Читать книгу How to Lose a Country - Ece Temelkuran, Ece Temelkuran - Страница 9

‘We have to take the deer! We have to!’

So says four-year-old Leylosh, shouting to emphasise the fact that we simply must put the imaginary deer on the infinitely large back seat of our imaginary car, which is already filled by several other animals, including a dinosaur we luckily managed to rescue from freezing. We are driving from Lewisburg, a once-thriving small farming town, sixty miles north of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to her granny’s house in Istanbul, to deliver the Lego duck that we built and then cooked on a miniature stove. Leylosh is squinting in the imaginary wind and providing a scary winter soundtrack for our arduous journey: ‘Oouuuuvvoouuuv!’ Now and then she checks with a quick side glance to make sure I’m fully engaged. Satisfied with my powers of imagination, she turns back to reassure our passengers: ‘Don’t be afraid. We’ll be at Granny’s soon. We don’t have to go to school today.’

In a less exciting parallel universe, she will have to go to kindergarten in fifteen minutes, and in an hour’s time I’ll have to give a lecture at Bucknell University, a liberal arts college, on ‘rising populism’ and my novel The Time of Mute Swans, which partly deals with how Turkey became the perfect case study for the topic. Leylosh’s mother Sezi, a long-time friend who teaches at Bucknell, talked me into this, because she believes that American academia needs to hear about the Turkish experience and to be warned about the later stages of the Trump administration. It is therefore now time to stop teaching Leylosh how to ‘kiss like a fish’ and return to my real-life role: floating like the angel with a bugle in Bruegel’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels to alarm the wool-gathering masses. Sezi keeps checking her watch. But neither Leylosh nor I are keen to get out of the imaginary car, and in a way, her reasons are no less political than mine.

Sezi is a fortepianist and an expert on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical instruments. Leylosh probably thinks all mothers play Chopin on antique pianos to persuade their daughters to eat their breakfast. It’s doubtless no more unusual to her that her father is an anthropologist who periodically visits indigenous tribes in the Amazon rainforest. Her school, a kindergarten for children whose parents work at the university, a safe haven for children of cosmopolitan academics in a small American town, is full of kids like her; they speak at least two languages, travel regularly between continents, and are blissfully unaware that what’s normal to them is far from ordinary.

‘She used to love going to school,’ says Sezi. But lately the mornings have begun resounding with cries of ‘No, Mom! No!’ As Leylosh holds on to the door of our imaginary car, refusing to leave for school, her mother explains that this new attitude, like many other inconveniences in the US, began after Trump came to power. Herein lie the political troubles of the four-year-old Leylosh.

The morning after the election, Leylosh arrived at school with her mother. The three teachers were waiting at the door, hands on their hips and brandishing new sardonic smiles. ‘It was as if they were telling us to “suck it up”!’ says Sezi. ‘They’re all Trump supporters who are taking care of the children of Bernie or Hillary voters. The tension has been gradually mounting ever since, and it now affects the children.’ Sezi stops to find the right words: ‘These people, they changed all of a sudden, it’s as if they are now a different species.’

As the Argentinian proverb goes, ‘A small town is a vast hell.’ This is especially the case in today’s world, because the phenomenon of rising populism has a lot to do with the provinces. Small towns are often where people first encounter this social and political current. However, they wouldn’t describe it as diligently as the political analysts – and even if they did, their concerns would go largely unheard. The mobilising narrative of the new political direction feeds on provincial perceptions of life and the world, perceptions that are seen as too archaic to be understood by cosmopolitans. The small, unsettling changes in the provinces can seem inconsequential in big cities, where monitoring one’s neighbours is a lost habit. It is therefore only long after right-wing populism has been felt by those in the provinces that it is diagnosed by the political analysts and big media.

Sezi gives me more examples of how people’s general attitudes towards one another in her small town changed after Trump’s victory, examples that might sound insignificant to big-city folk: ostentatiously smirking when the liberal academics enter local restaurants, or not removing ‘Make America Great Again’ signs from front gardens months after the election, and so on. As the examples multiply, it’s as if she’s trying to describe a strange smell: ‘It’s like it was already there, boiling away silently, and Trump’s victory activated something, some dark motion was unleashed.’

Something has indeed been unleashed around the Western world. In several countries an invisible, odourless gas is travelling from the provinces to the big cities: a gas formed of grudges. A scent of an ending is drifting through the air. The word is spreading. Real people are moving from small towns towards the big cities to finally have the chance to be the captains of their souls. Nothing will stay unchanged, they say. A new we is emerging. A we that probably does not include you, the worried reader of this book. And I remember how that sudden exclusion once felt.

