The rise and rise of the right
Liberalism and its discontents
“More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
That’s a quote from Woody Allen’s (fictional) 1979 speech to graduates. It could also be a sentiment shared by some who have been observing the world retreat from democracy, liberalism and secularism.
Branko Milanović believes that western intellectuals misinterpreted the revolutionary changes in Eastern Europe in 1989 – changes that saw the end of European communist regimes and the re-unification of Germany – as a victory for “liberalism, multiculturalism, and democracy”. But they were actually a re-assertion of nationalism. His essay, Hopelessness, in Brave New Europe, concludes:
The rule of the rich locally and of the powerful internationally seems so ideologically entrenched today that no hope of betterment, no hope of national nor economic equality seems on the horizon.
Instead of promoting the virtues of social democracy and a mixed economy, western opinion leaders moved into the space vacated by communism to promote the economic doctrine of neoliberalism, a doctrine easily embraced by nationalist strongmen and their cronies, but which in many ways is inimical to a more inclusive notion of liberalism.
Stan Grant in a post on the ABC website – As war rages in Ukraine and China challenges democracy, where is liberalism – and what does it stand for? – makes the strong point that democracy does not necessarily lead to liberalism. Russia, Hungary, Brazil and Turkey may be defective democracies, but they still have many trappings of democracy, including elections. “Autocracy itself thrives within democracy” he writes.
The main part of his essay is a discourse on liberalism: its scepticism, openness to ideas and aversion to taking strong stances puts liberalism at a disadvantage in troubled times, when liberals compete with those who confidently offer simple prescriptions. Grant invokes Yeats: “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity." He draws on the work of Isaiah Berlin and Joshua Cherniss, author of Liberalism in dark times: the liberal ethos in the twentieth century. Like Milanović, Cherniss regrets that for many liberalism has come down to the barren philosophy of neoliberalism.
Stan Grant also has a 30-minute discussion with Francis Fukuyama – Is democracy under siege? – on the ABC’s Religion and Ethics Report. Fukuyama acknowledges that worldwide democracy and liberalism are in retreat, but he doesn’t see history moving in one direction. There will be ebbs and flows, he suggests. (That’s something of a departure from his optimistic 1982 work The end of history and the last man.) Much of the discussion is about identity politics, and the possible conflict between liberalism with its universalist principles, and the demands of specific groups for particular status and recognition, be they “white” Americans, women, people with or without religious conviction, people with sexual identities, or other groups. Grant and Fukuyama acknowledge, however, that in settler societies first nation people have strong claims for specific recognition. Again, they acknowledge that neoliberalism has given liberalism a bad name. Classical liberalism does not embrace neoliberalism; rather it is concerned with economic justice.
Fukuyama’s most recent book is Liberalism and its discontents.
Also on the ABC website, Nicholas Heath asks What's behind Putin's popularity in the West?, and offers “family values and a strongman persona” as an explanation. Part of Putin’s attraction to people, including many US Republicans, is his rejection of liberalism. Some of that illiberalism is manifest in his ability to draw support from so-called “Christians”, and his embrace of “family values” – an idea that elevates the “family” over society, and that is intolerant of social liberalism.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Jack Snyder of Columbia University, warns that worldwide the human rights movement is losing, because its tactic of denouncing offenders from a righteous pulpit is ineffective. Historically, human rights movements have been successful when they have formed broad coalitions with other mass movements. If they are to succeed today human rights movements should align themselves with those movements seeking democracy and shared prosperity. He writes:
To begin to revive the rights-based system, democratic countries and rights advocacy groups can work to impose far stricter rules on international money laundering, tax evasion, the hiding of stolen assets, and the global dissemination of hate speech, defamation, and false information.
He makes the contestable claim that no country has advanced betyond the middle-income trap (25 percent of US per-capita GDP) “without adopting the full panoply of liberal democratic and human rights”. (He conveniently excludes “small oil states”, but that still leaves Hungary, Turkey and even Russia as clear exceptions to his bold generalization, and China isn’t far off that 25 percent target.)
Snyder is author of Human rights for pragmatists: social power in modern times.
Democracy in America
If Alexis de Tocqueville were to re-visit the USA in 2022, what updates and amendments would he make to his work Democracy in America after 190 years?
The January 6 hearings seem to have raised awareness of the fragility of America’s democracy. The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington describes how Americans have responded to the revelations in his article: ‘US democracy will not survive for long’: how January 6 hearings plot a roadmap to autocracy’. He draws on Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, author of How democracies die, to describe Trump as an unsuccessful but determined coup leader. According to Levitsky the Republican Party is quite openly anti-democratic. He asserts that “in a two-party system, if one political party is not committed to democratic rules of the game, democracy is not likely to survive for very long”.
