Untitled

“This rich book is an act of guardianship.
Filled with fascinating and incisive

essays, it probes the recrudescence of anti-liberal and non-liberal regimes that
often claim to be excellent democracies, better than the liberal variant. For
those of us wishing to secure the rule of law and individual and public rights,
political liberalism’s hallmarks, there is no more vexing challenge.”
Ira I. Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science
and History, Columbia University
“In presenting a multiplicity of perspectives on the broad and timely issue of

illiberal democracy, The Emergence of Illiberalism fills a major gap in current
scholarly literature. Examining the rise of illiberal politics from numerous an-
gles, this volume will provide an excellent foundation for readers seeking to
understand contemporary political conditions.”
Phillip W. Gray, Assistant Professor of Political Science,
Texas A&M University at Qatar
Taylor & Francis
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http://taylorandfrancis.com
THE EMERGENCE OF ILLIBERALISM
As illiberal and authoritarian trends are on the rise—both in fragile and in

seemingly robust democracies—there is growing concern about the longevity
of liberalism and democracy. The purpose of this volume is to draw on the an-
alytical resources of various disciplines and public policy approaches to reflect
on the current standing of liberal democracy. Leading social scientists from
different disciplinary backgrounds aim to examine the ideological and struc-
tural roots of the current crisis of liberal democracies, in the West and beyond,
conceptually and empirically.
The volume is divided into two main parts:
• Part I explores tensions between liberalism and democracy in a longer-

term, historical perspective to explain immanent vulnerabilities of liberal
democracy. Authors examine the conceptual foundations of Western lib-
eral democracy that have shaped its standing in the contemporary world.
What lies at the core of illiberal tendencies?
• Part II explores case studies from the North Atlantic, Eastern Europe,
Turkey, India, Japan, and Brazil, raising questions whether democratic
crises, manifested in the rise of populist movements in and beyond the
Western context, differ in kind or only in degree. How can we explain the
current popular appeal of authoritarian governments and illiberal ideas?
The Emergence of Illiberalism will be of great interest to teachers and students of

politics, sociology, political theory, and comparative government.
Boris Vormann is Professor of Politics and Director of the Politics Section
at Bard College Berlin. His research focuses on the role of the state in global-
ization and urbanization processes; nations and nationalism; and the crisis of
democracy. His most recent books are Democracy in Crisis: The Neoliberal Roots
of Popular Unrest (with Christian Lammert, 2019) and Contours of the Illiberal
State (2019).
Michael D. Weinman is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College Berlin. He

is the author of three books, most recently, The Parthenon and Liberal Education
(2018, co-authored with Geoff Lehman), and the editor (with Shai Biderman)
of Plato and the Moving Image (2019). His research focuses on Greek philosophy,
political philosophy, and their intersection.
THE EMERGENCE OF
ILLIBERALISM
Understanding a Global
Phenomenon
Edited by Boris Vormann and

Michael D. Weinman
First published 2021
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Boris Vormann and Michael D. Weinman to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Vormann, Boris, editor. | Weinman, Michael, editor.
Title: The emergence of illiberalism: understanding a global phenomenon /
edited by Boris Vormann & Michael Weinman.
Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020009409 (print) | LCCN 2020009410 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367366261 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367366247 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780429347368 (ebook) | ISBN 9781000079081 (adobe pdf ) |
ISBN 9781000079135 (mobi) | ISBN 9781000079180 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Populism. | Right and left (Political science) | Democracy. |
Populism—Case studies. | Right and left (Political science)—Case studies. |
Democracy—Case studies.
Classification: LCC JC423 .E48 2020 (print) |
LCC JC423 (ebook) | DDC 320.56/62—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009409
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009410
ISBN: 978-0-367-36626-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-36624-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-34736-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
CONTENTS
List of Figures ix
Preface x
PART I
Democracy, Contested: Causes of Illiberalism 1

viii Contents
PART II
Democracy, Distorted: Cases of Illiberalism 99
PART III
Epilogue: Persevering through a Crisis of Conviction 225
List of Contributors 247

Index 251
FIGURES
7.1 Electoral Volatility 1950–2018, Western Europe 107

7.2 Anti-System Parties Vote Share 1975–2018, Western Europe 107
7.3 Top 10% Income Share 1990–2014 (World Inequality Database) 113
7.4 Types of Anti-System Parties 116
7.5 Dominant Forms of Anti-System Politics 117
7.6 Median Income Change and Critical Elections after 2008 118
7.7 Nature of Crisis and Variations in Anti-System Politics 119
PREFACE
It almost seems like, for several decades, belief in the market as an ersatz for
politics dominates; then, politics seems to become important again as a way to
rein in the markets. Despite this historical experience and these “open secrets,”
many (economic) liberals went on arguing time and again that a free market
would, of necessity, lead to free societies. And they keep on doing so today. The
only difference is that the crisis of conviction, limited at earlier moments to na-
tional and continental levels, now has more immediately global cascading effects.
The insight that liberal democracy, both as an idea and as a set of practices,
is rooted in striking a balance between economic and political forces was al-
ready very much clear to a classical liberal like Adam Smith. Smith has been
read, since his death, in a carelessly one-sided way as simply concerned with
prosperity and the “invisible hand” of the market. This, despite the fact that
the metaphor of an invisible hand was hardly of central importance to Smith
and in any case was surely not meant to undermine the moral duty of states to
ensure liberty and equality, values of at least as much importance to Smith as
prosperity.
His concerns about the destabilizing and demoralizing potential in an un-
checked economic liberalism were underscored by reformist liberals such as
John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, who, despite their political and
Preface xi
ideological differences, both articulated a vision of liberalism grounded in val-

ues other than those that can be commodified. In short: homo economicus is not
enough; for liberalism to thrive, the ideal subject would also have to be homo
politicus! For this political tradition within liberalism, freedom of opinion, reli-
gious freedom, and plurality mattered. Social progress, its enthusiasts thought,
depended on the openness of societies. Yes, markets were important, but they
were not sufficient, by themselves, for democracy to succeed.
This volume seeks to make sense of today’s global crisis of liberal democracy
in light of the recurrent amnesia concerning the insufficiency of economic
liberalism alone among many liberals in power since World War II. Sometimes
more, sometimes less directly, the myopic vision of market rule as an equivalent
of democracy seems to underlie many of the critiques made in the theoretical
and empirical chapters. Exposing the internal contradictions and shortcomings
of liberalism, and how they interact with other causes, the chapters in this book
seek to develop a clearer understanding of the parameters and dynamics that
define an evolving set of crisis tendencies.
This book is the long-term result of a colloquium on “illiberal democracy”
that the editors (and contributor Ewa Atanassow) organized at Bard College
Berlin and the Hertie School of Governance in April 2018. We gratefully
acknowledge our debt to both institutions and their leadership for making
the colloquium possible. We would also like to express our gratitude to our
colleagues at Bard College Berlin, Irina Stelea and Bendetta Roux, for their
work in organizing and publicizing the Illiberal Democracy colloquium, and
our student Simon Kastberg for editorial assistance.
We thank the authors who agreed to rework their colloquium presentations
into book chapters. In the meantime, we had the good fortune to meet fur-
ther scholars willing to contribute to the project. Their chapters were written
specifically for this volume and have provided a compelling complement to
the presentations that constituted the 2018 meeting. Moreover, three essays
in this book are updated versions of texts that have recently appeared in jour-
nals. We thank Foreign Affairs, the Journal of Democracy, and The New Statesman
for permission to reprint and slightly rework articles by Ivan Krastev, Marc
Plattner, and Kristin Surak—and these scholars for their willingness to con-
tribute to this volume.
We are very grateful to all the authors for their trust and enthusiastic work.
We are particularly humbled for the opportunity to work with Roger Scruton,
who kindly and carefully corresponded with us during months in which his
health was failing, and to be able to share his contribution posthumously. Finally,
we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very careful reading
of the entire manuscript and for many helpful comments and suggestions.
The editors
Berlin, February 2020
Taylor & Francis
PART I
Democracy, Contested
Causes of Illiberalism
Taylor & Francis
1
FROM A POLITICS OF NO
ALTERNATIVE TO A POLITICS OF FEAR
Illiberalism and Its Variants
Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann
Introduction1
Liberal democracy is in crisis. This much seems undisputed in the literature and
media comments that have proliferated since 2016, when the Brexit referendum
and the election of Donald Trump ignited new debates about the meaning and
limitations of liberal democracy. If anything, this verdict has been consolidated
by subsequent electoral successes of populist parties in other European states,
such as France, Austria, Italy, and Germany, as well as similar tendencies in
Australia and Ontario, Canada’s most populous and globally connected prov-
ince. The dissatisfaction with the status quo was equally expressed in the initial
shift toward the left in Southern European countries such as Greece, Spain, and
Portugal—and the rise of right-wing parties that followed. Beyond the West,
the election of Jair Bolsonaro as the President of Brazil, turmoil in former
Soviet states in Eastern Europe, and an autocratic reinterpretation of democ-
racy under Abe, Erdogan, Modi, and Putin only reinforce the sense that the
triumphant era of liberalism is over.
The engines of neoliberal, market-led globalization, which appeared un-
paralleled in power after the fall of the Berlin Wall, seem to have come to a
screeching halt. So, too, has the confidence or at least the hope that democ-
racy, in tandem with markets, was on an inevitable course to expand happily
ever after. In the West, what is common across otherwise wildly different
cases is a distrust for existing parties, deep inequalities coupled with extreme
polarization of the political spectrum, and the desire for anti-establishment
politicians to clean up corruption and restore responsiveness to their constit-
uencies. On both sides of the Atlantic, opponents of free trade and critics of
globalization are organizing; so are ethnic nationalists, who see an opening
4 Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann
for more authoritarian politics. More often than not, elections turn into tri-
bunals on the establishment, with the judgment turning against the elites and
the status quo.
On a global level, liberalism and theories of democratic peace seem to have
lost explanatory power and normative appeal. Hopes for global convergence
and integration are thwarted as the divide between the global north and the
global south deepens further. Humanitarian interventions are being refuted as
thinly veiled geostrategic maneuvers and the West seems to have lost its lure—a
process accelerating as its core countries seem to be themselves turning away
from the liberal creed. National interests are again dominating international
relations (IR), while more normative approaches seeking cooperation and inte-
gration tend to be rejected as naïve do-goodism. Supranational institutions of
the post-World War II era—the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank, and
the World Trade Organization—are eroding under the pressures of protection-
ism and neo-mercantilist trade conflicts. In short, Realpolitik is back. And so are
great power politics, weapons races, and zero-sum politics.
Illiberal forces quickly seek to fill the ideological vacuum left by a hollowed
out liberal idealism. Once in office, however, demagogues not only fail to de-
liver most of their promises, but also and perhaps more importantly, alter the
structures of the state and civil society in ways that are likely to inflict long-
term damage. Undoing checks and balances, in particular through interven-
tion in the judiciary, public officials’ conflicts of interest, and the defamation
of the media, they put essential pillars of democracy and core ideals of the
enlightenment under attack. In the absence of meaningful reform, strongman
leaders distract attention from their bankrupt political vision with xenophobic
appeals and a politics of indignation, further unraveling prior commitments to
liberal democracy. Meanwhile, they revise institutional and procedural pillars
of democracy, indicating that illiberal politics—a fear-driven, authoritarian
reorganization of the state around exclusive and patriarchal notions of an ethnic
demos that seeks to undo the norms and institutions of political liberalism—
will not be effaced easily with the next election, impeachment, or vote of no
confidence.
We contend that the variegated forms of illiberalism—much like variegated
neoliberalization patterns (Brenner et al. 2010)—materialize in otherwise very
different contexts at the same historical moment because they have a set of
common denominators. Illiberal tendencies seek to partially reshape neoliberal
practices and ideas of the past half-century—the politics of no alternative that pos-
ited the inevitability of globalization and the superiority of market solutions—
at a moment where these practices and ideas no longer seem legitimate in the
core countries of the North Atlantic. While progressives have been criticizing
neoliberalism for a long time, it is the right-wing critique of neoliberalism
that is much more successfully redoing neoliberalism, and, potentially, undoing
liberal democracy in the West and beyond.
Illiberalism and Its Variants 5
Unlike the left, which argues for reform through redistribution and decom-
modification to address the consequences of welfare state retrenchment and
deep inequalities, right-wing critiques operate from the understanding that
the demos—defined in exclusive, ethno-nationalist terms—is under attack by
overwhelming outside forces, while the state, corrupted by naïve or deluded
elites—the much-scolded establishment—is unwilling or unable to protect its
citizens. Calls for law and order, stricter security, and a reassertion of popular
sovereignty are at the heart of this politics of fear.2 From that perspective, reform
won’t do and the institutional safeguards of democracy, above all the separation
of powers and the protection of minority rights, become viewed as hindrances
to the defense of the “true” demos. Liberal democracy seems to stand in the
way of “true” democracy.
How does this challenge to liberal democracy compare across contexts? How
does the perceived failure of liberal policies and institutions in one region impact
the global standing of liberal democracy in others? How far has the politics of fear
progressed? And has a liberal vision of democracy been unseated? The chapters
that follow explore the current crisis of liberal democracies conceptually and em-
pirically, putting into perspective a wide range of country examples in the West-
ern and Non-Western context, to seek answers to these questions and develop
a vocabulary to better fathom illiberal tendencies. As they show, democracies
around the world are facing a two-pronged crisis. One part of the crisis brought
figures such as Trump, Johnson, and Orban into office in the first place. This is
very much a crisis emerging from within the neoliberal paradigm. The second
part of the crisis is currently unfolding as such political figures capture state power.
Comparing Global Variants of Illiberalism

Integral to the new illiberal international, understood as an internal outgrowth
and not simply as an emulation of anti-Western autocrats such as Vladimir Putin,
are the antipluralist, often demagogic, politicians who come to wield almost un-
checked state power in both longstanding and emerging democracies (see also
Galston 2018). Responding to recent electoral successes by non-establishment
parties in very different contexts—from Brazil to the US, the UK to Israel—
recent literature in the burgeoning field on “populism” is often written for a broad
audience and, given the focus on one or another national readership, can lack the
comparative scope and empirical depth for which this volume aims. To be sure,
political context matters both for outcomes and potential ways of addressing crisis
tendencies. Political cultures, institutional path dependencies, the role of a state in
the international order as a hegemonic or peripheral power, are crucial for how
the crisis dynamics play out in different settings. But because it tends to ignore
important parallels that transcend, for instance, the specificities of a given party
system—e.g. polarization in the US two-party system—or national context—e.g.
Germany’s divided past—existing work undertheorizes commonalities.3
There is, of course, a risk of treating all these cases—Brazil and the US,
Germany, and India—the same. They are not. And we are not aiming to do
that. The danger of such an endeavor would be to misunderstand common
developments as though they naturally evolved in tandem developing such
internal propulsion as to become almost inevitable—a wave of autocratiza-
tion. What is the added value of bringing all these developments into one
perspective, then? Above all, it enables us to explore the global scope of related
phenomena and to stress parallels and potential pathways. This, in turn, helps
us to theorize certain patterns that we otherwise would not see because they
might appear conjunctural or coincidental in an individual context where they
are not. Trump, for instance, is not simply chaotic even though he is often por-
trayed as such. Viewing him in comparison helps to outline what is actually a
rather coherent pattern of policy visions.
While too much of the work on populism focuses only on state-by-state
unit-level idiosyncrasies, we also hope to identify a broader context in which
all this happens, common preconditions that facilitate the rise of autocrats, and
certain strategies that they use to mobilize their voter base, seize state capac-
ities, and act while in office. Although the empirical cases examined in this
volume reflect a wide range of political systems, different democratic traditions,
and economic contexts, the paths toward autocracy are contiguous. As such, we
can sketch out something like an ideal-typical trajectory of de-democratization
that we can witness in otherwise very different places—even if the starting
point and (therefore) the end results differ in important ways.
The Problem with the Term Populism

Before we sketch these broader global patterns, an important terminological
caveat is in order. Notwithstanding Chantal Mouffe’s (2018) recent explicit call
for a “left populism,” it is difficult to find voices that self-identify as populist
within the circle of those hoping to sustain liberal democracy through its cur-
rent moment of crisis. The term is usually used in a pejorative manner to dis-
credit different movements. This creates a series of problems. Populist critiques
might well voice true grievances that should be taken seriously and surely not
be rejected out of hand. Worse, knee-jerk reactions against populist movements
ignore the democratic potentials of binding recently politicized populations
back into actual politics (Eichengreen 2018; see Calhoun in this volume).
As such, the common deployment of the term “populism,” both within so-
cial science and by political actors associated with liberalisms of the left, right,
and center, only aggravates the well-known crisis of legitimacy. As Jan-Werner
Müller crucially points out, “[n]ot everyone who criticizes elites is a populist”
(Müller 2016, 101). But oftentimes, in practice, this distinction is blurred so
that many public discussions do fall into a by-now familiar dichotomy: either
you are with the status quo or a populist. The simple derogatory use of the
term populist equates all such movements regardless of political ideology and
direction, playing down actual fascist groups and aggrandizing fringe move-
ments, placing anyone skeptical of liberalism into a single category: enemies of
democracy. This is hampering an already fraught political discourse. We use
different terms to refer to critics of liberalism, (civic or ethnic) nationalists, and
fascists, and there are reasons for that.
From an analytical perspective, another crucial problem with the term pop-
ulism is that, if used uncritically, it ignores the more structural and discursive
factors that have given rise to widespread discontent in the first place. This, of
course, has far-reaching implications. If one interprets the rise of illiberalism
simply as the outbreak of a contagious craze at the populist fringes, the status
quo ante, that is, a return to neoliberalism, might suddenly appear quite ap-
pealing. But “global Trumpism” (see Hopkin and Blyth in this volume) has its
roots precisely in neoliberalization processes. It is not simply the result of an
irrational aberrance. This is why simply returning to the politics that paved the
way for illiberalism would do little to resolve the more fundamental problems
at stake that emanate from an internal crisis of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism’s Implosion
Deep are the roots of those thinkers who advocate for free market capitalism. But
Adam Smith (particularly in his Theory of Moral Sentiments), John Stuart Mill, and
Alexis de Tocqueville would all have agreed that homo economicus—as someone
who only strives for the maximization of their self-interest in a competitive
struggle for survival of all against all—is not enough; for liberalism to thrive, the
ideal subject would also have to be someone who can take informed choices and
sometimes prioritize the common good: homo politicus! For this political tradition
within liberalism, freedom of opinion, minority rights, and plurality mattered.
Social progress, its enthusiasts thought, depended on the openness of societies. Yes,
markets were important, but they were not sufficient, by themselves, for democ-
racy to succeed. There needed to be associations, free media, and a sensus communis
(not just “common sense” but also a sense of community) for democracy to be
actually possible (see Atanassow and Scruton in this volume).
Liberalism consists of a set of practices and ideas that since the beginning of
the enlightenment era have foregrounded the importance of individual liberty,
private property, and the market in organizing societies. Importantly, however,
liberalism is a deeply ambivalent term. Two hearts beat in its chest. Whereas
economic liberalism emerged as a critique of the absolutist state and an attempt to
strengthen the emerging bourgeois classes in 18th-century Europe, what we
(along with others; e.g. Brown 2015) call political liberalism of the 19th century
foregrounds the need for a minimal, but nonetheless interventionist, state and
a strong civil society to hem in the outgrowths of the market and allow certain
civic and political rights for the citizenry.
In short, economic liberalism is mostly concerned with market freedoms and

assumes that there is an automatic expansion of political rights once markets
grow. By contrast, it is political liberalism that develops a more profound under-
standing of democracy and that asks for certain institutional arrangements (such
as elections, the separation of powers, political parties), for individual rights and
certain substantive public goods (political freedoms, education, information,
etc.) to ensure its existence. In the first half of the 20th century, it was ulti-
mately this political tradition that fostered the rise of modern welfare states, in
and beyond the West, to add certain social rights to protect citizens from social
risks (such as unemployment, sickness, old age, etc.) and make possible deeper
and wider participation in democratic institutions.
Since the late 1970s, however, neoliberalization processes—economic lib-
eralism in practice, not theory—have reversed these achievements of political
liberalism, under the pretense that if markets rule, the rest will follow (Brenner
et al. 2010; Peck 2010). As we contend, it is this long-term crisis of political
liberalism—hollowed out by a notion that economic liberalism would equally
sustain and extend democracy—that has prepared the ground for illiberal tenden-
cies. Thus, Smith, Tocqueville, and Mill would probably agree with our view.
At the risk of belaboring the point, it is important to emphasize that this is
not an external crisis that has suddenly overcome all liberal democracies. Put
differently, this is not simply a wave of autocratization analogous to Samuel
Huntington’s notion of waves of democratization (Huntington 1991). At the
heart of this immanent crisis is a confusion. Or rather: a slippage. In Western
democracies, economic liberalism has hijacked the political project of the en-
lightenment. It has inverted emancipatory social projects into social division,
political apathy, and full-out anger. In economic and social policy, an impov-
erished understanding of liberal democracy, equaling democratization with
the expansion of markets and the protection of individual property rights, has
eclipsed the principles of political liberalism. As such, market fundamentalism
has left us bereft of a language to think and act politically outside the terms set
by economic thinking (Brown 2015).
Karl Polanyi, a central thinker to describe this predicament of market so-
ciety, has been proven right in many things, but wrong on one key point:
laissez-faire was by no means as dead as he thought, even if it might have seemed
so in 1944, when he published his seminal book The Great Transformation. To be
certain, he did write at a moment where it could easily have seemed that way:
this moment saw the birth of a Bretton Woods order, through which social
policies gradually expanded to ever larger sections of societies in the North
Atlantic. In many contexts, the welfare state thus did take off the edges of eco-
nomic liberalism (while the West became a role model for others to imitate).
However, the 1970s resuscitated old beliefs. A bundle of crises—the OPEC oil
crisis, stagflation, and fiscal crises at the local government level (as, most prom-
inently, in New York City)—delivered a death blow to the Keynesian-Fordist
compromise and the post-World War II order. The conservative revolution of

the early 1980s was successful in developing a narrative that held government
interventionism responsible for the crisis, and government leaders (with Ron-
ald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher being just the most often-cited) proceeded
to dismantle regulations and privatize public goods in the name of efficiency
and under the banner of individual freedom. In most Western democracies,
these processes included a period of rolling back Keynesian institutions in the
1980s, and rolling out and deepening neoliberal policy agendas through wel-
fare state retrenchment, labor market deregulation, and free trade agreements
in the 1990s and 2000s (see Brenner et al. 2010).
Again, markets took precedence over politics. In the process, Hayek’s “road
to serfdom” led instead to a radicalization of the concept of the market. Not
only, now, were social progress and the growth of markets supposed to go
together, as they did in the works of the classical economists. No, the argu-
ment went: without freely competitive markets, democracy would be utterly
impossible. The more that social order was left to the market mechanism, the
greater the degree of democracy, while the more active the state, the greater
the degree of oppression. While market failure might well occur, the risks of
government failure would always be worse still. This fanatical orientation of
economic liberalism’s market philosophy in the West was amplified after the
fall of the Soviet Union, given that the failure of actually existing socialism
seemed to spell out the lack of any viable alternative to liberal capitalism. The
global expansion of neoliberalism under these preconditions also explains the
impact of the crisis today as markets have expanded in every social sphere in
and between nation-states.
The blind faith in market rule ignored the risks at stake. The promise of
personal fulfillment that it incited in individuals worked so long as there was
upward mobility because the belief in one’s own opportunities for success could
compensate for some of the retrenchment of the welfare state. In the wake of
the financial crisis of 2008, however, this belief in individual success no longer
seemed appropriate (Hopkin 2020). In the global north, the path of fulfill-
ment through consumption could no longer be maintained with the help of
cheap credit and affordable goods from abroad. Meanwhile, given the empha-
sis on individual responsibility in the unbundling of social systems since the
Reagan-Thatcher revolution, the middle class had lost many of its rights to
participate in decision-making both in the workplace and, increasingly, in pol-
itics. Just as public goods had been disappearing, individuals found themselves
increasingly left alone (Honig 2017; Vormann and Lammert 2019), while the
fragmentation of the public sphere made it more and more difficult, if not im-
possible, to articulate and pursue emancipatory political projects (see Milstein
in this volume). The promise of prosperity, freedom, and peace, however, as
supposedly enabled by market globalization proved to be only unevenly ful-
filled, at best. Inequalities had grown by leaps and bounds within and between
countries, and health care and social security systems are today massively un-
derfinanced (see Lammert in this volume).
Not only did the blessings of the market, unanimously heralded after the
Cold War, fail to materialize; the market also did harm. Instead of the salutary
promise of “trickle-down” and the blooming fields of economic integration,
there followed stagnating salaries, exploding living costs, and an ever-widening
gap between rich and poor (see Hopkin and Blyth in this volume). In addition,
the privatization of public goods made the logic of the highest bidder spread
to many areas of life pushing the fragmentation of society to new extremes. As
wealth became concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of
individuals, the economization of society and politics began to threaten social
cohesion. In numerous countries, the fissure today runs along the divide be-
tween urban and rural areas, highly qualified specialists and individuals with
less education, self-designated elites and those who have been economically
left behind.
As globalization seemed inexorable (and ultimately beneficial to all), in-
creasingly technocratic politics did little to halt the hollowing out of market
protections (see Berkowitz in this volume). In the West, the so-called Third
Way of the immediate post-Cold War era instead promised many things to
many people: the center-right was appeased through cuts in social spending
in the name of competitiveness, while the center-left emphasized the cosmo-
politan potentials of globalization. Interestingly, the “bloated state” that had
been held responsible for the crises of the 1970s ultimately did not become any
smaller. Its priorities simply shifted: from redistribution to militarization, from
investments in public goods through federal and local governments to the so-
called public-private partnerships that mimicked private competition by shift-
ing costs and blame to the public actors—ultimately making these solutions
across policy fields neither less expensive nor less exclusive or more democratic,
for that matter. As flexible, precarious working conditions grew in number,
however, as systems to buffer social risk were left unfunded, and politicians
no longer seemed to listen to the citizenry (and sometimes were found to be
corrupted), the dissatisfaction with the status quo grew and these politics of no
alternative divided society along existing default lines.
Liberal democracy increasingly appeared as an empty shell. Even in those
presumably stable democracies of the West, whole segments of the popula-
tion no longer felt heard by politicians. Influence on the political process—a
core element of functioning representative democracies—appeared as a privi-
lege reserved for the lobbyists and water-carriers of business and the super-rich
(Gilens 2012). A deep rift therefore opened up between privileged populations
and those who feared losing their social status, an unsavory combination that,
as Jill Frank (2005, 74–75) notes, Aristotle already identified in Politics (Book
3, Chapters 1–4) as anathema for rule by constitution, i.e. for a politeia, the
“healthy regime type” where many share in rule that is aligned with and can
degenerate into demokratia, the “popular” regime. As Robert A. Dahl (1989,

18) foregrounds with view to the Athenian city-state, “no state could hope to
be a good polis if its citizens were greatly unequal.” If citizens no longer act for
the common good, if there is a disconnect between those who govern and the
governed, questions of legitimacy arise quickly. The same still holds true for
modern, large-scale democracy.
Cascading Effects: The Global Crisis of Liberalism

The crisis of liberal democracy is truly global mainly because the politics of
no alternatives pursued by economic liberals in the name of market global-
ization had its origins in a similar premise in Europe and the US (Vormann
and Lammert 2019), and by implication through extended networks of market
exchange and finance, as well as Bretton Woods institutions and other enti-
ties of global governance, it extended beyond these countries of the core. A
neo-classical vision of market rule has therefore dominated the politics of the
last decades, not only in the settled democracies of the NATO alliance and
in the EU but also in the so-called emerging democracies of Latin America
and Asia. Within nation-states, it has meant shrinking governments through
budget cuts and fiscal conservatism; privatizing public goods; and deregulating
labor, financial, and health-care markets, while simultaneously transferring to
individuals the responsibility for their social reproduction and employment.
In international affairs, it has meant forcibly expanding free trade through the
policies of the Washington Consensus, which was then—in a wish that quickly
soured—also expected to ensure a democratic peace among rational state ac-
tors, thanks to the interdependence and mutual agreements between states that
were supposed to accompany such policies.
While around the most recent turn of the century even autocratic leaders felt
the need to aspire at least in rhetoric to the ideal of democratic governance—
think of Putin’s “sovereign democracy” or, for that matter, Orban’s “illiberal
democracy”—the enthusiasm of an American-led expansion of liberal democ-
racy has lost all its momentum. The implosion of neoliberalism as an ideal and
a set of practices are central to this. Not only were many cosmopolitan hopes
thwarted, liberal democracy has increasingly been seen as a fig leaf for wel-
fare state retrenchment in the West, and structural adjustment in the semi-
periphery and the global south. Economic liberalism has failed, but political
liberalism is being held responsible. The blame for underfunded social goods
was shifted to the open society in an odd but by no means accidental reversal
and distortion of causalities.
At the same time that the Washington Consensus hollowed out the hopes for
integration and political emancipation, US hegemony entered a crisis which,
since the turn of the century, has often been described, particularly with the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the expansion of NATO (and EU) into
Eastern Europe, as the fallout from an imperial overstretch. In that context,

the self-ascribed moral leadership of the US was fundamentally weakened by
the use of torture under George W. Bush, the failure to close Guantanamo
under Barack Obama, not to speak of Donald Trump’s pivot from the idealist
tradition to neo-realist zero-sum logics and full-on confrontation. Trump’s
decision to give up the ideal of American moral leadership altogether hence al-
most seems consequent. It is certainly consequential for the viability of a liberal
vision of inter-state relations.
Unsurprisingly, this reorientation away from the post-Cold War liberal con-
sensus is currently a hot topic in scholarly debates in the political science sub-
field of IR. The “realist” perspective welcomes it, pointing out how the liberal
project had always been a set of high-flying ideals that were bound to fail from
the outset and should be given up altogether. Stephen Walt’s book with the
telling title The Hell of Good Intentions paradigmatically argues that
America’s pursuit of liberal hegemony poisoned relations with Russia, led

to costly quagmires in Afghanistan, Iraq, and several other countries […]
and encouraged both states and non-state actors to resist U.S. efforts or to
exploit them for their own benefit.
(Walt 2018, 14)
Like Walt, John J. Mearsheimer highlights the impossibility of the “liberal

dream” (Mearsheimer 2018) which had dragged the US into unnecessary
and dangerous engagements abroad, and urges policy-makers to balance off-
shore rivals through tactics of divide and conquer while redirecting military
investments into the rebuilding of public goods at home—interestingly, a
traditional claim of the left (for instance, Williams 1959). Even liberal the-
orists, while they don’t share the prescriptive conclusions, agree that the
liberal order is in peril (Ikenberry 2018; Rose 2019). The years of confidence
and notions of an inevitable liberal expansion under the moral leadership of
the US seem long gone. Against this backdrop of a compromised ideological
consensus and the loss of a common compass, in the global south and in the
semi-periphery, the hopes of the post-Cold War have abated (Krastev in this
volume). The 1990s enthusiasm for marketization, very much at the center
of cosmopolitan hopes of global emancipation and integration, now rings
hollow.
Less discussed in the IR literature, but nonetheless crucial is the fact that,
much in line with Karl Polanyi’s observation, illiberalism springs spontaneously
from a legitimate set of concerns and grievances within a multitude of different
societies. It is not, at its origins, an “anti-liberal conspiracy” (Polanyi [1944]
2001, 151) concocted and premeditated by a new type of political conscious-
ness. The nearly simultaneous parallels in re-nationalization not only in the US
and the UK but clear across the world and encompassing established and new
democracies from Brazil to India indicate something deeper. Namely, that and
how the hopes of political emancipation, which still prevailed in the late 20th
century, have disappeared precisely alongside the expansion and integration of
the market within all spheres of politics.
Progressive Critiques: Liberalism Is Not Rule by Markets