‘No, we are different. We are not a party, we’re a movement.’

It is autumn 2002, and a brand-new party called the Justice and Development Party, AKP, with a ridiculous lightbulb for an emblem, is participating in a Turkish general election for the first time. Being a political columnist, I travel around the country, stopping off in remote cities and small towns, to take the nation’s pulse before polling day. As I sit with representatives of other, conventional parties in a coffee shop in a small town in central Anatolia, three men stand outside the circle, their eyebrows raised with an air of lofty impatience, waiting for me to finish my interview. I invite them to join us at the table, but they politely refuse, as if I am sitting in the middle of an invisible swamp they don’t want to dirty themselves in. When the others eventually prepare to leave, they approach me as elegantly as macho Anatolians can. ‘You may call us a movement, the movement of the virtuous,’ the man says. ‘We are more than a party. We will change everything in this corrupt system.’ He is ostentatiously proud, and rarely grants me eye contact.

The other two men nod approvingly as their extremely composed spokesman fires off phrases like ‘dysfunctional system’, ‘new representatives of the people, not tainted by politics’, ‘a new Turkey with dignity’. Their unshakeable confidence, stemming from vague yet strongly held convictions, reminds me of the young revolutionary leftists I’ve written about for a number of years in several countries. They give off powerful, mystic vibes, stirring the atmosphere in the coffee shop of this desperate small town. They are like visiting disciples from a higher moral plane, their chins raised like young Red Guards in Maoist propaganda posters. When the other small-town politicians mock their insistence on the distinction between their ‘movement’ and other parties, the three men appear to gain in stature from the condescending remarks, like members of a religious cult who embrace humiliation to tighten the bonds of their inner circle.

Their spokesman taps his fist gently, but sternly, on the table to finish his speech: ‘We are the people of Turkey. And when I say people, I mean real people.’

This is the first time I hear the term ‘real people’ used in this sense. The other politicians, from both left and right, are annoyed by the phrase, and protest mockingly: ‘What’s that supposed to mean? We’re the real people of Turkey too.’ But it’s too late; the three men delight in being the original owners of the claim. It is theirs now.

After seeing the same scene repeat itself with little variation in several other towns, I write in my column: ‘They will win.’ I am teased by my colleagues, but in November 2002 the silly lightbulb party of the three men in the coffee shop becomes the new government of Turkey. The movement that gathered power in small towns all over the country has now ruled Turkey uninterrupted for seventeen years, changing everything, just as they promised.

‘We have the same thing here. Exactly the same thing! But who are these real people?’

It’s now May 2017, and I am first in London, then Warsaw, talking about Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy, telling different audiences the story of how real people took over my country politically and socially, strangling all the others who they deemed unreal. People nod with concern, and every question-and-answer session starts with the same question: ‘Where the hell did these real people come from?’

They recognise the lexicon, because the politicised and mobilised provincial grudge has announced its grand entrance onto the global stage with essentially the same statement in several countries: ‘This is a movement, a new movement of real people beyond and above all political factions.’ And now many want to know who these real people are, and why this movement has invaded the high table of politics. They speak of it as of a natural disaster, predictable only after it unexpectedly takes place. I am reminded of those who, each summer, are surprised by the heatwave in Scandinavia, and only then recall the climate-change news they read the previous winter. I tell them this ‘new’ phenomenon has been with us, boiling away, for quite some time.

In July 2017, a massive iceberg broke off from Antarctica. For several days the news channels showed the snow-white monster floating idly along. It was the majestic flagship of our age, whispering from screens around the world in creaking ice language: ‘This is the final phase of the age of disintegration. Everything that stands firm will break off, everything will fall to pieces.’ It wasn’t a spectre but a solid monster telling the story of our times: that from the largest to the smallest entity on planet earth, nothing will remain as we knew it. The United Nations, that huge, impotent body created to foster global peace, is crumbling, while the smallest unit, the soul, is decomposing as it has never been before. A single second can be divided up into centuries during which the wealthy few prepare uncontaminated living spaces in which to live longer while tens of thousands of children in Yemen die of cholera, a pre-twentieth-century disease. The iceberg was silently screaming, The centre cannot hold.