The January 6 coup may have failed, but Trump is not dissuaded. Nor are his supporters. Sarah Longwell of Republicans for the Rule of Law, has an article in The Atlantic: Trump supporters explain why they believe the big lie. It’s not a matter of logic, rather it’s about emotion and tribal identity:
For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose. They know something nefarious occurred but can’t easily explain how or why. What’s more, they’re mystified and sometimes angry that other people don’t feel the same.
Erin Hurley, writing in the Lowy Institute’s magazine The Interpreter, describes how Trump’s supporters, after a few nanoseconds of hesitation following the coup attempt, quickly rallied behind him. Her article Understanding the rise of Trump – and how it might happen again presents a wider context, in a review of a book by Lawrence Jacobs: Democracy under fire: Donald Trump and the breaking of American history. America’s political system has deep-seated structural weaknesses, particularly the primary process, which tends to limit the choice of candidates in a two-party system to those who are elected by a small turnout of party zealots who vote in primaries.
Candidates win primary contests by appealing to narrow factions of the electorate who extract policy commitments from those candidates. These policy commitments typically fall far afield from the preferences of most Americans who hold comparatively moderate views and value compromise.
(Jacobs’ comments would seem to be relevant to any political system in which party bosses are chosen by a small number of electors.)
Jonathan Swan, writing in Axios, describes Trump’s elaborate plans to make a comeback: A radical plan for Trump’s second term. It involves a takeover of the policy functions of the federal public service, involving the replacement of up to 50 000 staff, involving key agencies such as the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Defense. Compared with Australia, the US has always had a more politicized public service, but Trump would go much further than any previous president. His plans are well-developed: his supporters have raised funds through the Conservative Partnership Institute, and they have come together to plan their roles in what would be a completely transformed bureaucracy, with loyalty not to the Constitution or the law but to the President.
Notable in Swan’s detailed exposition, and in other writers’ description of Trump’s tactics, is the relative absence of any description of his policy agenda. Perhaps it does not need to be articulated. Or, more likely, his plan and that of the Republican Party, is to concentrate on weakening the institutions of democracy, starting with America’s already weak electoral processes and the Supreme Court.
One may be tempted to dismiss Swan’s assertion on the basis that it looks too much like a conspiracy theory, but some conspiracy theories happen to be correct. In fact Trump’s plans are so open that they should not even be classified as a “conspiracy”, because secrecy is an essential aspect of any good conspiracy. We have learned over the last few weeks how far Trump is prepared to go, and that his supporters are quite open about their loyalty.
Of course Trump’s plans depend on his winning the primaries, and maintaining the support of the Republican Party and of Murdoch’s Fox network. The Guardian’s Edward Helmore has detected signs that Murdoch is tiring of Trump. That doesn’t mean the Trump era could be coming to an end, however. Atlantic writer (and former Republican Party member) Peter Wehner stresses that Trump is a creation of the Republican Party: The moral desolation of the GOP. “Republicans are the co-creators of Trump’s corrupt and unconstitutional enterprise. The great majority of them are still afraid to break fully with him”, he writes.
Understandingly the focus of the January 6 hearings is on Trump. It’s an extraordinary comment on the weakness of America’s legal institutions that the question of whether he will face prosecution is an open one. Even if he does escape prosecution, however, he may still be seen as a liability by the Republican Party, who can switch their support to another far-right populist in their ranks, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or the smooth-talking Ted Cruz. In fact it would be a smart tactic by the party to allow Trump to be the scapegoat for the strife around the election and the insurrection. Without Trump in the electoral landscape those who have been offended by his behaviour are less likely to come out to vote.
Regardless of whom the Republicans choose for their 2024 presidential candidate, there is no indication that the party is moving away from far-right populism. Prominent Republicans, including Trump, Cruz, DeSantis and Palin are highly represented in the Conservative Politcial Action Conference, a body that has most recently been prominent in its opposition to Covid-19 public health mandates, and which over a long period has endorsed extreme right stances. This year all the Republican luminaries will attend its conference, to which Hungary’s strongman prime minister Viktor Orbán has been invited to speak. On Late Night Live Andrew Gawthorpe of Leiden University explains why Republicans find Orbán so attractive: Viktor Orbán and his American sycophants. He can express views that Republicans hold but dare not utter. He takes pride in his illiberalism. He does not hide his admiration of Putin. He makes no secret of his control of the electoral process, his suppression of independent media, and his contempt for multiculturalism and racial equality. (16 minutes)
Commentators who can look beyond Trump as the source of the nation’s troubles are warning about deep flaws in America’s political institutions. Writing in The Atlantic Brian Klaus, of University College London, a scholar who has studied the breakdown of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism around the world, warns that America’s self-obsession is killing its democracy. He writes:
When democracies start to die, they usually don’t recover. Instead, they end up as authoritarian states with zombified democratic institutions: rigged elections in place of legitimate ones, corrupt courts rather than independent judges, and propagandists replacing the press.