It is not that the left didn’t see it coming. A body of work emerged much before
the first so-called populists came to power that voiced a very strong critique of
the neoliberal politics of no alternative. Political scientists and economic sociol-
ogists, among others, explained the central themes at stake in today’s debates
about the crisis of democracy in great breadth and depth (Mouffe 2005; Crouch
2011; Wallerstein et al. 2013; Vogl 2015; Streeck 2017). As such, the down-
sides of globalization and the dangers that result from inequalities and threaten
social stability have been identified, analyzed, and denounced in recent de-
cades by many authors in Europe, North America, and beyond (Stiglitz 2003;
Wilkinson 2005; Bartels 2008). Nor was it only academics and readers with
specialized interests who began to think more deeply about inequalities and
their dangers. The topic veritably exploded following the global financial crisis,
and authors like Blyth (2013) and Piketty (2014) became very well-known far
beyond the ivory tower.
The critique of neoliberalism included, as one of its elements, a critique of
the market that essentially took aim at the negative consequences of the econo-
mization of societies—a tendency that, according to these authors, endangered
democracy. Not everything, they argued, can be simply treated as a commodity
(in other words, not all things can be commodified). Markets have technical,
moral, and political limits.4 Subsumed within the market, societies lose their
ability to think and act politically. In that way, technocracy, as it has come
to dominate education, the legal system, and political discourse, renders true
politics impossible (Crouch 2015). Adding to this, market society’s growing in-
equalities translate into unequal influence on politics. As such, responsiveness,
the extent to which political representatives still attend to the interests of the
people, is extremely unequally distributed.5
In sum, this progressive critique highlighted, democracy is sometimes at
odds with (economic) liberalism, because even though the latter might aim
to protect certain individual rights and thereby the constituents of the demos
from the tyranny of the majority, its emphasis on individual liberty can contra-
dict the need for public virtue. Put differently, liberalism—even more so in its
economic version—gives only a partial vision of democracy that foregrounds
individualism at the detriment of other potential understandings and practices
of democracy (see Plattner in this volume). However, as innumerable authors
have insisted since at least the 18th century—Smith, Tocqueville, and Mill
again come to mind—democracy is more than market rule.
This progressive critique did not end with calling into question the current
state of affairs. Many critics on the left even pointed to possible ways out of the
crisis. Particularly since the 2008 global financial crisis, some authors stressed
the role of the state as an important actor, despite globalization, and that, as in the
past, government should be called to account on matters that concern the public.
Since the government is responsible for constructing infrastructure and investing
in science and education, for instance, and since it exerts an often-invisible influ-
ence on the distribution of resources, it bears a significant share of responsibility
for social welfare (Peck 2010; Mettler 2011; Mazzucato 2015). Especially where
there is upward redistribution, the government must act in accordance with the
common good, not wealthy special interests—or so went the normative argu-
ment. In other words, the state needs to be foregrounded and held accountable.
This could indeed be a starting point for rebuilding the (center) left from its
ashes, because recognizing such responsibility means that the state does have
room for maneuver and therefore could engage in a politics of redistribution
and decommodification—politics, in other words, are not without alternative.
But, be that as it may, in practice, after every crisis, exactly the opposite seems
to transpire: the costs and indebtedness of private interests have been foisted
upon the public many times over, while the state has been regarded either as
helpless, wasteful, or inefficient. The global financial crisis is the best example.
In many countries, it was renamed a sovereign debt crisis (which it never was)
to shift both burden and blame from the private to the public. Mark Blyth, on
this subject, talks about the “greatest bait-and-switch operation in modern his-
tory” (Blyth 2013, 73). All this was happening before the backdrop of historical
economic inequalities and, in many countries, long-term real wage stagnation
for the majority of workers (Runciman 2018). Is it surprising that there would
be anger against economic and political elites?
Under these conditions of frustration and disillusionment, of deep inequalities
and precarious labor, little events can spark turmoil. Think of the fuel hikes in
France that unleashed the yellow-vest movement and of the increase in public
transportation prices in Santiago that triggered some of the largest protests of
Chilean history. Add to this a series of external shocks, such as natural disasters
(as in Turkey), terrorist attacks (as in France), foreign interference (as in the US),
and an already frail system seems much more vulnerable than the immediate
post-Cold War era would have made seem possible. The 20th century’s hopes
of equality and freedom, and of global peace and progress have been called off.
However, responses to the global crisis of neoliberalism are not preordained.
What progressive voices offered as an alternative was to reject the dangers of
market-led economic liberalism and embrace more political visions of society.
They reasserted political liberalism to point out the divisiveness of market rule
and the responsibility of the state. However, the left, despite movements such as
Occupy Wall Street or Blockupy, was much less successful in articulating that
political vision and translating it into electoral victories than the right.
The Critique from the Right: Who Belongs?

For the right, the solution to the long-term crisis of neoliberalism was not a
salvaging of political liberalism, but its rejection in favor of a narrowly defined
reassertion of popular sovereignty. As such, economic liberalism’s (very) myo-
pic vision of market-led democracy has been in the process of being replaced
by another, equally partial understanding of the idea of democracy. For all the
differences between regimes and actors (self-)identified as illiberal, today they
each share a key conviction: popular sovereignty, not the rule of law or protec-
tion of minorities, is the sine qua non of democracy.
Despite their differences, contributors to this volume—who explore the cri-
sis phenomena at hand from conservative and progressive points of view—share
the sense that illiberalism is a symptom rather than a root cause of the crisis of
liberal democracy. Both left and right critique an overexposure to globaliza-
tion and break with the dominant post-Cold War discourse of liberalism. In
practice, as we shall argue, illiberalism is mainly a phenomenon of the right
and it has given rise to a strange hybrid—in essence, an authoritarian turn and
reinvention of neoliberalism (see Peck and Theodore 2019), that holds on to
some selected neoliberal traditions and democratic rituals, but rejects liberal
democracy as a normative social goal and a guiding principle to govern global
economic exchange and political relations.
Such right-wing illiberalism misconstrues the body politic as Volkskörper,
that is as “an organicist and essentialist entity” in which ‘the people’ comes to
be regarded as “a somehow unified organism” (Paul 2019, 128). Globalization in
its different forms—financialization, trade, migration—by contrast, is regarded
as a threat to that demos which needs to be diverted. Even from a very general
point of view, the concept of democracy is always ambivalent because the root
of the term—‘rule by the many’ or ‘people’s rule’—neither tells us which peo-
ple (demos in Greek, whence “democracy” derives) it applies to nor by which
means such people should rule and be ruled. As such, modern democracies are
constantly disputed: who is in and who is not matter. Moreover, the methods
of rule are contested. Under which conditions is a representative government
legitimate? How and for whom to ensure democracy? (Dahl 1989) Illiberalism
is concerned, quite precisely, with the rejection of the political and social claims
of political liberalism as they extend to a widely defined demos. Such rights and
privileges should only be extended to the “true” citizen (determined by rather
arbitrary ethnic approximations defined by the illiberal politician).
This commitment to popular sovereignty around a narrowly defined demos,
in short, constitutes the core characterization of illiberalism, traversing the con-
ceptual and terminological fields discussed in different ways and with different
assumptions in this book. Interestingly, at the same time, illiberalism, while it
rejects tenets of inclusive political liberalism, does not necessarily refute all the
precepts of economic liberalism. Domestically, illiberal politicians indeed tend
to even strengthen market rule, while bracketing all democratic protection of

individual and minority rights. It remains an open question, then, whether the
commitment to popular and/or national sovereignty asserted by those who take
up the mantle of “illiberal democracy” only pays lip service to those frustrated
with the effects of globalization or whether it ought to be considered worthy
of the name “democracy” at all. Even more so since in actual illiberal politics,
more often than not, the closing of borders and erecting of (trade) barriers are
matched by domestic hyper-deregulation and privatization. This will do little,
of course, to address the problems of inequality and irresponsiveness at home—
that we claim to be causal for the crisis of liberal democracy.
As discussed in detail in Marc Plattner’s contribution to this volume, Fareed
Zakaria’s term illiberal democracy (Zakaria 1997), rendered famous in a 2014
speech by Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, is a misnomer in that
sense. Rather, undemocratic (purely economic) liberalism would more aptly describe
what we see in many contexts where a further rollout of privatization and liber-
alization of the economy—economic liberalism in its truncated and amplified
form—dovetails with a retrenchment of civil liberties, voting rights, and other
political freedoms and social rights.
Not Just Reaction: Illiberalism’s Productive Capacities

So far, we have argued that, at this specific historical juncture, illiberalism rises as a
promise to return to a vague pre-neoliberal era. Right-wing anti-globalization forces
are seeking to protect nationals from the outside in a hostile world. But unlike the
Keynesian-Fordist welfare state, there is hardly an articulation of an emancipatory
political counter-vision—and if there is, it targets only an imagined ethnic core and
seeks to restore traditional patriarchal values. Instead, we witness an extreme form of
clientelism and the radical slashing of education budgets, a repealing of environmen-
tal protections—think of the environmental protection agency in the US, the burn-
ing down of rainforests in Brazil, or even the weak climate pact in Germany—and a
massive deregulation of the financial sector. This is no longer quite neoliberalism tout
court, given, for instance, the turn away from free trade or from the lip service to de-
mocracy and cosmopolitanism; nor quite fascism, because some democratic institu-
tions persist, even if in an often very truncated way. This in-between phenomenon,
described by some as a period of transition, or “interregnum” (Berman 2019), is what
we see as the inflection point from which illiberalism emerges.
The illiberal alternative gestures toward a set of ways out of the neoliberal
politics of no alternative. In its most extreme variants, essentially, what arises
from the ruins of neoliberalism (Brown 2019), from the vacant ideological
room left by undemocratic liberalism (Mounk 2018), in the absence of a strong
center-left (or center-right) alternative, is a politics of fear. This politics of
fear operates on prerational terms. It seeks to drive a wedge between the ‘true
demos’ and the outsider. It works from the premise that the state is no longer
performing its basic tasks. That it no longer holds the monopoly of violence and
can no longer protect citizens from foreign invasion and inner disintegration,
and that the citizen has to take self-defense in their own hands.
No longer, obviously, is this the left critique of inequality and the injus-
tices of globalization that could be faced by addressing the shortcomings of
the state in terms of redistribution or decommodification. It is a critique that
shifts the blame from the economic inequalities between the haves and the
have-nots, between the nation as a group of citizens and workers below—the
99%—against the 1% at the top (see OWS) to a critique of inside and outside:
the ethnic nation that defends its traditional values and is under threat by over-
whelming external forces that the state seems unwilling (because of its multi-
cultural politics and openness to trade) or unable (see the critique of reduced
state capacities that is shared with the mainstream discourse) to mitigate.
Under these circumstances of perceived emergency and threat to the very core
of the populace, the institutions and procedures of liberal democracy no longer
seem to hold. Everyone who opposes the ‘will of the people’ is an enemy: the me-
dia that spread fakenews to distract us from what is really going on, the foreigner
who is taking away resources, the parliament that is dysfunctional and has been
doing nothing but talking (“all talk, no action”). And so the essential pillars of the
rational enlightenment, necessary to make democracy possible, are toppled. The
checks and balances are unfit to tackle the challenges and are set aside. Govern-
ment operates by decree and by state of emergency. The politics of fear, such as
those we see in the wake of the still-unfolding global pandemic, make pluralistic
debate impossible. They pose political problems as life or death questions. Once
this threshold is passed, there is simply no place for reason and reasoned argument.
As such, illiberalism is not only a reaction to the inner tensions and contradic-
tions of neoliberalism. It has productive capacities. To attain power, would-be au-
tocrats reinforce the climate of anxiety—by creating fears of an ethnic exchange
(a conspiracy theory of the extreme right), instrumentalizing dissatisfaction with
migration inflows (such as European political mobilizations against refugees since
2015 and candidate Trump’s call to “Build That Wall!”), and creating an impres-
sion of constant threats to physical safety from terrorists and other criminals (as in
Duterte’s war on drug dealers). By demonizing others, demagogues can demand a
partial reversal of globalization processes, insisting on popular sovereignty, while
at the same time reinventing the demos as an ethnic, rather than civic group,
united by birth and territory rather than common values and interests.
What is at stake, then, is not just a conservative attempt to address the true
grievances (that the political left would accept do exist) by shifting the focus
from economic inequalities to outside threats and the blame to political rivals.
Rather, it is to impose a different form of society. Illiberal actors seek to replace
the multicultural and emancipated vision that was used under neoliberalism to
paint economization in humanistic and cosmopolitan colors, by a more nation-
alistic vision of a new (but really very old) social project.
This restoration of a deeply conservative, imaginary primordial state of

affairs (that, of course, never really existed) seeks to also enforce pre-modern
patriarchal gender relations. As such, it rejects claims by the LGBTQ com-
munity, perceived as postmodern aberrations and extravagances. Feminism
and gender studies departments become key targets of attack precisely because
they undermine the legitimacy of such unquestioned traditions of patriarchy
that autocrats seek to restore. This does not mean that critique of gender
studies shouldn’t be allowed or that all arguments in feminist work (as if this
were one coherent set of arguments in the first place!) should be blindly ac-
cepted. Nor does it mean that concerns about ideological uniformity in aca-
demic contexts are inherently illiberal or empirically false.6 Nevertheless, it
is striking that across contexts where illiberal tendencies gain political force,
such work is under direct attack and often has to suffer deep budget cuts.
Beyond the academe, and immediately relevant to the life worlds of millions
of women, illiberal actors push for antiquated, patriarchal gender roles, un-
dermining women’s reproductive rights (as, for instance, in Poland where the
Law and Justice party, PiS, seeks to render abortions illegal). In that sense, the
productive capacities of illiberalism have a lot to do with the reassertion of
paternalistic notions of white masculinity.
Revising the Demos

Unsurprisingly, as illiberal and authoritarian trends are on the rise—both in
fragile and seemingly robust democracies—there is growing concern about the
longevity of both liberalism and democracy. One source of the growing popu-
larity of illiberal policies, then, is an expression of a crisis of conviction owing
to economic, cultural, and institutional distortions of citizens’ self-interest as
they understand it. Alongside this, there is a second source that cannot merely
be written off as “populist.” Namely, anti-system movements and political par-
ties have been able to exploit the discrepancy between supranational institu-
tions (the EU, the WTO, the UN) and respective national interests, conceived
narrowly as those of an ethnic community in need of protection from outside
forces. Different actors have used such outside threats to mobilize opponents of
globalization and to raise claims for (often rural, majority ethnic) core constitu-
encies. From this vantage point, (supranational) democracy has been viewed as
a floodgate for foreign interests willing to exploit an already vulnerable national
population whose national public goods (infrastructures, health-care systems,
pension and retirement systems) have been destroyed by forces of globalization.
These distortions of the constitutional protection of minorities in the service
of authoritarian (or authoritarian-like) policies expose real tensions within the
practice of constitutionalism and self-understanding of constitutionally elected
representatives of “the whole people” who also explicitly identify with ethni-
cally or ideologically defined partisans within that people.
In Western democracies, it is telling that upon closer examination, it is

not actually those who have suffered most from globalization who are in
uproar: for instance, the minorities exploited in highly precarious jobs along
the supply chain, from resource extraction to consumption. Rather, it is
a specific type of citizen (often white males in former manufacturing re-
gions) who had previously benefited from the post-War compromise—an
irony of history, yes that compromise struck by the forces of political liber-
alism to build the welfare state!—but now feels and more often than not is
“left behind.” If not exclusively—because fear mongering and hate speech do
matter—this is a story of relative status decline, accompanied by a number
of very real and harsh consequences, such as the opioid drug crisis and the
surge in suicides in the US that many link (we think convincingly) to such
economic hardship. It has a strong racial and gender component: the bread-
winner that no longer can earn a sufficient household and loses a position
of relative privilege (Fraser 2016). This motive recurs in the US after the
welfare reforms of the 1990s and in Europe in the early 2000s as much as it
does, in a curious, reversed scenario in Brazil, where existing middle classes
have felt increasingly threatened by the rise of ethnically different working
classes (Solano in this volume).
It is important to emphasize that the neoliberal compromise was not just im-
posed by conservatives, more often criticized for their proximity to the private
sector. Rather, in a phenomenon labeled progressive neoliberalism by Nancy
Fraser (2017), parties of the (center-) left grew increasingly fond of the so-called
New Economy and Silicon Valley during the 1990s, becoming complicit in
a market fundamentalism that is now creating a global backlash. This is now
being leveraged against the left. In short, depending on context and political
culture, tropes of ethno-nationalist nostalgia, fears of ethnic extinction, tra-
ditional Christian values, and/or critiques of political correctness are being
mobilized to redefine the body politic and exclude minorities, feminists, intel-
lectuals, social democrats, and the broader left. The strategic use of conserva-
tive narratives and the remaking of leftist markers has been a successful political
tool and has also served as a smokescreen for those parties that actually made it
to power: for instance, in Eastern and Central Europe (Krastev in this volume).
Remaking the State

Once in power, autocratic populists seek to weaken established democratic
mechanisms that limit their power. The illiberal party undermines the sepa-
ration of powers, particularly with attacks upon the independence of the ju-
diciary; it assaults the fourth estate and sows doubts about its credibility and
curtails the freedom of speech. All forms of contradiction to the strongman
leader are rejected. What the leader says (not the ‘corrupted’ media) is supposed
to become the truth. Truth, put differently, is not something arrived at through
deliberation in the public sphere but through authority and tradition. Journal-
ists and the free press constantly challenge this authority and therefore become
themselves enemies of the people. The same holds, of course, for ivory tower
intellectuals; spoilt middle-class students; and children environmentalists, à la
Greta Thunberg, who are seen as part of the privileged elites who want to take
the last shirt off the hard-working people’s back.
Illiberal politicians seek to stabilize their power by surrounding themselves
with loyal nepotists and family in public offices, intimidating and seeking polit-
ical dirt on their opponents at home and abroad, and changing the rules of the
electoral system. Gerrymandering and other political tools are used to reduce
the competitiveness of political opponents, and electoral defeats are generally
viewed as the result of irregularities—how could the demos not vote their true
leader who is clearly the only one defending their interests? Only rarely, so far (as
recently in the case of Poland), do illiberals advance (limited) social policy pro-
grams for the lower middle classes. What this indicates, nonetheless, is that they
cannot act only by submission. This need to sustain their legitimacy leads such
decision-makers to also accelerate economic growth through hyper-deregulation
and privatization and the sell-off of remaining public goods, while at the same
time pacifying economic elites (tending to be part of the majority population and
not fearing resentments against minorities) through tax breaks and pro-business
legislation. Securing the benevolence of the upper (middle) classes through major
tax cuts contradicts earlier critiques of wasteful spending by old elites, but that
does not seem to be important any more. Concerns with clientelism and conflicts
of interest are equally brushed aside, claiming that everybody would rationally
act this way, and that what was more important than focusing on these marginal
details were the injuries inflicted on the true demos by others.
We are by no means saying that illiberalism automatically leads to fascism.
But illiberal actors create a political climate in which lies, corruption, and
violence become acceptable everyday phenomena and where democracy dis-
integrates to a point where these forces can gain power. In some cases, this
process is incremental—Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warn us that often
“[d]emocracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible” (2018, 6)—in others,
it is accelerated by external shocks and systematically used states of emergency,
i.e. attempted coups (see Coşkun and Kölemen in this volume), terrorist attacks
or when these are absent, the potential for such (see Surak in this volume), and
interethnic violence (see Sundar in this volume), inter alia. The suppression of
opposition and the creation of a de facto one-party state through changes in
the electoral system can be and are being legitimized along the same lines, as
much as is the curtailing of political rights and the militarization of society.
From that point onward, the distinction between this sort of democracy and a
dictatorship, resting on little more than the fact of holding elections, but incit-
ing political violence against political opponents and intimidating oppositional
voices, becomes blurred.
Conclusion: Illiberalism Is Not Only Anti-Liberalism

Liberal democracy is at a crossroads. Four decades of market fundamentalism,
put into political practice by elites from both the center-left and center-right,
have hollowed out the promises of political liberalism, not just in the US or
in the European Union and its individual member states (Blyth 2013; Offe
2015), but equally so in other nation-states with different commitments to
democratization across the world. The promise of market efficiency has been
used to reform labor markets, slash social budgets, and shift all social risks to
individuals. All this happened under the pretext that no alternative was possi-
ble, simply because globalization—this seemingly overwhelming, external set
of dynamics—had forced the hand of politicians on all levels of government
in every region of the world, however advanced its economic development
and whatever the status of its regime type. Meanwhile, elected officials, often
unresponsive to their own constituencies, did in fact legislate in a way very
much responsive to the desires of expanding transnational companies. This
pattern of revolving doors and lucrative partnerships has led to a serious erosion
of trust and a pervasive sense of injustice. As the West loses its faith not just in
economic liberalism, but in what has been used as a justification to remake so-
ciety in its image—liberal democracy—so do nation-states in the global south
that are increasingly disappointed by the failed promises of liberalism and even
come to see the liberal order as a ruse to extend colonial rule with the means
of the market.
The critique of liberalism, and by implication of liberal democracy, is no
longer only a progressive critique as it had been in the years immediately after
the global financial crisis. Instead, more often than not, it has been rearticulated
by reactionary movements into a critique of an aloof elitism. All boils down to
a stylized face-off between the cosmopolitan globalists, jetting from global city
to global city, and those who truly care for the real, hard-working people. But
illiberalism is not just a reaction. Its agents actively seek to remake politics and
follow specific interests—illiberalism is not just an irrational change of mood
in parts of the population. It is characterized, from an economic perspective,
by hyper-liberalization and clientelism at home as well as a neo-mercantilist
recalibration on the inter-state level. Illiberal politicians tend to reject and hol-
low out some of the central institutions and procedures of liberal democracy
(court-packing in the judicial branch, undermining the separation of powers,
limiting the franchise, attacking free speech and opponents), and recast democ-
racy in partial ways as a protection of sovereignty based on a clearly ethnically
demarcated demos.
But this is not simply an autocratic wave: in fact, rather than a sudden surge
at the right, we note a crisis of conviction in the center. If our analysis is right,
ways out of an illiberal world therefore need to address two crises at once.
The first is the protracted crisis of political liberalism itself. That is the root
cause that led to the implosion of neoliberalism, particularly in the core group

of Western democracies. Markets alone simply cannot bring social peace and
stability domestically; consult Smith, Tocqueville, and Mill on this. Neither
can they assure more legitimate and harmonious inter-state relations, as prac-
tice shows. Citizens need to be equipped with a modicum of political and social
rights if the moniker of liberal democracy is to hold any credibility and describe
viable processes. That includes limits on the influence of particular interests on
government, the provision of a range of public goods (including health care, edu-
cation, affordable housing, and mobility), options for social mobility, and the re-
regulation of labor markets. Moreover, there needs to be a notion of the common
good—an important reason why an integrative civic (not ethnically exclusive)
type of nationalism indeed fulfills an important political role that shouldn’t sim-
ply be abandoned for the sake of an idealistic cosmopolitanism (Calhoun 2007).
Populists in power offer none of this, but neither or only rarely do estab-
lishment parties. In national contexts where autocrats are not yet in office, for
center-left parties in particular, this means that a political vision would need
to be articulated in opposition not just to would-be autocrats but to almost a
half-century of policies that have enriched the few and harmed the many—an
alternative to the politics of no alternatives that does not revert to fear. Cosmo-
politanism will have to mean something different from a simplistic embrace of
open markets. On the center-right, questions of identity and belonging as well
as the tradeoff between security and civil liberties will have to be reassessed
and renegotiated in earnest to offer alternatives to citizens so-inclined. But
these debates will have to be pursued strictly within the space of democratic
contestation.
The question of scale is a reasonable and important one that democracies
must face squarely, on the basis of a debate grounded in rational deliberation.
What would be the most emancipatory way to organize politics, given that the
global economy is as yet unmatched by global political institutions? What is the
role of the nation and the nation-state in creating true alternatives to neoliberal
globalization? Such a debate is best predicated on the observation that democ-
racy thrives on visions of abundance. Such imaginaries make sharing in the
common good possible, and don’t limit politics to zero-sum games.
But if the crisis of democracy is older than the Trump presidency, illiberal
politicians like him do add a new layer of complexity to the challenges liberal
democracy is facing. The second crisis requires a different set of approaches. No
doubt, autocratic movements learn from one another across national boundar-
ies. They also have a structural advantage, given the conjuncture of apocalyptic
scenarios dominating politics and fueling fear: chronic unemployment, displace-
ment by technology, terrorism, pandemics, and even human extinction. And yet,
illiberalism is not self-fulfilling or inexorable. Examples of autocracy elsewhere
can also serve as a warning sign to those who want to defend the potentials of
democracy and who seek to rearticulate them, not as a return to the market
fundamentalism of the past, but as a set of political ideas and practices in their
own right (see Wiesner in this volume for the case of the European Union).
Can the specters of illiberalism and hatred be overcome? It certainly has been
done before and we do also see hopeful signs for a democratic revitalization,
such as the repoliticization of public discourses, marches against antiplural-
ists and racists, and solidarity between democratic actors in civil society. Even
though they have been instrumentalized for the wrong purposes, we believe
that there are indeed political values worth salvaging in the liberal tradition
(Katznelson 2013). Political liberalism articulates social ideals that help provide
mechanisms for (an approximation of ) self-rule in modern large-scale society
while seeking to protect the rights of individuals and minorities in a pluralistic
society. It can bring with it a culture of political liberty and social emancipa-
tion that no other regime can. Liberal democracy will need to be reinvented
to find a way out of its self-made crisis of legitimacy and an important part of
this will be to rethink liberalism as a project in political economy, rather than
a merely political or economic policy program. Only thus will it be possible to
address the rightful concerns and true economic and ecological grievances that
untrammeled market rule has brought with it.
Notes

the authors of this longer-standing critique highlighted that the market form can
present a political problem of its own. Nancy Fraser (2016), Robert Kuttner (2018),
Jamie Peck (2010), Fran Tonkiss, and Don Slater (2001) are only some among a
whole list of authors who emphasize that the logic of the market is, after all, fun-
damentally not consistent with the logic of democracy, or even, to refer to Karl
Polanyi’s (2001 [1944]) seminal argument many of these authors build on, corrosive
to the survival of society itself.
5 In the US, by and large, it is only the super-rich and/or the corporations that store
and expand their wealth that are still heard in the political process, while the inter-
ests of the middle class and lower income groups have become background noise
that is barely perceived at all (Gilens 2012). In such a context, elections degenerate
into a public spectacle of democracy, while political decisions are made behind
closed doors, with the support of influential lobbyists (Bartels 2008).
6 Indeed, the attempt in this volume to include commentary from across the ideo-
logical spectrum alongside analysis that aspires to impartiality evidences that we, as
editors, have our own concerns about the insularity of academic discourse.
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2
WHAT DOES A LEGITIMATION CRISIS
MEAN TODAY?
Financialized Capitalism and the Crisis of
Crisis Consciousness
Brian Milstein
Introduction
When we hear the expression “crisis of liberal democracy” today, more likely
than not what is being referenced is the rise of right-wing populist movements.
But democracy has been caught on the shoals for some time. Some two decades
ago, Colin Crouch coined the term “post-democracy” (2004) to describe a
society that still possessed all the formal trappings of liberal democracy, but
they ceased to be of any substance, as real authority had passed to a technocratic
elite serving the interests of financialized capitalism. Crouch did not believe
that we were already living in such a society, only that we may be moving in
that direction. In this respect, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble
may have become the first self-consciously post-democratic politician when he
reputedly declared at a 2015 Eurogroup meeting, “Elections cannot be allowed
to change the economic program of a member state” (Varoufakis 2016). Years
before Donald Trump publicly mused about disregarding the results of the U.S.
presidential election, the European leadership was already making a practice of
overriding democratic procedures to enforce its austerity policies. To the adage
that the answer to the problems of democracy is more democracy, we might
add the corollary that the problems of democracy, left unaddressed, only bring
more problems.
There were many on the left who hoped that the political aftermath of the
2008 financial crisis would spark a legitimation crisis in capitalist societies—one
that would at last overturn neoliberal forms of economic thought, kick-starting
a revitalization of social democracy and a much-needed renewal of utopian
energies. Others noted the startling absence of such a legitimation crisis in
the years following 2008, despite the evident strains being put on democratic
28 Brian Milstein
autonomy and legitimacy by international financial institutions and encroach-