The progressive movements that sprang up all around the world, from the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999 to the 2011 uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, were in many respects a response to these fractured times. In a world where more people are talking, but fewer are being heard, they wanted to tell the rest of humanity, through their bodies, that regardless of our differences we can, and indeed must, come together to find collective answers to our age of disintegration, otherwise everything will fall apart. They demanded justice and dignity. They demanded that the world realise that a counter-movement is necessary to reverse the global course of events. They showed us that retreat is not the only response to the global loss of hope. They were the ones who resisted the temptation to ‘yield to the process of mere disintegration’, and rejected the notion that it is ‘a historical necessity’.* Their answer to disintegration was to create new, invigorating, temporary and miniature models of loose collectives in squares around the world. In several different languages they responded to the famous words of W.B. Yeats with the message that, if people unite, the centre can hold.

As time passed, however, many of these progressive movements ended up suppressed, marginalised or swallowed back into the conventional political system. For several understandable reasons they couldn’t accomplish what they started – not yet. However, their voice was clearly heard when they announced globally that representative democracy (abused by financial institutions and stripped of social justice) was undergoing its biggest crisis since the Second World War.

Today we are witnessing the response to similar fears of an entirely different mass of people, one with a more limited vocabulary, smaller dreams for the world, and less faith in the collective survival of humanity. They too say that they want to change the status quo, but they want to do it to build a world in which they are among the lucky few who survive under the leadership of a strong man. It is no coincidence that ‘wall’, whether literal or virtual, has become the watchword among rising right-wing political movements. ‘Yes, the world is disintegrating,’ they say, ‘and we, the real people, want to make sure we’re on the sunny side of the dividing wall.’ It is not that they want to stand by and watch babies die in the Mediterranean, it is just that they don’t want to die as well. What we are hearing, as it carries from the provinces to the big cities, is the survival cry of those whose fear of drowning in the rising sea of disintegration trumps their interest in the survival of others. And so, ruthlessly, they move.

Political movements are promises of transition from actuality to potentiality – unlike political parties, which must operate as part of actuality, playing the game but standing still. This is why, from Turkey to the United States, including the most developed countries with their seemingly strong democratic institutions, such as France, the UK and Germany, we have seen people assemble behind relentless, audacious populist leaders, in order to move together and attack the actuality they call the establishment; to attack the game itself, deeming it dysfunctional and corrupt. A movement of real people is the new zeitgeist, a promise to bring back human dignity by draining the swamp of the stagnant water that politics has become. In other words, les invisibles, the masses, long considered to be indifferent to politics and world affairs, are globally withdrawing their assumed consent from the current representative system, and the sound of it is like a chunk of ice breaking off from Antarctica.

The job of changing the global course of events is, of course, too big a task for the fragile I, and so we is making a comeback in the world of politics and ethics. And this comeback is at the heart of the global phenomenon that we are witnessing. We wants to depart from the mainland of political language, dismantle it and build a new language for the real people. If one wants to know who the real people are, one must ask the question, what is we? Or why is it that I don’t want to be I any more, but we?

It is one of those crowded Sundays on the European side of the Bosporus in the summer of 2015. Sunday is the day that the upper-middle classes of Istanbul move en masse to the cafés on the seaside for the famous Turkish breakfast, which lasts more or less the entire day. The cafés are located alongside the Ottoman fortress walls, where bloody wars were fought to enable us to one day have these glorious feasts and to be irritated when our order is late. There is a family over there, on the pavement, in their best outfits. Not wealthy enough to sit at the cafés, but able to make ends meet so that they can stroll through the richest neighbourhood on the Bosporus and watch the arduous weekend breakfast campaign. The two small kids are being led by their young mother, who is trying hard not to make it too obvious that this is their first time in this part of the city. The father seems to be searching for something on the ground as he walks. Then he stops, and points to a spot on the pavement. ‘Here! Here!’ he shouts happily. ‘This is the one. This one. I put that there.’ His gaze then proudly travels the full length of the paving. ‘This is the longest road in Istanbul,’ he says, ‘and we made it.’

I have always wondered whether the families of the fallen workers of the great bridges, great tunnels, great roads, ever visit the little memorial plaques attached to those constructions. Do they take pictures in front of them, pointing at a name? And is it essential that they describe the road as ‘the longest’, the tunnel ‘the deepest’, their country ‘the greatest’? Otherwise, will their relative’s life and death be meaningless? Some of us cannot and never will understand why a man who can hardly make a living is proud of the fact that Erdoğan’s is ‘the greatest palace’, or why he rejoices when he hears that the daily cost of running that palace is ten times more than he earns in a year. For many of those who are privileged enough to be in a position to try to analyse the important matters of big politics, the ordinary man’s feeling of smallness and the rage it engenders are inaccessible, and so it is equally hard for them to comprehend how that smallness might desperately crave to be part of a we that promises greatness.

‘I play to people’s fantasies. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It is an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion.’

