Yascha Mounk
What do the coup attempt in Turkey, Donald Trump’s US presidential candidacy, the Brexit referendum, and the rise of populist parties in France, Germany, and elsewhere have in common? They all reflect deep anxieties among many citizens about the functioning of their democracies and the openness of their societies.
The short-lived coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan failed in large part because Turks poured into the streets in their tens of thousand to oppose a military takeover of their country. The fact that so many would willingly risk their lives for what they perceived as their “democracy” speaks well of their courage. But it is also likely to reinforce Erdoğan’s troublesome understanding of what democracy is: a form of government in which the will of a popular majority is fully represented by him, and is to be implemented by him without regard for institutional or legal constraints.
Donald Trump’s campaign for the American presidency also seems to draw on this understanding of democracy. His recent praise of torture, his calls to exclude all Muslims from entering the United States, and his attempted intimidation of a federal judge all speak to a contempt for law as a limit on what he believes a majority of Americans really want.
That so many US voters seem to agree with Trump raises a question that would have seemed utterly bizarre a year ago. Is the political system of the world’s mightiest power and oldest democracy in danger of going down an unstable, populist path? For most Project Syndicate contributors, the question is even broader. It would be easy to think of Trump, and of the reasons for his rise, as uniquely American. But while the particulars of his appeal – from his boasts of almost supernatural entrepreneurial skill to his defense of America’s lax gun laws – take their cue from the political culture of the United States, they also highlight the parallels between his rhetoric and values and those of populist strongmen like Erdoğan elsewhere.
In the apt words of the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, a new breed of politicians across the West now seem to be forming “a new International, not of communism, but of vulgarity and bling.” Leaders like Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi also seemed ludicrous, until they managed to amass power, degrade their countries’ political culture, and erode the integrity of public institutions. Given this, it would be a mistake to underestimate the challenge that the bling and rant brigades pose to the status quo. “One is tempted,” Lévy writes, “to ask whether Trumpism might not also be the harbinger – or perhaps even the apotheosis – of a truly new episode in world politics.”
But what will this new episode in world politics look like? In what sense are politicians as different as Trump, Erdoğan, and French National Front leader Marine Le Pen connected? Does the anger that has set so many countries’ voters against their political establishment have common causes – and, if so, are there common remedies that can halt the rise of populists?
The Anger of Wealthy Nations
The first step to understanding world politics in this era of “autocratic democracy” is to figure out why, particularly in the advanced economies, public anger against the establishment became so intense that it paved the way for the stunning success of illiberal populists. According to Bill Emmott, former Editor of The Economist, the reasons are straightforward: “the interests of ordinary people have been subordinated to those of the elite.” And now ordinary people have had enough. “A democracy in which a majority feels neglected or exploited is not sustainable.”
That diagnosis seems only partly convincing. It doesn’t explain why alienation from the political establishment is felt more keenly today than, say, 30 years ago. Have political elites grown so much more indifferent to the fate of ordinary citizens, or are they simply less able to defend citizens’ interests?
For NYU economist Nouriel Roubini, the explanation lies in forces that national politicians can’t control: “The reemergence of nationalist, nativist populism is not surprising: economic stagnation, high unemployment, rising inequality and poverty, lack of opportunity, and fears about migrants and minorities ‘stealing’ jobs and incomes have given such forces a big boost.” In country after country, “populist right-wing authoritarians” channel the “backlash against globalization – and the freer movement of goods, services, capital, labor, and technology that comes with it.”
Harvard’s Dani Rodrik agrees, arguing that “the internationalization of markets for goods, services, and capital drives a wedge between the cosmopolitan, professional, skilled groups that are able to take advantage of it and the rest of society.” Just as nineteenth-century Britain was defined by a clash between those who would profit from liberalizing trade in basic foodstuffs like corn and those who would be harmed by it, the coming decades will be defined by a distributional fight over the rules that govern an increasingly globalized world.
