To the extent that the illiberal leaders understand and act on their interests, they know they cannot enact policies that accord with populist passions or bring their own demise. Orbán cannot start a war with Romania to restore Hungary to its pre-Trianon Treaty size. Trump cannot block most trade with China and Mexico. Nobody can borrow to finance public services without eventually raising more money from taxes. The populist neo-illiberal trick then is to manipulate the passions; make symbolic gestures like building useless walls on the border of Mexico and sending soldiers to protect the country from migrants that do not exist in East Europe, while using bombastic language. For example, Poland has at once one of the most liberal non-populist immigration policies in Europe with millions of immigrants from outside the EU (mostly from Ukraine), while its leaders have some of the most anti-immigration and anti-EU rhetoric in Europe. When all else fails, the illiberals can distract passion with passion, like a new object of fear or hatred. Populist crowds have many passions that they do not fully understand and express, so the demagogue can trigger and manipulate them.
The populists and neo-illiberals have a common goal of dismantling liberal institutions. But they do not share common interests. Populist illiberal leaders have no interest in acting on the populist passions that would lead to their self-destruction. They have an interest in obtaining and maintaining absolute power. This interest in absolute power is shared by all the neo-illiberal politicians, though it is not exclusive to them. Once they have such power, many, though not all, will further use it for personal enrichment and corruption, which is against the interests of their populist supporters. The dilemma of populist illiberals in power is that the stronger they express the populist passions, the more support and legitimacy they receive in their confrontation with liberal institutions. Yet, the more they actually act on those passions, the greater is the risk that the regime would collapse under the pressure of its own passions. The populist illiberals are constrained by reality from acting on much of their rhetoric. Consequently they increase the volume of the rhetoric and provoke. Small populist policies can generate a lot of noise but little damage. For example, provoking liberals by being rude and trampling on norms of political respect, or making symbolic gestures such as building symbolic borders, putting poor immigrant children in cages (morally abhorrent but politically inconsequential), and prohibiting the migration of people from countries that send few high-net-worth immigrants, are populist policies that create much more noise than actual political damage. Should illiberal populists start acting on their rhetoric, as in classical ancient absolute democracies, populist self-destruction will follow.
The opposite political pole to populism is technocracy, the rule of experts. Experts should represent instrumental rationality in the service of interests. Since Plato, the technocratic ideal has been for the rulers to be knowledgeable experts. Plato had a non-specialized, holistic, concept of knowledge and political expertise. He “appointed” philosophers to run his utopian technocracy. Contemporary notions of expertise prefer applied specialists to theoreticians. Mounk (2018) documented the growth of technocracy since the 1930s, including liberal bureaucracies exempted from democratic elections, such as quasi-non-governmental organizations that are financed by the state but are not controlled by its representative bodies. Technocracies do not have to be liberal; they can serve absolutist states, as well as authoritarian or democratic governments. Indeed, all modern monarchies and dictatorship had to use at least some technocrats.
Plato identified in his Republic two related problems with technocracies. When self-proclaimed experts disagree, as they often do, there is no higher authority to decide who the real experts are, who has knowledge and who has mere opinion. Experts also have group and personal interests that may bias their judgments. A technocratic class may mistake its own self-interest or even, perish the thought, its passions, for expert analysis. Indeed, Plato’s own political philosophy may be interpreted in such terms. Technocrats are just as corruptible as everybody else both as individuals with interests, and as a class that has shared common interests in protecting its privileges.
Since experts as a class cannot be trusted to act more impartially than anybody else, liberal constitutions place them in institutions that should supervise and compete with each other. The increase in the power and complexity of the state has required a commensurable growth in technocratic liberal institutions that balance each other like the Central Bank, the BBC, and the Ombudsman, and so on, to check the power of the technocratic state. That mutual growth is not contradictory but necessary, the bigger the state is, the more necessary it is to curb its powers. It is impossible for modern states to function with no technocratic expertise and assistance. Even if policy ends are dictated by the passions, populist politicians need a technocratic bureaucracy to devise means to try to realize them. The horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism and authoritarianism resulted from the efficient use of technocrats to implement passionate politics.
Eight Regimes
The eight possible combinations of the three continuous pairs of ideal types (Populist vs. Technocratic; Liberal vs. Absolutist; and Democratic vs. Authoritarian) can be represented in a table with eight cells, as below.
These eight regime types are ideal. There are many intermediary forms between the extreme poles. For example, in the modern world, even populist governments must rely on some technocratic expertise. Democratic politicians, even in liberal technocracies sometimes indulge in manipulating popular passions. But these are useful signposts for demarcation and orientation in the vast political landscape. To elaborate a bit on these eight forms before concentrating on populist illiberal democracy:
Authoritarian absolutism, populist or technocratic, is a simple and familiar regime. Revolutionary dictatorships like the Jacobins, Fascists and Communists achieved power by manipulating populist social movements but tended to grow technocratic with age. Before the regime becomes entrenched and stable, authoritarian revolutionaries may attempt to mobilize popular support and cater to some populist passions for revenge retribution and violence. Military coups imposed authoritarian absolutist technocracies to replace populist democracies numerous times in Latin America and most recently in Thailand and Egypt.
| Populist | Technocratic | |
| Liberal Democracy | Democratically elected governments that function within limits set by liberal institutions to implement populist policies. For example, Greek governments, which accumulated foreign debt to finance party patronage before 2008. | The post-Second World War liberal democratic model. For example, the British and French states with their professional civil services. |
| Authoritarian Absolutism | Revolutionary dictatorships based on popular mobilization. Typically, in their early stages, for example, the Jacobins. | Bureaucratic dictatorships; for example, Napoleon’s Empire and late-Communist bureaucratic socialism. |
| Liberal Authoritarianism | When liberal institutions are backed by the nobility or rising bourgeoisie, the monarch or dictator may adopt populist policies to ally with commoners against them; for example, in Wilhelmine Germany. Authoritarian liberal governments can generate populist protest from below; for example, in late Habsburg Austro-Hungary. | Authoritarian technocratic states limited by liberal independent institutions. For example, Habsburg Austro-Hungarian post-1848 state and contemporary Singapore. |
| Absolutist (Illiberal) Democracy | Populist democratically elected governments without liberal institutional constraints; for example, classic Greek and Roman democracies. | Democratically elected governments, unchecked by liberal institutions and led by technocrats; for example, the post-totalitarian democracies in Central Europe during 1990–2010. |
