Democracy Against Liberalism

Its Rise and Fall

Aviezer Tucker

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509541225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

It should not surprise anyone that democracies can become dangerously illiberal; indeed, it was one of the classical critiques of ancient democracies. Is the contemporary backlash against liberal democracy merely the same old story, or are we witnessing something unprecedented? In this witty and engaging book, Aviezer Tucker argues that the contemporary revival of authoritarian populism combines the historically familiar with new technologies to produce a highly unstable and contagious new synthesis that threatens basic liberal norms, from freedom of the press to independent judiciaries. He examines how the economic crisis blocked social mobility and thereby awakened the dark, dormant political passions exploited by demagogues such as Orban and Trump. He argues that this slide towards 'neo-illiberal democracy' can be countered if we hard-headedly restore a 'liberalism without nostalgia' which institutes policies that can dampen down populist passions and strengthen liberal institutional barriers against them. Readers interested in current affairs, social science, history, and political and social theory will find Aviezer Tucker's original theoretical and historical analysis incisive, innovative, and entertaining.

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, and better entrenched liberal 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 would have preferred had they been given the choice, they are not given the choice, and the regime does not represent them. Authoritarian regimes can be more or less popular, but they are not accountable to their subjects.

Liberalism vs. Absolutism

I use liberalism as a constitutional institutional and social structure that checks and limits the size, scope, and reach of government. Liberalism can co-exist with democratic, authoritarian, and other regimes, but not with totalitarianism that can accept no institutional or legal limits. In modern societies, liberalism is manifest in the rule of law enforced by independent branches of government, such as the judiciary. Some of these institutions guarantee rights. Without institutions, rights are ideals and ideologies, not political reality, “nonsense upon stilts” as Jeremy Bentham put it. Absolutism is the opposite of liberalism. It eschews checks or balances on the scope, size, or power of government. Absolutism can be authoritarian as well as democratic.

Liberalism developed originally to submit monarchs to laws that codified traditional and not so traditional rights, as interpreted by independent judges. Absolutist governments could and did grant privileges and sufferance to minorities and civil society, but they could rescind them at will. The universality of the rule of law protected the rights of minorities and the autonomy of civil society. The state’s size, powers, and capacities grew with the expansion and professionalization of state bureaucracy and following technological advances. It has become necessary, then, to increase the number and strength of liberal institutions to preserve the balance between the powers of the state and society. The division between the three branches of government became insufficient. Other independent institutions accumulated, including institutional religion, the free and independent media, the education system, and the Central Bank. These institutions may be financed by the government as long as they maintain their independence. The modern liberal state is further bound by a web of international treaties and agreements that are adjudicated and implemented by international liberal institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the International Trade Agreement, and the European Union.

The liberal to absolutist dimension is continuous. Even absolute monarchies were not entirely unencumbered by institutions. When the French monarchy needed to increase taxation, it had to call the estates, thereby triggering the French Revolution. The independence of central banks is historically recent and resulted from the populist temptation of democratic governments to push interest rates too low for too long and generate hyper-inflation. Other institutions, like the political party, may limit the power of government by forcing it to use the party’s mediation to connect with supporters. Absolutist governments prefer unmediated personalized relationships with unorganized and unstructured followers. Successful ancient demagogues, tribunes of the plebs, and dictators had such a direct relation with masses and mobs.

Absolutism describes better the opposite pole to liberalism than illiberalism because it has been in use and debated for centuries. However, in the contemporary political context, illiberalis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• 1 What’s Your Problem? Illiberalism, Populism, Authoritarianism
• 2 Illiberal Democracy: Old Hemlock in Plastic Cups
• 3 All the Roads Lead to Caesarea
• 4 It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Historical Evitability of Neo-Illiberal Democracy
• 5 New Liberalism without Nostalgia
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement