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Democracy Against Liberalism
Its Rise and Fall
Aviezer Tucker
polity
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Copyright © Aviezer Tucker 2020
The right of Aviezer Tucker to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4120-1 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4121-8 (paperback)
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1 What’s Your Problem? Illiberalism, Populism, Authoritarianism
We have been living in interesting times recently, as the apocryphal Chinese curse goes. A political apocalypse seems to follow a cascade of calamities, rolling waves of economic recessions and downturns, social discontents, and political upheavals that have reinforced each other since 2008. This “return of history” threatens to replace liberal democracy with illiberal populism.
Populist neo-illiberalism has generated engaged interest and earnest confusion in equal measures. The verb “to happen,” especially in the indefinite passive voice has become the key political verb. Politicians, commentators, and social scientists reacted as if a meteor had stricken the political planet. Nobody quite understood what hit them. Nobody was responsible, but everybody has become anxious. A telling example is Hillary Clinton’s electoral self-postmortem autopsy, entitled What Happened? Madeleine Albright in a book entitled Fascism: A Warning (2018) replied: “Trump happened.” Things happen, unfortunate events “befall,” when there is no agency and no responsibility. Denial of responsibility assumes historical inevitability; it happened because it had to happen and nothing anybody could have done would have changed that. Alternatively, at the cost of accepting responsibility, it is possible to regain agency and accept that things could have been different, history could have taken a different course, had some people made better choices.
The current reversal in the fortunes of liberalism, the onset of populist-driven neo-illiberalism that gradually deconstructs institutional checks and balances has taken place in a dazzlingly broad scope of countries of entirely different histories and political cultures. It started in weakly liberal post-totalitarian democracies when populist illiberals won democratic elections in Hungary and Poland, and proceeded gradually to dismantle feeble liberal institutions. In Hungary, illiberalism progressed sufficiently to subvert free and fair elections and establish an authoritarian, illiberal, populist regime with unfair elections, where gerrymandered districting is designed to transmute a large minority or a small majority of the votes into an absolute special majority in the parliament that can revise the constitution at will, change the rules of the political game as it proceeds to guarantee the winner. The coronavirus pandemic crisis seems to have given the regime the final excuse to give even democracy the coup-de-grâce to become fully authoritarian.
Over the same period, Netanyahu’s Likud government in Israel, a country with much older, stronger,
