Читать книгу Democracy Against Liberalism - Aviezer Tucker - Страница 11

This book is a late addition to the burgeoning “political apocalypse now” genre of books about the death of democracy, the twilight of civilization, and the return of ideological mortality to history. It benefits from this late coming. This is not a knee jerk or hysterical reaction to a shock, nor a desperate cry for help, nor the thought of somebody who was pushed off a skyscraper and tells himself half way down “so far so good.” The theoretical analysis I propose in this book offers a historically and comparatively founded theoretical alternative to a few earlier popular interpretations of the politics of the second decade of the twenty-first century, which I call Weimarian, Jacksonian, and Singaporean:

Weimarian interpretations perceived a global acidic wave of authoritarianism, corroding and washing away the achievements of the postwar reconstruction in Western Europe, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and the “third wave” of democratization in Southern Europe, Latin America, and East Europe. An apparently similar “tidal wave” in the 1920s and 1930s undid the achievements of the post-First-World-War Wilsonian world order of self-determining liberal-democratic nation-states in a peaceful community of nations. The current “wave,” like its predecessor almost a century earlier, does not have a single common source or explanation. It resembles an unconditional zeitgeist, a historical trend that spreads partly by imitation and partly for unknown common or separate reasons, like colonialism or nationalism. Weimarians tend to conflate authoritarianism, illiberalism, and populism and, taken to extremes, reduce them all to “Adolf.” If this analysis is correct, the liberal institutional defenses are so weak that a chance occurrence, such as a terrorist attack like the one that burnt the Reichstag in 1933, or the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, may provide the excuse to bring down the democratic house of cards and establish illiberal authoritarianism. It may be that by pure luck there has been no such destabilizing terrorist attack and liberals let their guards down, until Covid-19 reshuffled the political cards and took all political bets off.

If this process is beyond anybody’s control, we might as well try to enjoy cabarets, while waiting for the gestapo. This interpretation emerged following the surprising rolling shocks of the successes of Trump’s rhetoric, Trump’s victory in the republican primaries and, above all, his victory in the 2016 elections. People who experienced or were directly affected by the Second World War (Albright 2018), or historians specializing in the study of that period (Snyder 2017), were particularly receptive to this kind of interpretation, though other historians who studied Nazism (Herf 2016a, 2016b) acknowledged some of the similarities, but also emphasized the differences. As Runciman (2018, 31) put it, Europeans and North Americans are too prosperous, old, networked, and with knowledge of history to repeat the end of Weimar. “Political violence is a young man’s game.” Too much of the 1930s is missing: current illiberal democracies have no militias and no unemployed risk loving and not just taking military veterans to man them. Most European countries have experienced demographic declines, especially in post-Communist countries where mass emigration combined with low fertility. Wealthier societies and welfare states have lower levels of misery in severe recessions than poorer and less secure workers did during the 1930s. Populist leaders this time depend on weak and fickle popular support that is not sufficient for starting costly wars, unless they can be won quickly and decisively. The liberal institutions in some countries with neo-illiberal governments or movements are more resistant and resilient than those of the Weimar Republic. As Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) emphasized, globally the number of democratic backslides is balanced by democracies that stabilized. The total number of democracies in the world has not changed much since 2005. Thomas Carothers, who attacked the transition-to-democracy “paradigm,” co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs entitled “Democracy is not Dying: Seeing through the Doom and Gloom.” There may be an illiberal wave, but it is far from a tsunami, and there are other waves pushing the ships of state in opposite directions.

History, however, rhymes rather than repeats itself. The final dramatic push toward authoritarianism from neo-illiberal democracy, “the burning Reichstag,” kind of event some analysts were expecting, as I write now in April of 2020, may not be terrorism, as many had worried, but the return of a pandemic plague after a hundred years – the spread of the coronavirus. The kinds of authoritarian measures that may be necessary to contain the spread of the disease are conducive to a permanent state of emergency and a permanent slide from neo-illiberal democracy to authoritarianism. A telling sign is that Hungary’s Orbán entirely abolished the constitutional power of the parliament that his Fidesz Party controlled anyway. In March of 2020, the Hungarian parliament passed a law that rhymed with the German Enabling Act of March 1933, which gave Hitler the right to rule by decree, following the burning of the Reichstag and a disinformation campaign about an impending Communist coup. The Hungarian parliament suspended its own constitutional powers and transferred to the government the right to rule by decree and prosecute those who “distribute misinformation.” The difference is that the Nazis did not have a parliamentary majority and so they had to arrest their opponents in order to have a majority, whereas Orbán the illiberal democrat already had a parliamentary majority that was ready to make itself politically powerless. Orbán’s use of an apparent emergency as a pretext is as obvious as it had been during the refugee crisis. As much as Hungary had one of the lowest rates in the EU of refugees trying to settle there, it also had one of the lowest mortality rates from the coronavirus in Europe, less than a percentage of that of Italy when the law passed. Obviously, suspension of civil rights and the powers of the parliament will not save a single soul. The worst-hit European countries at that stage, Italy and Spain, did not take any steps away from liberal democracy in response to the crisis, let alone suspend parliament.

