Tomorrow the United States, and therefore the world, enters a new and dangerous era, with a president committed to the reversal of the (uneven) gains that democracy and liberalism have made in the last eight decades. All the more reason for us to try to understand the recent rise of authoritarianism, not just in the US but worldwide.
We’ve dealt a number of times here with the phenomenon of so-called “populism” – see, for example, this post from last March, which draws on an article by Aurelien Mondon and Alex Yates and also includes a useful set of links. But I don’t think I’ve read anything quite so comprehensive as this article by Larry Bartels (originally published in Foreign Affairs), an American professor of political science, on “The populist phantom”.
Bartels’ thesis is that the authoritarian turn is not a “populist wave” but a movement directed by political leaders and their elite supporters, abetted by the media. As he puts it in the title of his recent book, “democracy erodes from the top.” Public opinion follows rather than leads:
Those panicking about the rise of populism tend to imagine that shifts in public opinion fuel the success of populist parties and figures; the public’s broadening antipathy to globalisation, immigration, integration (in the European context) and the political class threatens to empower extremists and undermine democracy. But that is demonstrably not the case.
He goes on to explain in considerable detail how the rise of far-right parties depends on the circumstances of different countries and bears almost no relationship to economic distress or to the experience of increased immigration. He is particularly harsh on the idea that politicians are just responding to anti-immigrant sentiment in the electorate:
The ubiquitous notion that the immigration crisis was tearing Europe apart represented an overreaction to the agitation of a xenophobic minority. Just as the press tends to exaggerate electoral gains by anti-immigrant parties, it tends to mistake outbursts by extremists for broad shifts in public opinion.
The point is not to minimise the threat that democracy faces, but to properly appreciate where it’s coming from. Echoing a point that I’ve made here many times, Bartels points out that far-right parties depend for their success on the collaboration of more mainstream forces, and that that is where resistance needs to be mounted. The rise of Trump, he says, should be blamed not on nativist voters but on establishment politicians:
Yet the threat Trump poses to American democracy has little to do with “populism.” It doesn’t come from ordinary citizens immersed in “culture wars” — even from those who stormed the Capitol on 6 January. They were and are a sideshow. The real threat is from the Republican officeholders who, hours later, supported Trump’s effort to decertify the election outcome. It was not some rush of anti-democratic feeling that threatened American democracy in those months; it was the machinations of political elites determined to entrench themselves in power.
Politics matters. We like to think that we are riding an irresistible tide of history that exempts us from having to study the tedious detail of how things actually work. But the reality, as Bartels says, is that “The fate of democracy lies in the hands of politicians.” It’s up to us to call out their wrongdoing and try to hold them to the path of defending civilisation rather than undermining it.
Do go and read the whole thing – it’s a long read, but it’s well worth it.
The World is Not Enough 