In his debut work of literature, The Art of the Deal,† Donald Trump was already describing the ‘truthful hyperbole’ that would later put him in the White House. He must be proud to have demonstrated that in order to become the American president he had no need to read any books other than his own. Trump knew one simple fact about people that many of us choose to ignore: that even though individualism as a concept has been elevated for many decades, the ordinary man still needs a shepherd to lead him to greatness. He knew how diminishing and disappointing it can feel to realise that you are only mediocre, in a world where you have constantly been told that you can be anything you want to be.

He also knew that the call to break the imaginary chains of slavery preventing the real people from reaching greatness would resonate with his supporters, regardless of the fact that it sounded absurd to those who had had the chance to become what they wanted to be. ‘It’s not you,’ he told them. ‘It’s them who prevent us from being great.’ He gave them something solid to hate, and they gave him their votes. And once he started speaking in the name of we – as has happened many times over the course of history – they were ready to sacrifice themselves. As Americans know very well from their own constitution, the words ‘We, the people’ can build a new country and bring empires to their knees. And believe it or not, even the British, a people who take pride in not being easily moved, are also not immune to the allure of we.

‘We have fought against the multinationals, we have fought against the big merchant banks, we have fought against big politics, we have fought against lies, corruption and deceit … [This is] a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people.’

Although this may sound like Salvador Allende, Chile’s Marxist leader, speaking after his election victory in 1970, it was in fact Nigel Farage, the erstwhile leader of UKIP – and incidentally a former banker himself. He uttered these words on the morning of 24 June 2016, the day after Britain’s Brexit referendum. He too was using the age-old magic of speaking in the name of ‘the people’. On the same day, however, many cosmopolitan Londoners, who were automatically excluded from this inflaming narrative, found themselves wondering who these real people were, and why they bore such a grudge against the big cities and the educated. And those who were old enough were beginning to hear echoes sounding from across the decades.

After the horrific experiences of the Second World War, not many people in Western Europe expected the masses ever again to lust after becoming a single totality. Most happily believed that if humans were free to choose what they could buy, love and believe, they would be content. For more than half a century, the word I was promoted in the public sphere by the ever-grinning market economy and its supporting characters, the dominant political discourse and mainstream culture. But now we has returned as the very essence of the movement, burnishing it with a revolutionary glow, and many have found themselves unprepared for this sudden resurrection.

Their voice has been so loud and so unexpected that worried critics have struggled to come up with an up-to-date political lexicon with which to describe it, or counter it. The critical mainstream intelligentsia scrambled to gather ammunition from history, but unfortunately most of it dated back to the Nazi era. The word ‘fascism’ sounded passé, childish even, and ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘totalitarianism’ were too ‘khaki’ for this Technicolor beast in a neoliberal world. Yet during the last couple of years numerous political self-help books filled with quotes from George Orwell have been hastily written, and all of a sudden Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is back on the bestseller lists after a sixty-eight-year hiatus. The hip-sounding term that the mainstream intelligentsia chose to use for this retro lust for totality was ‘rising populism’.

‘Rising populism’ is quite a convenient term for our times. It both conceals the right-wing ideological content of the movements in question, and ignores the troubling question of the shady desire of I to melt into we. It masterfully portrays the twisted charismatic leaders who are mobilising the masses as mad men, and diligently dismisses the masses as deceived, ignorant people. It also washes away the backstory that might reveal how we ended up in this mess. In addition to this, there is the problem that the populists do not define themselves as ‘populists’. In a supposedly post-ideology world, they are free to claim to be beyond politics, and above political institutions.

Political thought has not been ready to fight this new fight either. One of the main stumbling blocks is that the critics of the phenomenon have realised that ‘rising populism’ is the strange fruit of the current practice of democracy. As they looked deeper into the question they soon discovered that it wasn’t a wound that, all of a sudden, appeared on the body politic, but was in fact a mutant child of crippled representative democracy.

Moreover, a new ontological problem was at play thanks to the right-wing spin doctors. Academics, journalists and the well-educated found themselves included in the enemy of the people camp, part of the corrupt establishment, and their criticism of, or even their carefully constructed comments on, this political phenomenon were considered to be oppressive by the real people and the movement’s spin doctors. It was difficult for them to adapt to the new environment in which they had become the ‘oppressive elite’ – if not ‘fascists’ – despite the fact that some of them had dedicated their lives to the emancipation of the very masses who now held them in such contempt. One of them was my grandmother.

‘Are they now calling me a fascist, Ece?’