The Nationalist International
The problem with these explanations is the mismatch between the root causes of popular anger and the form this anger takes in most countries. Supporters of Trump or the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders may blame free-trade agreements for eroding job opportunities; but the bulk of their energy and anger is directed not at prevailing economic orthodoxy, but at social policy. The defining feature of their political brand is hatred of immigrants, not of the World Trade Organization.
Carl Bildt, a former prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden, argues that animus toward outsiders is merely the form which economic insecurity takes. “Tribalism has strong appeal in periods of rapid, tumultuous change.” Citing Trump’s proposed wall on the US frontier with Mexico or pro-Brexit campaigners’ calls to “control our borders,” Bildt notes that fears of immigration or terrorism heighten perceptions that “the mythical tribe [is] suddenly under attack by invading hordes from afar.”
Joschka Fischer, a former foreign minister of Germany, has a more radical view of the economic causes of an essentially cultural rage. He argues that the “White Man’s World” is under attack from the “globalization of labor markets, gender parity, and the legal and social emancipation of sexual minorities.” Immigration is the “issue that brings that prognosis home (not just metaphorically) to today’s angst-inspired nationalists.”
Fischer’s view helps to explain a puzzle identified by Daniel Gros, Director of the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels. If losses from globalization “account for the rise of populism, they must have somehow intensified in the last few years, with low-skill workers’ circumstances and prospects deteriorating faster vis-à-vis their high-skill counterparts.” But “that simply is not the case,” Gros shows, “especially in Europe.” While the economic transformations of recent decades help to explain falling trust in existing political institutions, it is facile to assume that it is primarily globalization’s immediate losers who support the populists, much less to expect that an upswing in the business cycle will halt the populists’ rise.
The Brave New World of People Power
Figures like Trump, Erdoğan, and Le Pen differ in their ethnic allegiances, economic views, and religiosity. But they share a view of liberal democracy’s shortcomings that makes them likely to transform their countries in surprisingly similar ways. All of them (and many others) claim that their countries’ most important problems cannot be solved unless a true representative of the people shoves aside the artificial obstacles – from separation of government powers to a politically correct concern for ethnic and religious minorities – that now block realization of the popular will.
“From a populist perspective,” Princeton University’s Jan-Werner Mueller points out, “this makes perfect sense: why should [leaders] accept checks on their power if they represent the authentic will of the people?” Populist leaders who win power “can live with representative democracy; what they cannot accept is political pluralism and the notion of legitimate opposition.”
Political scientists usually term this form of rule “illiberal democracy.” As the Anglo-Dutch writer Ian Buruma, drawing on the insights of Alexis de Tocqueville, argues: “What is steadily falling away is not democracy, but the restraints that de Tocqueville thought were essential to make liberal politics work.” In other words, “populist leaders regard their election by the majority of voters as a license to crush all political and cultural dissent.”
Evidence of this approach is surely abundant in much of Central and Eastern Europe. The combination of charismatic leadership and raw majoritarianism that started in Russia with the rise of Vladimir Putin at the turn of the century soon emerged in Turkey under Erdoğan, then in Hungary under Viktor Orbán, and now in Poland under the Law and Justice (PiS) party’s government.
In each of these countries, a dominant populist leader is following the rulebook described by Mueller and Buruma. First, he undermines vital checks on his power like independent courts or electoral commissions. Then he stifles dissenting voices by taking control of state media or silencing private media. In the process, he shores up popular support by scapegoating old elites as well as the foreigners and minorities with whom they are supposedly in league.
Democratic Dictators?
As checks and balances disappear and leaders amass ever more power, will voters in countries like Poland, Hungary, and Turkey eventually have an opportunity to “throw the bums out” in reasonably fair elections? Or will rulers be too well entrenched – or have too much to lose – to be dislodged even if a majority of voters should turn against them?