ing technocratic forms of governance, especially in the EU (Crouch 2011;
Fraser 2015). There was even speculation that late-capitalist societies may have
reached a point where it is effectively immune to serious legitimation challenges
(Azmanova 2014a, 2014b, 2015; Roitman 2014; Streeck 2016).
The 2016 Brexit referendum and Trump’s election as U.S. President made
it clear that the symptoms of legitimation crisis have finally arrived. But they
arrived in a form very different from what many expected, much less desired.
Moreover, if the hegemony of the neoliberal world order has been shaken,
it is far from clear what (if anything) might fully unseat it, for the populist
movements that have sprouted up seem hardly any more stable in the long run.
Nancy Fraser writes that we find ourselves in what Gramsci once described as
an “interregnum,” in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born,”
during which time “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (Gramsci
1971, 276; Fraser 2017).
The concept of a “legitimation crisis” is most closely associated with Jürgen
Habermas, and recently, his 1970s book on legitimation crisis tendencies in
postwar capitalism has provided a common reference point for discussion of
the various forms of political turmoil that have ensued in Europe and the U.S.
over the last decade (Cordero 2014; Streeck 2014; Fraser 2015; Habermas 2015;
Milstein 2015; Gilbert 2019; Ibsen 2019; Lebow 2019). Originally published as
Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus in 1973, Legitimation Crisis examines the
deep-seated tensions between capitalism and democracy and the ways in which
crises can be “displaced” from the economic realm into the administrative and
political realms of society.
Using Habermas’s original thesis as a point of departure, the purpose of this
chapter is to explore the meaning of legitimation crisis under the financial-
ized capitalism of the 21st century. My argument is that legitimation crises can
take on specific and pathological forms under financialized capitalism, which
Habermas’s model failed to fully capture. At the same time, Habermas’s argu-
ment contains theoretical resources that are invaluable to understanding the
present crisis, though he did not always develop them sufficiently. In addition to
his analysis of crisis tendencies in state-managed capitalism, Habermas’s book
is notable for the way it questions and reformulates the concept of crisis in capi-
talist society. As Rodrigo Cordero recently noted, a central claim of the book
is that “the analysis of the reality of crisis cannot proceed without a critique
of the concept of crisis” (Cordero 2014, 500). Habermas realized that, though
we frequently describe crises as objective events accessible to social-scientific
description and analysis, the “reality” of crises in modern societies is a function
of crisis consciousness on the part of society’s participants: societal contradic-
tions, pathologies, systemic deficits, and the like only rise to the level of crisis
phenomena to the extent that actors experience them as such. Furthermore, he
realized that crisis consciousness in modern societies is enacted discursively, in
What Does Legitimation Crisis Mean Today? 29
the way crisis-conscious citizens bring their experiences and understandings of

crisis to bear on each other as a public. But he did not carry through on the im-
plications of this discursive conception of crisis consciousness, and particularly
the ways the discursive deployment of crisis consciousness can be impeded or
distorted under certain social conditions.
As we will see, the contours of a legitimation crisis under financialized cap-
italism differ from those described by Habermas in the 1970s. The contradic-
tions of financialized capitalism are such that securing legitimacy can only be
achieved via the virtual desiccation of the political public sphere. This has a
side effect, however, in that, when the hegemony of financialized capitalism
falls into legitimation crisis, the absence of a sufficiently robust public sphere
compromises the ability of citizens to fully develop their collective sense of
crisis consciousness. This allows society to fragment. It does not “cause” people
to embrace illiberal or authoritarian populism, but it fosters an atmosphere in
which such populism can gain a foothold. In this respect, financialized capi-
talism exacerbates the legitimation crises it generates for itself, leading them to
take on pathological forms, including several of those we now group under the
heading of “crisis of liberal democracy.”
Habermas Revisited
For all its influence, Legitimation Crisis was a product of its time. Aside from its
heavy reliance on the systems-functionalism of Talcott Parsons, its core thesis
is aimed directly at the politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which were
marked by widespread counter-cultural and protest movements across Europe
and the U.S. The question concerning Habermas was whether the Keynesian
welfare state really had overcome capitalism’s tendencies toward contradiction
and crisis (Habermas 1975, 30–31). Orthodox Marxism, after all, is built on
the idea that capitalism is at its core afflicted by an ineradicable contradiction
between the forces and relations of production, which drives it into periodic
economic crises of increasing intensity, which articulate themselves politically
in class conflict. But postwar economic policy had brought to the West near-
continuous growth uninterrupted by major economic crisis, while the “welfare
state compromise” brought the forces of labor and capital to a truce. Had the
Keynesian welfare state really “resolved” the core contradictions of capitalism?
If so, why all the discontent?
Habermas’s argument was that the Keynesian welfare state had not elimi-
nated capitalism’s crisis tendencies; it merely displaced them. Habermas accepted
the view that, under state-managed capitalism, economic crises are no longer
necessary sources on legitimation crisis in the way they had been under the
laissez-faire capitalism of the 19th century. At the same time, the capacities
of the political system to absorb the tensions internal to capitalism come at a
cost, which could only be paid through the ever-increasing intrusion of the
30 Brian Milstein
administrative realm into the sociocultural lifeworld of society. This had the
effect of making the administrative state the focus of political conflict instead
of class division: the more the state expands into everyday life, the more legit-
imacy it must command. In Habermas’s assessment, the increasing need for le-
gitimacy creates for the capitalist state a new kind of problem (Habermas 1975,
68–75). As the state penetrates further and further into society, it begins to alter
the social and cultural bases of society. Growing bureaucratization of social life
increases senses of alienation and disillusionment. Economic prosperity means
that citizens are no longer as driven by basic material needs as they once were,
loosening the hold of privatist ideology. Eventually, the welfare state becomes
its own source of public discontent by destroying the cultural resources it re-
quires for legitimation (Habermas 197, 92–94).
In short, instead of resolving capitalism’s crisis tendencies, the postwar welfare
state transposes them from the economic to the cultural domain. Habermas was
far from alone in locating the source of mid-century alienation and discontent in
some complex of the administrative state and consumerist culture. Much of the
criticism of the postwar period, such as that can be found in the works of Hannah
Arendt, Michel Foucault, and the Frankfurt School, coalesced around suspicions
of “the social” and associated forms of “discipline,” “governmentality,” or an
“administered world” (Arendt 1958; Foucault 1977, 1991; Marcuse 2002 [1964];
Adorno 2003 [1968]). This is not to mention the ways state-managed capitalism
was seen to reinforce gender-based and (especially in the U.S.) racialized status
hierarchies (Fraser 2016; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 87–90, 103–6). Indeed, by the
1980s, the fault lines of social conflict as articulated in the “new social move-
ments” appeared to have shifted toward a decidedly “post-materialist” terrain
(Inglehart 1977; Habermas 1987a, 392–6; Fraser 1997).
Needless to say, the 2008 crisis and its aftermath threw cold water on this
aspect of Habermas’s thesis. Late-capitalist society remains quite capable of
tumbling into economic crisis, and in retrospect, there appear a number of
fronts on which his argument may have fallen short. One is Habermas’s un-
derstanding of political economy. After all, his thesis about crises taking on
post-materialist forms presupposes a capacity on the part of the administrative
system to effectively subsume the economy. According to Wolfgang Streeck,
Habermas overestimated the extent to which the state could transform own-
ers and firms from “advantage-seeking profit maximizers” into “functionaries
obediently carrying out government economic policy” (Streeck 2014, 21). For
Streeck, the postwar arrangement could better be characterized as an uneasy
partnership between capitalism and democracy, and in fact it had already begun
to unravel around the time Legitimation Crisis was published. Over the next
three decades, successive governments attempted a series of monetary, fiscal,
and financial policy strategies to preserve standards of prosperity well after the
postwar economy ran out of steam, including reliance on sovereign debt and
deregulation of private finance, before the game finally expired in 2008.
More to the point, Habermas’s account of the legitimation crisis of state-

managed capitalism failed to anticipate how it might pave the way for the neoliberal
revolution to come. Building in part on Streeck’s analysis, Nancy Fraser argues that
because Habermas did not duly recognize the political agency of capital, he could
not account for the ways capital exploited or maneuvered the crisis. In her view,
capitalists were ultimately able to channel progressive discontent with the welfare
state in such a way that made “post-materialist” politics compatible with a regressive
economic politics. This ultimately would lead to what she calls “progressive neo-
liberalism,” an alliance of identity politics and free-market capitalism with which
Fraser associates the “Third Way” agendas of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Gerhard
Schröder, and others (Fraser 2017; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 79–81, 200–04). For
Fraser, the overtaking of center-left parties by an agenda that largely forfeits resis-
tance to marketization and financialization would leave them unprepared for the
political crisis that followed 2008 (and ultimately allow populist movements to draw
away voters in former labor strongholds). But there is a deeper issue at play as well.
Underlying this objection is a point concerning the character of legitimation
crises as such. Habermas wanted to situate his account of crises in a theory of
social evolution, and he lists among the drivers of emergent crisis consciousness
the progression of scientism, post-auratic art, and universal morality (Habermas
1975, 84–89). But in Fraser’s view, this “culturalist” account does not take into
account the specifically political forces that need to be in motion for the legiti-
macy of a given order to fall into crisis. It is not sufficient to speak, as Habermas
sometimes does, of a mere “withdrawal” of legitimacy; rather, a full account
of crisis requires an account of hegemonic politics—that is, the way social and
political forces come together to shape the parameters of “normal” political de-
bate, as well as the counter-forces that might challenge or upset such normality
(Fraser 2015, 172–3). Disturbances in the sociocultural realm are not sufficient
to spark political change without effective political mobilization; nor can they
by themselves determine the direction of political change.
Indeed, the evolutionary model on which Habermas relies, as well as the (still
not fully developed) model of communicative rationality to which he ties it, ex-
pects largely progressive outcomes of such crises. In Legitimation Crisis, and later
in Between Facts and Norms, his analysis of transformative possibilities in times of
crisis does not extend further than the prospect of a galvanized citizenry “mobi-
lizing counterknowledge” and challenging established power (Habermas 1975,
96; Habermas 1996, 372–3, 380–4). Consequently, the model has no means
for distinguishing between crises that reignite the progressive-democratic en-
ergies of the citizenry, those which are recuperated by elites in a different guise
(see Boltanski and Chiapello 2007), and those which lead down a path toward
authoritarian populism and destructive ideologies. As a result, not only was
Habermas unable to foresee how the 1970s crisis paved the way for the neoliberal
revolution, but it also appears underequipped for discerning how the 2008 crisis
paved the way for the present crisis of liberal democracy.
32 Brian Milstein
Despite the above-named problems, Habermas’s model of late-capitalist le-

gitimation crises remains pertinent. After all, the story Streeck tells about the
“delayed crisis of democratic capitalism” has purchase precisely because states
continue to assume responsibility for economic performance and crisis man-
agement (cf. Lebow 2019, 388). As much as states attempt to renounce their
regulatory authority in favor of first public and then private modes of finan-
cialization, the history of late 20th-century capitalism is one tailored to the
dilemma of a political system that, having openly acknowledged capitalism’s
crisis tendencies and staked its own legitimacy on its capacities to successfully
mitigate them, has yet to convincingly extricate itself from these burdens in
the way a genuine free-market ideology would demand. This suggests that
Habermas’s more fundamental diagnosis of the tensions between capitalism
and democracy continues to be relevant. In what follows, I will argue that how
these tensions are managed under financialized capitalism, and at what cost,
remains problematic as they create specific legitimation demands that can only
be met by compromising society’s ability to successfully process crisis.
The Modern Concept of Crisis

But it could well be argued that the real legacy of Habermas’s contribution lies
not in the particulars of his sociological diagnosis but in how he engages our
understanding of “crisis” as such. Legitimation Crisis also contains Habermas’s
first sustained engagement with his famous distinction between “lifeworld”
and “system” aspects of society. Believing both the Marxist and cultural-
conservative conceptions of crisis to suffer crucial limitations, his two-level
approach avoided the pitfalls of a fully “system”-oriented view as well as an
exclusively “culturalist” view by recasting crisis phenomena as disturbances felt
by lifeworld-embedded participants grappling with intrusion by system imper-
atives (Habermas 1975, 3; Cordero 2014, 500–01). Consequently, “crisis” must
be treated no longer as a diagnosis applied by an external observer but as—in
Cordero’s words—“an act of communication with critical intentions,” whose
validity claims reside in the end in the discursive activity of the participants
themselves (Cordero 2014, 502). I would argue, however, that Habermas him-
self does not fully capitalize on the implications of this discursive reformulation
of the crisis concept. A more in-depth exploration will afford us necessary tools
for understanding the dynamics and—more importantly—the potential defor-
mations of legitimation crises in late-capitalist societies.
Andrew Simon Gilbert recently noted how a postmetaphysical recon-
struction of the crisis concept implies “a focus on ‘crisis’ rather than crisis”
(Gilbert 2019, 177). Particularly in light of the linguistic turn in 20th-century
philosophy and theory, the meaning and import of “crisis” must be understood
above all in the discursive contexts within which it is put into play by social ac-
tors: “first as a conceptual vehicle for validity claims, only second as a candidate
for social theory or history” (Gilbert 2019, 177). This account has the potential
to answer criticisms that the crisis concept necessarily invokes a “philosophy of
history” (cf. Koselleck 1988; Roitman 2014); more importantly, it allows us to
account for abuses, exploitations, and distortions in social practice.
The word “crisis,” of course, comes to us from Ancient Greece, and it pos-
sessed a variety of connotations in medicine, politics, law, and theology, which
inform the ways we understand the concept today (Koselleck 2006 [1982],
358–61). Yet the concept of crisis, in the sense that we know it today as a
moment of broad social or political urgency, is a distinctly modern concept. The
idea of a political crisis did not take shape until the 17th and 18th centuries, and
the idea of an economic crisis only entered into widespread circulation with the
rise of liberal capitalism in the 19th century. This is not to say that there were
no phenomena prior to modernity that could be described as crises. Crisis-like
events certainly happened, but in the modern period, they became “routin-
ized” in a specific way. One reason is the growing complexity and accelerated
pace of social life: though Europe had seen some notable events that resembled
the modern economic crisis, such as “Tulip Mania” in the 1630s and the South
Sea Bubble of 1720, only in the 1800s was it possible to refer to “economic
cycles” that alternated regularly between periods of boom and bust. But it is
also the concept itself that standardizes these situations of unexpected urgency
and uncertainty, and that makes them all of a type that is to be approached in a
particular way with a particular consciousness.
Put another way, the crisis concept presupposes some distinctly modern as-
sumptions about one’s relation—that is, the relation of one who makes use of the
crisis concept—to the social world. “Crisis” emerges as social participants cast off
their reliance on traditional authority or divine order, taking on instead a reflex-
ive attitude toward themselves and their societal context (Milstein 2015, 144–5).
But it also emerges alongside a certain level of social complexity, whereby so-
ciety appears to acquire the status of a “second nature” (Habermas 1987a: 173).
Sociologists have long noted a paradoxically dual character to modern society,
thematized through such distinctions as “labor” and “capital,” “agency” and
“structure,” and “lifeworld” and “system.” Society appears, on the one hand, as
something that can be acted upon by its members, and that can be made transparent
and shaped according to their own collective will and reason; yet it also appears,
on the other hand, as something that acts upon its members, and that remains ex-
ternal and opaque to everyday life, carrying its own objective force, to which
the self-understanding of participants must bend (Milstein 2015, 146). As a basic
concept (Grundbegriff ) of modernity, “crisis” functions as a conceptual tool for
navigating this duality. We speak of the economy, the state, or the environment
being “in crisis” only to the extent that we can point to a discrete entity called
“the economy” or “the state” or “the environment” that behaves according to
rules we can comprehend and manipulate if not make transparent. As unpre-
dictable, wild, overpowering as a crisis may be, this is what distinguishes one
34 Brian Milstein
from a plague, disaster, or scourge of the gods. To the latter, one may contain it,
adapt to it, or repent for it. Crises, in contrast, emanate from a source we believe
can be mastered, at least in principle.
It is not difficult to note the promethean element of modern crisis conscious-
ness, which Koselleck once tied to modernity’s entanglements with utopian
arrogance and revolutionary excess (Koselleck 1988 [1959]). Once the crisis
concept is understood discursively, however, the situation becomes more ambig-
uous. On the one hand, modern crisis consciousness implies a form of “posi-
tive freedom”: in declaring the existence of a crisis, one is not only making a
normative judgment about how things should or should not be and that action
is urgently needed, one is also assuming for oneself a certain ownership or
authority over the situation. “Crisis” is a public concept, which members of
a public deploy to alert each other to a matter of public concern and to bind
one another to a set of commitments for taking action (Milstein 2015, 148). To
possess crisis consciousness is to assume ownership of one’s social world, in the
sense of being capable and assuming oneself authorized to make judgments and
demand actions. On the other hand, the actualization of this positive freedom
now depends on the ability of crisis-conscious citizens to successfully make dis-
cursive sense of their stakes in the crisis and claims to action. This raises the
question of whether the means of the discursive realization of crisis conscious-
ness can be somehow disturbed or distorted.
Among the early Frankfurt writers, Erich Fromm was especially sensitive to
this dilemma. In Escape from Freedom, Fromm, too, locates the core of modern
crisis consciousness in society’s emergence from what he calls the “primary
ties” of traditional authority. But this move only earns the modern individ-
ual “negative” freedom, a freedom from constraining bonds and dogmas. To
fully make good on one’s freedom, the participant must progress to “positive”
freedom, which Fromm associates with the development of “an active, criti-
cal, responsible self ” (Fromm 1969 [1941], 108). Otherwise, participants find
themselves overwhelmed by the forces of a society that now appears alien and
unremitting:
The rationality of the system of production, in its technical aspects, is

accompanied by the irrationality of our system of production in its social
aspects. Economic crises, unemployment, war, govern man’s fate. Man…
has become estranged from the product of his own hands, he is not re-
ally the master any more of the world he has built; on the contrary, this
man-made world has become his master, before whom he bows down,
whom he tries to placate or to manipulate as best he can. …He keeps up
the illusion of being the center of the world, and yet he is pervaded by
an intense sense of insignificance and powerlessness which his ancestors
once consciously felt toward God.
(Fromm 1969 [1941], 117–18)
Crisis consciousness is awareness of the conflict wherein it remains to be de-

cided whether it is the participants who steer society or vice versa, whether
we will make our own history or be made by it. Stripped of “primary ties”
of traditional modes of life, a merely negative freedom unaccompanied by
positive freedom can become too burdensome, leading people to seek escape
from freedom altogether in search of ontological security. In Fromm’s analysis,
such tactics of retreat can take the form of authoritarianism, destructiveness,
and conformism: deprived of power over themselves, they are driven to exert
power over others; lacking in purpose, they submit themselves to the cause
of a leader; overburdened by the tasks of critical thought, they embrace un-
thinking or “pseudo-thinking” conformism (Fromm 1969 [1941], 140–204).
Fromm believed that the appeal of fascist doctrines such as National Socialism
was in their—ultimately futile—promise to replace the “primary ties” lost to
modernity.
Fromm’s approach is psychoanalytic. Yet despite searching for frustrated
crisis consciousness in individualized psychological experience, Fromm
locates the inhibitions to positive freedom in prevailing social conditions. He
blames the monopoly capitalism of the early 20th century for stifling pros-
pects for self-actualization: as capital becomes increasingly concentrated in
the hands of fewer and fewer, class domination and the commodification of
social relations strip away the resources available to individuals to develop
themselves.
We can reconstruct this pathological deprivation of positive freedom in
communications-theoretic terms. Habermas does not theorize the ways a
legitimation crisis can take on pathological forms, but we can do so using
the above-discussed conception of crisis as “an act of communication with
critical intentions” (Cordero 2014, 502). Understood thusly, the collective
development of crisis consciousness hangs not on the successful psychic de-
velopment of self-world relations but on the communicative exercise of pub-
lic autonomy. Understood as a publicly articulated discursive process, crisis
consciousness begins as a personal intuition of crisis, but its full development
into a fruitful sense of crisis consciousness—one capable of generating a col-
lective understanding of the crisis and ultimately reasserting agency over the
causes and mechanisms of crisis—can only be achieved for the citizenry at
large in public discourse. This requires, among other things, a sufficiently
(even if imperfectly) open and active civil society and public sphere where
citizens and their representatives can voice and reconcile their diverse expe-
riences, action claims, and stakes in the crisis. This implies a conception of
public freedom that is less demanding than Fromm’s and easier to translate
into institutional terms. Conversely, we can hypothesize about the forms
of alienation that result from being denied voice and representation in the
public realm, from being denied the resources with which to make sense of
crisis intuitions.
36 Brian Milstein
Financialized Capitalism’s Crisis of Crisis Consciousness

Recalling Streeck’s analysis, financialized capitalism relies on a contradictory
arrangement. On the one hand, it demands the deregulation of markets and the
dramatic rolling back of social welfare protections. Not only do such moves
exacerbate the iniquities of capitalism, allowing for extreme concentrations
of wealth among owners of capital, the dismantling of protections for sellers
of labor power leaves them exposed not only to stagnated standards of living
generally but to the ravages of economic convulsions. On the other hand, because
elites cannot openly rewrite the terms of democratic capitalism in so onerous
a fashion, the political order must continue to stake its legitimacy on the post-
war commitment to manage economic crises and sustain prosperity, even as it
relinquishes its capacities for doing so. As we now know, the strategies of first
public, then private financialization through which states sought to compensate
their loss of regulatory capacity only increased the likelihood and magnitude
of crisis, and, in so doing, it all but invited their metamorphosis into adminis-
trative and then legitimation crisis as the remnants of the postwar commitment
finally prove themselves a façade (Thompson 2012; Ibsen 2019).
But there is more. Not only does the contradiction of financialized capitalism
contain the seeds of its own legitimation crisis, it also distorts the discursive pro-
cessing of crisis consciousness in pathological ways. This is due to the exorbitant
and contradictory legitimation demands financialized capitalism must place on
itself to sustain this already contradictory arrangement. Such demands could only
be met through a ruthless depoliticization of the economy, which was achieved
via the cartelization of the political party system and the post-democratic des-
iccation of the public sphere. This had the effect of keeping capitalism out of
the political realm, but it also had the collateral cost of depriving society of the
resources necessary to fully generate a collective sense of crisis consciousness.
Habermas notes that all capitalist societies must confront “the problem
of distributing the surplus social product inequitably and yet legitimately”
(Habermas 1975, 96). In postwar social democracy, this meant, first, that gov-
ernments took responsibility for quelling the harshest iniquities and instability
of market forces, and, second, that sellers of labor power would be granted the
formal rights of citizenship. Hence, Gøsta Esping-Andersen described the post-
war welfare state as a project of “decommodification”: these measures shield
individuals from the “sense of insignificance and powerlessness” Fromm at-
tributes to a post-traditional state of “mere” negative freedom by facilitating
a modicum of positive freedom (Esping-Andersen 1990). A fully empowered
form of positive freedom, in contrast, is not a viable option, as Habermas ex-
plains: “Genuine participation of citizens in the processes of political will-
formation [politischen Willensbildungsprozessen], that is, substantive democracy,
would bring to consciousness the contradiction between administratively so-
cialized production and the continued private appropriation and use of surplus
value” (Habermas 1975, 36). In Habermas’s assessment, legitimacy under cap-

italism requires a “structurally depoliticized public realm” that exhibits the
trappings of formal democracy but largely encourages citizens to resign them-
selves to a limited role of granting and withholding electoral acclamation. This
passive orientation is buttressed, in turn, by an ideology of “civic privatism”:
citizens remain motivated by personal, careerist, and consumerist pursuits,
while trusting political matters to a qualified elite (Habermas 1975, 37).
Fraser, too, argues that democracy must perforce be limited in all capital-
ist societies, but the “hollowing out” of democracy takes an extreme form
under financialized capitalism (Fraser 2019; see also Crouch 2004). Despite
the “truce” declared between capital and labor during the postwar years, even
politics under welfare-state capitalism retained traces of class partisanship, even
as major political parties shifted from old cleavage structures to “catch-all”
organizations (cf. Kirchheimer 1966; Lipset and Rokkan 1967). By the 1990s,
the “economic cleavage” had become largely depoliticized as even center-left
parties deprioritized social policy in favor of free-market agendas (Ibsen 2019,
808–9). Richard Katz and Peter Mair refer to a process of cartelization of West-
ern party systems whereby major political parties begin to not only converge
in their political platforms but, in certain ways, “cooperate” with one another
(Katz and Mair 2009). Though partisan rivalry appears no less acrimonious in
some cases, topics of debate become restricted to matters of culture and identity
or personal scandal, while dissenting voices are marginalized.
This depoliticization process comes to be reflected in the public sphere as
well. Katz and Mair note how domination of mass media in politics has greatly
reduced the dependence of party elites on members and activists, while increas-
ing their dependence on money in political campaigns (Katz and Mair 2009,
758). Commercial mass media and television have, in turn, altered the character
of political discourse, forcing politicians and journalists alike to prioritize the
scandalous and the sensational (Crouch 2004, 46–49). Moreover, ownership
of mass media outlets are settling into fewer and fewer hands, which has the
effect of exerting additional pressure on the part of capital on the constraint of
political agendas. As Colin Crouch observed:
Control over politically relevant news and information, a resource vital to

democratic citizenship, is coming under the control of a very small num-
ber of extremely wealthy individuals. And wealthy individuals, however
much they might compete with one another, tend to share certain po-
litical perspectives, and have a very strong interest in using the resources
at their command to fight for these. This does not just mean that some
parties will be favoured rather than others by the media; the leaders of
all parties are aware of this power and feel constrained by it when they
formulate their programmes.
(Crouch 2004, 50)
38 Brian Milstein
Political systems under post-democratic conditions thus find themselves doubly

gate-kept by capital: first, at the level of party politics and political campaigns,
as political elites become more dependent on corporate funding and various
lobbies; second, at the level of the public sphere, as political messaging must be
both sufficiently attention-grabbing and inoffensive to pass the filters of media
conglomerates. What was established, in short, was a rigid form of political
hegemony whereby the legitimation demands posed by the contradiction of
financialized capitalism were met by a full expulsion of capitalism from the
political realm. In the years following 2008, this hegemony faltered as govern-
ments proved unable or unwilling to manage the fallout of the economic crisis.
In Legitimation Crisis, Habermas wrote that when the contradictions of
the prevailing order are exposed, causing its legitimacy to evaporate, “the
latent violence [Gewalt (translation amended)] embedded in the system of
institutions is released,” inviting an “expansion of the scope for participation”
(Habermas 1975, 96). Conditions appear to (temporarily) resemble that of a
“substantive democracy” able to “bring to consciousness the contradiction”
contained in the existing social order, opening the horizon to societal prog-
ress (Habermas 1975, 36). Years later, in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas
likewise describes crisis consciousness as periods of public “problematiza-
tion” wherein “the attention span of the citizenry enlarges” in “an intensified
search for solutions” (Habermas 1996, 357). Even in a “power-ridden” public
sphere dominated by corporate mass media, it should remain possible in princi-
ple for a galvanized citizenry to successfully countermand a critically exposed
order of hegemony.
But there is another possibility—namely, that the post-democratic public
realm proves itself inhospitable to the collective processing of crisis con-
sciousness. As Fraser observes, the conversion of a legitimation crisis into a
successful overturning and replacement of prevailing hegemonic order with
a more equitable and democratic order requires the successful organization
and mobilization of “counter-hegemony,” one that reflects a broad coalition
of identity and class interests (Fraser 2015, 172–3; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018,
216–7). But such a movement requires crisis-conscious actors to be able
to reconcile their various understandings and claims across identities and
classes. They must be able to mobilize around collective understandings of
the crisis; its causes, character, magnitude, and effects; the social norms, val-
ues, and capabilities it threatens; and what an adequate response looks like.
A political public sphere beholden to corporate interests that largely echoes
the issue-agendas of a cartelized political system may prove ill-equipped if
not hostile to this task. Elites may not want to relinquish the ability to direct
the public narrative, and they may even have interests of their own to pursue
in the midst of the crisis. Meanwhile, mass media may indirectly or overtly
marginalize efforts to propagate counterhegemonic understandings or alter-
native strategies. A media atmosphere constructed around sound-bites and
“politainment” may inhibit efforts to gain broad support for new ideas and
critiques, while political journalists may join elites in casting them as fringe,
radical, or otherwise lacking in seriousness.
If welfare-state capitalism had a propensity to find itself faced with “crises
of crisis management” (Offe 1984 [1973]), financialized capitalism finds itself
exposed to crises of crisis consciousness. This need not mean that the public is left
unaware of the “latent violence” behind the system; on the contrary, citizens
may have strong intuitions that their representatives are acting in interests other
than those of their constituencies. But while the hegemony of the establishment
may be faltering, the citizenry is hampered in mobilizing an effective counter-
hegemony. Deprived of the sense of positive freedom necessary to redeem their
sense of crisis in the public realm, citizens may be led to reject the public realm
altogether. In the face of elite corruption and hypocrisy, appeals to “unity” or
“civility” sound increasingly self-serving; in the face of a closed-off and intran-
sigent mass media, claims of “fake news” or “Lügenpresse” in this context carry
a certain resonance. Lacking an effective public sphere within which to assess
claims, justify knowledge, or synthesize judgments, citizens may be drawn to
act on prejudice, seek alternative fora, or embrace conspiracy theories, while
offensiveness to established pieties becomes the primary standard for evaluating
authentic challenges to the status quo. The public realm fragments and the
political atmosphere becomes fertile for exploitation by charismatic figures and
demagogues. This scenario is not by itself sufficient to cause illiberal populism
to take root, but it fosters an environment in which the appeal of indiscriminate
anti-elitism, simplistic promises, or finding scapegoatable “others” can more
easily take hold.
Conclusion
One of Habermas’s core theses was that legitimation crises manifest themselves
differently under different formations of capitalism. Under the liberal-competitive
capitalism of the 19th century, economic crises remained the immediate source of
legitimation crises in the form of class conflict, while postwar welfare-state cap-
italism pushed the contradictions of the capitalist system into the administrative
and cultural realms (Habermas 1975, 29–30, 68–75, 92–94). The aforementioned
reflections suggest that, under 21st-century financialized capitalism, the character
of legitimation crisis transforms yet again, by pushing the contradictions into the
political sphere. As we have seen, the contradiction of financialized capitalism
consists in the fact that the demands of sustaining legitimacy for a political order,
which claims ability to manage economic crises while dismantling the regulatory
capacities to actually do so, are such that hegemony can only be maintained via
an increasingly desiccated public realm that allows minimal scrutiny and the for-
mulation of no alternatives. In the process, it deprives citizens of the capacity to
discursively come to terms with the consequences of major crisis and participate
40 Brian Milstein
in the formulation of solutions, leaving them with a Frommian “sense of insig-

nificance and powerlessness” that invites exploitation by charismatic leaders with
illiberal agendas. The present “crisis of liberal democracy” is then a consequence
of a propensity in financialized capitalism to exacerbate the crises it generates for
itself—a propensity which begins, ironically, with the hollowing out of liberal
democracy by financialized capitalism.
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3
ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND THE
STRUGGLE ON THE RIGHT
Marc F. Plattner
Introduction1
One of the biggest challenges to democracy today is posed by the dramatic
change in the political-party landscape, especially in Europe but in some other
parts of the world as well. Attention understandably has focused on the rise of
a variety of populist candidates and movements, but what has enabled their
rise is the drastic decline in support for the parties that had long dominated the
political scene. Without grossly exaggerating, one can say that for decades, the
modal configuration of Western political systems has featured strong center-left
and center-right parties or coalitions that support the basic principles and in-
stitutions of liberal democracy but compete with each other in regard to a
variety of specific issues within this larger framework. The primary cleavage
separating these parties has been economic, with center-left parties typically
favoring more government spending and allying themselves with trade unions,
and center-right parties leaning toward more friendliness to the private sec-
tor and market-oriented policies. These days, however, virtually every new
round of elections indicates that this longstanding pattern of dominance by the
center-left and center-right is losing its hold.
Although the United States and Britain, with their first-past-the-post
electoral systems, have so far resisted this trend, it can be observed in numer-
ous countries in Europe and Latin America. In France’s 2017 elections, both
the Socialists and the center-right Republicans failed to make the presiden-
tial runoff, and the recently formed centrist “En Marche” movement of newly
elected president Emmanuel Macron won an absolute majority in the National
Assembly. In Germany, both the Christian Democratic Union and the So-
cial Democrats have been hemorrhaging support, a trend that accelerated in
44 Marc F. Plattner
elections at the state level in Bavaria and elsewhere in 2018, and that has made
the far-right Alternative for Germany the third-largest party in the Bundestag.
In Italy’s 2018 elections, the center-right and the center-left each received less
than a fifth of the votes, leading to a coalition government between two pop-
ulist formations, the Five Star Movement and the Northern League (running
under the less regional-sounding label of just “Lega”).
Similar results have been seen in Latin America. In Brazil, for example, the
weakening of the Workers’ Party and the implosion of the center-right led to
the 2018 presidential victory of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro. In Costa
Rica, meanwhile, neither of the two long-dominant parties (the National
Liberation Party and the Social Christian Unity Party) made the 2018 presi-
dential runoff, and for the first time, they account between them for fewer than
half the seats in the Legislative Assembly.
Overall, it is the parties of the center-left (mostly socialist or social-
democratic) that have been experiencing the steepest decline, and there are
signs that the commitment to liberal democracy of some emerging forces on the
left is questionable. But at the moment, I believe the graver threat to liberal de-
mocracy is that it will wind up being abandoned by substantial segments of the
right. I am not referring here to small extremist groups such as the “alt-right”
in the United States, which have always been present in one form or another,
but have previously never been able to attain real electoral significance. Instead,
I am concerned with the threat that mainstream center-right parties will be
captured by tendencies that are indifferent or even hostile to liberal democracy.
I believe that the struggle of these tendencies to win over the right will be the
most consequential development affecting the future of democracy in the pe-
riod ahead. And it increasingly appears that this battle will be fought out not
only in the arena of party competition but also in the realm of political thought.
The Battle over Terminology

