Hallmarks of illiberal democracy
The historian Christopher Browning in the NYRB discusses the Trumpists’ similarities to and differences from Nazis and other fascists.
The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
Lies, Putin, Fox News, bots – it all adds up.
Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.
We’re there now. He’s not talking about the potential future there, he’s talking about how bad it already is.
Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights. On these issues, often described as the guardrails of democracy against authoritarian encroachment, the Trump administration either has won or seems poised to win significant gains for illiberalism. Upon his appointment as chancellor, Hitler immediately created a new Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who remained one of his closest political advisers.
In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of TheWashington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.
But in the end climate change will override all that.
Have a nice weekend.
And the non-base Republicans, the ones for whom ‘respect of the office’ means something (as long as it’s a Republican holding the office, naturally), the ones who *don’t* binge-watch Fox News…they think that the caterwauling against Trump is just business-as-usual partisanship. They’re self-righteous low-information voters, and they’re the ones who turned out in droves to tick the R box just because they’d always done so.
Now, much like then, fascism won without even a plurality of actual affirmative support, but rather with the idle disinterest of people who considered themselves above the petty fray of politics.
Fuck ’em.
Seth, re:
I was thinking about this group, or rather simply low-information voters, and one thing struck me as particularly odd. In the US, it seems that young, working class males – the manual and semi-skilled, non-officer class military (the ‘grunts’), firefighters, and so on tend to be Republican voters where the same group in Britain are largely Labour voters. I really cannot understand why the Americans in that category would vote for a party that clearly does not represent their interests.
Seth
One word. Race.
Kavanaugh has been confirmed. Just thought…I don’t know what I thought. I am numb (even though I expected it). Illiberal democracy gets another boost, with a justice who believes a president is above the law – in essence, then, a feudal overlord, a tyrant king who can do as he pleases (and yes, it’s always he; the instances of female tyrants are rare, partially because women leaders were rare prior to democracy, and still rare after, though slightly less so) without consequences.
Now he only needs 4 to vote with him, and I suspect our only hope of holding off that outcome is Roberts. If that makes anyone feel safer, then they are almost certainly a Trump voter.
AofS. @2
Yes, the tendency of some people to vote against their own class interests is a poltical mystery. The conservative parties in Australia represent, in my opinion, about 20% of the electorate yet historically they attract about 40% of the vote.The argument that conservative parties represent middle-class prejudices rather than interests probably has some merit.
There’s been a particularly sinister development, the Liberal(Conservative) party has voted to privatise the ABC, our equivalent of the BBC and for most Australians the only reliable news source. If they ever succeed Australia will be on the road to illiberal democracy.
AoS, RJW – I live in the middle of the people who vote against their own interests. They don’t perceive it that way. I have heard a number of people tell me that ending abortion is the only issue. There are others who are determined to reduce taxes, even though it will hurt them. The people around here who work for the state will vote for people who are determined to get rid of state functions, because they claim that people working for the state are parasites (they do not remember that they, themselves, work for the state, because they work for a school, which isn’t the state, right?). They vote against political correctness, against diversity, against women, and against non-Christians. They vote against immigrants, against Muslims, against unions, and against any sort of social safety net. They believe they are voting against evil, and that in a just world where all these “bad” things dried up and disappeared, they would get what they deserved, and be on the top of the heap, because they would no longer have to give all their money to the government to support lazy loafers.
And I suspect most of them don’t realize, or managed to forget, that Trump was against farm subsidies, which is what keeps our state going.
iknklast @ 6
Agreed. The most frustrating aspect of this situation is, as you indicated, the fact that voters just don’t make connections.
Eg, It’s obvious that real wage growth has halted in many Western countries and the voters are aware of the situation. However the simple and obvious deduction is that it’s a consequence of the emasculation of trade unions seems to be ignored. I can cite many examples of this ‘disconnectedness’, one in particular really annoyed me. A nursing colleague of my wife was anti-union, she didn’t need unions, or so she thought, however she readily accepted the wages and conditions achieved by union representatives.
Rural voters are usually against ‘socialism’, however when there’s a drought, farmers can accept ‘drought relief’, basically welfare handouts, without the slightest embarrassment.
I’m beginning to favor the idea of an epistocracy, ie government by the politically knowledgeable.
RJW, our farmers around here are receiving subsidies all the time, not just during droughts. The subsidies often make up half or more of their income. They still vote against all relief packages for everyone else, because that is “socialism” and relief for them is “capitalism”. They will literally say they are being paid to work, while others (including teachers, in their estimation) are being paid to not work. They are able to divorce their own benefits from the specter of “socialism” by trumpeting how hard working they are (never mind that the average farmer doesn’t spend that many hours on the farm anymore, and much of it is done by remote control and in climate controlled vehicles…they benefit from the image of the Okie, the old dirt farmer…most of them are working jobs in town and taking off time for planting and harvest, and making more than the median income). It’s disgusting to watch.
iknklast,
To be fair to Australian farmers, I should have acknowledged that they receive the second lowest level of government assistance in the OECD. They’re, by international standards, very efficient. The critics of ‘drought relief’, which includes me, point out that droughts are very frequent in Australia, so if farmers can’t survive a drought by using their own resources, they should be allowed to go out of business. I listened to an interview with a drought-affected farmer, he complained about the red tape and all the forms he had to fill out, he had to get his accountant to complete the application for relief. The unemployed also have complicated forms to submit and they usually don’t have accountants. Failure to comply with the requirements can result in the dole being suspended or even fines.
‘The critics of ‘drought relief’, which includes me, point out that droughts are very frequent in Australia, so if farmers can’t survive a drought by using their own resources, they should be allowed to go out of business.’
That’s the argument I used to make to people wanting to offer tax breaks and other incentives to companies to relocate to the small town where I was part of the government. ‘If companies can’t figure out how to make a profit within the structure we have in place, then they’re not very good at their job, so we shouldn’t want them here. Don’t you capitalist supporters believe in survival of the fittest (at least when it’s ‘social Darwinism’)?’
RJW @#9:
An academic economist I know says that in reality there is no such beast as economics. There is just political economy. An example would be the attempt initiated a while back by one Gina Rinehart (reputedly the richest woman in the world) to buy out Fairfax, publishers of newspapers like The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s The Age, and so to put an end to scrutiny she found obnoxious. (Then someone must have pointed out to her that Fairfax was going broke anyway, so why bother? And she desisted.)
The conservative side of Australian politics has always been in favour of stopping small farmers from going broke and getting out, such as the dairy farmers concentrated in coastal electorates, because the vote of those farmers has been crucial to said conservatives staying in office at both state and federal levels.
Omar, @11
Yes, I’d agree with the political economy observation, the same conservative politicians that let our car industry die because it was uncompetitive regularly pork-barrel rural areas.