or anti-populist austerity and reform (as ordinary center-left politicians do). Politicians, including “left-wing populists,” make promises that they cannot or do not intend to fulfil. The real test of populism is of policy.
The undoubtedly passionate aspect of left-wing politics is the fanatic insistence of left-wing populist voters on voting for a politician who expresses precisely their convictions, ideals, and passions. Populist left-wing voters shun compromises for the sake of building a broader, less ideologically purist, coalition that can actually stand a chance of achieving a democratic majority and face the test of cold reality. This is passionate political populism in its obvious self-destructiveness, guaranteeing fragmentation and political defeats.
Weimar, Jackson, Singapore
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