Since much of the coming contest on the right will be a battle over terminol-
ogy, let me begin by offering brief and generally accepted definitions of the key
terms at issue. “Liberal democracy” is the most common way of labeling the
form of government that has long prevailed in the United States and Western
Europe, and that, since the mid-1970s, many countries throughout the world
have tried to establish. It combines two constituent elements that often go to-
gether and yet are sometimes in tension with each other—a democratic element
and a liberal element.
Each of those words has a long and complex history, and each has taken on
different meanings in different eras and places. “Democracy” is derived from
a Greek word meaning rule by the people, while “liberal” and “liberalism”
derive from a Latin word meaning free. Today, however, democracy is often
used as shorthand for liberal democracy and thus is also thought to incorporate
The Struggle on the Right 45
the protection of individual freedom. Consequently, features such as the rule of

law and the freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, and the press, though more
properly categorized as liberal, are often regarded as hallmarks of democracy.
Further confusion stems from the fact that the term liberalism, in addition
to the broad sense conveyed by the expression liberal democracy (or liberal
education, meaning literally the education befitting a free person), is also used
in a more narrowly political sense: in the United States, “liberalism” denotes
support for an activist government and is typically regarded as the opposite of
conservatism. To compound the confusion, in Europe, the term liberal has
been applied to parties that support the free market and a more limited role for
government. Moreover, especially outside the United States, figures on the left
pin the label of “neoliberalism” on those they regard as too friendly to market
capitalism.
Democracy and liberalism may be understood as addressing two different
questions: democracy is an answer to the question of who rules. It requires that
the people be sovereign. If they do not rule directly, as they did in the ancient
Greek polis, they must at least be able to choose their representatives in free and
fair elections. Liberalism, by contrast, prescribes not how rulers are chosen but
what the limits to their power are once they are in office. These limits, which
are ultimately designed to protect the rights of the individual, demand the rule
of law and are usually set forth in a written constitution (hence, “constitutional
democracy” sometimes serves as an alternative term for liberal democracy).
Although democracy was typically conjoined with liberalism in the
20th-century West, the two are not inseparably linked. Premodern democra-
cies were not liberal, and historically, there have been liberal societies (some
European constitutional monarchies in the 19th century and Hong Kong under
British rule in the 20th) that were not governed democratically. The fact that
liberalism and democracy do not inevitably go together is reflected in the cur-
rent debate about illiberal democracy.
The central figure in this debate is Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán,
who is arguably the most influential figure today on the European right. By
seeking to embrace democracy and at the same time to jettison liberalism,
Orbán is blazing a trail that he hopes to lure others on the right to follow. It is
useful to review the strange history of the term “illiberal democracy” in order
to understand how Orbán has tried to wield it for his own purposes.
The Strange History of “Illiberal Democracy”

The distinction between the liberal and the democratic aspects of liberal de-
mocracy has long been a topic of scholarly discussion, but the term “illiberal
democracy” is not so old. It was first introduced by Fareed Zakaria (1997), in
an influential article that he wrote for Foreign Affairs. Zakaria argued that in the
past virtually all modern democracies were liberal democracies. In fact, in most
46 Marc F. Plattner
Western democracies, a commitment to constitutionalism, the rule of law, and

individual rights had preceded the broadening of the franchise to encompass
universal suffrage. Thus, the world’s leading democratic regimes had been lib-
eral before they became democratic.
But, Zakaria argued, as a result of the “third wave” of democratization that
began in the mid-1970s, democracy in the form of free elections spread to
countries that wholly lacked a liberal tradition. The result was the emergence
of many regimes that, although they had adopted the democratic mechanism
of elections, were not liberal and hence could not be considered genuine liberal
democracies. The policy implication that Zakaria drew from his analysis was
that prematurely introducing elections in such countries would actually re-
duce the chances of their evolving into liberal democracies. The path through
“liberal autocracy,” he suggested, might be a surer route than the path through
illiberal democracy for reaching the ultimate goal of liberal democracy.
Two key aspects of Zakaria’s essay are worth emphasizing here. First, he
agreed that liberal democracy was the most desirable political regime—the
debate that his essay sought to ignite was over the most effective way of achiev-
ing this ultimate goal. Second, Zakaria made it clear that he regarded a liberal
political order as an unmixed good; by contrast, democracy, the choosing of
political leaders via free elections, was good only if it fostered and was accom-
panied by liberalism.
It is a sign of the time at which the essay was written that almost no critics
objected to the privileged status that Zakaria assigned to liberalism. During the
years preceding 1989, liberalism and free markets had already experienced a
remarkable intellectual and political revival. The demise of European commu-
nism accelerated a growing global consensus that constitutionalism, the rule of
law, the protection of individual and minority rights, and even market econ-
omies were universally desirable, even if they were not easily achievable in
countries with long histories of authoritarian rule.
In two articles I wrote at the time in response to Zakaria (Plattner 1998,
1999), I sought to explain why liberalism is unlikely to survive in the contem-
porary world unless accompanied by democracy. I noted that the exaltation
of liberalism had been accompanied by “a clear weakening of the view that
popular majorities should play a more active role in deciding on governmental
policies” (Plattner 1999, 131). This heightened suspicion of popular majorities
was reflected in the global spread of judicial review and the rise of independent
agencies (such as central banks) explicitly intended to be insulated from the
branches of government most responsive to popular sentiment. As I concluded
then, “the popularity of the attack on illiberal democracy may itself be regarded
as a sign of the triumph of liberalism” (Plattner 1999, 132).
There was no question that Zakaria intended “illiberal democracy” to be
a term of disparagement. The term designated countries that had initiated a
transition away from authoritarian rule and had adopted free elections, but had
failed to build the liberal institutions that could guarantee individual rights.
To be no more than an “illiberal democracy” was a mark of failure. It was not
a label that any regime sought, much less a banner that national leaders would
proudly fly.
Viktor Orbán Transforms the Debate

By the 2010s, however, the global landscape had changed. Following the
2008 financial crisis, market economies were no longer in such high repute,
and the travails of Western democracies, together with the rise of China,
were attenuating the appeal of liberalism. The “liberal consensus” that had
prevailed in Central Europe was visibly weakening already, as had been
demonstrated by the 2005–07 first tour in power (as part of a coalition
government) of the Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland and then by the
sweeping triumph of Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary in 2010. A formerly
center-left formation that had moved to the right, Fidesz won 53% of the
vote, but that was enough to give it a two-thirds majority in parliament,
enabling it to radically revise Hungary’s constitution. Fidesz’s numerous and
far-reaching changes to the basic law had the effect of weakening checks on
majority rule and entrenching Fidesz’s control of the courts, other indepen-
dent agencies, and the media.
In July 2012, the Journal of Democracy published a set of articles analyzing
“Hungary’s Illiberal Turn.” Although Orbán’s party was initially inclined to
counter charges that it was governing in an illiberal fashion, at some point,
Orbán decided to accept (and later even to embrace) the idea that Fidesz had
turned against liberalism. In a speech he delivered in July 2014 at an annual
summer program held at Bãile Tunad in a part of Romania that has long had a
large ethnic-Hungarian population, Orbán offered the first positive endorse-
ment of illiberal democracy of which I am aware.2
Although his remarks at the time seemed shocking coming from the leader of
an EU member state, Orbán’s language was somewhat cautious—according to
the official English translation of his speech, he never actually used the precise
phrase “illiberal democracy.” Nonetheless, he surely implied that this was the
concept he was endorsing. Citing the economic success of Singapore, China,
India, Russia, and Turkey under “systems that are not Western, not liberal, not
liberal democracies and perhaps not even democracies,” he went on to state that
“a democracy does not necessarily have to be liberal. Just because a state is not
liberal, it can still be a democracy.” And he added that “the new state that we
are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.” Despite his
seeming reluctance to adopt the phrase “illiberal democracy,” Orbán openly
stated that his intent was to break with “dogmas and ideologies that have been
adopted by the West,” and there was little doubt about the antiliberal direction
in which his thought was heading.
48 Marc F. Plattner
In the ensuing years, especially with the global surge of populism, the theme
of illiberal democracy has received growing attention. Populism, after all, is an
outlook that emphatically claims to be democratic and that relies for its legiti-
macy on elections as expressions of the popular will. Yet when populists come
to power, they tend to infringe upon the rule of law, the independence of the
courts and the media, and the rights of individuals and minorities, as has been
the case in Hungary. Moreover, these illiberal aspects of populism had begun to
surface not just in countries lacking a liberal tradition but even in longstanding
Western democracies.
As a result, discussions of illiberal democracy flourished anew among politi-
cal theorists. I will have more to say about this in the concluding section of this
chapter, focusing on political thinkers on the right. Here, I note that the rela-
tionship between liberalism and democracy has also recently been addressed by
theorists on the center-left (see, among others: Galston 2018a, 2018b; Mounk
2018a, 2018b). Jan-Werner Müller (2016, 56) offers a critique of the “thought-
less invocation of ‘illiberal democracy’” by opponents of Orbán; Jeffrey C.
Isaac (2017) offers a counterargument in his review of Muller’s book. In my
view, “illiberal democracy” is a reasonable term for political scientists to use
to describe regimes whose rulers win genuine elections but then violate liberal
freedoms. I doubt, however, that illiberal democracy is a stable regime form.
Although it can move back toward liberal democracy (as appears to be hap-
pening in Ecuador), it often becomes a way-station for authoritarianism, as it
clearly has been in Russia, Venezuela, and Turkey.
The next step in Orbán’s embrace of “illiberal democracy” came on July
28, 2018, when, at the same venue where he gave his 2014 speech, Orbán em-
phatically and unequivocally expressed his support for illiberal democracy. He
contended, first, that “there is an alternative to liberal democracy: it is called
Christian democracy.” But he underlined that Christian democracy as he un-
derstands it “is not about defending religious articles of faith.” Instead, it seeks
to protect “the ways of life springing from Christian culture.” And this, he
added, means defending “human dignity, the family and the nation.”3
Orbán then went on to warn his listeners to avoid an “intellectual trap”—
namely, “the claim that Christian democracy can also, in fact, be liberal.”
To accept this argument, he told his partisans, is tantamount to surrendering
in the battle of ideas. Therefore, he urged his listeners, “Let us confidently
declare that Christian democracy is not liberal. Liberal democracy is liberal,
while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal: it is, if you like,
illiberal.”
Why does Orbán insist that his brand of “Christian democracy” cannot
be liberal? He addresses this question by citing three key issues on which
the two differ: (1) liberal democracy favors multiculturalism, while Chris-
tian democracy “gives priority to Christian culture”; (2) liberal democracy
“is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration”; and
(3) liberal democracy “sides with adaptable family models” rather than the
Christian family model. With respect to each of these three issues, Orbán
emphatically states that the Christian view can be categorized as an “illib-
eral concept.”
What is Orbán’s purpose in drawing such a sharp and unbridgeable dis-
tinction between liberal democracy and Christian democracy? And why is he
so concerned with refuting the view that Christian democracy can also be
liberal—a claim that would seem to be borne out by the crucial contribution
that Christian Democratic parties have made to liberal democracy in Europe
since the end of World War II?
Part of the answer is broadly ideological. Orbán wishes to make support for
liberal democracy seem inseparable from support for multiculturalism, open
immigration policies, and nontraditional family structures such as gay mar-
riage. Historically, of course, this has not typically been the case. Until the last
half-century, many liberal democracies tended to be fairly strict in terms of
family law. Apart from settler countries such as the United States, Canada, and
Australia, they were not very welcoming toward immigrants, and the countries
that did accept large-scale immigration tended to favor assimilationist rather
than multicultural approaches to integrating newcomers.
It is true that in most democratic countries today there is considerable sup-
port, especially on the left, for accepting multiculturalism, high rates of im-
migration, and gay marriage. In some places, such policies now are backed by
popular national majorities and have been enacted into law. At the same time,
sizeable portions of the voting public take a different view, even among those
who remain firm adherents of liberal democracy.
In the past, it was generally accepted that citizens may take opposing views
on these matters without ceasing to be good liberal democrats, and that policies
regarding such controversial issues should be decided on the basis of a free and
open political process. Orbán, however, is attempting to convince Europeans
who find themselves on the conservative side of these social issues that they are
being ill-treated and disrespected in contemporary liberal democracies. What is
more, he warns them that they are in danger of losing out demographically and
ideologically in the future. He seeks to equate the term liberal as it is used in
the phrase “liberal democracy” with the term liberal as it is used to characterize
the left side of the political spectrum in the United States—that is, to denote
“progressives” as opposed to “conservatives.” Orbán’s effort to blur these two
different meanings of liberalism gains some purchase from the fact that the
“Brussels elites” he is so fond of attacking tend to hold views close to those of
United States liberals on social and cultural issues.
The attempt to identify liberal democracy as such with United States-style
progressivism also fits neatly with Orbán’s efforts to demonize Hungarian-born
United States billionaire George Soros. Soros is a strong supporter of liberal
democracy but also of United States-style political liberalism. Thus, at the same
50 Marc F. Plattner
time that his philanthropies make generous grants to organizations working

on behalf of freedom and against authoritarianism around the world, they are
also among the largest funders of the United States Democratic Party and of
nongovernmental organizations on the left.
The Recent Electoral Battle in Europe

Orbán seeks to use the dissatisfaction of conservatives with “liberal” social and
cultural policies to pry them away from their fundamental commitment to liberal
democracy. But his motives are also more narrowly partisan, as he candidly re-
vealed both in his July 28 speech and in an earlier speech delivered on June 16 at a
conference honoring the memory of Helmut Kohl, the Christian Democrat who
served as German chancellor from 1982 to 1998.4 Orbán made it clear that his goal
is to take over the mainstream European right and to shape its future direction.
In his memorial address for Kohl, who died in 2017, Orbán states that “it
would be easy” to establish a new far-right grouping of European parties drawn
from those opposing immigration. But he advocates resisting this “temptation”
and opting instead to stick with and to renew the European People’s Party
(EPP). This is the center-right grouping that has long had the largest bloc in
the European Parliament and that has been home to Fidesz since Kohl invited
it to join in 2000. The EPP, a strongly pro-EU formation with deep Christian
Democratic roots, has produced within its ranks some of the EU’s top leaders.
Within the EPP, the continuing membership of Fidesz has been a source of
great controversy, with some EPP members calling for its expulsion in light of
the illiberal policies and rhetoric that it has adopted. Orbán so far has success-
fully defended Fidesz against these attempts, but the two speeches cited above
suggested that he was preparing to go on the offensive and try to redirect the
EPP’s orientation.
In his Kohl memorial speech, Orbán characterized the EPP’s current—and,
in his view, failing—strategy as one of forming an “antipopulist front” that
seeks to work together with all the traditional European parties (from Com-
munists and Greens to social democrats, liberals, and Christian Democrats)
to oppose the “emerging new parties” (that is, the populists). Instead, Orbán
advocates the strategy that he says has been successfully followed by the parties
in power in Austria and Hungary—in effect, borrowing from the playbook of
their far-right competitors in addressing issues such as immigration.
Orbán characterizes Fidesz as occupying the right wing of the EPP, com-
paring its situation to that of the Bavarian Christian Social Union in relation
to German chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. Orbán’s
goal is for Fidesz to lead a right-wing takeover of the EPP and to steer it toward
Fidesz-style policies at the European level. What is more, in his speech on July
28, 2018, he recommended a plan of action to his followers: to “concentrate all
our efforts on the 2019 European Parliament elections.”
Orbán acknowledges that elections for the European Parliament generally

are not taken seriously by voters, who often cast their ballots, if they turn out
to vote at all, on the basis of national political issues rather than Europe-wide
concerns. The May 2019 contest, Orbán asserted, would be different for two
reasons—the growing right-wing sentiment in Europe and the rise of immi-
gration as an issue that can motivate voters across the EU. In short, Orbán’s
calculation was that the composition of the European Parliament could be sig-
nificantly altered by mobilizing anti-immigration sentiment. He hoped that
this would lead to a new balance of forces within and around the EPP, with
rightist tendencies and parties such as Fidesz gaining greatly expanded influ-
ence, as well as to a new composition of the EU leadership, with European rul-
ing elites (whom Orbán calls “liberal” but who prominently include moderate
Christian Democrats) giving way to a new generation of populist leaders like
himself.
Hungary on Trial
In September 2018, Orbán’s project suffered an apparent setback when the
European Parliament narrowly achieved the two-thirds majority needed to
initiate so-called Article 7 proceedings against Hungary. These proceedings
invoke a provision in the Treaty on European Union that provides for disci-
plinary action against a member state when it has been found to present a “clear
risk of a serious breach” of EU values.
It is also noteworthy that Fidesz failed to win majority support within the
EPP; those EPP members of parliament who were present (the EPP then con-
trolled 219 seats in the 750-member body) approved the report charging Hun-
gary with breaching EU values by a vote of 114 to 57 (with 28 abstentions). In
an additional setback for Orbán, the vote against Hungary was backed by some
of his previous key supporters, including Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz
and Bavarian politician Manfred Weber, the leader of the EPP in the European
Parliament.
The document that the parliamentarians approved was compiled by rappor-
teur Judith Sargentini, a Dutch MEP from the GreenLeft party. In her report,
Sargentini (2018) alleges a very wide range of violations of EU values by the
Fidesz government. Some of these strike at the most basic components of liberal
democracy, including the independence of the judiciary and the freedoms of
expression and religion. Others, however, stray into areas of social and cul-
tural policy (for example, family law, immigration policy, the extent of welfare
benefits) whose relationship to liberal-democratic principles is by no means
obvious. As policy analyst Dalibor Rohac (2018) persuasively argues, the report
mixes “two issues, social conservatism and authoritarianism,” in a way that is
likely to undermine the EU’s credibility among conservatives and to divide the
opposition to Hungary’s genuinely illiberal policies.
52 Marc F. Plattner
The approval of Sargentini’s report launched a process that is still ongoing.

In principle, this process could result in Hungary having its EU voting rights
suspended, but a later stage of the proceedings will require unanimity among
the member states, and PiS-governed Poland has already indicated that it will
not give its approval. In any case, the inquiry is not likely to produce results
anytime soon.
At the EPP Congress held in Helsinki in early November 2018, the delegates
approved some “emergency resolutions” intended to make Fidesz commit itself
to supporting European values. The first of these resolutions, on “Protecting
EU Values and Safeguarding Democracy,” includes strong endorsements of de-
mocracy, the rule of law, and individual freedom, but the word liberal occurs
only once (in the phrase “liberal democracy”) in a historical reference in the
preamble. The fourth resolution (on “A Prosperous and Secure Europe”) states
that “EU taxpayers’ money should not be spent in countries where fundamental
EU values and the rule of law are not respected.”5 As Gerardo Fortuna (2018)
reported, this sentence initially contained the words “liberal democracy” in-
stead of “the rule of law,” and this change was made at the request of Fidesz.
So while Orbán felt compelled to support these resolutions, he did manage to
avoid openly endorsing liberal democracy.
In his July 28, 2018 speech, Orban boasted, “The opportunity is here.
Next May we can wave goodbye … to liberal democracy and the lib-
eral non-democratic system that has been built on its foundations.” The
May 2019 elections for the European Parliament, however, did not realize
Orban’s hopes. Although populist parties made gains and the traditional
center-right lost some support, the latter remains dominant within the EU.
In March 2019, Fidesz was suspended from the EPP, but it was not expelled.
Since then, many EPP member parties have continued to push for the ex-
pulsion of Fidesz, but as of April 2020 they had not succeeded in reaching
their goal. So the struggle for control of the center-right remains at the heart
of European political competition, both within the EU and within national
parliaments.
The Conflict in the Realm of Political Theory

Signs of the emerging partisan and ideological struggle over the future of the
center-right are also evident in some recent writings by political theorists
identified with the conservative side of the political spectrum. One promi-
nent example is Ryszard Legutko. A professor of political theory at Jagiellonian
University in Kraków and a onetime member of Solidarity, Legutko has also
been active in current Polish politics, having served as minister of education
and as an elected senator, both on behalf of PiS. Currently, he is a member
of the European Parliament, where he is the vice-president of the European
Conservatives and Reformists Group.
Legutko (2016) is, to say the least, deeply disappointed in Poland’s transition
to liberal democracy. The burden of his book is to show the many respects
in which the reign of liberal democracy in Poland resembles the preceding
reign of communism. (He does grudgingly acknowledge that there are also
differences between the two, especially with respect to individual freedoms.)
Chief among the similarities he cites is that both doctrines favor the ideas of
“modernization” and progress. He also makes the dubious claim that liberal
democracy is animated by the same totalizing spirit as communism, citing as
evidence various instances of groupthink and political correctness. Although
he suggests that these aspects of liberal democracy have worsened markedly
since it became infected with the liberationist ethos of the 1960s, his attack is
directed not against the recent decline or the present condition of liberal de-
mocracy but against both liberalism and democracy as such. And his withering
criticism does not spare those “classical liberals” (such as F.A. Hayek) who are
heroes to much of the right.
This has not prevented many conservatives from praising his book. Its fa-
vorable reception among United States conservatives may have been aided by
the fact that it carries a Foreword by the distinguished British journalist John
O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter and advisor to Margaret Thatcher who has
also served as editor of National Review and other United States-based conser-
vative publications. Yet it is doubtful whether O’Sullivan’s interpretation of the
book accurately reflects Legutko’s own understanding. In O’Sullivan’s view,
Legutko is writing about the “transformation” of liberal democracy in recent
decades: “The regime described here by Legutko,” O’Sullivan remarks in his
Foreword,
is not liberal democracy as it was understood by, say, Winston Churchill

or FDR or John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. That was essentially ma-
joritarian democracy resting on constitutional liberal guarantees of free
speech, free association, free media, and other liberties.
(Legutko 2016, vi)
Indeed, O’Sullivan goes on to say that Legutko “hyphenates liberal- democratic

as an adjective in the book; maybe he should do the same with the noun
‘ liberal-democracy’ to distinguish it from the liberal democracy of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries” (Legutko 2016, vi–vii). But I find no evidence
in the book that Legutko himself sees his aim to be that of restoring liberal
democracy to the healthier condition that it enjoyed in previous centuries. I
think he wants it to be superseded by other kinds of governments and societ-
ies, presumably including those that PiS and its leader Jarosław Kaczyñski are
trying to build in Poland.
Patrick Deneen (2018) has recently published a book in the spirit of Legutko’s
work. Unlike Legutko’s unmistakably European book, Deneen’s is American
54 Marc F. Plattner
through and through—he barely even mentions any other countries in the
contemporary world. Indeed, in a mostly laudatory review of Deneen’s book,
Legutko (2018, 2) suggests that there is something distinctively American in
Deneen’s “misplaced hope” that democracy can offer a solution to the problem
posed by liberalism. While Deneen’s title and the conservative slant of his previ-
ous writings might lead readers to expect that his critique is primarily directed
at the left in the United States, Deneen (2018, 18) makes it clear that he is going
after a bigger target. He calls contemporary progressivism and conservatism
(“classical liberalism”) two sides of “the same counterfeit coin,” united by the
fact that both accept the fundamental principles of the broader liberal tradition.
The failure that Deneen’s book indicts is that of liberal democracy as such.
Since the liberal tradition is so deeply rooted in the history and politics of
the United States, it has typically been revered by American conservatives. An
American thinker with a conservative disposition is naturally drawn to honor
the accomplishments of the country’s Founding Fathers. Deneen, however,
does not hesitate to attack the work and the thought of the Founders, including
the United States Constitution and the Federalist. Deneen (2018, 46–50) is
quite explicit in his opposition to the entire liberal tradition, and especially its
seminal thinker, John Locke. Yet after all his efforts to demolish the founda-
tions of liberalism, Deneen does not feel obliged to put forward an alternative
theory. Instead, his occasionally eloquent jeremiad against liberalism weakly
concludes with the following tepid and airy recommendations:
What we need today are practices fostered in local settings, focused on

the creation of new and viable cultures, economics grounded in virtu-
osity within households, and the creation of civic polis [sic] life. Not a
better theory but better practices.
Nonetheless, his book not only has been given a sympathetic reception in many
conservative quarters but also has been prominently and respectfully discussed
in high-profile publications in the United States (Drochon 2018, Szalai 2018;
for a critical review, see Plattner 2018).
Yoram Hazony (2018) is the author of The Virtue of Nationalism, a book that
has attracted wide attention among conservative thinkers. As its title suggests, it
offers a spirited defense of nationalism, which Hazony (2018, 3) characterizes as
“a principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations
are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own tradi-
tions and pursuing their own interests without interference.” Hazony (2018, 3)
labels the opposing viewpoint as “imperialism, which seeks to bring peace and
prosperity to the world by uniting mankind, as much as possible, under a single
political regime.” The contemporary examples he gives of such imperial proj-
ects are the European Union and the post-Cold War effort of the United States
to create a “world order” based upon its own hegemony.
Hazony’s philosophical-historical account claims to find a solid foundation

for a nationalist order in what he calls the “Protestant construction” of the po-
litical world that was built in the 17th century and, he argues, was deeply influ-
enced by the Hebrew Bible. Hazony (2018, 29–36) insists that this is something
wholly different from the “liberal construction,” whose principal architect is
John Locke; he devotes an entire brief chapter to a simplistic analysis of Locke’s
political thought intended to show its “radical deficiency” (Hazony 2018, 34).
In a 2017 article coauthored with his fellow Israeli political theorist Ofir Haivry,
Hazony criticizes those conservatives who have risen “in defense of liberal de-
mocracy” and who have seen preserving and strengthening liberal democracy as
the “historic task of American conservatism”; Hazony regards this stance as con-
firmation that many conservative defenders of liberal democracy in the United
States and Britain “see conservatism as a branch or species of liberalism—to their
thinking, the ‘classical’ and most authentic form of liberalism,” with its founda-
tions “in the thought of the great liberal icon John Locke” (Haivry and Hazony
2017, 1). According to Hazony, this view overlooks an authentically conservative
Anglo-American tradition that can be identified with older British thinkers such
as Sir John Fortescue, Richard Hooker, Sir John Selden, and Edmund Burke, who
allegedly rejected the universalism and rationalism embraced by Locke.
Hazony, who unlike Deneen presents himself as an admirer of the United
States Constitution, contends (unpersuasively) that support for limited govern-
ment and the defense of individual freedoms can find firmer roots in this earlier
Anglo-American conservative tradition than in liberalism. His argument, how-
ever, does not seem to leave room for conservatives to embrace the Declaration
of Independence, with its unquestionably Lockean elements. Moreover, Haivry
and Hazony try to claim Alexander Hamilton for their antiliberal conservative
lineage even though Hamilton cowrote the Federalist, with its strong defense
of Lockean-style liberalism. In any case, they argue that the supposedly genuine
conservative tradition they have recovered provides a superior theoretical basis
on which to defend nationalism and state support for religion, both of which
they strongly endorse with regard to contemporary politics.
The three thinkers discussed above are in many ways very different. Among
other things, Hazony explicitly draws upon Jewish and Protestant teachings,
while Legutko and Deneen are both Catholics (though neither of their books
especially appeals to Catholic teachings). Would any of them accept the label
of illiberal? I suspect Legutko would do so, but I am less confident that Deneen
would. As for Hazony, he bemoans the “intensive use of the term illiberal as
an epithet to describe those who have strayed from the path of Lockean liberal-
ism” (Haivry and Hazony 2017, 24–25). Still, it seems fair to describe all three
thinkers as engaged in a more theoretical version of the enterprise that Viktor
Orbán is pursuing at the political level. The common goal is to conflate liberal
democracy with contemporary progressivism and thus to suggest that conser-
vatives should have no interest in supporting or defending liberal democracy.
56 Marc F. Plattner
Many other conservatives, of course, including most of the still dominant

center-right parties in Europe, remain committed to liberal democracy. But to-
day’s intellectual and political currents do not appear to be trending their way.
Although illiberal forces made only small gains in the May 2019 elections to
the European Parliament, there are signs that their influence may still be on the
ascent. The most interesting and consequential developments for the future of
liberal democracy are likely to emerge from the continuing internal struggles
on the right.
Notes
1 This chapter is a slightly updated and revised version of an article that originally
appeared in the January 2019 issue of the Journal of Democracy.
2 For an English translation of Orbán’s speech on illiberal democracy of July 26, 2014, see
www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-
minister-viktor-orban-s-speech-at-the-25th-balvanyos-summer-free-university-
and-student-camp.
3 For an English translation of Orbán’s July 28, 2018 speech, see www.miniszterel-
nok.hu/prime-minister-viktor-orbans-speech-at-the-29th-balvanyos- summer-
open-university-and-student-camp.
4 For Orbán’s Kohl memorial speech in English, see www.miniszterelnok.hu/prime-
minister-viktor-orbans-speech-at-a-conference-held-in-memory-of-helmut-kohl.
5 “Protecting EU Values and Safeguarding Democracy,” Emergency Resolution Ad-
opted at the EPP Congress, 7–8 November 2018, www.epp.eu/papers/protecting-
eu-values-and-safeguarding-democracy; and “A Prosperous and Secure Europe:
EPP Calls for a Timely Adoption of the EU Budget Post-2020,” Emergency
Resolution Adopted at the EPP Congress, 7–8 November 2018, www.epp.eu/
papers/a-prosperous-and-secure-europe-epp-calls-for-a-timely-adoption-of-the-
eu-budget-post-2020.
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4
ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY? A
TOCQUEVILLEAN PERSPECTIVE
Ewa Atanassow
Introduction: Illiberal Democracy?