My grandmother, one of the first generation of teachers in the young Turkish republic, a committed secular woman who had spent many years bringing literacy to rural children, turned to me one evening in 2005 while we were watching a TV debate featuring AKP spin doctors and asked, ‘They did say “fascist”, right?’ She dismissed my attempt to explain the peculiarities of the new political narratives and exclaimed, ‘What does that even mean, anyway? Oppressive elite! I am not an elite. I starved and suffered when I was teaching village kids in the 1950s.’

Her arms, having been folded defensively, were now in the air, her finger pointing as she announced, as if addressing a classroom, ‘No! Tomorrow I am going to go down to their local party centre and tell them that I am as real as them.’ And she did, only to return home speechless, dragging her exhausted eighty-year-old legs off to bed at midday for an unprecedented nap of defeat. The only words I could get out of her were: ‘They are different, Ece. They are …’ Despite her excellent linguistic skills, she couldn’t find an appropriate adjective.

I was reminded of my grandmother’s endeavour when a seventy-something American woman approached me with some hesitation after a talk I gave at Harvard University in 2017. Evidently one of those people who are hesitant about bothering others with personal matters, she gave me a fast-forward version of her own story: she had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s, teaching English to kids in a remote Turkish town, then a dedicated high school teacher in the USA, and since her retirement she had become a serious devotee of Harvard seminars. She was no less stunned than my grandmother at the fact that Trump voters were calling her a member of the ‘oppressive elite’. She said, ‘I try to explain myself to them when we talk about politics, but …’ A ruthless political narrative that labelled her lifelong labours as both unimportant and oppressive was gaining traction. In this new political scenario, she found herself trying to crawl out of the deep hole that had been dug for elites, a hole that was proving too deep for her frail legs. The more serious problem was that the real people never asked her to join them, or offered to help her climb out of the hole. All they demanded from her was ‘respect’.

‘Respect is something I hear a lot about from Trump voters. The spirit of the sentiment is often: “Maybe Trump’s a jerk, maybe he won’t do what he says he will, but he acts as if people like me are important, and the people who disrespect me aren’t.”’

In September 2016 the Chicago Tribune published a Bloomberg opinion piece by Megan McArdle.‡ As she had expressed before in other columns, McArdle was stunned by the fact that any conversation with Trump supporters was usually brought to a halt by the word ‘respect’. When Trump entered the scene, bucketloads of ‘respect’ flushed through American politics, and Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ comment about Trump supporters gave them yet another angle to exploit. Suddenly the media was questioning its own ability to respect ordinary people. Self-criticism among journalists, together with the massive attacks on the media from Trump supporters for being disrespectful towards real people, became impossible to ignore. So much so that after the election the New York Times opened a ‘Trump voters only’ section in which they could express themselves free from the condescending filter of the elitist media. Even if the new platform might have functioned as a rich source of raw research material for academics, it was definitely a triumph for Trump voters in their quest for gaining respect, a victorious battle in the long war of recognition.

We always holds its challengers to ethical standards (such as objectivity) that it does not itself feel obliged to meet, because the original owners of we have a monopoly on morality and the privilege of being the real voice of the masses. End of story. Critical voices become so paralysed that they don’t notice that the ‘respect’ we demand of them is actually an unquestioning silence.

The magic word ‘respect’ is also frequently used by the right-wing Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán. ‘Respect to the Hungarians!’ was his party’s 2014 European Parliament electoral slogan. Between then and the end of 2017, Orbán relentlessly reiterated the central importance of respect. He demanded respect from Germany, the United States and the EU, and when attacked for his xenophobic policies he replied: ‘According to my thinking, this is a sign of respect.’ He announced his solidarity with Poland because Poland wasn’t respected enough, and offered his respect to Trump, Vladimir Putin and Erdoğan. He also complained that ‘respect is a scarce commodity in Europe’, and asserted that only respect could save the continent.

Erdoğan likewise introduced excessive amounts of ‘respect’ into Turkish politics after he came to power in 2002. He repeatedly demonstrated to the Turkish people that respect no longer had to be earned, it could simply be unconditionally demanded. Whenever there were serious poll-rigging claims, he demanded respect for ‘my people and their choices’, just as he demanded respect for court decisions only when they resulted in his opponents being imprisoned. However, when the Constitutional Court decided to release journalists arrested for criticising him, he said, ‘I don’t respect the court decision and I won’t abide by it.’ As with Orbán, Trump and others, respect is a one-way street for Erdoğan: he only accepts being on the receiving end.

‘[Respect] is what Putin really wants,’ wrote Fiona Hill in a piece for the Brookings Institution’s website in February 2015.§ She continued, ‘He wants respect in the old-fashioned, hard-power sense of the word.’

