1. FAKE DEMOCRACY: Everybody Has Their Reasons
The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons.
—Octave in JEAN RENOIR, The Rules of the Game
I have lived for the last month … with the sense of having suffered a vast and indefinite loss. I did not know at first what ailed me. At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
They do not all look the same; plenty of differences are obvious. But group them together and they clearly make up one political family: Orbán, Erdogan, Kaczynski, Modi, undoubtedly ex-president Trump, perhaps Netanyahu, but Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro for sure. It is imperative to understand what is often described as a global trend in authoritarianism.
The obvious danger is that the effort to do so will homogenize what, after all, remain fundamentally different national trajectories. The causes for the rise of right-wing populism in particular are not identical. But radical right-wing populists have developed a common strategy and even what might be called a shared authoritarian-populist art of governance—hence the family resemblances.
The spread of this populist art has put paid to a particular post–Cold War illusion: not that History had ended (did anybody really believe that?), but that only democracies could learn from their own mistakes and from one another’s experiences. Authoritarian regimes, so the assumption went, could not adapt to changing environments and innovate; they were all fated to end like the Soviet Union in 1991. The new Authoritarian International—whose members can try out and refine techniques of radical right-wing rule—puts that complacent liberal-democratic self-conception to rest; best authoritarian practices (or should we say worst?) can be copied across borders.
Broadly speaking, the authoritarian-populist art of governance is based on nationalism (often with racist overtones), on hijacking the state for partisan loyalists, and, less obviously, on weaponizing the economy to secure political power: a combination of culture war, patronage, and mass clientelism. To be sure, the nationalism often amounts to a simulation of sovereignty, a studied performance of collective self-assertion, when in fact not all that much is changing; plenty of antiglobalization rhetoric turns out to be perfectly compatible with the continued deregulation of capital flows across borders and other measures that enrich elites in other countries.
These specifics are missed by political diagnoses that equate contemporary right-wing populism with fascism, or see populism as a new, internationally successful ideology, or assume that “ordinary people” just brought all this on themselves with their supposed craving for authoritarianism. Historians have sought precedents for what we are witnessing, often with a view to drawing “lessons from the past.” Of course, exercises in comparison are valuable, and there cannot be blanket prohibitions on finding parallels between the present and the atrocities of the twentieth century, for, without first comparing, we could not appreciate the differences. Still, analogies all too often lead to shortcuts in political judgment; we are more likely to see the similarities, or even engage in motivated reasoning, that is, pick evidence in order to justify our preferred political strategy for today. As James Bryce—today virtually forgotten, but a highly influential diagnostician of democracies at the turn of the twentieth century—put it, “The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.” That’s a note of caution which always applies; more specific to our age is Tony Judt’s observation that we have become extremely skillful at teaching the lessons of history but probably quite bad at teaching actual history.
The truth is that today’s threats to democracy barely even rhyme with many twentieth-century experiences. Many of those who after November 8, 2016, rushed to buy 1984 or The Origins of Totalitarianism might well have given up after a few dozen pages. Fascism specifically—as distinct from authoritarianism or racism in general—is not being revived in our era: we do not see the mass mobilization and militarization of entire societies;1 and while hatred against vulnerable minorities is being fanned, no systemic cult of violence that glorifies mortal combat as the apotheosis of human existence is being instituted. Nor are states being thoroughly remade on the basis of racism, which is not to deny that racial (and religious) animus has been legitimated from the very top in Hungary, Brazil, and the United States.
We are all in favor of learning from history, but we implicitly assume that only good people learn from it. One of the reasons we are not witnessing the second coming of a particular antidemocratic past is that today’s anti-democrats have also learned from history. They know full well that highly visible human rights violations on a mass scale should not form part of today’s authoritarian repertoire: that would be too uncomfortable a reminder of twentieth-century dictatorships. Large-scale repression, as perpetrated by Erdogan since 2016, must be understood as a sign of weakness, not strength. Trump sending his “army” of far-right hobby warriors, conspiracy theorists, and the occasional country-club Republican in the direction of the Capitol was a matter of desperation, not proof of a master plan for a fascist takeover. Precisely because we might recognize it as a historical precedent, it by and large isn’t happening. So, what then is happening?
But What Is Right-Wing (or, for That Matter, Left-Wing) Populism Anyway?
I’ve so far used the term “populism” as if its meaning were self-evident. It’s not. It is positively misleading to equate populism with “criticism of elites” or “anti-establishment attitudes.” While such an equation has become conventional wisdom, it’s actually based on a rather peculiar thought. After all, any old civics textbook would instruct us that keeping an eye on the powerful is a sign of good democratic citizenship, yet, nowadays, we are told incessantly that such conduct is precisely “populist” (and, by implication, according to many observers, dangerous for democracy and the rule of law). Now, it’s true that populists, when in opposition, criticize sitting governments (and, usually, also other parties). But, above all, they do something else, and that is crucial: in one way or another, they claim that they, and only they, represent what they often refer to as the “real people” or also the “silent majority.”