Around the world today, movements and political parties labeled “populist”
and regimes calling themselves illiberal have claimed the mantle of democratic
sovereignty. In the name of egalitarian values and of effecting the popular will,
these movements contest the liberal status quo by calling into question not
only concrete policy orientations but also embedded norms and institutional
practices that have long been recognized as the bedrock of any constitutional
system. The rising popularity of anti-liberal models even within established
liberal democracies feeds on a growing skepticism—shared by the political
right and left—concerning the capacity of liberal institutions to deliver politi-
cal legitimacy, national security, and economic well-being (Haidt 2016; Sides
and Varick 2016).
On the right, state sovereignty is being reclaimed both as the only viable
response to democratic deficits, economic hardship, and high waves of mi-
gration and cultural dislocation especially since the refugee crisis of 2015, and
as a brake on the perceived globalism of liberal policies. From this vantage,
driven by their own class and partisan interests, liberal elites have severed ties
with democratic publics, and failed to provide for their well-being. Liberalism,
these critics aver, lacks a coherent vision of national and economic security, and
of the moral substance that holds a democratic polity together (Deneen 2018;
Hazony 2018). If the right considers the liberal status quo as inherently thin
and recklessly universalist, the left sees it as all too thick and partial, pointing
to its structural or normative underpinnings as evidence of inegalitarian biases.
Decrying the failures of liberal institutions to guarantee democratic represen-
tation, critics on the left question the sincerity of liberal ideals (Brown 2015;
A Tocquevillean Perspective 59
Moyn 2019). Charging that liberalism’s universalistic assumptions about reason

and humanity are little more than rhetorical flowers covering over real chains
of political and economic exploitation, these critics unmask core liberal val-
ues, including the rule of law or human rights, as cynical instruments of neo-
colonial domination (Chatterjee 2007; Sassen 2015; Mishra 2017).
Alongside these theoretical and practical contestations of the liberal demo-
cratic order, a debate is taking place in academic and policy circles around the
question how best to understand our populist moment, and whether “illiberal
democracy” as a concept helps or hinders efforts to address present discon-
tents, and chart a way forward. Most influentially, Jan-Werner Müller (2017)
has questioned the term illiberal democracy and the claim that there can be a
genuine democracy that is divorced from liberal constitutionalism. Warning
against populist efforts to undermine liberal democratic values, Müller insists
on conceptual clarity as indispensable to resisting these efforts. Such clarity re-
quires that we reserve the term “democracy” only for polities committed to the
rule of law, liberal rights, and a constitutional system of checks and balances.
Conversely, to speak of “illiberal” democracy, “sovereign” democracy, etc., is
to proliferate analytical and normative confusions. Analytically vexed, Müller
claims, such notions are also strategically harmful, allowing populist and
authoritarian forces to claim a democratic legitimacy they do not merit.
And yet, if driving a conceptual wedge between liberalism and democracy
is the main weapon in the current attack on liberal democracy, insofar as it
carries explanatory power, the term “illiberal democracy” could also be seen
as critical to its defense. While some reject its analytical and practical utility in
accounting for and addressing what seems like a rising wave of authoritarian-
ism, a growing number of academic and policy publications, some included in
this volume, adopt the concept as a historically grounded and resonant way of
thinking about the crisis of democracy in the 21st century. In defense of this
analytical and rhetorical practice, they point out that, in a broader sense, the
global conflicts of the past two centuries have been contests about the mean-
ing of democracy and its relationship to liberal norms and institutions, whose
landmarks include the rule of law, separation of powers, individual rights, and
political representation (Isaac 2017). If the fall of the Berlin Wall marked a
moment of convergence and global confidence in a liberal future, three decades
later, the relation between democracy and liberalism is again in question in the
West and beyond (Krastev 2017).
Along with registering the question and its violent history, the concept of
“illiberal democracy” also captures the most striking feature of recent develop-
ments: the rhetorical and in some contexts also practical dismantling of inde-
pendent institutions by democratically elected governments that, in the name
of popular sovereignty or egalitarian values, oppose key liberal tenets. The con-
cept refers to the political ascent of parties, movements, and charismatic leaders
that try to divorce democratic governance from constitutional principles, thus
60 Ewa Atanassow
eroding structural limits on the exercise of power. Staying within formal elec-
toral rules, these forces seek to consolidate authority by undermining substantive
commitments to practices and norms such as minority rights, individual auton-
omy, or constraints on the government through law and independent institu-
tions. Behind them stand democratic publics that seem to condone or welcome
this state of affairs (Mounk 2018; Daly 2019). The concept thus points to the
deeper tectonic shifts taking place in democratic societies and political systems
worldwide that are bringing such governments to power—often in the face of
poor performance and at the price of economic hardship. Attacking liberal insti-
tutions in the name of democratic values, they evince or explicitly embrace the
possibility of a democratic order that is not liberal, or is expressly anti-liberal.
In short, “illiberal democracy” is at the center of a heated academic debate
with real-life implications: how to describe what is going on in the world; and
whether our way of thinking and talking about it aids or rather compromises
both analytic and policy efforts to meet with what is referred to as a popu-
list challenge. While diagnoses differ in focus and appreciation, they point to
the clash between liberal principles and democratic aspirations as critical for
the current political conjuncture and the very problem of our time. As Marc
Plattner argues in this volume, rethinking the relationship between democracy
and liberalism, and addressing the ideological and political tensions between
them are indispensable for rehabilitating the political center in the eyes of both
disillusioned elites and disabused voters, and for reinvigorating a broad-based
commitment to liberal democracy.
While broadly diagnostic, Plattner’s essay helps to clarify the overarch-
ing goal and also the particular means of resisting democratic erosion. If the
goal should be to resuscitate inclusive, widely shared commitment to liberal
democracy, Plattner points to a double strategy with which the anti-liberals
of today must be met: first, by rethinking the relationship between liberal-
ism and democracy; and second, by recovering a richer, less dogmatic lib-
eralism that would offer liberal democratic alternatives to contested liberal
policies.
This chapter takes up the challenge to rethink the compatibility of liber-
alism and democracy and the current flaring up of tensions between them by
drawing on the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, one of liberal democracy’s most
esteemed champions and penetrating critics. It aims to show that, while newly
urgent, the rise of illiberal and populist movements in the past two decades is
not in itself new. Though conjured up by particular circumstances and polit-
ical constellations, these movements reflect and respond to the dilemmas and
conflicts that are constitutive of modern democratic society. Among the first to
theorize these constitutive tensions, Tocqueville is well poised to illuminate the
enduring dimensions of our i lliberal moment.
In light of Tocqueville’s analysis, the emerging illiberal impetus finds its
source in the clash between two distinct, if interrelated, understandings of
democracy: between the universal scope of the principle of equality, which

pushes against all limits and borders, and popular sovereignty, i.e. the ideal and
practices of political self-rule that require a particular collective self, a people,
and a notion of rule or sovereignty. For Tocqueville, democracy cannot be
liberal if either of those elements is missing. But their combination generates
tensions and fault-lines that shape the stakes of modern politics.
Liberalism vs. Democracy in Tocqueville

As early as 1835, Tocqueville hailed democracy’s global rise and proclaimed
that there is no viable alternative to the principle of social equality and its po-
litical counterpart—popular sovereignty—in the modern world. In the wake of
the American and the French Revolutions, the defeat of aristocracy as a social
system relocated political struggle within the framework of democracy itself.
Henceforth, Tocqueville insisted, the primary political question was no longer
whether to have democracy but of what kind: how to embody democratic
ideals in institutions and practices, and what precise shape these should take.
Tocqueville expected the same questions to reach and revolutionize every cor-
ner of the world and reshape the global order.
If Tocqueville hailed democratization as “irresistible,” he did not view it as
following a fixed path. Inflected by historical traditions, and variety of other
factors, the struggle for democracy is undetermined in crucial respects. Indeed,
democracy’s social base and the passion for equality that, Tocqueville claimed,
define the modern age are compatible with two radically different political
scenarios: one that postulates universal rights and protects equal freedoms, and
another predicated on an omnipotent state that pursues equality by demanding
the equal powerlessness of all. These alternative outcomes stand as two global
models, which Tocqueville famously and perspicaciously identified with the
US and Russia (Tocqueville 2009, 6, 89–90, 610, 655–6).
And so, against the hopes of 20th-century modernization theory, freedom,
for Tocqueville, is not a necessary outcome of democratization. While point-
ing to democratic equality as the defining feature of the modern world, he
also worried about the political order it may bring about. With the ascen-
dance of the democratic principle of legitimacy, and the demise of traditional
orders and alternative regime types, the fundamental modern political choice,
Tocqueville claimed, is that between democratic self-rule and egalitarian des-
potism. Not only does democracy not necessitate a liberal outcome: the drive
toward ever-greater equalization makes liberty’s prospects ever less certain.
For “equality produces, in fact, two tendencies: one leads men directly to
independence […]; the other leads them by a longer, more secret, but surer road
toward servitude” (Tocqueville 2009, 1193).
Tocqueville, in short, saw the danger of illiberal democracy: the very
specter haunting our times. Hailing the irresistible rise and global scope of
62 Ewa Atanassow
democratization, his work highlights the tensions between democracy and

liberalism as defining both the character and the main challenges of the mod-
ern world. If today’s anti-liberals distinguish liberalism from democracy and
purport to embrace the latter in order to reject the former, Tocqueville insisted
on this distinction to enhance liberal self-understanding and protect democracy
against modern threats to liberty (Atanassow 2017; see also Rahe 2010 and
Richter 2006).
Yet unlike current and past attempts to draw a clear line between democ-
racy and liberalism, hence between liberal and non-liberal forms of democracy,
the distinction is both comprehensive and ambiguous in Tocqueville’s telling
(Schmitt 1988 [1923, 1926]; Schmitter and Karl 1991; Snyder 2018). It is not
a matter of choosing between institutional forms (representative vs. direct), or
of abstract principles (majoritarianism vs. minority rights), nor does it rest on a
particular definition of freedom (individual vs. collective), as scholars have re-
cently insisted (Müller 2017; Randeria et al. 2019; Urbinati 2019). A decent and
free democratic order must include all these dimensions. More importantly,
Tocqueville makes clear that a healthy liberal democracy depends on deeper
things: intellectual and spiritual orientations, modes of relating to the past and
to the political community as the product of a particular historical trajectory,
or a view of religion’s place in social and political life.
While Tocqueville’s classic study of American democracy and his works
as a whole are go-to sources for recovering the richer and deeper liberalism
Plattner calls for, in the remaining, I focus on a foundational aspect and point
of departure of that study, i.e. the tension between two distinct and potentially
conflicting meanings of democracy: democracy understood as the principle
of social equality vs. as political self-rule, and the illiberal potential each of
these carries. Liberal democracy, seen through Tocqueville’s eyes, depends on
how the tensions between these distinct democratic imaginaries, and the policy
dilemmas behind them, are understood and navigated. Revisiting Tocqueville’s
account of these dilemmas may help us put our troubled moment in perspec-
tive, and distill useful lessons.
Democracy’s Dilemma: Social Equality vs. Popular Rule

Modern democracy, for Tocqueville, is premised on the notion of the moral
equality of human beings. Not primarily a political concept, democracy is fun-
damentally a “social state.” It defines a condition of society in which status is
not fixed at birth but must be acquired. This egalitarian condition need not
deny that at any given point, there may be extensive inequalities, say, between
rich and poor, or between more or less educated, to mention Tocqueville’s two
key metrics. Indeed, the universal striving for social eminence and economic
success is what democracy is all about. What social equality means above all is
the promise that no one has by virtue of origin or inherited qualities a political
precedence over any other person; or no person’s social prospects are simply
determined by the fortuitous circumstances of birth and heritage.
Equality, then, means social mobility: the possibility of rising—and fa lling—
on the social ladder. It draws on a peculiar moral imaginary: a way of seeing
the social world that glosses over existing inequalities to insist on fundamental
human similarity. It also entails a peculiar mindset characterized by the “ardent,
insatiable, eternal, invincible” love of equality itself (Tocqueville 2009, 878).
This passionate commitment to equality ensures that the democratic social state
is not a static regime but a dynamic, ever-changing condition that continuously
questions social conventions and presses against social boundaries and institu-
tional forms. The motor of this progressive dynamic is the individual desire for
independence and flourishing, and claiming the right to shape one’s own life.
Yet, Tocqueville warns, while a central feature of democratic freedom, this
desire for individual independence is also its foremost danger. Encouraging fix-
ation on private interests and goals, it tends to hide from view each person’s re-
liance upon—and duty toward—fellow citizens and the social world. Focused
on the here and now, and privileging self-interest, democracy’s individualistic
mindset works to shrink the citizens’ understanding of interest and utility and
militates against social cohesion. Left to itself, it narrows the scope of what is
held in common and facilitates taking short-sighted and self-serving decisions,
whose costs are externalized to invisible others: classes, countries, and genera-
tions. This, in turn, triggers solidarity deficits that undermine the ethical and
psychological preconditions for liberty: civic allegiance and trust in the insti-
tutions, and the citizens’ confidence in their capacity to effectively shape their
personal and collective fate. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018) have
pointedly argued, the result is an alienation from the political culture and its
norms, which suddenly appear to have lost their raison d'être.
Arguably, it is the deepening of just such alienation and the decline of
social cohesion that facilitates the current rise of populist leaders and move-
ments, and their successful bid on power. Various studies of Trump’s ascent
have shown that the 45th President has been much more popular in areas that
have experienced community breakdown, and where feelings of resentment
and powerlessness are rampant. As Timothy Carney’s (2019) Alienated America
shows, Trump numbers were high where social capital was low.
And so, the passion for equality, which has revolutionized and continues
to transform the modern world by opening new avenues for individual self-
assertion, can both support democratic freedom and undermine its precondi-
tions. Though a check against abuse of social and political power, the drive to
individual independence can erode the social fabric and undermine confidence
in the institutional order. Abandoned to itself, it weakens attitudes that one
may call liberal in both meanings of the word: i.e. disinterested and generous,
on the one hand, and freedom-loving, on the other hand. It can lead to losing
the ability to attain, in common, common ends, which is of the essence of a free
64 Ewa Atanassow
democratic government. As Tocqueville warns, in times of hardship, in crises

financial or other, the isolated individual would quickly learn the limits of his
independence and power. Having lost the ties to his fellow citizens or the taste
for seeking out their support, begrudging the status of those who seem to fare
better, he would likely turn to the only agent that has retained uncontestable
agency: the state. Paradoxically enough, the obsession with individual inde-
pendence is only likely to augment the competences of the state, and tip public
opinion in favor of what Robert Dahl (1991) once called “guardianship democ-
racy.” In a kind of dialectical reversal, it may result in forms of government least
conducive to individual freedom (Zakaria 2003).
Popular Sovereignty
If equality is the social meaning of democracy, its political principle is popu-
lar sovereignty. In its broadest meaning, this principle postulates that political
arrangements, in order to hold, must be validated by the people over whom
they rule. If the moral equality of individuals grounds the principle of human
rights, the claim that the people are sovereign underpins the fundamental lib-
eral norm of government by consent, and of the accountability of government
to the governed.
Although popular sovereignty, for Tocqueville, is an indispensable ingre-
dient and integral element of democratic liberty, it is not simply a guarantor
of freedom. Like the passion for equality, it too can support both liberal and
illiberal arrangements. If democracy requires the consent and support of the
governed, reflecting the nation’s will and serving the people is, Tocqueville
claims, what “schemers of all times and despots of all ages” have purported
to do (Tocqueville 2009, 91). As an abstract principle or ideological slogan,
popular sovereignty easily lends itself to populist manipulation, and to abusing
rather than effecting the power of the people. And so, while a crucial element
of a free democracy, popular sovereignty is not in itself liberal. Its liberal char-
acter depends on how this principle is institutionalized and how the popular
support indispensable for the functioning of institutions is being generated and
expressed. What distinguishes the American polity—Tocqueville’s example of
a free democracy—is not the popular principle itself, but the particular way this
principle has been put into institutional and social practice.
Tocqueville celebrates the constitutional system and political culture of the
US for the wide variety of institutional forms that enable broad-based popular
participation: from the direct democracy in the township, to the representative
state and federal governments. He views the full range of spontaneous and es-
tablished associations, participatory and representative institutions as so many
different instantiations of the popular principle. Despite the variety of ways in
which they articulate this principle, all institutional arrangements have a single
legitimating force: the people, and a single court: public opinion. This is how,
as one of Tocqueville’s chapter headings has it, “It Can Be Strictly Said That in
the United States It Is the People Who Govern” (Tocqueville 2009, 271).
Tocqueville famously credits the participatory spirit of public life in A merica
with the “real advantages” of America’s democratic government, including
political education, public spiritedness, commitment to rights, and respect
for law (Tocqueville 2009, 375). As he claims, it is the people’s widespread
perception and, to a significant degree, the reality of being in charge that sus-
tains popular allegiance to liberal democratic institutions and liberal values.
And without this allegiance, the balanced government mandated by the Con-
stitution would be a mere theory, as the Constitution itself would be reduced
to a sheet of paper.
In other words, what makes the American polity liberal, for Tocqueville, is
its being robustly republican. To be meaningful and viable, along with enshrin-
ing constitutional rights, democratic liberty must connote the active exercise
of those rights: a capacity to participate, individually and collectively, in deter-
mining one’s present and future. Freedom, in short, implies sovereignty, and
the meaning of sovereignty is self-rule or, to use Lincoln’s formula, a govern-
ment not only of the people, for the people, but in decisive ways by the people
as well.
Yet if Tocqueville comes close to equating democratic freedom with dem-
ocratic sovereignty and republican self-rule, he does not fail to point out the
dangers that threaten to turn popular self-rule into democratic tyranny. Pre-
cisely because all democratic institutions draw on the same social base, and
are the applications of one and the same popular principle, there are no struc-
tural barriers that could prevent a self-aware democratic multitude, numerous
enough, from embracing or exercising tyrannical power. Ironically, it is the
majority’s commitment to constitutional principles that alone can limit the
power of the majority. Yet if the constitutional system of checks and balances
works because the majority sees it not as inimical to but as enhancing popular
rule, what happens if they come to see otherwise?
Democratic freedom, then, is endangered by both of democracy’s core prin-
ciples: by the radicalization of equality and individualistic erosion of the social
solidarity that is needed to uphold the constitutional order; as well as by a
reified and often reactive notion of “we, the people” that threatens, as Ivan
Krastev writes in this volume, “to turn democracy from an instrument of in-
clusion to that of exclusion,” and democratic sovereignty into the very meaning
of oppression. While seemingly antithetical, these two dangers have a way of
morphing into each other. If the anxiety and sense of disempowerment that
may arise amidst the relentless dynamism of democratic life can render the
pressures to conform and join a powerful majority all the more irresistible,
what makes that majority oppressive if not the breakdown of broader solidar-
ities and a narrow understanding of collective identity and self-interest, i.e.
selfishness writ large?
66 Ewa Atanassow
The larger threat Tocqueville’s work points to is not only the tyranny of
this or that particular formation, or local outbreaks of illiberalism, but a global
discrediting of sovereignty of the people, and of democratic politics as such
(Bickerton et al. 2007; Rhodes 2018). Put differently, if one form of democratic
despotism issues from an essentializing view of the people as a hard-edged,
tyrannical whole, the other, depicted in Democracy in America’s final chap-
ters, consists in losing sight of peoplehood altogether and, with it, of political
agency and freedom. In the latter scenario further down the egalitarian road,
the citizens are reduced to an indiscriminate “crowd of similar and equal men”
(Tocqueville 2009, 1249). No longer bound by collective categories or civic
membership, each becomes a stranger to the destiny of the others, and to the
idea of directing one’s own life. As discrete identities lose their meaning and
legitimacy, so do political and existential alternatives. The space for choice and
action radically shrinks, and self-government gives way to a top-down techno-
cratic governance laboring for the happiness of all by relieving each from “the
trouble of thinking and the care of living” (Tocqueville 2009, 1251).
Conclusion: What Is to Be Done?

Seen through the lens of Tocqueville, the current rise of illiberalism appears
as a clash between two dimensions of democracy: equality and popular self-
rule. While the egalitarian passion is the engine of social transformation with
no visible end, the principle of popular sovereignty implies limits: those of
membership in the people. If love of equality rests on the sentiment of univer-
sal similitude, the popular principle bespeaks a particular solidarity based on
shared history, political experience, and a distinctive way of life, in a word: on
difference. How modern democracies navigate these conflicting aspirations to
similarity and difference, and the tensions between universal principles and the
particular political order, is critical for the future of democratic freedom.
If Tocqueville’s analysis of the inherent tensions between the social and po-
litical definitions of democracy is correct, our illiberal moment is an instance
of a dynamic that is inscribed in democratic life. While liberal institutions were
designed to harness this dynamic into a process that is both progressive and sta-
ble, as Julia Azari (2019) has argued for the American case, these centuries-old
institutions now appear out of sync with social developments. A gap seems to
have opened up between institutional frame and citizens’ self-understanding.
From facilitating democratization, representative institutions have come to be
seen as an obstacle both to democratic progress, and to popular control.
Even if we agree that the root of our present discontent is the clash between
institutions and mindsets, to insist that the problem is simply that the institu-
tions don’t deliver on the expectations of social mobility and prosperity is to
take a narrow view on what they are to deliver, or on the preconditions for
democratic success. While institutional innovation or repair may be one kind
of response called for, addressing the citizens’ self-understandings and their

solidarity deficits—and so, civic repair—is another (Putnam 2016; Offe 2017).
To be liberal, in other words, a popular regime vitally depends on nurturing
social trust and broad-based identification with the constitutional arrangement,
and the unwritten norms that underpin the political and civic practices. As
Tocqueville argues, this identification is partly achieved through civic par-
ticipation and engagement in the task of ruling. But in our busy world of
constantly changing social landscape and ever more dazzling technological
environment, the key question is often how to trigger this participation in
the first place. What motivates citizens to get involved, and make an effort on
behalf of the public interest, rather than focus on their private lives or get ab-
sorbed in virtual reality?
Tocqueville’s American study goes a long way to probe the psychology of
civic engagement, and the mechanisms that propel naturally selfish and con-
ventionally independent individuals to become dedicated democratic citizens.
Crucial among those motives and mechanisms are the citizens’ sense of moral
distinctiveness and the pride they take in their collective identity. This involves
their sharing a sense of belonging, and their self-understanding as a commu-
nity of fate bound by a joint political project. While participatory practices
are a v ital generator of civic identities, because of their narrow scope, the af-
fective ties stirred up on a local level, by civil groups and NGOs, or even by
nation-wide associations such as political parties, may not translate to the pol-
ity as a whole. Indeed, the stronger those ties and the sense of distinctiveness
they evince, the more polarizing and productive of political disaffection they
can become. As Sheri Berman (1997) has shown in the example of Weimar
Germany, under certain conditions, vigorous civil society can deepen rather
than balance solidarity deficits, thus fatally compromise democratic stability.
And so, along with reaffirming the civic ideals of equal participation and the
people’s right to self-rule, there is a need for comprehensive narratives that
would weave the great variety of civic experiences into the larger, multicolor
whole that is a democratic people. In other words, how individual citizens ex-
ercise their rights and duties, and whether they engage in civic life and reach
out across social divides, critically depends on how the people, and membership
in the people, are defined and understood.
In a recent paper, the political scientist Rogers Smith argues that popu-
list success can be studied to devise strategies for liberal recovery.1 The first
elements of this success, he claims, are persuasive stories that invoke popular
sovereignty and democratic ideals. What populists offer is not only an outlet for
anger and frustration, or targeted proposals for addressing urgent policy issues,
but also compelling stories of popular identity and rule: democratic stories af-
firming the dignity of the people against conniving elites or impersonal global
forces, and explaining how sovereignty can be restored, and the political system
revamped to serve those it is supposed to be serving: the people. Not simply
68 Ewa Atanassow
rejecting such stories but telling better—truer, more complex, and more liberal
ones—is, Smith contends, the way to combat the ascent of illiberal populism.
In a like spirit, Harvard historian Jill Lepore (2019) has issued a clarion call
to fellow historians to make the nation central to their craft again. In her bid to
restore the dignity and purpose to national history writing, Lepore points out
that if academic historians may have graduated from painting national tableaus
to crafting multi-layered canvases set in a global frame, democratic publics have
not. These publics see and feel the world in terms of nations, and look for a
historical narrative that reflects and instructs their self-perception. “They can
get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will”
(Lepore 2019, 20). Democratic freedom, in Lepore’s telling, crucially relies on
the way popular identity is understood. A people, to be free, needs to have a
vision of itself. Much depends on the quality and resonance of that vision; and
on whether those most qualified to offer it are up for the job.
In sum, for liberal institutions to be stable, the confidence in the liberal
democratic polity has to be built and rebuilt both from below and from above.
Liberal democracy relies on the citizens’ constant practice and experience, as
well as on the elite’s willingness to interpret that experience in a meaningful
light and provide unifying narratives that can bridge the distance between
individuals and institutions, majority and minority, people and elites. To be
free, democracy requires broad-based civic participation as well as political and
moral leadership: that is, ongoing efforts to sustain the sense of common mem-
bership and reimagine “we, the people.”
Note
1 Rogers Smith, “Popular Sovereignty, Populism, and Stories of Peoplehood,” paper
presented at an SSRC Workshop on Popular Sovereignty, Swarthmore, October
2017. See also Smith (2015).
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5
THE OPEN SOCIETY FROM
A CONSERVATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Sir Roger Scruton
Introduction
Given the rise in popularity of openly illiberal politics, both in political sys-
tems and in theoretical discussions, it is of pressing importance to articulate
a positive conservative view of the classical liberal idea of the open society.
This chapter aims to offer just such an articulation, focusing on the need to
balance freedom—especially individual freedom—and openness with the trust
required for the preservation of social integrity. I shall argue that conservatism
is not against openness and change; it is concerned with the social conditions—
chiefly solidarity, continuity, and trust—that must be kept in place if those
things are to be possible. The danger in liberal individualism, to which the cur-
rent “illiberal” turn is a reaction, is that it sees any constraint of individual free-
dom as unjustified, until proven to be necessary. By shifting the onus of proof
constantly in favor of the individual, liberalism jeopardizes the trust on which
liberal policies and the very possibility of an “open” society ultimately depend.
First, a bit of context. The idea of the “open society” was introduced by the
French philosopher Henri Bergson (Bergson 1932), with a view to contrasting
two ways of creating social cohesion: the magical and the rational. Magical
thinking involves the submission to mystical forces that must be appeased and
obeyed, and societies founded on magic are closed to innovation and experi-
ment, since these threaten the dark powers that govern human destiny. Rational
thinking, by contrast, involves exploring the world with a view to discovering
the real laws of nature, and exerting ourselves to find reasoned solutions to our
social and political problems. Rational thinking leads to an open society, in
which differences of opinion and lifestyle are accepted as contributions to the
collective wellbeing.
72 Roger Scruton
The distinction was taken up by Sir Karl Popper who, writing in the wake
of World War II, saw totalitarianism, whether of the fascist or the communist
variety, as a return to magical ways of thinking and to a society based on fear and
obedience rather than free rational choice (Popper 1962). For Popper follow-
ing Bergson, magical thinking has persisted in new forms, and intellectuals—
those who live by their reasoning powers—had been in part responsible for this.
Thus, in his account, the real enemies of the open society were those thinkers,
Plato, Hegel, and Marx in particular, who—at least on Popper’s view of them—
had advocated submission to the collective, rather than individual freedom, as
the goal of politics. Such thinkers, Popper argued, failed to see that without
individual freedom, reason has no purchase in human affairs. To Popper’s mind,
thinking through the cataclysm of the mid-20th century and at the dawn of the
cold war, the worst of the gods that European intellectuals (following the lead
of Hegel and Marx) had superstitiously imposed on us, in order to perpetuate
our submission, has been history itself. Thus, Popper argues, historicism prose-
lytized a fatalism just as inexorable and dogmatic as that of traditional and fun-
damentalist religion. The hecatombs of sacrificial victims went to their death,
under the fascist and communist regimes, because ‘history’ required it.
Both the thesis Popper advanced concerning totalitarian tendencies in the
history of Western thought and the vehemence with which he pursued that
thesis can be and have been criticized by the political right (see, for instance,
Bialas 2019). Nevertheless, we cannot deny that the issues to which Popper
referred are still very much alive, even if they have taken on a new form. We
are still besieged by the idea that history is a force to which we must submit,
and that attempts to resist it—whether in the name of freedom, or in the name
of tradition—will always be futile. But the superstitious submission to history
is now more commonly associated with those who call themselves liberals than
with Marxists or nationalists. In particular, many who advocate for the open
society tell us that globalization is inevitable and that with it comes new forms
of trans-national government, new attitudes to borders, migration and gov-
ernance, and new ideas of civil society and legal order. The message coming
down to us from many of those who propose themselves as our political leaders
has been ‘globalization is the future, it is inevitable, and we are in charge of
it’—the same contradiction that was announced by the advocates of totalitarian
political systems. (For if it is inevitable, nobody can really be in charge.) But is
it inevitable? Is it really compatible with the open society?
In one sense, then, Popper’s conception of the open society derives from
Bergson and the quest to purify 20th-century European thought and society
of lingering traces of magical thinking and their pernicious political conse-
quences. But the Open Society is also a recent manifestation of a far older idea,
namely that of liberal individualism as this took shape during the Enlighten-
ment. Followers of John Locke saw legitimacy as arising from the sovereignty
of the individual. Free individuals confer legitimacy on government through
The Open Society 73
their consent to it, and the consent is registered in a contract in which no indi-
vidual has an actually operative veto. The result is a reasonable and reasoning
form of government since it draws on individual rational choice for its legiti-
macy. In such an arrangement, individual freedom is both the foundation and
the goal of politics, and the resulting society is open in the sense that nobody is
in a position to impose opinions or standards of conduct unless the people can
be persuaded to accept them. There will be dissenters of course, but an open
society shows itself by nothing so much as by its attitude to the dissenter, whose
voice is allowed in the political process, and whose freedom to express dissent-
ing opinions is protected by the state. This idea underlies Popper’s vision, and it
is an idea of perennial appeal. However, it is open to an objection, made vividly
by Hegel, whose writings on political philosophy Popper seems willfully to
have misunderstood.
The objection is this: freely choosing individuals, able to sign up to con-
tracts and to accept responsibility for their agreements, do not exist in the
state of nature. Popper himself acknowledges that magical ways of thinking,
submission to dark forces and the desire to appease them, define the origi-
nal position from which we humans must free ourselves. We become free
individuals by a process of emancipation and this process is a social process,
dependent on our interactions with others, and on the mutual accountability
that shapes each of us as a self-choosing ‘I.’ The free individual is the product
of a specific kind of social order, and the constraints necessary to perpetuate
that order are therefore necessary to our freedom. If openness means free-
dom, then freedom cannot be extended so far as to unsettle the social order
that produces it. But then the advocate of freedom must be an advocate of
that kind of social order, and this means thinking in terms of something other
than openness. We need to know what kinds of constraints are required by
a free society and how far we can allow them to be eroded. As I see it, that
defines the agenda of conservatism, from its foundation in the philosophy
of Thomas Hobbes, through Burke, Smith, and Hegel to its frail and belea-
guered advocates today.
Enlightenment
For some Enlightenment thinkers, individual freedom makes sense only in the
context of a universal morality. Individual freedoms and universal values sus-
tain each other, and are two sides of a coin. Such is the position advocated by
Kant, in his theory of the categorical imperative. Morality, according to Kant,
stems from our shared nature as rational agents, each of whom is governed by
the same collection of imperatives. Humanity and free rational agency are ulti-
mately the same idea, and to be human is to live under the sanction of the moral
law, which tells us to will the maxims of our actions as universal laws, and to
treat humanity always as an end in itself, and never as a means only.
74 Roger Scruton
The moral law, in Kant’s view, follows immediately from the fact that we
are free, in the sense of being guided by our own reason, independently of any
threats or rewards that might be waved in front of us. This condition—which
he described as the autonomy of the will—can be over-ridden by tyrants, but
never destroyed. Even if we are constrained to do what the moral law forbids,
we will inevitably know that we are doing wrong. A regime that maintains it-
self in being by threats therefore violates what for Kant was the basic condition
of legitimate order, which is that rational beings, consulting their reason alone,
would consent to it.
There are many complexities and subtleties involved in spelling out that po-
sition. But it has lost none of its appeal, and is the best argument ever produced
for the very idea of human rights—the notion that there are universal rights
which serve as a shield behind which we can all exercise the sovereignty over
our lives that reason itself requires of us, and in doing so express and act out
our consent to the political regime under which we live. Rights are equal and
universal, and are the way in which the sovereignty of the individual is fitted
into the same slot, as it were, as the sovereignty of the state.
Few doubt the importance of this idea, and all that it has inspired by way of
constitution building. It is the foundation stone of the liberal order. For Pop-
per, as for many others, it is the way to release reason into the community, and
to produce a society open to innovation and experiment. But we should not
neglect the difficulties associated with the human rights idea, of which two,
in particular, stand out as especially relevant to the times in which we live.
First, what exactly are our rights, and what prevents people from claiming as a
right what they happen to want, regardless of the effect on the common good?
Second, what are our duties, and to whom or to what are they owed?
The American Declaration of Independence told us that all human beings
are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, including Life,
Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That relatively innocuous summary
leaves open as many questions as it answers, and when Eleanor Roosevelt set
out to draft the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the list
began to grow in ways that the American founders might very well have ques-
tioned, in particular the expansion from basic political and civic rights to em-
brace what have come to be called social and cultural rights. Human rights,
which began life as fundamental freedoms, came to include elaborate claims
to health, work, security, family life, and so on, which are available only if
someone is prepared to provide them. Rights, initially conceived as a limitation
to the power of the state, thus became a way of increasing state power, to the
point where the state, as guardian and provider, occupies more and more of the
space once allocated to the free acts of individuals. We have seen this process of
‘rights inflation’ everywhere in the post-war world, and much of it issues either
from declarations such as that of the UN, or from the national or international
courts established to adjudicate their application.
The Open Society 75
The expansion of rights goes hand in hand with a contraction in duties. The
universalist vision of the Enlightenment, as classically presented in Kant, con-
ceives duties as owed indifferently to all mankind. We have a general duty to
do good, the beneficiaries of which are not bound to us by specific obligations
but are simply equal petitioners for a benefit that cannot in fact be distributed to
them all. No particular person comes before us as the irreplaceable object of our
concern: all are equal, and none has an over-riding claim. In such circumstances,
I can be easily forgiven if I neglect them all, being unable to fulfill a duty that
will in any case make little difference to the net sum of human suffering.
If you look at recent literature on ethics stemming from thinkers such as
Peter Singer (2019) and Derek Parfit (2013–17), you will get a fairly clear idea
of what this Enlightenment morality has come to mean today: futile calcula-
tions of cost and benefit, from which all real human feeling and all lively sense
of obligation and moral ties have been removed. Unless you have the good
fortune to be switching the points in the path of a runaway railway trolley,
giving to Oxfam is about all the moral life amounts to.
It should be said that Kant’s own position by no means tends in that direction.
For Kant, the fundamental moral concept was not right but duty. The free being
is bound by the moral law, which imposes the duty to treat humanity always as
an end in itself, and never as a means only. If there are universal rights, this is
simply a consequence of the fact that there are universal duties: notably, the duty
to respect each other as sovereign individuals, to tell the truth, and to keep our
promises. As Onora O’Neill (1993, 2005) has persuasively argued, for a Kantian
moral outlook, there is a necessary balance between rights and duties and an ob-
ligation to clearly cognize our specific moral ties, or at least to reflectively seek
a path toward such a cognition and act on it. But without the underlying meta-
physics, it is difficult to see how today’s muddied version of the Enlightenment
vision of the moral life will lead to anything other than enhanced claims for me,
accompanied by reduced duties to you (Korsgaard 1996).
A Misconception
That imbalance can be observed in a radical misconception that seems to lie at
the heart of much liberal politics in our day. The view adopted by many ad-
vocates of the open society is that Enlightenment universalism, once adopted,
will replace all other social ties, providing a sufficient basis on which individuals
can live together in mutual respect. Moreover, this replacement ought to oc-
cur, since universalist values are ultimately incompatible with those historical
loyalties and rooted attachments that cause people to discriminate between
those who are entitled to the benefits of social inclusion and those who are
not. Enlightenment universalism requires us to live in an open and borderless
cosmopolis, from which all forms of traditional obedience—whether tribal,
national, or religious—are marginalized or banished.
76 Roger Scruton
This misconception results from identifying what is in fact a rare achieve-

