Public ideass
What comes after democratic breakdown?
The essay in Foreign Affairs by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way – What comes after American authoritarianism? – makes for confronting reading.
It describes how Trump will consolidate his power in a way he didn’t manage in his earlier term. He will appoint cronies into key public service positions, particularly the Department of Justice. He will bring criminal and defamation charges against his critics. Democratic Party donors will be targeted by the Internal Revenue Service. He will use the power of the Education Department to shut down criticism from academics. Political violence could flare up as those who have been pardoned for having taken part in the January 6 insurrection feel emboldened.
U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.
Usually such essays conclude on an optimistic note, and the authors do point out that America’s democratic institutions are somewhat stronger than those in countries such as Turkey and Hungary where strongmen authoritarians have dug in. But particularly having stacked the Supreme Court, Trump is in a remarkably strong position.
The authors don’t see the political system constraining Trump’s authoritarianism:
… much of the Republican Party now embraces the idea that America’s institutions—from the federal bureaucracy and public schools to the media and private universities—have been corrupted by left-wing ideologies.
They don’t mention the mid-term elections, and they hardly mention the Democratic Party. Trump has enough power to weaken normal electoral processes.
If there is to be opposition it will have to come from civil society.
What populism is, and isn’t
As with pornography, we recognize populism when we see it, but we find it dreadfully hard to define.
Shikha Dalmia, President of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism and editor of The UnPopulist, helps clarify our ideas in her Persuasion post What populism is – and isn’t.
She starts with a clarification between popular and populist movements. The former is “a resistance movement against an illicit power that is ruling in explicit violation of the will of those it governs”. The latter “is aimed at domestic ‘establishment’ which was formed with the consent of the people but over time has become corrupt – genuinely or allegedly”.
She sees populist movements as “a pathology specifically of established democracies where the people already have self-rule, but where the dominant majority feels that this rule no longer works for it because the establishment in control no longer cares for its wishes, or, worse, is actively hostile to it”.
She goes on to the age-old problem of political representation: who are “the people” whose interests are to guide public policy? Populist movements deal with this by “separating the ‘real’ people from all the others – rich people, foreigners, Jews, racial and religious minorities, dissidents – who stand outside, and against the people”.
Populism involves proposing simple solutions to complex problems, “pursuing policies that the majority favours without subjecting them to normal deliberative processes”.
She sees divisiveness and polarization as the sine qua non of populist politics. This polarization is generally accompanied by a “coarsening of political discourse”, and a scapegoating of out groups who are allegedly responsible for the troubles faced by the majority. She mentions Trump in this context – Australians can identify their own strongman populist.
Can human rights survive the decline of global Western hegemony?
That’s the opening sentence of an article in Social Europe – Human rights on the edge – by Nicholas Bequelin, of Yale Law School.
Although the human rights movement has always asserted that human rights are universal, anchored in impersonal international norms, over time the movement has come to be associated with western democracies. That association has given it legitimacy and a degree of effectiveness in dealing with conflicts such as the Balkan wars and genocide in Rwanda, but it has come at the cost of authoritarian regimes justifying abuses of human rights on the basis that the movement is a western imposition on non-western countries.
He believes there has arisen a false confidence that the movement’s achievements are pointers to solid and irreversible progress:
Human rights advocates’ belief that normative progress leads over time to improvements on the ground overlooks how truly tenuous the place is that human rights has occupied in international relations.
Recognizing the relative decline of the countries that once prioritized human rights, he writes:
The human rights movement must accept that it no longer commands the authority that it once had, and that this trend will continue as states deprioritize rights issues. No matter how universal the human rights enterprise claims to be, the reality is that in the diplomatic realm, only liberal democracies have consistently backed financially and institutionally its endeavors, irrespective of how they conducted their foreign policy in practice. It is imperative for the human rights movement to anticipate their further decline.
A strong overlay in his analysis is America’s loss of soft power following the election of Donald Trump.
His solutions, which include deals with non-western countries to “reprioritize” the movement’s concerns (i.e. to compromise), are morally challenging.