‘You come to me and say, “Give me justice.” But you don’t ask with respect.’ This quote comes not from another respect-obsessed political leader, but from Don Corleone, in the opening scene of The Godfather. One might easily mix them up, because the global circuit of exchanged respect (Geert Wilders respecting Farage, Farage respecting Trump, Trump respecting Putin, Putin asking for more respect for Trump, and all the way back round again, much as Hitler and Stalin once voiced their respect for one another) has started to sound like some supranational mafia conversation. The web of respect among authoritarian leaders has expanded so much that one might forget that this whole masquerade started on a smaller scale, with a seemingly harmless question. It started when the ordinary people began transforming themselves into real people by demanding a little bit of political politeness: ‘Don’t we deserve some simple respect?’

But here’s how the chain of events goes further down the line when respect becomes a political commodity. When the real people become a political movement, their initial, rhetorical question is this: ‘Do our beliefs, our way of life, our choices not matter at all?’ Of course, nobody can possibly say that they do not, and so the leaders of the movement begin to appear in public, and take to the stage as respected, equal contributors to the political discussion.

The next password is tolerance, tolerance for differences. Then some opinion leaders, who’ve noticed social tensions arising from polarisation in the public sphere, throw in the term social peace. It sounds wise and soothing, so nobody wants to dismiss it. However, as the movement gains momentum, tolerance and respect become the possessions of its members, which only they can grant to others, and the leader starts pushing the ‘social peace’ truce to the limits, demanding tolerance and respect every time he or she picks a new fight.

But at a particular point in time, respect becomes a scarce commodity. For Turkey, this invisible shift happened in 2007, on the election night that brought the AKP a second term in power. Erdoğan said, ‘Those who did not vote for us are also different colours of Turkey.’ At the time, for many political journalists the phrase sounded like the embracing voice of a compassionate father seeking social peace. However, not long afterwards, Erdoğan started speaking Godfather. He stopped asking for respect and raised the bar, warning almost everyone, from European politicians to small-town public figures, that they were required to ‘know their place’. And when that warning was not enough, he followed it up with threats. On 11 March 2017, Turkey was mired in a diplomatic row with Germany and the Netherlands after they banned Turkish officials from campaigning in their countries in support of a referendum on boosting the Turkish president’s powers. Erdoğan said, ‘If Europe continues this way, no European in any part of the world can walk safely on the streets.’ In threatening an entire continent, he’d become the cruel Michael Corleone of The Godfather Part II.

Even for those countries that have only recently begun to experience a similar social and political process, this chain of events is already beginning to seem like a cliché. Nevertheless, the way in which the logic of contemporary identity politics serves this process is still relatively novel, and is rarely discussed. In the twenty-first century it’s much easier for right-wing populist movements to demand respect by wrapping themselves in the bulletproof political membrane of a cultural and political identity and exploiting a political correctness that has disarmed critical commentators. Moreover, the use of a sacrosanct identity narrative turns the tables, shining the interrogator’s lamp on the critics of the movement instead of on the movement itself, making them ask, ‘Are we not respectful enough, and is that why they’re so enraged?’ As the opposition becomes mired in compromise, the movement begins to ask the probing questions: ‘Are you sure you’re not intimidating us out of arrogance? Can you be certain this is not discrimination?’

And we all know what happens when self-doubting intellect encounters ruthless, self-evident ignorance; to believers in the self-evident, the basic need to question sounds like not having an answer, and embarrassed silence in the face of brazen shamelessness comes across as speechless awe. Politicised ignorance then proudly pulls up a chair alongside members of the entire political spectrum and dedicates itself to dominating the table, elbowing everyone continually while demanding, ‘Are you sure your arm was in the right place?’ And the opposition finds itself having to bend out of shape to follow the new rules of the table in order to be able to keep sitting there.

‘We become increasingly uncomfortable when people take advantage of our freedom and ruin things here.’

These words came from a Dutch politician, but not the notorious xenophobe Geert Wilders. They are from his opponent, the Dutch prime minister and leader of the centre-right Liberal Party, Mark Rutte, in a letter to ‘all Dutch people’ published on 23 January 2017. Although the words seemingly referred to anyone who ‘took advantage’, they were in fact aimed at immigrants. Rutte’s opposition to right-wing populism was being distorted by the fact that he felt obliged to demonstrate that he shared the concerns of the real people: ordinary, decent people. He must have felt that in order to keep sitting at the top table of politics, he had to compromise. And this is the man who two months later would bring joy to Dutch liberals by beating Wilders. Many Dutch voters accepted, albeit unwillingly, the new reality in which the least worst option is the only choice. The manufactured we is now strong enough not only to mobilise and energise supporters of the movement by giving them a long-forgotten taste of being part of a larger entity, but to affect the rest of the political sphere by pushing and pulling the opposition until it transforms itself irreversibly. It creates a new normality, which takes us all closer towards insanity.