ment, involving extensive trial and sacrifice, as the default position of human-
ity. Only take away the exclusive loyalties, it is supposed, and people will revert
of their own accord to the universal values, having no particularist code to
distract them. We saw the effect of this misconception in the so-called ‘Arab
spring,’ when the Western powers acted on the assumption that we need only
remove the tyrant, and democratic politics will emerge from beneath him, as
the default position of any modern society. But the default position is neither
democracy nor any other system expressive of Enlightenment individualism.
As Ruth Wodak (2015) has argued, the default position in response to this is
fear, and I would hasten to add, this is indeed a justified fear. For fear in the
face of adversity and uncertainty is proper to creatures living side by side with
the most dangerous of all existing animals. Hence, people flee toward the next
offer of security, often provided by the army and/or a strongman leader since
that is what armies are for (Chatterjee and Katznelson 2012).
Loyalty and Trust

Human beings have a primary need to trust those among whom they live, and
to be settled side by side with them in a shared experience of belonging. Trust
grows in small units like the family, in which the members experience each oth-
er’s wellbeing as their own. But family-based communities are unstable, riven
by the all-too-apparent contrast between the unbreakable trust that unites me
to my family and the defeasible obligations that I acknowledge toward families
other than mine. Under pressure, such communities break down along family
lines, with vendettas of the Montague and Capulet kind. In general, kinship
loyalties are more likely to sustain closed than open societies since each family
holds its loyalty close to its chest.
Trust in an open society must extend to strangers: only then will it provide
the foundation for an outgoing and experimental experience of belonging, one
that guarantees free deals and consensual arrangements and which will not
be undermined by favoritism and family ties. The question we need to ask
ourselves is how trust between strangers arises, and what maintains it in the
absence of personal affection or shared commitments? Trust, like affection,
cannot be commanded. (‘Trust me!’ is not a command but an undertaking.)
Trust extended to strangers is what enables people in a large modern society,
referring to their neighbors, their countrymen, and their fellow citizens, to
say ‘we’ and to mean it—to mean it as an expression of obligation and not
just of fate.
It is important to recognize that most of us in Western democracies are
living under a government of which we don’t approve. We accept to be ruled
by laws and decisions made by politicians with whom we disagree, and whom
we often deeply dislike. How is that possible? Why don’t democracies regularly
The Open Society 77
collapse, as people refuse to be governed by those they never voted for? Clearly,
a modern democracy must be held together by something stronger than party
politics. As thinkers as ideologically variant as Francis Fukuyama (2018) and
Jürgen Habermas (2001) have argued, there must be some sort of “civic” na-
tionalism, a ‘first-person plural’ identity and a pre-political loyalty, that causes
neighbors who voted in opposing ways to treat each other as fellow citizens,
for whom the government is not ‘mine’ or ‘yours’ but ‘ours,’ whether or not we
approve of it. This first-person plural varies in strength, from fierce attachment
in wartime, to casual acceptance on a Monday morning at work. But at some
level, it must be assumed if we are to accept a shared form of government.
A country’s stability is enhanced by economic growth. But it depends far
more upon the sense that we belong together, and that we will stand by each
other during the real emergencies. Trust of this kind depends on customs and
institutions that foster collective decisions in response to the problems of the
day. It is the sine qua non of enduring peace, and the greatest asset of any peo-
ple that possesses it, as the British have possessed it throughout the enormous
changes that gave rise to the modern world. Whether the Hungarians possess it,
after the disasters of Nazi and Soviet occupation, and all that has flowed from
the Treaty of Trianon, is a real question today, and one that I am not competent
to answer. But the evidence is that the Hungarian ‘we’ is just as strong, and just
as full of conflicts and tensions as the British.
People acquire trust in different ways. Urban elites build trust through
career moves, joint projects, and cooperation across borders. Like the aristocrats
of old, they often form networks without reference to national boundaries.
They do not, on the whole, depend upon a particular place, a particular faith,
or a particular routine for their sense of membership, and in the immediate cir-
cumstances of modern life, they can adapt to globalization without too much
difficulty. However, even in modern conditions, this urban elite depends upon
others who do not belong to it: the farmers, manufacturers, factory work-
ers, builders, clothiers, mechanics, nurses, carers, cleaners, cooks, policemen,
and soldiers for whom attachment to a place and its customs is implicit in all
that they do. In a question that touches on identity, these people will very
likely feel differently from the urban elite, on whom they depend, in turn, for
government.
Hence, the word ‘we’ in this context does not always embrace the same
group of people or the same networks of association. David Goodhart (2017)
has presented a dichotomy between the ‘anywheres’ and the ‘somewheres’:
those who can take their business, their relations, and their networks from place
to place without detriment, and those for whom a specific place and its indige-
nous lifestyle are woven into their social being. These two kinds of people will
be pulled in different directions when asked to define the real ground of their
political allegiance. This fact is beginning to cause radical problems all across
Europe, as the question of identity moves to the center of the political stage.
78 Roger Scruton
Liberal individualism grants to each of us a great benefit: sovereignty over

our lives, and a shield of rights in the face of all who seek to take that sover-
eignty away. But it also imposes on us a great burden, which is life among oth-
ers who enjoy the same benefit, and who may very well use their sovereignty
to our disadvantage. And because liberal individualism expands freedom and
opportunities, it also amplifies society, bringing in more and more people who
do not know each other personally, but who nevertheless want to sign up to the
deal. Why and how should we trust them? To that question, liberal individual-
ism gives no persuasive answer.
Forms of Belonging
In a religious community, people are bound together by a shared faith, and by
traditions and customs that express the faith and are in some way authorized by
it. The history of modern Europe is the history of our emancipation from that
kind of community. Not that we have turned away from religion (though some
people certainly have) but that we have privatized it, removed it from the foun-
dations of our public life, and brought it into the house, as, classically, Jews have
learned to do. In communities founded on religious obedience, such as Calvin’s
Geneva, the fear and hatred of the heretic will, in any emergency, destabilize
loyalties. Like Muhammad’s Medina, Calvin’s Geneva made no distinction be-
tween secular and religious authority, and for both Muslims and Calvinists, the
move toward purely secular government has been an uphill struggle, and also
something that Islam, in some of its versions, actually forbids.
Whatever we think about the Enlightenment, a glance at 17th-century
Europe prior to the Peace of Westphalia, and at the Islamic world today, must
surely give credence to the opinion that a modern society needs another kind
of first-person plural than that provided by religion. And down the centuries,
people have always been aware of this. It is why religious communities morph
into dynasties or military dictatorships. Those are the real default positions,
and vestiges of them remain wherever religion is in retreat from its formerly
dominant position.
The religious first-person plural should not be contrasted with those default
positions but rather with the first-person plural that we in Western societies
enjoy: the ‘we’ of political order. The American constitution was issued in the
name of ‘we the people’—i.e. of people bound together by political obligations
in a place that they share. Any advocacy of the open society must begin from
this conception, which is the sine qua non of open dealings. In summary, the
‘we’ of political order arises in the following conditions:
• There is an inclusive political process, i.e. one in which we all participate

in one way or another, and which therefore legislates by consensus build-
ing, negotiation, and compromise.
The Open Society 79
• There are rules determining who is and who is not a member of the
first-person plural: anyone who seeks the benefit of membership must also
assume the cost.
• The cost includes that of belonging to a community of trust, which, in
turn, involves acquiring the attributes that enable trust, such as a willing-
ness to learn the language, to work, to put down roots, and to adopt the
surrounding public culture.
Those conditions suggest that, under the bargain of secular authority and in-
dividual autonomy, political order rests on a pre-political identity, in which
neighborhood rather than religion has become the foundation of belonging.
This pre-political identity puts territory, residence, and secular law before re-
ligion, family, and tribe. And it is what makes true citizenship possible, as
those who assume the burden of a man-made law acknowledge their right to
participate in making it.
But who is included in such a bargain? This is the question of our time, and
globalization has made it increasingly urgent (see Calhoun in this volume).
People have wanted the benefit of the open society without the cost of provid-
ing a secure answer to that question. But can we have an open society with-
out national sovereignty, and borders secured by a territorial jurisdiction? The
European Union says yes; Mr Orbán says no. And in my own country, it is in
part the pressure of migration from the European Union (Hungary included)
that led to the Brexit vote, which was interpreted by many people as an affirma-
tion of national sovereignty and a defense against inward migration.
What Is Openness?
Before deciding what a conservative defense of the open society would look
like today, we must be clear about what openness actually consists in. There
are, in fact, two rather different conceptions in the literature as to the nature
and value of the open society: one epistemological, the other political.
Popper’s conception is purely epistemological, and was critiqued for this
reason by Aurel Kolnai (1995: xii–iii), among others. Only in conditions of
open discussion and the free exchange of opinion, Popper argues, does human
enquiry reliably tend toward knowledge. In such conditions, as he puts it, our
hypotheses die in our stead. Without the open competition of opinions in the
forum of free discussion, beliefs are chosen for their convenience rather than
their truth: darkness and superstition reclaim their ancestral territory. The in-
spiration for Popper’s view is the scientific revolution and the benefits that have
flown from it, as much as the political philosophy of liberal individualism.
The epistemological benefits of openness have been emphasized by other
central European thinkers, notably Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek,
for whom free association is the repository of social knowledge—the kind of
80 Roger Scruton
knowledge that exists only in social networks and never in an isolated head.
And we should not overlook the argument, due to Mises and Hayek, that a
regime of free exchange is the necessary vehicle of the economic information
on which a Great Society depends. But all these epistemological benefits might
exist in a society, like modern China, in which personal liberties are seriously
curtailed and, in some areas, non-existent.
Thus, a further and expressly political defense of the open society is needed.
Such a defense values freedom not as a means to knowledge and information,
but as an end in itself. This was the position defended by John Stuart Mill (2007
[1859]), and it raises the question of political order in a radical form. When
do we jeopardize the social order by extending freedom, and what kind of
order does freedom presuppose? Or does social order arise spontaneously from
freedom, when individuals are released from traditional constraints? Those are
the questions that underlie conservatism in politics, and I will conclude with a
summary of what follows, when we take them seriously.
The Conservative Response

Conservatives have in general been suspicious of the liberal individualist idea,
that society is, or can be, founded on a social contract. Deals and contracts
presuppose trust and do not produce it. Trust is the long-term background con-
dition that makes political order possible (Fukuyama 1995). Such trust comes to
us as an objective fact, something that we inherit with our social membership.
It is bound up with customs, traditions, and institutions that establish a con-
tinuous conversation linking past, present, and future. This conversation exists
only where there is a confident sense of who belongs to it and who does not. It
requires a conception of membership, and the knowledge that in emergencies,
each will assume the duties that are needed for our collective survival.
This membership is not simply a matter of acquiring rights that will be pro-
tected by the community; it means acquiring duties toward the community,
including the duty to inspire the trust on which the community depends. In the
case of newcomers, this means displaying a willingness to belong; minimally,
Habermas (2001), himself a left-liberal, has maintained an understanding of
and commitment to the basic law/constitution of the host nation. Such an un-
derstanding and commitment has long been the norm among immigrants to
the US, but it has not been the norm everywhere in Europe (Müller 2006).
The mobility of populations in the modern world is one reason why con-
servatives have leaned toward the national idea as their preferred first-person
plural: it indicates a way of belonging that is accessible to the newcomer, to the
stranger, and to the person who has nothing in common with you apart from
residing in the place where you are. By contrast, the religious way of belong-
ing presents an existential challenge. To adopt a religious form of membership
is to convert, to change your life entirely, and to submit to strange gods and
The Open Society 81
alien doctrines. Religious communities present a barrier to the migrant and

the refugee, as well as an internal boundary within the nation, a fault line
that will open at once in any conflict, as in the former Yugoslavia. As I have
recently argued, national identity shapes a pre-political loyalty that is adapted
to the most urgent of our political requirements today, which is that of a single
system of law, defined over territory, and resting on a shared attachment to the
place where we are, rather than on any religious or family-based imperative
(Scruton 2017).
Of course, nationality is not enough to establish a viable first-person plu-
ral. The nation is a pre-political community that is turned by its nature in a
political direction, and may find a political expression in many different ways.
There are nations that are bound together under a unified sovereign order, as
in Britain, and nations that are scattered across political borders, as in Hungary.
Nevertheless, there is a trust between neighbors that comes from a shared at-
tachment to territory and the language and customs that prevail there; and it
is this kind of trust rather than shared religious obedience or the fall-out from
global markets and cosmopolitan ideals that will sustain the truly open society.
It is when people are settled side by side in a condition of neighborliness that
they are most disposed to tolerate differences of opinion, freedom of speech,
and a variety of lifestyles. It is, in my view, a mere illusion that societies become
more open in those respects the more cosmopolitan they are.
In this connection, however, we must acknowledge that the nation-state,
which seemed to open so tempting a path to democratic government in the
19th century, is no longer a clear conception in the minds of the young. At the
same time, the question of what to be put in its place has received no consensual
answer. On one interpretation, the European Union was such an answer, but
in all issues in which national sovereignty has been at risk, the EU has slipped
away into the realm of wishful thinking, and the nation has stepped forward in
its stead. While the EU has tried by all available means to persuade Europeans
to replace their national attachments with a new and cosmopolitan identity,
the only effect has been to stir up other, narrower, and more emotional na-
tionalisms, as with the Scots, the Flemings, and the Catalans. The conservative
response to all this is to say: stop looking for something that has never previ-
ously existed, and think instead of adapting what we have. And what we have
is a collection of historic settlements, in which national attachment sustains
a liberal rule of law, and in which people can live together without conflict,
agreeing about some things and disagreeing about others.
Liberal Doubts
Liberals and conservatives are united in accepting the epistemological argu-
ment for the market economy. And classical liberals will often go further along
the road taken by conservatism, and acknowledge that tradition too might be
82 Roger Scruton
an essential part of social knowledge, on which we depend in the unforeseen

and unforeseeable circumstances of social change. But liberals, like many social
conservatives, argue that markets must be controlled and that human ingenuity
is constantly giving rise to new ways of abusing the trust on which markets de-
pend, as in currency speculation, asset stripping, and similar ways of extracting
value from everyone without adding value of one’s own. Economic freedoms
may impose a huge and unforeseen cost on people who had built their lives
around a now defunct economic order. Under capitalism, the Communist Mani-
festo famously said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ Globalization vastly enhances
this effect, as capital roams the world in search of those unexploited margins,
detaching one economy after another from its protected enclave. In the face of
this, it is normal, now, for governments to offer some protection to their citi-
zens against the global storm. A free economy, it is therefore assumed, must be
a regulated economy, if the citizens are to put their trust in it.
But that means that the economy should be regulated in the interests of the
given first-person plural, the ‘we’ on which social trust depends. A free econ-
omy must be constrained by the national interest.
Liberal doubts about market freedoms are now widespread. More contro-
versial are liberal doubts about religious freedoms. The first amendment to the
US Constitution granted freedom of religion, or at least forbad the Federal
government from imposing a religion of its own, and also forbad any interfer-
ence with free speech and free assembly. But it should be clear to everyone that
we have come a long way from those requirements. Does freedom of religion
extend to the freedom to teach religion to the young, to wear religious symbols
in public, to run an adoption agency that upholds the traditional Christian
view of marriage, and which on these grounds accepts no applications from gay
couples, to refuse to design a cake celebrating gay marriage, when trading as a
provider of wedding cakes? Some of those freedoms are rejected by people who
consider themselves to be defenders of the open society idea. Likewise, there is
a growing view among people who declare themselves to be liberals that free
speech should not extend so far as to protect hate speech, a term which is itself
hostage to the one who chooses to define it.
To put it simply, we have witnessed a closing down of choices in those areas,
such as religion and speech, where new interests are competing for space against
the old and once-settled customs. It is no longer clearly true that self-styled
liberals are unqualified in their support for the open society. Yes, they say: an
open society, provided it is a society of liberals.
Conservative Doubts
Conservatives also have doubts about the open society idea, believing that the
modern tendency to multiply options might damage the trust on which free-
dom ultimately depends. The case of marriage has been particularly important:
The Open Society 83
an institution that many believe to be the bedrock of society has been rede-
fined, so as to offer same-sex marriage through the mediation of the state. Is
this an addition to our freedoms, or an assault on them?
Many conservatives say that the state, by intruding into a sphere that is, in
its true meaning, sacramental, has exercised a power that it cannot legitimately
claim. If that is so, the enlargement of choices has been purchased at the cost
of the institution that gives sense to them. What is offered to homosexuals by
the state, therefore, is not marriage but something else. And by calling it mar-
riage, the state downgrades the life-choice that previously went by this name.
Conservatives who mount that argument do not, as a rule, seek to impose their
view on those who disagree with it, since they are attached to the liberal con-
ception of law, as the protector of individuals against those who would like to
control them. But they also see the enlargement of the concept of marriage as
restricting liberties since it takes away an institution that they would otherwise
have wished to commit to. A new option is created, yes, they argue, but only
by destroying the old option that meant so much more.
Conclusion
Responding to both sets of doubts concerning the open society and the fact of
globalization, how can we articulate a conservative defense of the open society
that can speak to the growing popularity of expressly illiberal ideas and illiberal
policies on the political right? First, we must recognize that conservatism is
not against openness and change; it is concerned with the conditions that must
be kept in place if those things are to be possible. In this respect, it is attuned
to liberal individualism’s dangerous tendency to cast any and every constraint
of an individual’s freedom of movement or action as unjustified, until proven
necessary. Such an onus of proof constantly in its own favor shields liberal indi-
vidualism in the absolute protection of law while undermining the social trust
on which liberal policies ultimately depend. Resisting this tendency in liberal
individualism, a conservative defense of the open society will instead recognize
that every increase in freedom (such as the freedom for an individual to marry
a member of the same sex, or to be recognized as belonging to a sex other than
that they were assigned at birth) is likely to have a cost attached to it, which
might well involve a loss of freedom for others.
Given this trade-off, the second key feature of the conservative defense of
the open society will be an insistence upon the dependence of the freedom of
free individuals to live where and how they like upon the first-person plural
context of mutual trust and shared identity, which alone can suffice for the
maintenance of peaceful relations between us and guarantee the passing on of
social capital. This trust must also be an open trust, one that does not depend on
surrender to an authority or a custom that closes down those freedoms that are
precious to us: freedom of association and opinion. Hence, it must help us to
84 Roger Scruton
move away from the religious and tribal forms of society toward the condition
of citizenship, and this entails replacing faith and kinship by neighborhood and
secular law as the primary bonds of civil association. The two points, many
conservatives will assert and celebrate, already have been the achievement of
Europe: the creation of the nation as an object of loyalty and the secular state
as its expression. Thus, the conservative defense of the open society seeks not
to establish something new on the basis of abstract universal claims, but to pre-
serve a heritage on the basis of mutual trust and a shared tradition.
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6
THE FAILING TECHNOCRATIC
PREJUDICE AND THE CHALLENGE
TO LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
Roger Berkowitz
Introduction1
In 1990, I graduated college and did something I could not have done even one
year earlier. I hoisted a pack on my back and instead of traveling through the
glistening capital cities of Western Europe, I flew to Istanbul and made my way
up through the cities of Eastern Europe. After stops in Athens and Santorini,
I took the train to Skopje, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Prague, Pecs, Budapest, Cracow,
Warsaw, and finally East Berlin. In each of these cities, newly freed from the
Iron curtain, I encountered people hungry for contact with young Americans.
The people of the former Eastern bloc were friendly and open. I never stayed
in a hotel, choosing instead to board with one of the dozens of people who I
met on every train and ferry I took hoping to earn some hard currency and also
have encounters with someone from the West.
Those were heady times. The walls had come down and the Velvet Revo-
lutions had brought the Cold War to an abrupt conclusion. Francis Fukuyama
(1989) wrote a year earlier of the “end of history,” and whatever one thought of
his thesis, the world did suddenly seem more free, more open, and more full of
possibility. Democracy had emerged victorious over the quasi-totalitarian and
repressive tyrannies of the Soviet Bloc.
The world feels different in 2019. Liberal democracies around the world
are in crisis. In Turkey, Hungary, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the
United States, the “people” are in revolt against governments run by elites. We
are witnessing what Martin Gurri calls the “revolt of the public,” a revolution
against all manner of elite authority (Gurri 2018). There is a “revolution in the
relationship between the public and authority in almost every domain of human
activity” (Gurri 2018, 27). The public—better understood as multiple publics
86 Roger Berkowitz
of self-informed amateur bloggers and activists—is angry at the mismanage-

ment and arrogance of the elites; these publics are rebelling and seemingly
would rather tear apart the system of elite governance than allow it to govern.
After more than five decades of increasingly technocratic rule by elites, we
are seeing a rebellion of the publics against elite governance. The prejudices of
liberal-democratic politics—that democracy is liberal and individualist, and that
democracy should privilege technocratic governance over populist politics—
are being upended. We are reminded, as Hannah Arendt argues, that politics
is not about truth, but a plurality of opinions. In this essay, I argue that the
technocratic prejudice of elite politics is no longer meaningful or feasible. This
means that we need to re-imagine a pluralist politics free from the prejudices
that have, for decades, bridled democracy by liberal and individualist ideals.
Elite Failures and Crisis of Democracy