Meanwhile, in Israel Netanyahu used the crisis and the health restrictions on public gathering in Israel to suspend the courts that should have tried him for corruption and to suspend the activity of the parliament where, following the elections, his coalition parties had a narrow minority. Israel’s Supreme Court ruled against the government and in favor of the parliament. But then Netanyahu was successful in following the neo-illiberal tried-and-tested book of tricks, where it is not necessary to have a majority, as long as the majority is sufficiently divided against itself. As I write in April, he may well neutralize the courts by controlling the appointments of new judges and have a new “emergency” government that would not undo the damage his government has already inflicted on Israel’s liberal institutions, if not expand it.

Historically, societies have committed plenty of irrational hysterical actions, including sliding to political fanaticism or authoritarianism during plagues. Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, followed by the rule of the thirty tyrants, following a plague. Desperate Florentines turned to Savonarola’s fanatical theocratic authoritarianism at the height of another plague. No doubt neo-illiberals are watching the results of the dramas in Hungary and Israel and making plans for their own countries. A continuous state of medical emergency and a spreading plague are good covers for suspending or stealing elections. Still, historical experiences demonstrate that the political results of plagues more often than not tend to be temporary and disappear with them. After plagues, surviving Europeans preferred to forget and try to resume their lives where they left them. Older European cities are marked by plague columns constructed to mark the end of plagues and the restoration of the older order. We may be building political as well as epidemiological columns before long. After the plagues, politics tends to return to the status quo ante, though there are longer-term economic and social changes. The big unknown as I write is how long it will take scientists to bring this plague under control, find cures, a vaccine, and then vaccinate the population, to bring this historical episode of the plague to an end. Hungary and Israel were neo-illiberal democracies before the plague and the results of the struggle between the executive and legislative and judiciary branches of government following the plague reflect how far neo-illiberal democracy had already proceeded down the road in each country; all the authoritarian way in Hungary, and half way in Israel. So far, in this early stage, in countries that had not been on the road to illiberalism and authoritarianism already before the plague, the plague increased the popularity of incumbents irrespective of their politics, but had few other apparent political effects.

Indian neo-illiberalism has been violent and involved militias of young men. Yet, it does not falsify Runciman’s thesis above because India is not as prosperous or old as the first-world countries who turned to neo-illiberalism. Though Hindu illiberalism turned into violence against Moslem Indians, that violence was not distinctly neo-illiberal or a new political phenomenon in India. Intercommunal and political violence in India has preceded illiberalism. Violence has been a feature of Indian majoritarian politics. The new neo-illiberal element is the retreat of the federal state from its secular liberalism that should have protected minorities from the state, though not from their neighbors.

The opposite Jacksonian interpretation gained credibility when the Reichstag failed to ignite, the storm troopers made it as far as Charlottesville Virginia, but failed to arrive in the cities, and life seemed to go on for many people who were not refugees, immigrants, or members of minorities but remained in their intact social and economic bubbles; though, as I write, the plague hits the cities and the social and economic bubbles are being punctured. Previously, some people were able to tell themselves that over the centuries, democracy resulted in many types of governments, some quite unsavory. Arguably, today’s neo-illiberal populism is unexceptional in comparison with previous populist episodes such as the presidency of Andrew Jackson, an uncouth representative of rural frontier America, who supported slavery and resented the urban, educated, wealthy parts of the country. Democracy in America and its liberal independent institutions survived Jackson. Donald Trump himself seems to encourage such an interpretation. He hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office and paid a respectful visit to Jackson’s gravesite, though some of his statements indicated that he was not too familiar with the history of Jackson’s presidency and when he lived. Arguably, populism ebbs and flows, while democracy and liberal institutions persist. All democracies have some populist aspects. As long as populism does not dominate government policies, the system can contain it without becoming self-destructive. People do not die each time they indulge in an excessive piece of cake or smoke a cigar. At least not immediately.

Yet, though the current crisis has been fueled by populism, and the dramatic noises of populism drown the steady droning of neo-illiberalism, its substance is neo-illiberal democracy, the unprecedented systematic attempt to deconstruct the independent branches and institutions of the liberal state. Populist president Jackson was a lawyer and he knew better than to challenge the constitution, such as it was, allowing slavery. The most extreme challenge president Jackson posed to liberal institutions was in his struggle with the Bank of the United States (Signer 2009). A comparable contemporary liberal populist to Jackson is Trump’s first Attorney General, former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, a populist xenophobe and likely racist, but also a liberal in respecting the constitution and the separation of powers. Trump, Orbán, Kaczyński, and so on, by contrast, are strictly illiberal. They have no respect for the rule of law and the institutions in charge of enforcing it.

The final Singaporean misinterpretation of neo-illiberal democracy is Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán’s deliberate misrepresentation of illiberal democracy as resembling Singapore’s government. Orbán attempted to confuse a prosperous technocratic liberal authoritarianism with its diametrical opposite, populist neo-illiberal democracy. Using the dialectical trope of totalitarian rhetoric, the identification between opposites, Orbán attempted to associate his regime with the successful modernization and wealth of its political opposite. Singapore enjoys the rule of law and independent judiciary and government free of corruption, though with authoritarian limitations on political freedoms and the freedom of the press (Rajah 2012). It is rich and attracts immigrants. Hungary is the opposite. It is among the five poorest members of the European Union on a per capita basis, and its skilled and young workers try to move to more liberal countries.