‘We are Muslims too.’

This was the most frequent introduction offered by social democrat participants in TV debates in the first years that the AKP held power in Turkey. Just as what constituted being part of the we, ‘the real, ordinary, decent people’, meant supporting Brexit in Britain or accepting a bit of racism in the Netherlands, so did being conservative, provincial Sunni Muslim in Turkey. Once the parameters had been set by the original owners of we, everyone else started trying to prove that they too prayed – just in private. Soon, Arabic words most people had never heard in their lives before became part of the public debate, and social democrats tried to compete with the ‘real Muslims’ despite their limited knowledge of religion. The AKP spin doctors were quick to put new religious concepts into circulation, and critics were forever on the back foot, constantly having to prepare for pop quizzes on ancient scriptures.

One might wonder what would happen if you passed all the tests for being as real as them, as I did once. In 2013, after studying the Quran for over a year while writing my novel Women Who Blow on Knots, I was ready for the quiz. When the book was published I was invited to take part in a TV debate with a veiled AKP spin doctor – a classic screen charade that craves a political catfight between a secular and a religious woman. As I recited the verse in Arabic that gave the title to my novel and answered her questions on the Quran she smiled patronisingly and said, ‘Well done!’ I was politely reminded of the fact that I was at best an apprentice of the craft she had mastered, and somehow owned. She made it very clear that people like me could only ever inhabit the outer circle of the real people. No matter how hard we toiled, we could only ever be members of the despised elite. Any attempt to hang out at one of Nigel Farage’s ‘real people’s pubs’ or a Trump supporters’ barbecue would doubtless end with a similar patronising smile, and maybe a condescending pat on the shoulder: ‘Way to go, kiddo!’

One of the interesting and rarely mentioned aspects of this process is that at times the cynical and disappointed citizens, even though they are critical of the movement, secretly enjoy the fact that the table has been messed up. The shocked face of the establishment amuses them. They know that the massive discontent of the neglected masses will eventually produce an equally massive political reaction, and they tend to believe that the movement might have the potential to be this long-expected corrective response to injustice. Until they find out it is not. ‘The insinuation that the exterminator is not wholly in the wrong,’ says J.P. Stern, ‘is the secret belief of the age of Kafka and Hitler.’¶ The limitless confidence of the movement is not, therefore, entirely based on its own merit; the undecided, as well as many an adversary, can furnish the movement with confidence through their own hesitations. After all, there’s nothing wrong with saying the establishment is corrupt, right? By keeping its ideological goals vague and its words sweet, the movement seduces many by allowing them to attribute their own varying ideals or disappointments to it. What is wrong with being decent and real anyway? The vagueness of the narrative and the all-embracing we allow the movement’s leader to create contradictory, previously impossible alliances to both the right and the left of the political spectrum. The leader, thanks to the ideological shapelessness of the movement, can also attract finance from opposite ends of the social strata, drawing from the poorest to the richest. Most importantly, as the leader speaks of exploitation, inequality, injustice and consciousness, borrowing terminology and references from both right- and left-wing politics, growing numbers of desperate, self-doubting people, and a fair few prominent opinion-makers besides, find themselves saying: ‘He actually speaks a lot of sense. Nobody can say that a large part of society wasn’t neglected and dismissed, right?’

‘I don’t understand how they won. I’m telling you, lady, not a single passenger said they were voting for them. So who did vote for these guys?’

This was the standard chat of taxi drivers in Turkey after the AKP’s second election victory. As a consequence, ‘So who did vote for these guys?’ became a popular intro to many a newspaper column. Clearly neither taxi drivers nor the majority of opinion-piece writers could make sense of the unceasing success of the movement, despite rising concerns about it. After hearing the same question several times, I eventually answered one of the taxi drivers with a line that became the intro to one of my own columns: ‘Evidently they all catch the bus.’

After the Brexit referendum, many people in London doubtless asked themselves a similar question. If I’d been a British columnist, the title for my column might have been ‘The Angry Cod Beats European Ideals’. Among the groups who voted Leave in the referendum were Scottish fishermen, who have obsessed for many years over the fact that European fishermen were allowed to fish in Scottish waters, as well as pissed off about an array of other European things that are of next to no consequence to Scotland. Similarly, in countries such as Hungary and Poland where right-wing populism is in control of the political discourse there has always been a ‘condescending Brussels elite’, or ‘the damn Germans’, who stand in the way of better lives for ordinary men, as well as the nation’s ‘greatness’.

