institutions, has become increasingly illiberal, attacking and attempting to take over the judiciary, the media, the civil service, educated elites, independent artists, and the Ombudsman, while attempting with decreasing success to suppress the votes of Israeli Arabs. In 2016, it became obvious that populist-illiberalism is not confined to Europe’s Eastern and Southern margins, when Donald Trump won the US presidential elections in one of the oldest continuously existing liberal democracies, and proceeded to attack the ultra-strong and well-entrenched US liberal institutions, the judiciary, the security services, the media, the Central Bank, and so on, while attempting to dismantle checks and balances within the administration and to by-pass the legislative branch of government.
Populist neo-illiberal parties have not only entered parliaments, but also coalition governments in Europe, a phenomenon that used to be confined to post-Nazi Austria. India, the largest democracy that maintained many liberal institutions in the British tradition has also turned illiberal, following the election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It attempts to disenfranchise and perhaps even deport some of its 200 million Moslem citizens through a new citizenship law. Finally, Brazil, a post-authoritarian country, also seems to have gone down the populist neo-illiberal path, with the 2019 election of Bolsonaro as president. This puzzling apparent absence of historical path dependency calls for an explanation.
Some pundits with professional or amateur interest in political theory have dusted off old, off the shelf concepts, and searched the inventories of political history for more or less appropriate analogies. Others floated new fuzzy conceptual balloons that quickly deflated from over-inflation. Other conceptual lead balloons were so overloaded with complex details that they failed to lift off the ground with more than a single example.
Conceptual “family” relations proved dysfunctional: Some authoritarian regimes are illiberal, and some illiberals are populist, and so it is possible to generate a concept of all three and call it either populist, or illiberal, or authoritarian. But political history is long and complex. Some authoritarian regimes were liberal. Even more disorienting are democratic regimes that were populist and liberal, not to mention democracies that were sometimes technocratic and illiberal. Political conceptualization by free association creates unmanageable amalgamations of historically contingent concepts. It is too easy to slide from populism to illiberalism and then to authoritarianism, not just politically, but also conceptually.
The problem is not in the political stars but in ourselves, in the expectation that the political world would align itself neatly in binary choices between good and evil, democracy and authoritarianism, liberalism and illiberalism, and the equally simplistic expectation that all the good and bad types should neatly align themselves on the same side: liberal democracy against illiberal populist authoritarians. As Mounk (2018) noted, political understanding should commence with the realization that the coupling of liberalism and democracy was a historical coincidence. Liberalism and democracy are quite independent of each other, though we have come to call the liberal–democratic coincidence, simply democracy (Sartori 1987).
A good-versus-evil Manichean, binary and unidimensional, political worldview has been reinforced since the end of the Second World War, through the Cold War. It divided the world between the democratic liberal light and the authoritarian forces of darkness. Light won over darkness in 1989–1991, and that was supposed to be the end. Liberal democracy should have been the curtain call of history. But political regimes have been multi-dimensional. Their differences are discrete yet continuous. The world is full of shades of grey, though some shades of grey are considerably closer to black or white than others.
President Trump is exceedingly adept at getting under the skin of people who dislike him, to become the center of attention. Too many scholars are happy to oblige. Many books in the democratic apocalypse genre, especially those originating from the United States, are obsessed with understanding “Trump” and how anybody could have voted for him. I try a different approach, I want to understand neo-illiberalism by “decentering” Trump from a historical comparative perspective, to pigeonhole him and his ilk in their proper comparative political-historical contexts.
This book understands and explains neo-illiberal democracy theoretically and historically. It distinguishes the contemporary episode of illiberal democracy from its previous historical incarnations. The book examines the possible causes of neo-illiberal democracy and predicts its instability. I argue that the political travails of the second decade of the twenty-first century were evitable. Finally, I propose new policies to preempt comparable crises of populist illiberalism in the future by preempting political passions, strengthening institutions, and tinkering with a few political mechanisms. If successful, these measures will result in new liberalism without nostalgia
Perhaps if theorists wish to see neo-illiberal populist democracy killed, they’d better dissect it first. Distinct political concepts should be clear, unambiguous, and above all, simple! Theorists need to weed out conceptually inessential or historically accidental properties. Only necessary minimal properties that distinguish regime types should be left in the end. Simplicity cuts through the conceptual fog and may even clear the political air.
Let’s start with “bikini” concepts that cover the bare minimum and are distinct. I introduce three discrete and continuous rather than binary political dimensions that stretch between opposing poles. The following three dimensions are sufficient and necessary for understanding the political crises that followed 2008:
| Democracy | |--------------------------------| | Authoritarianism |
| Liberalism | |--------------------------------| | Absolutism (Illiberalism) |
| Technocracy | |--------------------------------| | Populism |
Though many associate the above left and right poles with each other to form unified Manichean good-versus-evil concepts (liberal technocratic democracy versus populist absolute authoritarianism), historically, these correlations were uncommon. I use familiar terms, democracy and authoritarianism, liberalism and absolutism, populism and technocracy in simpler and more limited, “bikini,” senses than is usual in political theory. I seek greater precision than in “fluid” journalistic ordinary language where terms flow into each other to create murky conceptual puddles.
Democracy vs. Authoritarianism
Democracy is often over-extended to include liberal institutional and cultural prerequisites. Democracy, civil rights, and the rule of law may well reinforce each other, but most democracies have not been liberal. If democracies that are not liberal and far from ideal in excluding resident aliens, or slaves, or the poor, or women, or have authoritarian elements, are excluded from the pure and pious democratic ideal, democracy becomes a utopian normative ideal that may not fit any historical regime and cannot explain the political world. Many democracies, including all the ancient ones, were surely more distant from the authoritarian pole than the democratic ideal pole, though none was liberal or respected rights. I use a minimal measure of democracy as the degree to which the government represents the citizens’ political choices in free and fair elections. On one pole there are authoritarian regimes that do not represent their citizens, while on the other pole there is pure proportional representation without a threshold, where all the citizens and residents vote. Hybrid authoritarian–democratic regimes that combine authoritarian features with limited political competition and unfair elections are in the middle (Levitsky and Way 2010). Closer still to the authoritarian pole are authoritarian regimes that allow limited representative elections, though the representative bodies do not govern, but represent or advise. Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, do not represent the political choices of their subjects, even when they reflect them. Even when the policies of an authoritarian regime happen to agree with what its subjects