At first sight, this might not look particularly nefarious; it does not immediately amount to, let’s say, racism or a fanatical hatred of the European Union or, for that matter, the declaring of judges and particular media “enemies of the people.” And yet this claim to a distinctly moral monopoly of representation has two detrimental consequences for democracy. Rather obviously, once populists assert that only they represent the people, they also charge that all other contenders for office are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a matter of disputes about policy, or even about values; such disagreements, after all, are completely normal and, ideally, even productive in a democratic polity. Rather, populists assert that their rivals are corrupt and simply fail to serve the interests of the people on account of their bad, or indeed “crooked,” character. What Donald J. Trump said about his rival in the 2016 election (and then also about his opponent in 2020) was extreme but not exceptional: all populists engage in talk of this kind.
More insidiously, populists also claim that those who do not agree with their ultimately symbolic construction of the people (and hence usually do not support the populists politically) might not properly belong to the people in the first place. After all, the suggestion that there is a “real people” implies that there are some who are not quite real—folks who just pretend to belong, who might actually undermine the polity in some form, or who at best are second-rate citizens.2 Just remember Trump’s habitual condemnation of his critics as “un-American,” or think of Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s railings against Poles who he said have treason in their genes, or listen to what’s really being said with the pronouncement of BJP politicians that “the division … is just in the mind of certain politicians, but, as a society, India is one and India is harmonious.”
Populists always claim to unify the people or simply uncover the unity that is always already there, but their de facto political business model is to divide citizens as much as possible. And the message that only some truly belong to the people systematically undermines the standing of certain citizens. Obvious examples are minorities (whose status in the polity might already be vulnerable for one reason or another) and recent immigrants, who are suspected of not being truly loyal to the country. Think of Modi’s policy of creating a register of genuine citizens. Ostensibly, this is supposed to help identify illegal immigrants (referred to as “termites in the soil of Bengal” by Amit Shah, when he was head of the BJP). Hindu nationalists understand perfectly well that the entire exercise is meant to affirm the “real”—that is, Hindu—people and put fear into one particular minority, namely Muslims.
Where populists come to power, one consequence of this exclusionary stance can be that some citizens no longer enjoy full equality before the law (or even protection of the law at all): they are treated differently in conspicuous ways, perhaps not necessarily by judges in court, but in many ordinary encounters with bureaucrats who have understood perfectly well what is expected from the very top.3 That is not even to mention the unleashing of hate on streets and squares. There is significant evidence, for instance, that Trump rallies were associated with a local increase in politically motivated assaults; Asian Americans were attacked more frequently during the pandemic; Trumpist vigilantes clearly felt empowered by the Republican Party’s showcasing a suburban couple training weapons on Black Lives Matter protesters; and, lest we forget, anti-Semitic “incidents” also hit an all-time high in the United States in 2019 (numbers for 2020 were not available at the time of writing).4 The philosopher Kate Manne’s term “trickle-down aggression” perfectly captures this phenomenon.5
Note how this radicalization of the right in the name of the people is not the same as nationalism per se. The latter implies that every cultural nation is entitled to its own state, that compatriots are owed more by way of moral and political obligations than foreigners, and that the imperative of preserving the nation has moral weight as such.6 To be sure, all populists need to provide some content for their notion of “the people,” and it is hardly an accident that right-wing populists have so often reached for an ethnically defined nation to do so (or opted for outright nativism). But, in principle, one can be a populist for whom the definition of the people is primarily political or ideological—just think of Hugo Chávez’s notion of Bolivarian socialism for the twenty-first century; what matters in this case is that those who disagree with the supposedly uniquely authentic representative of the people are declared illegitimate and quite possibly put hors la loi.
An Art of Governance
Authoritarian-populist regimes, then, constantly seek to divide their societies and, more particularly, hold up ideals of the “real Turk,” the “real Indian,” the “real American,” and so on. But these attempts at solidifying cultural domination have gone hand in hand with something much more mundane: a propensity for crony capitalism. Many of today’s authoritarian regimes are in effect also kleptocracies (a term coined by the Polish-British sociologist Stanislav Andreski in the late 1960s). There is one straightforward explanation for this: the absence of legal and political constraints makes self-dealing so much easier, which in turn reinforces the need to maintain a tight grip on the judiciary and the political system in order to avoid punishment in the future. But there is also a political logic: involving others in criminality compels their loyalty to the regime; mass clientelism—rewarding supporters with patronage—solidifies mass allegiance; and threatening those who might not support the authoritarian populists with loss of jobs or benefits solves the problem of how to exert control over societies without too much direct political repression.
Such dynamics, which go beyond traditional kleptocracy, are what the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar has in mind when he refers to the rise of a “mafia state” in his native country.7 A mafia state is not about large envelopes with cash changing hands under the table; rather, it is the use of state structures and what on the surface are legal means—in particular public procurement processes where, strangely, only one bidder ever shows up, or where the crony is paired with a phony bidder. A mafia state is controlled by and benefits what Magyar calls extended “political families.” (This might well include the ruler’s actual family, as in the prominent examples of Trump’s, Orbán’s, Bolsonaro’s, and Erdogan’s children, with especially nefarious roles reserved for sons-in-law.) Absolute loyalty is given in exchange for material reward and, equally important, protection for an indefinite future. “The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state,” a Hungarian observer has noted, “is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.”8
Here ideology can also function as a reliable indicator of political and familial submission; going along with provocations and outrageous norm breaking by the leader becomes a litmus test for those who might otherwise be suspected of having retained a belief in proper democratic standards. What’s more, since violating norms compromises members of the political family, they must stick together for mutual protection, which helps establish reliability and trust—a defining feature of the original form of the mafia, of course.