The rise of modern society included the rise of management elites—the sci-
entists, social scientists, journalists, social engineers, and governors—who
promised to analyze and steer an increasingly complex mass society toward an
infinite promise of progress. The world depends upon these elites; even now,
the public must rely on experts and specialists to address economic, educa-
tional, environmental, and political challenges. But increasingly, the experts
are seen to have failed. When schools are not improved, when health care
makes you sick, when the CIA doesn’t protect the country from terrorists, and
when taxes go up and services go down, the elite claim to govern is suspect.
Elites hurt their case more when they simply claim that the public needs to trust
them to do better and give them more resources. And never do they lose their
jobs. To the public, there appears to be a mutual protection pact among elites.
The result is anger, distrust, and ressentiment.
For much of the industrial era, elite authority was protected by a generally
rising standard of living and an elite monopoly on information. As Martin
Gurri rightly sees, the daily newspaper was “an odd bundle of stuff—from
government pronouncements and political reports to advice for unhappy wives,
box scores, comic strips, lots of advertisements, and tomorrow’s horoscope”
(Gurri 2018, 26). This eclectic mix claimed to be authoritative, organized,
and vouched for by elite gatekeepers. The newspaper—as also the politicians
and scientists they relied upon—“pretended to authority and certainty” (Gurri
2018, 26). But the bundling has been met with a massive tsunami of informa-
tion, a “digital revolution” that has overwhelmed the “artificial boundaries
of information” and empowered plural public communities to question the
narratives put forth by elite gatekeepers (Gurri 2018, 25–27). Every story is
partial and leaves out some facts—facts that are irrelevant or inconvenient. In
the age of unlimited information and misinformation, it is simply too easy to
poke holes in elite narratives of climate change or the benefits of immigration.
The Failing Technocratic Prejudice 87
And the result, Gurri convincingly argues, is uncertainty that dissolves elite
authority.
Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on

information is lost, so too is our trust. Every presidential statement, every
CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly
acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection
rather than intellectual rigor. When proof for and against approaches in-
finity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over ev-
ery authoritative judgment.
(Gurri 2018, 24)
The revolt of the public has upended journalism, education, business, and pol-
itics. It has created a society of distrust between elite and the public. And an
exasperated public has countered by notching up the vehemence of crit-

icism and the frequency of its interventions. At times, in some places,
the public has abandoned all hope in modern society and lapsed into a
permanent state of negation and protest.
(Gurri 2018, 119)
There is a “tectonic collision between a public which will not rule and elite in-
stitutions of authority who are progressively less able to rule” (Gurri 2018, 119).
The danger is in the collision of the public with the elites who desperately
want to cling to what they think they have earned. There is a mutual in-
comprehension between a public that simply loathes the elites and elites who
have utter contempt for the public. The public sees the elites as talking funny,
protected from reality, and out of touch. And the elites look at the public as a
basket of deplorable, prejudicial, and uneducated troublemakers.
The danger from the elites is that there has maybe never been an elite class
more detached from the social reality of everyday people. The sex scandals,
the $4 lattes, the living in bubbles, and the contempt create an elite class that
disdains the people and feels justified in its privilege. The elites just want to
be elites. To be distant, protected, and insulated, that is the reward for having
made it big. An out of touch elite is indifferent to the people like the aristoc-
racies of the 18th century in France. The way elites maintain their authority is
that they control the narrative. But with technology and information today, it
is no longer possible to have and control authority; what Gurri makes clear is
that the result is a loss of authority in institutions, including liberal democracy.
The more imminent danger is that the public in its hatred of elite institutions
slips into nihilism. Driven by a frustration at their disempowerment, the publics
easily move from resistance to destruction. Demagogic leaders such as Victor
Orbán and Donald Trump are symptoms and stimuli to such nihilism. They are
88 Roger Berkowitz
post-ideological and nationalist, but only in the sense of economic advantage for
the nation. And yet when someone as unqualified as Donald Trump is elected
President of the United States, it can only be as a “gesture of supreme repudiation,
by the electorate, of the governing class” (Gurri 2018, 357). Trump’s success is a
result of his nihilism, an expression of “the public’s surly and mutinous mood.”
He is hardly a great dictator or revolutionary. Rather, he is a sign of a major shift
in politics, “away from the structures of representative democracy to more sec-
tarian arrangements. The public craves meaning and identity” (Gurri 2018, 358).
It is just such meaning and identity that the feeble and bureaucratic institutions of
modern, elite, cosmopolitan government frustrate. Amidst an “institutional vac-
uum and an informational chaos” (Gurri 2018, 360), a plurality of decentralized,
angry, and mobilized publics seeking meaning and identity find it more meaning-
ful to bring down the institutions that frustrate their particular ambitions.
For most elites today, the rise of the publics is interpreted as a return to
authoritarianism. Thus, Henry Giroux writes of Trump as the leader of a
“dystopian ideology” who offers a “nostalgic yearning for older authoritarian
relations of power” (cited in Gurri 2018, 369). But as Gurri responds, to be
authoritarian, a government must do something. It must “trample on institu-
tional checks, break the law, abuse established rights” (Gurri 2018, 370). And
for the most part, Trump and Orbán and their brethren around the world are
not acting as authoritarians so much as democratic demagogues.
Far from authoritarianism, we are witnessing a crisis of authority. If you
look at the 1960s, trust in government in the United States was 60–70%. Today,
trust in government is between 20 and 30%, and for Congress, it is in the teens
(PEW 2019). Trust in the media is below 30%. The kind of authority that the
industrial model bestowed on institutions is being destroyed. That govern-
ments are failing regularly in Britain, Israel, and Italy—and that coalitions of
the mainstream parties in Germany, France, and Greece are being realigned
and challenged—shows the widespread mood of chaos and rebellion that af-
flicts politics today.
The elites have failed to deliver the better world that was promised. In the
United States, there is widespread agreement that public schools have failed.
Health care has failed. Government has failed. And the elites say: give us an-
other chance. Let us make it better. But the people have lost their trust in elites.
And the revolt of the public has given rise to a democratic crisis.
For decades, many of us living in Western-liberal-representative democ-
racies had thought such worries about liberal democracy were relics of a past
age. We were, we now know, naïve to believe in the stability of modern
liberal-representative democracies. We looked away as skyscrapers built by
migrant laborers sprouted for cosmopolitan elites in Dubai. We turned a blind
eye to resentment against illegal immigration and applauded as the European
Union created a new constitution without a vote. All the while, we ignored
how the working classes around the world were hollowed out, squeezed, dis-
enfranchised, and abandoned; financial markets soared, CEOs paid themselves
more than 300 times the salary of their average employee, and global cities be-
came our playgrounds (Giang 2013). And while this was happening, we in the
United States elected Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, three
of the least politically experienced Presidents in our nation’s history. Ameri-
can confidence in the stability of representative democracy now seems like a
dangerous nostalgia for a “golden age of security” that lasted from the 1950s
through to the first decades of the 21st century. American faith in representa-
tive democracy during the last 50 years could go on only because nobody cared.
The Origins of Crisis: The Technocratic Fallacy

In retrospect, it may be possible to mark the beginning of our democratic crisis.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave the commencement address at Yale
University. The President told the graduates that they were entering a very
different world. Past graduates had found themselves in a world beset by great
questions. When John C. Calhoun graduated in 1804, the nation was divided
over the questions of a national bank and slavery. When William Howard Taft
graduated Yale in 1878, the nation was grappling with questions of reconstruc-
tion, the “cross of gold,” and the progressive movement. In the 1930s, at the
end of Taft’s career, the United States was again buffeted by forces of political
and economic division surrounding economic liberalism and the New Deal.
For nearly 200 years, politics in the United States had been riven by dramatic
disagreements “on which the Nation was sharply and emotionally divided”
(Kennedy 1962). Such ideological and political divisions, Kennedy optimisti-
cally proclaimed in 1962, were specters of a distant past. He announced:
Today these old sweeping issues very largely have disappeared. The cen-
tral domestic issues of our time are more subtle and less simple. They
relate not to basic clashes of philosophy or ideology but to ways and
means of reaching common goals—to research for sophisticated solutions
to complex and obstinate issues.
(Kennedy 1962)
This was one of the worst-timed speeches in political history. Kennedy’s con-
fidence that major political questions were behind us—that political problems
had transformed into “administrative or executive problem[s]”—quickly ran
into the return of political disagreements of the highest order in the Vietnam
War, the Cold War, the 60s counterculture, and the Civil Rights revolution.
Soon after, in the 1980s, the Reagan Revolution reasserted the return of po-
litical and ideological contestation. And in the 21st century, the rise of the Tea
Party and the outbreak of Occupy Wall Street once again set serious politi-
cal disagreements front and center. And then there is Donald Trump. Contra
Kennedy, we are not living in a period of post-political and post-ideological
administration.
90 Roger Berkowitz
In spite of being so completely wrong, Kennedy’s technocratic faith—

his belief that “the kinds of problems” we face today are those “for which
technical answers, not political answers, must be provided”—sounds eerily
familiar (Kennedy 1962). The idea that expert analysis should and would re-
place political contestation is bipartisan boilerplate. Tony Blair offered a new
free-market Labor Party. Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker
and founder of the Centrist En Marche, and Angela Merkel of the conserva-
tive Christian Democrats are beloved by educated elites because they elevate
competence over ideology. Bill and Hillary Clinton built the former’s pres-
idency and the latter’s campaigns on the promise of a third way that melded
Blue Dog Democratic centrism with technocratic competence—which gave
us the welfare to work program and other centrist policies (Lammert in this
volume). George W. Bush, in the midst of a war, depoliticized major deci-
sions in Iraq by saying that “our commanders on the ground will determine
the size of the troop levels” (Clarke 2011). And President Barack Obama
was deeply deferential to the “expertise of conventional authorities: generals
and national-security professionals, political operatives like Rahm Emanuel,
and, above all, mainstream economists and bankers such as Larry Summers and
Tim Geithner” (Purdy 2016). Relying on administrators, Obama regularly
bypassed Congress and governed to an unprecedented extent through the
administrative state. Jedediah Purdy (2016) writes that President Obama per-
sonifies the technocratic style of our anti-political times. Modern politicians
increasingly imagine themselves as administrative overseers who defer to and
rely upon technocratic elites.
After Technocracy
It is my thesis that our crisis of democracy is deeply entwined with the rise
of the technocratic and anti-political approach to politics. In a 2016 column,
David Brooks sought to defend politics against what he called the anti-politics
of populism. Brooks argued that politics is about the engagements among plural
people who have different opinions in a common public sphere.
Politics is an activity in which you recognize the simultaneous existence

of different groups, interests and opinions […]. The downside of politics
is that people never really get everything they want. It’s messy, limited
and no issue is ever really settled […]. But that’s sort of the beauty of
politics, too. It involves an endless conversation in which we learn about
other people and see things from their vantage point and try to balance
their needs against our own. Plus, it’s better than the alternative: rule by
some authoritarian tyrant who tries to govern by clobbering everyone in
his way.
(Brooks 2016)
Brooks’s defense of the messiness of a pluralist politics gets something right.

Politics is based upon what Arendt in The Human Condition calls the “human
condition of plurality, […] the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and
inhabit the world” (Arendt 1958, 7). Politics is that centripetal force, a magnetic
or charismatic center, around which a diverse and chaotic multitude gathers
and is held together.
The polis, “Arendt argues,” is not the city-state in its physical location;
it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking
together, and its true space lies between people living together for this
purpose, no matter where they happen to be.
(Arendt 1958, 198)
Politics is that “space of appearance” in which individual actions acquire “an

enduring quality of their own because they create their own remembrance”
(Arendt 1958, 208). And the politician is that person who speaks or acts in such
a way as to enable the people to say what they share in common in spite of their
differences.
But even as he praises the messiness of politics, Brooks recoils from the
tumultuous nature of populist politics. The problem with populists, he writes,
is that they refuse to recognize expertise. They don’t like the social scientists
and technocrats that Brooks believes are most qualified to govern our democ-
racy. He dislikes the Tea Party and the Bernie Sanders contingent of the left for
the same reason: they want to elect people who are immature political actors,
people who don’t recognize restraints. The populists Brooks demeans are polit-
ical precisely in the way that Kennedy thought was a thing of the past. They are
pugilistic rather than bureaucratic. They have ideologies and they want total
victories for themselves. They are not inclined to listen to experts. They prefer
“soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations” (Brooks, 2016).
Brooks is right that populism can be crude, coarse, and dangerous. Right-
and-also-left-wing populisms threaten the stability of a liberal-democratic
consensus around technocratic governance of stable, liberal-representative
democracies. With the rise of populist politics in the United States, Russia,
Turkey, and Hungary, traditional liberal democracies are experiencing a crisis.
The weakening of that democratic consensus is scary and dangerous. This is
especially so because it was the weakness of Western democracies in the 1930s
that led to the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes across Europe.
Driven by real fears, it is only natural to seek to defend the institutions and
norms of liberal-representative democracies that are currently under attack.
We should and must do so. But so much reflection on democratic crisis today
assumes only the defensive posture of protecting our crisis-riddled democra-
cies. It is my hope that we can take advantage of this crisis to make democracy
stronger.
92 Roger Berkowitz
Four Elite Prejudices

A crisis, writes Hannah Arendt, “tears away façades and obliterates prejudices.”
The opportunity provided by the very fact of crisis—which tears away

façades and obliterates prejudices—[is] to explore and inquire into what-
ever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter […]. A crisis forces
us back to the questions themselves and requires from us either new or
old answers, but in any case direct judgments. A crisis becomes a disas-
ter only when we respond to it with preformed judgments, that is, with
prejudices.
(Arendt 1968, 171)
Populist and authoritarian movements have exposed the fantasy of peaceful,

stable, and just liberal-representative democracies. The forgotten middle class
has risen up and said enough; black Americans subject to police violence are
insisting that black lives matter. Around the world, millions of citizens in the
United States and other liberal democracies regimes are rebelling; they are
raising fundamental questions about previously taken-for-granted assumptions
concerning political inclusion and exclusion, ethnic and racial prejudice, and
economic and social inequality.
If Arendt is right and a crisis only becomes a disaster when we respond to it
with prejudices, we need to look upon our prejudices with open eyes. In what
follows, I suggest four prejudices that have been exposed by our democratic
crises. First, there is a prejudice held by many of the very elites that have come
to control liberal democracies that democracy by its very nature is liberal. Sec-
ond, many liberal elites insist that modern representative democracy should be
individualist and cosmopolitan and is endangered by collectivist nationalism.
Third, there is a conviction that non-liberal political actors are evil. Finally,
these three prejudices coalesce in an overriding prejudice that democracy must
oppose populist politics in order to enforce its distinct liberal preference for
security over freedom. Together, these four prejudices form an overwhelming
prejudice that democracy must be liberal and thus must forsake democratic
disorder for the certain and technocratic control by a community of educated
elites.
At a moment in which liberal democracy in the United States and around
the world is in crisis, we who live within these democracies are confronted
with a choice. We can double down on our prejudices for liberal democracy
and insist that democracy must be liberal, while insisting that any deviance
from liberal-democratic principles is dangerous and evil. Or we can question
our own prejudices and seek to open ourselves to new democratic possibilities.
Such a path of openness is dangerous and even terrifying in a political culture
suffused with violence, bigotry, and propaganda. But in a crisis, Arendt argues,
we must not take the easy path and fall back on these prejudices. Instead, we
must obliterate our prejudices and in doing so open the possibility for a new
politics to emerge; at the very least, we must open ourselves to revisiting these
questions.
The First Prejudice: Individual Rights Trump

Conditions of Equality
First, populist movements have revealed the elitist prejudice that democracy by
its very nature is liberal. By liberal, I don’t mean left-wing or progressive. The
liberal tradition has its source in the freedom from oppression, whether it be the
oppression of tyrants, aristocrats, oligarchs, or the democratic majority. Liber-
alism speaks the language of civil and human rights. The nobility of the liberal
tradition is that it recognizes that human beings and political citizens possess cer-
tain natural and political rights that are crucial to the thriving of human dignity.
Against the liberal tradition of plurality and individual rights, the demo-
cratic tradition has its foundation in the power and equality of the people.
As Tocqueville understood, democracy is about the “equality of conditions”
(Tocqueville 2002 [1835], Chapter XI). No one has the traditional, political, or
God-given right to rule over me.
What is too often overlooked is that the liberal and democratic traditions
are generally opposed to each other (Mouffe 2005, 53). Liberalism opposes
and suppresses the coarser elements of democratic freedom. As Tocqueville
observed,
A very civilized society tolerates only with difficulty the trials of freedom
in a township. The civilized community is disgusted at the township’s
numerous blunders, and is apt to despair of success before the experiment
is completed.
(Tocqueville 2002 [1835], 67
Tocqueville saw the spirit of the United States in townships governed by farm-
ers, teachers, and shop owners. The township includes “coarser elements” who
resist the educated opinion of the experts and politicians. Which is why town-
ship freedom is usually sacrificed to enlightened government. A government by
elites and experts risks actively disempowering the people.
When liberalism triumphs over democracy, the people no longer feel that
they have a meaningful opportunity for participation concerning important
decisions. In part, this sense of powerlessness arises in the face of an elite-driven
bureaucracy. “[T]he greater the bureaucratization of public life,” Arendt saw,
“the greater will be the attraction to violence” (Arendt 1970, 178). Much of
the populist anger in the United States and around the world today results
from a feeling of the betrayal of the democratic promise of self-rule. Since “in
94 Roger Berkowitz
a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue,
to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be
exerted” (Arendt 1970, 178), bureaucratic rule breeds resentment. It is what
Arendt calls “The Rule of Nobody” and is “the form of government in which
everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by
Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny
without a tyrant” (Arendt 1970, 178). The very idea of democracy as “govern-
ment of the people, by the people, and for the people” is too often opposed by
elites who in the name of pluralism and civilization foreclose democratic pos-
sibilities and alternative ways of free peoples choosing to live in their own way.
We witness the populist and popular revolt against the rule of nobody today
in jeremiads against the “system” or the “deep state.” For nearly 50 years, pop-
ular opinion across ethnic and racial groups has opposed immigration, while
liberal and even conservative elites in the United States have embraced immi-
gration. As Eric Kaufmann writes,
No one who has honestly analysed survey data on individuals—the gold stan-
dard for public opinion research—can deny that white majority concern over
immigration is the main cause of the rise of the populist right in the West.
This is primarily explained by concern over identity, not economic threat.
(Kaufmann 2019, 2)
As Kaufmann sees, “The tug of war between white ethno-traditionalism and

anti-racist moralism is redefining Western politics” (Kaufmann 2019, 23). In
short, elites in the West insist on a policy of cosmopolitan anti-racism even
reaching to the idea of open borders, which is deeply unpopular with white
national majorities. Once we understand the contradictions between liberalism
and democracy, we can understand how the victory of a particularly liberal idea
of democracy carries with it a democratic deficit that can contribute to right-
wing and also left-wing anti-establishment populist parties (Mouffe 2005, 53).
The Second Prejudice: For Individualism and Cosmopolitanism;

against Collectivist Nationalism
A second prejudice exposed by our crises of democracy is that modern represen-
tative democracy should be individualist and cosmopolitan and is endangered
by collectivist nationalism. Politics, Arendt reminds us, is the gathering of a
group of diverse persons around certain common experiences and shared beliefs.
Insofar as political elites—especially those political elites on the social-democratic
left—have defined politics as the pursuit of individual interests, they either ignore
or reject the political need to “mobilise passions and create collective forms of
identifications” (Mouffe 2005, 53). Elite and technocratic democratic politicians
recoil from arguments about rootedness, belonging, and fundamental questions
about how to organize our common world and shared existence.
Technocratic democracy forgets that politics must not only feed the peo-
ple bread but also must inspire and give them meaning. It is the rootlessness
and homelessness of modern life, Arendt argues in The Origins of Totalitarianism
(1951), that leaves people susceptible to totalitarian movements that satisfy their
deep human need for belonging. Human beings need stories they can tell about
themselves that give purpose and significance to their individual existences; only
when our lives are understood to serve some higher purpose can we bear the pain
of our insignificant human lives.
Especially in the modern age when religious and traditional explanations of
collective purpose have lost their public impact, it is natural that large numbers
of people seek to justify the tribulations of their lives with artificial but coherent
collective narratives. It is because of their prejudice against collective religions,
traditional, and national identities that liberal democrats cede the terrain of de-
fining what it means to be an American to right-wing populists who are often
the only ones eager to define a national vision of a people.
The Third Prejudice: The Moralization of Political Opposition

A third prejudice made evident by our worldwide democratic crises is that we
imagine our political antagonists to be evil. Instead of understanding political
opponents as people with different opinions and different interests, the moralists
of the anti-political elite imagine the populists as violent outsiders who threaten
the post-political consensus. So confident in their access to the truth, liberal, cen-
trist, and even conservative elites refuse to engage in debate with those populists
who disagree; instead, elites present both right-and-left-wing populists as moral
enemies to be destroyed and eradicated; they are deplorables and anarchists.
The moralization of the political opposition as evil is much easier than hav-
ing to consider them as political adversaries (Mouffe 2005, 58). What is more,
the moralization of democratic politics makes democracy impossible insofar as
democracy requires that we agree to share a common world with those who in
their plurality are fundamentally different from ourselves.
When our opponents are evil, no common democratic world is possible. On
all sides, we can retreat into our comfortable bubbles of affirmation; we live
content in the echo chambers of our superiority. But we recoil from the hard
work of democracy, of listening to and learning to find commonalities with
those with whom we disagree.
The Fourth Prejudice: Prioritizing Security over Freedom

Taken together, these three prejudices—that democracy is liberal, that democ-
racy is individualist, and that democracy moralizes our opponents as evil and
undeserving of sharing in a liberal democracy—reveal a fourth and overrid-
ing prejudice underlying our democratic crisis: democracy today is prejudiced
against politics by its distinct preference for security over freedom.
96 Roger Berkowitz
The prejudice against politics is governed by a profound fear: “the fear that
humanity could destroy itself through politics and through the means of force
now at its disposal” (Arendt 2005, 97). Having lived through totalitarianism,
and having witnessed the dropping of nuclear bombs, we today are deeply
aware that politics may well destroy the political and economic worlds we have
built; it may also destroy the earth itself.
From out of the fear of politics comes, as Arendt writes, a horrible hope:
Underlying our prejudices against politics today are hope and fear: the
fear that humanity could destroy itself through politics and through the
means of force now at its disposal, and linked with this fear, the hope that
humanity will come to its senses and rid the world, not of humankind,
but of politics. It could do so through a world government that trans-
forms the state into an administrative machine, resolves political conflicts
bureaucratically, and replaces armies with police forces.
(Arendt 2005, 97)
Terrified by the danger of politics in an age of horrifying technical power, it is

all-too-likely that democracies will seek to replace politics with technocratic
and bureaucratic administration. But such a hope, Arendt argues, will more
likely lead to
a despotism of massive proportions in which the abyss separating the rulers

from the world would be so gigantic that any sort of rebellion would no lon-
ger be possible, not to mention any form of control of the rulers by the ruled.
(Arendt 2005, 97)
We will, in other words, trade our political and democratic freedom for the
security of expert rule.
Hannah Arendt knew that democratic freedom is tenuous. She famously
wrote in The Crises of the Republic in 1970,
Representative government is in crisis today, partly because it has lost,

in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual
participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease
from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two par-
ties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.
(Arendt 1972, 89)
Arendt saw the weakness of representative democracy to be its basic idea, that citi-
zens should turn over the time-consuming work of self-government to professional
politicians. This fundamental anti-political prejudice of representative democracy is
magnified in an age where technology brings the terror of massive political abuses.
Conclusion
Most liberal-minded people today are fearful of public power. We say power
corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but the insufficiency of this
formula is lately all too apparent. We are scared of the power that emerges when
people act together. So, we prefer a government of experts, not least because
it frees us to spend our time on private pursuits like consumption and family.
The disempowerment of the people in representative democracy embraces our
bourgeois preference to be freed to pursue our individual interests, to be re-
lieved of the duty of politics and public virtue. Much easier to leave governing
to the experts.
For Arendt, the rise of massive technocratic bureaucracies leads to what she
calls “the rule of nobody” (Arendt 1970, 178). The fact that politics is apolitical
and governed by technocratic departments does not mean that it is less tyranni-
cal or less despotic. On the contrary, “the fact that no world government — no
despot, per se — could be identified within this world government would in no
way change its despotic character.” Such a bureaucratic government “is more
fearsome still, because no one can speak with or petition this ‘nobody’” (Arendt
2005, 97). Bureaucracy is anti-political because “any sort of rebellion would no
longer be possible” (Arendt 2005, 97).
Note

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PART II
Democracy, Distorted
Cases of Illiberalism
Taylor & Francis
7
GLOBAL TRUMPISM
Understanding Anti-System Politics
in Western Democracies
Jonathan Hopkin and Mark Blyth
Introduction
Donald Trump is such a departure from the conventions of the US presidential
politics that it is easy to treat him as an N of one. If he is compared at all, he
is cast in with Brexit, which has its own peculiarities. But doing so would be
a mistake. From a comparative perspective, Donald Trump is far from being
an outlier on the global stage. Variants of Trump’s populist rhetoric and refusal
to play by the norms of democratic politics can be observed in most of the
advanced industrial states. Trump is a manifestation of a global phenomenon,
what has previously been called Global Trumpism (Blyth 2016). To see why
this is the case, we need to place Trump in his proper context: the universe of
advanced democratic countries that have all, to some degree, accepted a partic-
ular neoliberal understanding of the relationship between the market economy
and the democratic polity over the past quarter-century. This policy consen-
sus, in particular the externalities that it has generated, has produced not just
Trump but a wholesale shift in the party systems of the advanced democracies.
Trump is a data point. Global Trumpism is a structural shift.
Understanding what lies behind this new anti-system politics is crucial if
Western societies are to understand how to respond to it. To do so, it is first of
all necessary to understand what Trumpism is, and what it is not. Second, we
need to understand the causes of Trumpism, and to do that, we need to recog-
nize the real nature of the liberal democratic orthodoxy that he rails against.
The backlash the Western democracies are witnessing is best understood as a
reaction against a specific set of political and economic arrangements, which
combine decreased competition in the political sphere and enhanced competi-
tion in the economic sphere. These arrangements have left many, perhaps most,
102 Jonathan Hopkin and Mark Blyth
citizens in Western democracies exposed to greater economic risk while re-

ducing the scope for political action to cope with those risks. In circumstances
of such sustained economic insecurity, any politician who offers to “root out”
the politicians responsible for producing it, and offers protection from the un-
predictability of globalized markets while doing so, has just cornered a ready
electoral market.
The return of aggressive nationalism after a financial crisis and recession
unlike any seen since World War II should not surprise anyone. Indeed, quan-
titative work predicts it ( Jordà et al. 2015). At the very least, past experience
should have warned that a policy of rescuing financial institutions while im-
posing harsh austerity on citizens would have consequences in a democratic
political system. Indeed, in many respects, the policies pursued in Europe and
North America since 2008 are uncomfortably similar to the defense of the
Gold Standard in the 1920s—stabilization through high unemployment and
balanced government budgets. Today, while living standards are much higher,
and welfare protections more highly developed than in the inter-war period,
the political response has taken longer. But the election of Trump and other
similar cases across the developed West suggest that patience and protective
institutions can both wear thin, and now have the potential to fundamentally
change the global order.
While this chapter takes the financial crisis and the subsequent austerity
policies imposed on populations in Europe at the regional level and in the US
at the state level as an important short-term cause of the rise of anti-system
politics, we also believe that these developments should be placed in a broader
context of institutional change in the global economic order over the past
half-century. In that regard, the work of Thomas Piketty (Piketty 2014) and
others has revealed a dramatic shift in the balance of power between capital and
labor since the 1970s, with major implications for the distribution of income
between different social groups in Western democracies.
Recent scholarship on party politics also reveals that democracy has been
weakened significantly over the same period by the organizational and intellec-
tual decline of political parties, which has exposed democracy to an increasing
degree of capture by wealthy interests, while the political influence of mid-
dle and lower-income groups has been curtailed (Palan et al. 2009). As such,
we contend that the current institutional arrangements governing democracy
and the market economy—what we call here the ‘liberal order’—were actually
quite fragile even before the crisis. The inadequate response to the crisis by
mainstream political forces after the crisis laid bare the inability of established
elites to govern in the interests of the broader public.
In short, the initially contained response of Western publics to the crisis has
given way to a rising tide of anti-system politicians expressing voters’ anger at
how they are governed. But these politicians do more than rail against existing
elites: they also demand a change in the existing political and economic order.
Global Trumpism 103
In particular, they articulate a social demand for protection from unfettered

markets. Trump has much in common not only with Nigel Farage, Marine
Le Pen, or Matteo Salvini, but also with Bernie Sanders, Pablo Iglesias, Alexis
Tsipras, and Jeremy Corbyn. From different ideological perspectives, all these
politicians express a demand for politics to intervene in markets, whether they
be financial, labor, or for goods and services, to protect the interests of their
voters. They can make such demands precisely because of the failings of the
existing order to satisfy this demand for protection. As Karl Polanyi wrote 80
years ago, attempts to shoehorn human civilization into a market system would
lead to resistance. He theorized a ‘double movement’ whereby the increasing
encroachment of market relations on social life provoked a protective reaction
or ‘counter-movement’ (Polanyi 1957, 79). If the incumbent political elites have
appeared reluctant to act to protect society from the downturn, competitors
offering a more aggressive approach can be expected to win support.
What Is Local about Trumpism? Anti-Globalization

and Anti-Elitism
Trump is in many ways a classic populist. His appeal to the nation, his fear-
mongering about its purported enemies, his demagogic railing against a corrupt
elite, his demonization of minority populations and immigrants, his cavalier at-
titude to facts, and his vague but confident assertions of easy solutions to com-
plex problems are all familiar components of populist rabble-rousing leadership
(Müller 2017). His oft-repeated slogans reflect these familiar populist tropes.
“America First” offers comfort to disgruntled voters that under his leadership,
American citizens would be a priority, unlike under previous incumbents, all of
whom, it was implied, favored foreigners (through a lax immigration policy or
bad trade deals). His insulting dismissal of political opponents—‘little Marco,’
‘crooked Hillary,’ ‘lyin’ Ted Cruz’ (Itkowitz 2016)—capitalized on widespread
popular dissatisfaction with incumbent elites and the workings of the political
system, a system which was ‘rigged,’ a ‘swamp’ which had to be ‘drained.’ Un-
like these ‘losers,’ Trump himself was a ‘winner,’ a gifted man with a magic
touch, able to make things better by making “great deals” and telling incom-
petent elites “you’re fired.” In the face of criticism and uncomfortable facts,
Trump retreats into a parallel world of “fake news.” Trump’s transparent rac-
ism and sexism; his amateurish, personalistic, and familistic interpretation of
the office; and his dubious international connections (especially with Russia)
have been front and center in the mainstream opposition to his presidency. But
these critiques have been ineffective in shifting attitudes amongst most Trump
supporters. To understand why, we need to examine what is appealing about
his populism.
“America First” may seem a simplistic slogan, but its effectiveness derives
from its ability to capture a feeling amongst many voters that mainstream
governing elites have not, in fact, put “America First.” Certainly, part of this
stems from a xenophobic and racist view of America as a quintessentially white
society, whose values are threatened both by the demands of minorities and
migrants to take a greater share of the nation’s resources (Hochschild 2016). But
it also reflects resentment toward globalization, and in particular trade agree-
ments, which have exposed many Americans in geographically concentrated
and electorally important areas, to competition from workers in emerging
countries willing to work for much lower wages (Autor et al. 2013). In short,
it is not just nationalism, it is economic nationalism, an appeal for policies that
would unapologetically protect Americans from market competition and favor
American interests in the global economy.
Trump’s rhetoric therefore represents a significant break not only from Re-
publican discourse on economic policy but also from the consensus of close
to the entire political establishment of the US, and Europe, over a quarter-
century, that free trade is not only good for the world but essential for America.
Trump directed particular ire at NAFTA, ultimately renegotiating the agree-
ment in separate agreements with Canada and Mexico after threatening to quit
it altogether, arguing that it is “unfair” to Americans (Campoy 2018). Similar
invective has been directed at China, accused of the “rape” of the American
economy and the “theft” of manufacturing jobs (Aleem 2018).
Instead, Trump campaigned on a slogan to “buy American, hire Ameri-
can,” promising to revive American manufacturing and force the return of
high-wage production jobs outsourced over the past quarter-century of glo-
balization. Market liberals rushed to condemn this strategy as implausible and
unworkable, but it had obvious appeal to lower-income Americans in areas of
industrial decline and received the backing of Bernie Sanders (Mayeda 2017).
In contrast, both Hillary Clinton and Trump’s major rivals in the GOP pri-
maries represented positions of broad continuity on trade, despite the former’s
equivocation on TTIP and similar agreements late in her electoral campaign.
The second main plank of Trump’s populist appeal is his “outsider” status
and anti-establishment rhetoric. By describing Washington, D.C. as a “swamp”
that needed to be ‘drained,’ Trump was doing more than simply replicating the
disdain for government regulation and federal overreach typical of Republican
candidates from Reagan onward. He was also condemning a cross-party com-
plicity with “special interests,” which constituted “rampant government cor-
ruption” frequently associated with his opponents, especially “crooked Hillary
Clinton.” He has directly attacked individual companies that he regarded as be-
traying American workers by outsourcing production: for example, by threat-
ening General Motors over Twitter with a border tax for its Mexican-made
vehicles (Stewart 2018). The press and most mainstream media apart from Fox
News—almost universally hostile to Trump—have also been a frequent target.
In sum, by combining criticism of policies that have allowed American jobs to
be shipped abroad with attacks on the political establishment that has presided
Global Trumpism 105
over economic decline, Trump has channeled the anger and desire for change
of large numbers of Americans.
Trump’s rhetoric constitutes a concerted assault on the political establish-
ment and the market liberal values it mostly represents. In this respect, his
campaign rhetoric shared common themes with the other prominent outsider
of the 2016 electoral season: Bernie Sanders. Both were deeply critical of free
trade agreements and the role of special interests and campaign contributions,
and both presented themselves as insurgents or outsiders against the Washing-
ton establishment. Neither were “insider” candidates, Trump self-identifying
as a Democrat at various points in his life, Sanders an independent socialist
caucusing with the Democrats. The obvious differences between them should
not obscure their common status as challenger candidates with outsider credi-
bility, a valuable credential at a time of legitimacy crisis, with public approval
of Congress at record lows (Gallup 2018).
Locating Trumpism Ideologically