I am aware that what I have written above might seem like the condescending remarks of a cosmopolitan, unreal person, and that there is, of course, a real and solid sense of victimhood behind all of these new movements: many of their members are indeed the people who catch the bus, and who have seen the price of their fish and chips rise. It would therefore, as Greek economist and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis says, be inconsequential mental gymnastics for intellectuals to analyse these movements only ‘psychoanalytically, culturally, anthropologically, aesthetically, and of course in terms of identity politics’.** And I agree with him on the fact that ‘the unceasing class war that has been waged against the poor since the late 1970s’ has been intentionally omitted from the narrative, and carefully kept outside the mainstream global discussion. Moreover, these right-wing populist movements can, in fact, also be seen as newly-built, fast-moving vehicles for the rich, a means for the ruling class to get rid of the regulations that restrain the free-market economy by throwing the entire field of politics into disarray. After all, there is certainly real suffering, genuine victimhood behind these movements.

However, they do not only emerge from real suffering, but also from manufactured victimhood. In fact, it is the latter that provides the movement with most of its energy and creates its unique characteristics.

In Turkey, the manufactured victimhood was that religious people were oppressed and humiliated by the secular elite of the establishment. For Brexiteers it is that they have been deprived of Britain’s greatness. For Trump voters it is that Mexicans are stealing their jobs. For Polish right-wing populists it is Nazis committing crimes against humanity on their soil without their participation and the global dismissal of the nation’s fierce resistance to the German invasion in 1939. For Germany’s AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) it is the ‘lazy Greeks’ who benefit from hard-working real Europeans, etc. The content really doesn’t matter, because in the later stages it changes constantly, transforms and is replaced in relation to emerging needs and the aims of the movement.

And every time the masses adapt to the new narrative, regardless of the fact that it often contradicts how the movement began in the first place. In Turkey, the Gülen movement, a supranational religious network led by an imam who currently lives in Pennsylvania, was an integral part of Erdoğan’s movement, until it was labelled terrorist overnight. The same AKP ministers and party members who had knelt to kiss the imam Fethullah Gülen’s hand were, less than twenty-four hours later, falling over themselves to curse him, and none of Erdoğan’s supporters questioned this shift. Doubtless Trump voters did not find it odd when the FBI, Trump’s very best friend during the probing of Hillary Clinton’s emails scandal, all of a sudden became ‘disgraceful’ after it started questioning whether Trump’s election campaign had colluded with the Russian government. Instead, Fox News called the FBI a ‘criminal cabal’ and started talking about a possible coup, confident that Trump’s supporters would follow the new lead, feeling, as their leader did, victimised by the disrespectful establishment. Once the identification of the masses and the movement with the leader begins, the ever-changing nature of the content of the manufactured victimhood becomes insignificant. And when the leader is a master of ‘truthful hyperbole’, the content even becomes irrelevant.

But how, one might ask, did the masses, dismissing the entirety of world history, start moving against their own interests, and against what are so obviously the wrong targets? Not the cheap-labour-chasing giant corporations, but poor Mexicans; not the cruelty of free-market economics, but French fishermen; not the causes of poverty, but the media. How did they become so vindictive towards such irrelevant groups? Why do they demand respect from the educated elite, but not from the owners of multinational companies? And why did they do this by believing in a man just because he was seemingly ‘one of them’? ‘This is almost childish,’ one might think. ‘It seems infantile.’ And it is. That’s why, first and foremost, such leaders need to infantilise the people.

Infantilisation of the masses through infantilisation of the political language is crucial, as we shall see in the next chapter. Otherwise you cannot make them believe that they can all climb into an imaginary car and travel across continents together. Besides, once you infantilise the common political narrative, it becomes easier to mobilise the masses, and from then on you can promise them anything.

Sezi promises Leylosh an ‘evening surprise’ to persuade her to go to school. I ask what the surprise is. ‘There is no surprise, but she won’t remember probably,’ Sezi says, before laughing devilishly. ‘And if she does, I’ll just make something up.’

* Karl Jaspers, Preface to Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Schocken, 1951).

† Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal (Random House, 1987).

‡ Megan McArdle, ‘“Deplorables” and the Myth of the Single-Issue Voter’, Bloomberg, 19 September 2016.

§ Fiona Hill, ‘This is What Putin Really Wants’, Brookings, 24 February 2015.

¶ Quoted in Michael Wood, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

** Yanis Varoufakis, ‘The High Cost of Denying Class War’, Project Syndicate, 8 December 2017.