote even more and more polarization and divisiveness in society. And that is why I think social media is the most important building block here.
Restoring civility: laws or social movements?
Rosie: I don't disagree with anything that has been said, but I am a little less confident about — maybe it's the Hobbesian in me — but I really have come to believe that unless you require behaviour to change, it's not going to happen.
If you look at the social revolutions of our lifetime: gay rights, women's rights, Indigenous rights, race, it came from law. We waited 60 years between Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896, where the American Supreme Court said separate cars for 'coloured people' are okay, are constitutional. Until we got Brown versus Board of Education in 1954. And in the meantime, while we were waiting for attitudes to change, Blacks in America had to endure segregation. Korematsu versus the United States. Both countries [Canada and the U.S.] had Supreme Court decisions that said it was okay for Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians to be put in camps, dislocated, removed from their homes. We waited because that was the consensus. But unless you have laws that determine what the parameters of conduct are, you're not going to get people to change.
Roberto: I agree with one thing that Rosie said, but I just want to...
Rosie: Just one thing?
Roberto: There is only one I want to mitigate a little bit.
I think law is very important, but you need to have a social movement behind it or it won't happen. The Brown [case] was actually enforced with the Civil Rights movement. So you cannot change that world through law or through court decisions. Court decisions help, like in Brazil I was the lawyer of a case on same-sex marriage. It was unthinkable when we filed the lawsuit in 2008. But when it was finally decided in 2011, it had the majority of the court, for the reason that the court and the law brought the issue to the public space… a social discussion.
Democracy: a faith-based system
If people lose faith in the justice system, if this lack of faith becomes permanent… if faith evaporates, what takes its place?
Rosie: Well, I think we need more success stories in this world. We need more countries like Canada. We need to show the world that it is a good investment to protect democracy because everything they've got in their autocratic regimes (security, safety, economic development) we have, too — plus the right to say what you want without hurting other people, the right to be a full member of society, the right to aspire to everything that you want for your family, the right to hope.
That's part of democracy. And we have to sell it. And we have to stop being shy about saying that it is the best system. Liberal democracy is the best system for everyone, and we've got to stop pretending that there are other ways that are just as good because they're not. So I would put my foot down and say, enough. I mean: look, is it working for us, this tolerance of intolerance all over the world? I would start promoting democracy, civility, respect, dignity, all the things that we thought we were doing 75 years ago — and bring it back.
Watch the live event, entitled The Threat to Civility and the Fight for Liberal Democracy:
*This conversation was edited for clarity and length. The episode was produced by Greg Kelly.