The expatriate Russian historian and social critic Nina L. Khrushcheva believes that the latter outcome is precisely what we should fear. “In Putin’s early days in power,” she reminds us, “he proposed a regime based on ‘sovereign democracy,’ claiming that Russia needed a ‘special system’ to protect itself from its many enemies, domestic and foreign.” She argues that Poland’s political “kingmaker,” PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński (who holds no government post), and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “subscribe to the same notion, completely missing, apparently, the irony in the use of ‘sovereign’ – a term typically applied to a monarch, not a democratic leader.” Putin’s creation, and the variants adopted by Kaczyński and Orbán, she concludes, “is more like a ‘sovereign dictatorship.’”
Defeating Trump and Le Pen is doubtless a short-run imperative. But if the social and economic forces that led to their rise persist, an increasingly angry populace will simply look for a new tribune. Recognizing this, many commentators advocate substantial reforms, though they differ both in the measures they favor and in their confidence that what they propose will succeed.
The most optimistic observers emphasize that the costs of globalization stem from politics, not economics. As J. Bradford DeLong of the University of California at Berkeley argues, income stagnation was caused not by globalization, but rather by politicians who have “failed to implement policies to manage globalization’s effects.” Rodrik agrees: “Even two decades ago, it was easy to predict that mainstream politicians’ unwillingness to offer remedies for the insecurities and inequalities of our hyper-globalized age would create political space for demagogues with easy solutions.”
Maybe so. Yet in the effort to boost living standards and halt the public’s creeping disenchantment with liberal democracy, it will always be easier for economists to advise than for politicians to implement. Roubini, for example, advocates “macro and structural economic policies that boost aggregate demand, job creation, and growth, reduce income and wealth inequality, provide economic opportunity to the young, and integrate rather than reject refugees and economic migrants.” But if such desirable policies exist, why should our political systems, having failed to pursue them in the past, be able to do so now?
Liberal Democracy at Dusk
In my view, the choices facing us in the next decades may be far starker than the optimists admit. There are three reasons why attempts to shore up living standards are unlikely to stem the populist threat: the right policies might not be adopted; even if they were adopted, they might fail to redress economic grievances sufficiently; and, most important, even if they did redress economic grievances, they would not necessarily defuse the culturally-based anxieties of many citizens. As Harvard’s Ricardo Hausmann emphasizes – and as the Brexit vote clearly showed – the “sense of ‘us’” is more important to many people than achieving greater success through integration with “others.”
We are accustomed to thinking of our political system as a set of countervailing forces, in which discontent among one segment of the population leads to corrective action, like a social program to ease their problems and defuse their anger. But once the system becomes sufficiently dysfunctional, countervailing forces may give way to mutually reinforcing feedback loops. As Kemal Derviş, Turkey’s former minister of economic affairs and a vice president of the Brookings Institution, argues, the “great paradox” of our time “is that if the rise of identity politics continues, governments will be even less able to address the problems that are fueling it.”
This implies that redistribution and compensation of globalization’s losers will not be enough, and that liberal democracy is likely to become an increasingly unstable political compound. As the conflict between liberalism and democracy escalates, we should expect two new regime types to emerge. One is illiberal democracy, in which public policy reflects populist frustration and anger, regardless of the cost to economic health or the rights of minorities. The second is what I have called “undemocratic liberalism,” a system in which rational economic policies and the rule of law are upheld by technocratic elites who routinely overrule their supposed constituents.
Either way, Lévy’s “bling brigades” herald more than an age of bad taste. They remind us that the political epoch in which we could trust that the champions of continuity would ultimately defeat the agents of disruption is over, probably for good. As Turkey’s failed coup attempt demonstrates, when the rule of law and the institutions that depend on it are hollowed out in the name of majoritarian rule, there are no reliable circuit-breakers left. In the end, the clash between illiberal democracy and undemocratic liberalism might even be decided in the streets – with liberal democracy gravely imperiled, regardless of who wins.
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