Klaus sees much of the problem in the country’s insularity – an inability to see their country as others see it – and a misinterpretation of phenomena like the rise of Sarah Palin or Donald Trump as isolated and extraordinary events, rather than as natural outcomes of America’s flawed political systems.
Nathan Gardels of the California-based Berggruen Institute, warns that The United States is on a bleak trajectory. Like many Americans he sees solutions in terms of electoral reform, such as proportional representation. He acknowledges that America, in the past, particularly in the Progressive Era around the turn of the twentieth century was able to establish democratic institutions, often with the support of liberal state governors, but he fears that such energies are harder to mobilize now.
An even bleaker analysis of America’s situation is given by William Allchorn of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. He sees patterns of right-wing terrorism, most recently the shooting in Buffalo, New York, when a gunman killed ten people, having deliberately chosen a predominately African-American neighbourhood: US Buffalo Shooting: The depressing predictability of far-right terrorism and how to stop it. Too often such acts of violence are treated as isolated acts by deranged individuals, while authorities ignore the underlying systemic causes of such radicalization. Some scholars dismiss the idea that killers who attack racial or religious minorities are “lone wolves”. Rather they are deliberately cultivated by movements such as The Proud Boys and even by some mainstream Republicans. (The trouble with such allegations is that even if they are true, they are nearly impossible to prove or disprove. They cannot pass any test of skeptical verification.)
One may ask why the path of American democracy matters to Australia and to the world. Peter Hartcher, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, warns that Trump 2.0 poses a grave risk to the US and Australia. In part Hartcher’s piece is a summary of Swan’s revelations, linked above. He also warns that our longstanding relationship with America rests on our two countries having had a set of shared interests, but Trump has a different set of geopolitical interests:
The US alliance is founded on a shared interest in an open trading system and mutual assistance in case of war. Trump is opposed to both concepts.
There is also the influence of American political extremism on our domestic politics. Far- right political movements, spawned in the US, have turned up in Australia, particularly in last year’s strident anti-vax protests. And Republican Party tactics seem to have made their way into the Liberal Party handbook. The Morrison government, when it tried to portray anyone on the left of the political spectrum as obsessed with woke issues – gendered toilets, the rights of LBGTIQ athletes, capitalization of the word “indigenous”, the carbon footprint of gas barbecues – was emulating the Republicans’ tactic of politically gaslighting the left.
It is notable that in the time between the election and the resumption of Parliament, the new leader of the opposition travelled to America. That was no holiday: Hawaii seems to be Liberals’ choice of destination for a genuine holiday. Rather, he went to Washington, and it’s doubtful if his intention was to absorb the culture of the Smithsonian museums or to visit the Civil War monuments.
The other risk posed by America’s move towards an authoritarian right is that it gives democracy a bad name. Those who follow worldwide political developments know that the USA is classified by the Economist Intelligence Unit as a “flawed democracy”, coming in with a world ranking of #26. (The Nordic countries and New Zealand occupy the top places, and we come in a little lower at #9.) But for most people in the world, the USA is still what comes to mind when they imagine what a democracy looks like, and they don’t necessarily like what they see through the media – a country with deeply-entrenched racism, uncontrollable gun violence, huge and widening chasms between the rich and poor, an expensive and inept military, and crumbling infrastructure.
We might ask what de Tocqueville would see if he were to come back. The America he observed in 1831 was hardly a democracy: in fact the title of his book is somewhat ironic. He was puzzled by the way the country could reconcile slavery with the principles embodied in its founding documents, and the political culture he observed was more a rough backcountry libertarianism, dismissive of any collective effort particularly if it was based on government, than one of liberalism. He may report that little has changed.
Observation of an emerging populist
“What unites all of [his] listeners is a feeling of humiliation, of injured self-respect.” The people who come to his rallies are “the ‘de-classed’ middle class: creatures visibly down at the heel, spiritually crushed in the struggle with everyday realities”. They are not the poorest or the downtrodden. Rather “they are all people who have had conceptions of life, and conceptions of their personal rôles in life, with which their present situation stands in violent contrast”. He finds the strongest responses from his supporters when he attacks the intellectuals “whom the plain man least understands”.
These are quotes from an essay in Foreign Affairs, first published in 1932, and re-published 90 years later, on a new political movement that was enjoying electoral success in Germany. Its author, Paul Scheffer, wondered if the National Socialists were a passing phenomenon, or if they would gain traction in a country where there was an urge to make the country great again after the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. Scheffer took some consolation in his observation that Germans by nature are disinclined to extremes.
The article Hitler: phenomenon and portent, is behind a paywall, but Foreign Affairs allows limited access through registration, and its fees for an online subscription are reasonable.