Not only are the new authoritarian-populist states not fascist in the familiar historical sense; in one important aspect, they turn the pattern of Nazi rule upside down. As the political scientist (and German exile) Ernst Fraenkel demonstrated, the Nazi polity was not characterized by complete lawlessness and chaos, in the way traditional accounts of tyranny or of totalitarianism tended to suggest; there were plenty of areas of life that proceeded in normal, predictable ways: marriages were concluded and annulled, business contracts written and enforced. Alongside these areas of relative legal normality, however, there was always the threat of the “prerogative state,” which could act in completely unpredictable and unaccountable ways. Fraenkel coined the term “dual state” to describe this split between ordinary, rule-governed life and unpredictable repression.9
What if today we are once more facing dual states, but with a difference? Now the realm of politics remains, in many respects, relatively normal but for some legal-looking manipulations, while in the economy one is subject to the arbitrary exercise of power. Or perhaps not so arbitrary, for if it is correct that loyalty to the political family is crucial for economic success, punishments are in fact foreseeable. Instead of sending muscle to collect the cash, the government simply asks the tax authorities for some extra audits. And, lo and behold, they always find something. As a consequence, powerful businesspeople not obviously loyal to the regime are made offers that they cannot refuse to sell their holdings; this has regularly happened to oligarchs in Hungary who were perceived to be aligned with the opposition socialist party. As the sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele has pointed out, these patterns are not always easily discernible to outsiders, for actions that are essentially political can always be represented as having been dictated by economic and financial necessity (in the same way that Trump’s brazen attack on the postal service was couched in the language of efficiency, even if it had the plainly political purpose of making mail-in voting in 2020 more difficult).10
Not all right-wing populist governments operate fully fledged mafia states, and in general mafia states are harder to establish in the internationally exposed parts of the economy. It is received wisdom that right-wing populists are enemies of neoliberalism, but a figure like Orbán evidently made his peace with international investors. He offers the German car industry what one Hungarian observer has called “Chinese conditions” in the middle of Europe: mostly pliant unions, where there are unions at all, and swift clampdowns on anything that looks like environmentalist protest, for instance, against the major Audi factory in Gyor; as one critic has put it, the system is as much an “Audi-cracy” as an autocracy.11 “We are pragmatic,” Mateusz Morawiecki, the head of Poland’s right-wing populist government, emphasizes: “We have a problem with a part of the European political elite and with journalists, but not with the normal people. For example, 97 percent of all foreign investors would come to us again.”
If they have sufficient power, populists try to colonize the state itself. One of the first changes Orbán and his party, Fidesz, sought after coming to power in 2010 was a transformation of civil service law that would enable them to place loyalists in what were supposed to be nonpartisan bureaucratic positions. The justification they gave was that the liberal left controlled the state and had to be purged; in line with their self-conception as the only true representatives of the people, populists could also claim that the state was there for the people, so that if they took possession of the administration, it was simply the people themselves appropriating what was rightfully theirs. Trump took longer to understand this logic, but eventually he also purged inspectors general who were supposed to check for fraud and favoritism in the federal government.
Both Fidesz and the Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland moved no less smartly to control the courts and exert power over the state media. It was made clear that journalists should not report in ways that violated the interests of the nation, equated with the interests of the ruling party. Like Napoleon III, they would typically counter any criticism from jurists or journalists by demanding, “Who elected you?” India’s finance minister declared that “democracy can’t be the tyranny of the unelected”; the Polish justice minister, engaged in relentless attacks on the independent judiciary, felt it necessary to explain that Poland was a democracy and not a “courtocracy.”
Trump has not been the only one given to declaring the independent media “enemies of the people.” Yet the capture of the media by authoritarian populists does not have to be complete; again, too obvious a Gleichschaltung—a homogenization of political content—would remind both citizens and outsiders of paradigmatic twentieth-century dictatorships. Independent websites and a major German-owned commercial TV station continue to operate in Hungary, for instance, but virtually all the country’s regional newspapers have passed into the hands of government-friendly oligarchs. Many of the latter were kind enough at the end of 2018 to “donate” their holdings to a new foundation tasked with “promoting activities that serve value creation and strengthen Hungarian national identity in the print, radio, television, and online media platforms that make up Hungarian mass communication.” According to the social scientist Gábor Polyák, the foundation—comprising in the end around five hundred media outlets and registered at the holiday home of a major Orbán ally—controls about 16 percent of all revenue in the Hungarian media market. On the basis of a special clause in competition law, the government declared the merger to be of “strategic national importance,” thereby preempting any action by the authorities officially charged with mitigating concentrations of media power.
Copyright © 2021 by Jan-Werner Müller