Something that was barely noticed at the time of the 2016 election was that
the three key figures of the 2016 electoral season represented the three broad
ideological options that have shaped political conflict in Western democracies,
particularly in times of economic stress: liberalism, socialism, and nationalism
(Luebbert 1991; Berman 2006), with the Democrats in particular typifying
liberalism.
For all the debate around the increasingly partisan and polarized politics of
the US in the recent period, on economic issues (see Keller and Kelly 2015),
American politics has been marked by a high degree of consensus around
market liberalism since the beginning of the Clinton presidency. Democrats
eagerly embraced trade openness, financial deregulation, and welfare curbs,
while Republicans were mostly reluctant to mobilize opposition to high levels
of immigration, which provided a steady supply of both skilled and unskilled
non-unionized labor. Both parties’ leaderships converged around the need to
bail out insolvent financial institutions in 2008, and Obama, despite present-
ing himself as an outsider candidate promising change, made continuity ap-
pointments in key economic policy positions. The 2012 election pitted Obama
against an economically and socially liberal Republican, Mitt Romney, with
close ties to the financial sector.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton was widely perceived as the candidate representing
this continuity position. Both Sanders and later Trump attacked her for her ties
to financial interests and complicity in a fundamentally corrupt political system
that failed to represent ordinary Americans. The entirely unexpected degree of
support for both the socialist and economic nationalist positions of the outsiders
in 2016 derailed the Clinton strategy of cautious centrism, to almost universal
surprise.
Yet it should not be so surprising that the candidate offering more of the
same, when the same meant stagnant living standards for most, and decline and
despair for many, would not carry the day. Indeed, putting the 2016 election in
a broader comparative perspective, we can see how Trump’s victory was in fact
quite consistent with the pattern of electoral politics observed in the advanced
democracies since the global financial crisis a decade ago. Continuity works
when things are going acceptably well. America, as Trump consistently hec-
tored, was “in terrible shape.” For many Americans, Trump was the candidate
that in the words formerly used by Bill Clinton in his first successful Presiden-
tial campaign “felt their pain.”
What Is Global about Trumpism? The Rise

of Anti-System Parties
The 2016 presidential election was not as unique as it might appear from an
American perspective. Following on from the Brexit vote in the UK in June, it
was not even the first unanticipated electoral result of the year. In fact, defeats
of incumbent parties and successes of outsider candidates have become routine
in the post-crisis period without much commentary from academics or jour-
nalists. The typical electoral cycle in crisis-hit democracies since 2008 has been
for the incumbent party to lose the first post-crisis election to the mainstream
opposition—a normal alternation—and then for (often new) anti-system polit-
ical forces to make major gains in the second post-crisis election as voters vent
their frustration at the slow pace of economic recovery.
Figure 7.1 provides some evidence of the dramatic shifts in electoral politics
in Europe over the past decade. Average electoral volatility, as measured by the
Pedersen index, has hit its highest levels in the democratic era, and there have
been far more ‘extreme’ volatility events, with eight of the biggest 12 electoral
shifts since World War II occurring after 2008.
This high level of volatility has meant more frequent incumbent defeats
and alternation of partisan control of government. But electoral change is not
limited to voters switching between political parties but extends to the growth
of parties whose very raison d'être is to disrupt the existing political order.
The share of the vote going to parties outside the usual governing coalitions
has also grown markedly since the financial crisis. For example, in a sample
of 39 European countries, populist parties have improved their share of the
vote in national elections to an average of 24.1% in 2017—up from 8.5% in
2000, with most of that increase occurring since 2008. Figure 7.2 shows that
these parties—which we will describe as “anti-system” parties (see Hopkin
2020)—have taken a significant share of the vote in several European countries
in recent elections.
Anti-system parties have been present in many democracies since the
1970s, and have sometimes survived for long periods, but the levels of support
Global Trumpism 107
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
Austria Belgium
Denmark Finland
France Germany* (West before 1994)
Greece Ireland
Italy Norway
Portugal Spain
Sweden Switzerland
Netherlands United Kingdom
Average Poly. (Average)
FIGURE 7.1 Electoral Volatility 1950–2018, Western Europe.

Source: Dassonville 2014.
40.0
35.0
30.0
25.0
20.0
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
M5S Podemos Syriza

True Finns Front National UKIP
AfD FPO Sweden Democrats
DPP PVV League
FIGURE 7.2 Anti-System Parties Vote Share 1975–2018, Western Europe.

Source: Dassonville 2014.
these parties have recently won, in some cases very soon after being founded,
or after long periods in the wilderness, point unequivocally to systemic shifts
in democratic politics. Moreover, these data only show us the shares of the
vote won by anti-system forces in general elections, and do not include other
clear signs of political disruption, notably the 2016 UK referendum in which
voters narrowly voted to leave the European Union, and the large numbers
supporting the secession of Catalonia and Scotland from their respective
nation-states.
In a world where anti-establishment politics is surging, Donald Trump’s
electoral success no longer seems exceptional. The defiance of entrenched pro-
tocols of political competition Trump, and to a lesser degree Sanders, brought
to the 2016 US election is in fact present in almost all of the advanced democ-
racies. And Trump’s success has encouraged anti-system forces in Europe, some
of whom have imitated his slogans to promote their own campaigns.
If this kind of anti-system politics is happening across the developed
democratic world at the same time, it is extremely likely that it has some
kind of common cause. That means that the kinds of ad hoc, nationally fo-
cused explanations that dominate political debate in the US, which revolve
around appeals to partisan and racial identities, and the defense of parties’
specific policy commitments to their core constituencies, are probably not
where we should be looking. After all, they cannot be generalized to other
similar cases.
In particular, the very specific, short-run factors that receive disproportion-
ate attention during election campaigns, such as the FBI’s investigation into
Hillary Clinton’s emails and the hacking of the DNC, may have effects at the
margin, but they cannot explain how an unusual candidate such as Donald
Trump could have been positioned to win the presidency in the first place. In
particular, it cannot explain why similar electoral earthquakes have been hap-
pening across a range of different democracies in the last decade.
Two broad structural explanations have dominated more comparative
accounts of these changes. One popular account focuses on the preva-
lence of immigration in the campaigns of anti-system politicians, and the
sometimes-overt racism and xenophobia present in the discourse of Trump
and the right-wing populists in Europe. This amounts to what could be de-
scribed as a culturalist explanation of the anti-system vote, drawing on the
strong associations between support for right-wing populist candidates and
authoritarian values, and the weak evidence for income levels dictating anti-
system voting.
For example, Trump voters on average had higher income levels than
Clinton voters, but were far more likely to be white and have socially con-
servative and authoritarian values (Inglehart and Norris 2016, Sides et al.
2017). Similarly, support for Brexit in the UK was strongly correlated with
Global Trumpism 109
authoritarianism: one study found that the strongest predictor of Leave voting
was support for the death penalty, and age was more correlated with the Leave
vote than income (Clarke et al. 2017). Opposition to immigration has been
associated with the vote for right-wing populist parties in several democracies
(Oesch 2008).
Another version points to the financial crisis of 2008 and the harsh aus-
terity meted out by governments in the 2010s, which in many countries led
to stagnant or even negative income growth over a much longer period than
is usual for the democratic era. Building on the established economic voting
literature, defeats of incumbent parties that open the space for anti-system al-
ternatives to prosper are the result of voters blaming the established parties for
their income and wealth losses resulting from the crisis. This research identi-
fies regions and localities suffering economic decline as particularly likely to
support anti-system candidates (Colantone and Stanig 2016; Che et al. 2017;
Malgouyres 2017). For example, Trump’s victory has been attributed to his
unexpected success in counties in the rustbelt states that had previously reliably
supported Democrats. Similarly, support for Brexit in the UK was strongest in
small towns and rural areas outside the prosperous South-East of England, with
growth since the financial crisis lower than the UK average.
Both of these explanations offer only a partial understanding of the global
reach of Trumpism. To move beyond these explanations, we need to both
properly conceptualize the phenomenon we are trying to explain and con-
sider the ways in which this phenomenon and the variables purported to
explain it vary over time. Failure to correctly define what we are trying
to explain will limit our ability to capture the causes of variation. This is
particularly important because political instability has been rising recently
across many countries, but it has taken different forms in different places, so
focusing our attention solely on support for right-wing populism, while ex-
cluding other forms of anti-system politics from the analysis, as is often done,
overstates the importance of immigration in driving change. Moreover, we
need to account for the quite sudden nature of the shift in electoral behavior
in several countries in recent years, which implies that slow-moving variables
such as the presence of authoritarian attitudes or hostility to immigration
among Western publics are unlikely to be the sole cause, as cultural explana-
tions try to maintain.
Here, we take a more global view and argue that recent political shocks are
best understood as the result of the exhaustion of a particular set of political
and economic ideas, policies, and institutions that can broadly be described as
the neoliberal “growth model” or “macroeconomic regime”. Our argument
develops in two stages. First, we outline the nature of the neoliberal growth
model, and show why it has undermined political stability across Western de-
mocracies. We then show how the anti-system politics that is emerging across
the democracies can be causally connected to the collapse of this regime. Fi-
nally, we analyze some of the differences in the characteristics and magnitude
of anti-system politics in different democracies.
The Neoliberal Growth Model: The Political

Consequences of Putting Capital First
The political and economic institutions that constituted Western capitalism in
the immediate pre-2008 period were themselves the product of the collapse
of the prior post-war order, variously described as “managed capitalism,” the
“mixed economy,” or “embedded liberalism.” That immediate post-war order
was built out from a recognition by liberal elites, in the US and the UK in
particular, that liberal democracy and the market economy were threatened
not only by the nationalist forces that had been defeated in World War II but
by the communist forces that had emerged out of it ever stronger. The recon-
struction of the market economy was therefore accompanied by the devel-
opment of international institutions that protected national economies from
financial risk—the Bretton Woods arrangements—and domestic institutions
that protected labor from economic and social risk—welfare state institutions
that established long-term policy commitments over full employment and in-
come replacement.
These risk-sharing institutions were extraordinarily successful in delivering
both high growth and relative income equality. But doing so was predicated
upon constraining the investor class significantly by entrenching capital con-
trols, redistributive taxation, and corporatist practices in the workplace. As a
result, when the Bretton Woods arrangements collapsed and the 1974 oil shock
compounded already high wage-led inflation, political forces inimical to the
post-war order mobilized to dismantle the institutions protective of labor and
remove constraints on capital, leading to a fundamental shift in bargaining
power and an increasing privatization of economic and social risk. The ideas
and institutions associated with this neoliberal turn, and their consequences
for the distribution of income are well documented and understood (Piketty
2014). What is less appreciated is that the neoliberal model had implications for
democracy too.
The liberal order that emerged out of what Jacob Hacker has called the “great
risk shift” prides itself on its democratic credentials, and its advocates have been
quick to condemn anti-system politics as a threat to democratic values (Mounk
2018). However, neoliberalism is only consistent with a very specific vision of
democracy, one that gives primacy to the protection of individual rights, es-
pecially property rights, over the ability of a majority of voters to assert claims
to represent the popular will. Not coincidentally, this ‘liberal constitutionalist’
vision of democracy is articulated most clearly in the political arrangements of
the US, the country which developed the most limited welfare arrangements in
Global Trumpism 111
the post-war period, and which has traditionally tolerated much higher levels of
economic inequality than most other Western countries.
In the neoliberal vision of democracy, one that spread widely during the
1990s and 2000s, with center-left parties in particular being the carriers, popu-
lar movements demanding constraints and taxes on capital, or policies to share
the national product and protect labor from economic and social risk, needed to
be curbed (MacLean 2017). These arguments, associated with the public choice
school of political economy and the emergent new classical macroeconomics,
carried particular force in a period of high levels of labor mobilization like the
1970s (Crozier et al 1975, King 1975). Governments were diagnosed as suffer-
ing from “overload” as citizen demands outstripped the capacity of the political
system to supply the public goods that were promised in ever greater numbers
by post-war parties.
Freeing capital from controls that limited its ability to move across borders
was an effective way of shifting the balance of power away from labor by en-
hancing the “recoil mechanism” of a capital strike, where investment would
fall and unemployment would rise until more capital friendly policies became
normalized (Lindblom 1982). In this new environment, national governments
became far more restrained in their use of monetary and fiscal policy to affect
employment levels and expand social protection. As a result, democratic elec-
tions since the late 1980s became less powerful tools for the implementation of
the popular will, becoming instead instruments for the disciplining of compet-
ing elites, a function in keeping with the thin liberal conception of democratic
participation associated with scholars such as Schumpeter and Riker (Riker
1982; Schumpeter 2013).
This liberal model of democracy became entrenched through a gradual ex-
tension of the role of non-majoritarian institutions that protected monetary
policy and market regulation from democratic incursions. Central bank in-
dependence became the norm through the 1980s and 1990s and was finally
entrenched as a requirement of European Monetary Union membership in the
Maastricht Treaty. The remaining hold-outs, such as the UK, adopted it by the
late 1990s.
Central bank independence was explicitly based on the theory that dem-
ocratic participation in monetary policy-making was a threat to stability, and
hence profitability, and delegated this key tool of macroeconomic management
to representatives of the financial industry and the economics profession sub-
scribed to such views. Trade policy was likewise made safe from democracy
by legalizing it globally through the GATT agreements and the WTO, and
regionally in Europe through the jurisdiction of the European Court of Jus-
tice. The increasingly close oversight of European Union member states’ fiscal
policies by the supranational authorities, which seeks to ensure that govern-
ments have a severely limited scope to affect demand, has compounded these
tendencies.
These institutional changes effectively removed a large part of the key de-
cisions around the economy and the division of the surplus that it generated
from direct democratic scrutiny and control, “hollowing out” the nation-state
(Rhodes 1994) in the process. What were once objects of policy, such as the
employment level, the price level, and trading arrangements, were no lon-
ger contested in elections, leaving citizens with no formal channel through
which they could influence them. Democratic politics became, as party system
theorists noted, “cartelized,” as the main political parties ceased competing
over the basic institutional structure of the economy (Blyth and Katz 2005;
Mair 2013). National parliaments and governments had increasingly less and
less influence over macroeconomic policy, and a significant part of regulatory
policy. This delegation of policy-making to technocratic institutions, some of
them supranational, was matched by a progressive decentralization of the re-
maining nation-state powers (Hooghe et al. 2010), such as the rise of devolved
assemblies, which fragmented political authority and made major challenges to
economic policy orthodoxy even more difficult.
The Economic Origins of the Democratic Deficit

These institutional changes, in turn, coincided with a decline in the orga-
nizational presence of political parties in society, and their embedding into
the structure of the state (Katz and Mair 1995, 2009). Party membership and
voter turnout declined steadily from the 1970s, as elections became less and
less meaningful in terms of fundamental policy change, and political parties
became ideologically more similar. An extensive literature has examined
a variety of organizational and societal causes of party decline but it has
largely ignored the consequences of the much more constrained role re-
served for elected politicians in the post-Bretton Woods era in terms of their
ability to either govern the economy or be seen to “do anything” about dis-
tribution. The neoliberal macroeconomic regime successfully shifted power
from political parties to technocrats and capital markets, leaving politicians
to perform the task of securing citizen consent for the outcomes they no
longer directly controlled. But such success comes at a price the moment
there is a crisis.
This hollowing out of democratic decision-making made collective risk
insurance weaker while leaving citizens to rely on decentralized market
mechanisms to secure their wellbeing. This was particularly the case in the
US and the UK, where a concerted assault on worker organization and re-
distribution through the welfare state was launched as early as the 1980s,
leading to an increasing privatization of risk, reflected in the highest levels
of inequality and income insecurity amongst the democracies. In Western
Europe, the marketization of social life was a more gradual process as such
policies had to erode more entrenched labor market and welfare institutions,
Global Trumpism 113
0.5
0.45
0.4
0.35
0.3
0.25
0.2
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
Australia Canada France
Germany Ireland Italy
US UK Sweden
Spain Denmark Netherlands
FIGURE 7.3 Top 10% Income Share 1990–2014 (World Inequality Database).
but here too, we observe a clear ‘neoliberal trajectory’ as reforms at the mar-
gin have undercut labor power (Baccaro and Howell 2017). The consequence
is rising inequality in almost every advanced democratic state, as Figure 7.3
illustrates:
This increasing inequality between households was reflected in increasing
inequality between regions within nation-states. Across countries, economic
growth has become more and more concentrated around a small number of
regions, leaving others increasingly dependent on redistributive policies for in-
come growth (Rodríguez-Pose 2018). As government spending was reined in
after the 2008 financial crisis, this redistribution essentially halted, leading to
quite sharp decline in incomes in some regions (Becker et al. 2017, Davidson
and Ward 2018).
This trend of rising inequality varies according to the degree to which pro-
tective national institutions have been entrenched enough to survive the pres-
sures of marketization. The differing levels of inequality in countries equally
exposed to marketizing pressures show that American or British income distri-
butions are not inevitable but are instead the result of the growing bargaining
power of capital translating into unmediated influence over the policy process
(Hacker and Pierson 2010, Hopkin and Alexander Shaw 2016). In countries
where welfare states and labor power were more entrenched, inequality re-
mained at much lower levels, and citizens remained more protected from eco-
nomic risk, although these arrangements have been coming under pressure
almost everywhere. Indeed, as these more egalitarian countries have aged,
what shows up as sustained welfare spending in the aggregate in fact masks an
intra-generational inequality as pensions are protected, if not expanded, while
other decommodifying programs are increasingly curtailed (Emmenegger
et al. 2012). The German Hartz IV reforms and subsequent pension reforms of
the 2000s show this asymmetric dynamic clearly.
Financialization Covered This Up—Until

the Growth Model Failed and Was Bailed
Economic risk is driven not only by position in the income distribution within
a society. The expansion of the financial sector has added a further layer of risk
to households, especially in the US, but also across much of Western Europe.
As the newly liberalized financial sector extended credit more and more lib-
erally, often riding bubbles in housing markets, household debt rose spectac-
ularly, exposing parts of society to the consequences of dramatic changes in
credit availability. With wages stagnant and money cheap, households’ balance
sheet explosions became the ‘assets’ on the Banks’ balance sheets. But with
wages stagnant and then suffering a sharp drop since 2008, the ability to service
these debts turned assets into liabilities.
Debt crises are thus threatening to both creditors and debtors as the latter’s
repayment problem can and indeed has translated into the former’s default
problem. Bailing out this system is 2008–10, and again in Europe in 2012–
15, set up debtor-creditor standoffs all over Europe that populist parties,
especially in the left such as Syriza and Podemos, capitalized upon. These
tensions have been reproduced at the global and regional levels as countries
occupy different positions in the various creditor-debtor relationships that
have emerged as capital markets have become more integrated and global
imbalances have grown. Creditor-debtor conflicts are likely to compound,
as household imbalances match those in national accounts. In countries such
as Greece, large numbers of households face servicing onerous debts as their
countries are also forced into a net saving position to meet their international
obligations.
In sum, the liberal order post-Bretton Woods by design placed democratic
politics in a subordinate position to capital markets and delivered growing in-
equality and insecurity to the majority of its citizens, even if these inequalities
were masked by cheap credit. After 2008, it ceased to deliver growth to the
majority and the credit that masked the income and wealth skew became more
expensive while wages fell still further. The centrist politicians who alternated
Global Trumpism 115
in power in this immediate post-crisis period shared a common response to

the crisis focused on maintaining private asset values through monetary engi-
neering while offloading the burden of fiscal adjustment onto wage-earners.
Creditors were supported and debtors were squeezed to find repayment out
of falling incomes. The historical experience of such situations indicates that
political crises will soon follow. In our view, the operational dynamics of this
“capital friendly” growth regime made a protective reaction inevitable, and the
severity of the financial crisis and the subsequent imposition of austerity explain
the timing of that reaction.
Having identified the failings of the neoliberal regime and suggested how
its operational dynamics made a populist reaction on both the left and the right
more or less inevitable, we now show that the anti-system forces that have pros-
pered in the post-crisis period are a direct response to the trails of this growth
regime. We assess two kinds of evidence for our contention. We first examine
the ideas and discourses of these new anti-system parties to show that they are
articulating more than a simple demand for elite turnover. They are in fact
challenging the foundational institutions of the extant growth regime. Then
we examine the support bases of these movements to show that they receive
support predominantly from the groups that have borne the greatest costs of the
crisis of this growth model.
The Rise of Anti-System Politics and the Distribution

of Risk: Right and Left Responses
In assessing the ideological and discursive identities of anti-system parties and
politicians, we take our cue from the last major episode of regime breakdown,
the depression of the 1930s. Scholarship of the inter-war period identifies three
broad ideological currents that were articulated in Western countries at that
time: liberalism, the pro-market, pro-Gold standard orthodoxy preferred by
political and economic elites in the early phase of the depression, nationalism
(in some cases articulated through fascism), and socialism or social democracy.
The same broad positions can be identified in the current post-crisis environ-
ment in several democracies. Liberalism in the contemporary period implies
support for the key institutions of the neoliberal regime: open capital, product,
and labor markets, monetary policy favoring low inflation and creditor inter-
ests, and constraints on redistribution and active demand management through
restrictions on taxation and spending. The anti-system forces expressing hos-
tility to these institutions articulate broadly nationalist or socialist alternatives
(see Figure 7.4).
Trump’s discourse is a good example of what we could describe as the
nationalist, or right-wing, attack on neoliberalism. Nationalist anti-system
movements target open product and labor markets as threats to the interests of
Nationalism Cosmopolitanism
Capitalism
Right-wing populists Cartel/mainstream parties
Regionalists/Secessionists
Neoliberal challengers
Economic nationalism
Welfare chauvinism (eg Macron, Citizens)
(Trump, Brexit, National

Front, Alternative for
Germany etc)
Anti-capitalism
Secessionist left Anti-system left
More welfare More welfare

Anti-euro Internationalism
(eg Catalan Left) (eg Podemos, Syriza)
FIGURE 7.4 Types of Anti-System Parties.
workers in Western countries, demanding protectionist measures in the form

of restrictions on trade openness and, most prominently, restrictions on labor
market competition through immigration. Right-wing anti-immigrant par-
ties have grown their votes in all the major West European democracies, with
the sole exceptions of Ireland and Portugal, where left populists predominate.
Monetary sovereignty is also a major issue. In member states of the Eurozone,
where monetary sovereignty has been pooled, nationalist parties protest at the
forms of burden-sharing that have emerged out of the debt crisis, which is par-
ticularly the case of right-wing populists in the creditor countries of Northern
Europe, where the True Finns, the Dutch PVV, and the German Af D have all
mobilized around opposition to bailouts of debtor countries in the South. Less
commonly, nationalist movements in debtor countries of the Eurozone mobi-
lize in protest at the onerous conditions imposed on them after their bailouts
by supranational authorities. More often, as the Italian election showed clearly,
proximity to migration flows united right and left populists in opposition to
Europe.
The main alternative critique of the liberal order comes from the left and fo-
cuses on the excessive political power of financial capital, and the austerity pol-
icies that placed the burden of adjustment disproportionately on lower-income
citizens. The anti-system left is critical of globalization and its institutions, but
mostly refuses to blame immigrants for the crisis, advocating decisive action
through the democratic institutions to curb finance and revive the public sec-
tor. In Europe, these forces are mostly pro-European, seeing cooperation at
the supranational level as a route to fiscal and monetary burden-sharing which
Global Trumpism 117
could alleviate austerity in the weaker economies. The anti-system left has
performed best in debtor countries, particularly in Southern Europe, where
the Eurozone crisis led to harsh austerity and the imposition of often unpopular
structural reforms.
The broad positioning of democracies on two dimensions of exposure to
economic risk predicts which types of anti-system parties are most likely to
prosper. Western democracies can be located in three broad positions, accord-
ing to their current account position, which acts as a proxy for their degree of
exposure to the financial crisis, and the commodification of labor, measured
as the degree of internal burden-sharing through protective labor market and
welfare institutions (Figure 7.5). These two variables capture the two main
drivers of individual-level risk of economic distress.
Current account position is a predictor of the type and extent of anti- system
politics. Debtor countries have carried most of the burden of adjustment, par-
ticularly in Europe, and therefore individuals in debtor countries are more
exposed to economic losses and have greater incentives to challenge existing
arrangements. We expect therefore that electoral instability and anti-system
party vote share will be higher in those countries with the greatest losses in
income growth.
Figure 7.6 shows that major party system changes after 2008 are correlated
with negative income growth for the median. However, creditor countries also
face internal tensions as policy toward debtors can easily provoke resentment,
both amongst savers angry at default risks and low interest rates, and amongst
citizens resentful of the outlay of public funds to bail out banks and foreign
governments. In the context of the relatively slow income growth and growing
inequality observed even in the creditor countries, anti-system politicians can
mobilize to offer protection from the risks to accumulated assets, or the labor
market competition and welfare burden resulting from increased migration
from debtor states.
Welfare and labor market arrangements are important determinants of how
the failure of the growth model affects different groups. Western European
democracies have relatively developed welfare systems, but the extent to which
Less commodified labour More commodified labour
Creditor Right-wing populist Right-wing populist

(Germany, small Northern (Switzerland)
European states)
Debtor Anti-system left Right-wing populist

(Southern Europe) Anti-system left
(UK, US)
FIGURE 7.5 Dominant Forms of Anti-System Politics.

45
Peak electoral volatility post-2008 40
35
30
25
R² = 0.4036
20
15
10
5
0
-10.0 -8.0 -6.0 -4.0 -2.0 0.0 2.0 4.0
Median income group disposable income change 2007-13
FIGURE 7.6 Median Income Change and Critical Elections after 2008.
Source: OECD Income Distribution Data Base http://www.oecd.org/social/income-
distribution-database.htm.
they protect citizens from economic risks—their degree of decommodifica-

tion (Esping-Andersen 1990; Scruggs and Allen 2006)—varies. The English-
speaking democracies mostly have limited welfare protection and more open
labor markets, implying a more commodified labor force facing a higher indi-
vidualization of risk. Most Western European countries in contrast have highly
developed welfare and labor market institutions that cushion citizens from
economic risk and equalize incomes, but risks are still unevenly distributed
and skewed by spending on the vote rich elderly. The main distinction here is
between the highly dualized forms of social protection that have developed in
the mixed market economies of Southern Europe, and the more comprehensive
coverage typical of the coordinated market economies of Northern Europe.
In the Southern European case, ‘outsider’ groups, especially younger citi-
zens, are much more exposed to risk than older ‘insider’ groups, and economic
shocks manifest themselves particularly through very high levels of youth un-
employment, which affect skilled and less-skilled workers alike. An anti-system
left appeal, which demands more government spending and curbs on finan-
cial sector excesses, but avoids nationalistic blame-shifting, has the potential to
mobilize the most affected groups in these states. In the creditor countries of
Northern Europe, where insider-outsider dynamics are less severe, a nationalis-
tic appeal to preserve the welfare state for citizens while protecting savers from
financial threats through monetary burden-sharing has more chance of being
successful. These broad differences in exposure to the crisis determine the con-
stituencies available to be mobilized and by extension the types of political
messages that anti-system politicians can use to capture them. This is seen and
illustrated schematically in Figure 7.7, which shows how creditor/debtor status
and welfare regime type correspond reasonably well to the extent and variance
of the anti-system response in Western democracies.
Global Trumpism 119
Type of Economic System Mobilized Groups Anti-System Type
Debt crisis + residual Most outside top 10%: Strong

welfare
(US, UK) Indebted working-age -> Anti-System Left
households, insecure youth (Sanders, Corbyn)
Pensioners, small savers,

older low-skill workers -> Right-wing populism
(Trump, Brexit)
Strong
Debt crisis + dualized
welfare and labour market ‘Outsiders’. Indebted -> Anti-System Left
(Greece, Spain, Italy, working-age households, (Syriza, Podemos, Five Stars
Portugal, France) insecure youth Movement, Left Bloc)
Creditor country, strong Moderate

welfare Pensioners, small savers,
(Austria, Denmark, Sweden, older low-skill workers -> Right-wing populism
Germany, Netherlands, (Alternative for Germany,
Finland) Dutch and Austrian
Freedom Parties, Finns
Party)
FIGURE 7.7 Nature of Crisis and Variations in Anti-System Politics.
Global Trumpism and the Global Economic Order

The anti-system wave reflects the deep crisis afflicting the liberal order that
emerged out of the disembedding of the post-war regime from the 1970s on-
ward. To locate our argument in terms of Dani Rodrik’s influential trilemma
of globalization (Rodrik 2011), an attempt to combine democracy with global-
ization at the expense of national self-determination has collided with the ex-
plicit withdrawal of consent on the part of a large share of Western electorates.
The elite-led project of closing off the democratic state from popular pressure
could perhaps be sustained in a context of consistent economic growth, or at
least credit-led growth, but with the need to impose painful austerity on the
lower-income majority to rescue the assets of the wealthy, this model’s funda-
mental lack of legitimacy has been exposed. Instead, voters are demanding that
politics be put at the service of defending society from economic threats. Fo-
cusing on the race-baiting of the Trump campaign, or the apparent proximity
of some populist leaders to Putin’s Russia, obscures the underlying dynamics
of the crisis and misleads as to the possibilities of restoring the liberal regime
without institutional changes to regain the authority to govern.
In the longer run, this latest attempt to make the liberal order more capital
friendly reflects the unstable relationship between democracy and the mar-
ket economy. Economists and public choice theorists developed a cogent and
influential critique of post-war managed capitalism, arguing that popular de-

mocracy inevitably placed governments under irresistible pressure to interfere
with markets for partisan purposes, by manipulating monetary policy, taxing
productive social forces to redistribute to electoral constituencies, or suppress-
ing market competition to reward favored industries. Their response was to
limit the scope of government to protect the market, to free capital of regu-
latory constraints, and to remove important powers from elected politicians.
Politicians were complicit in this exercise, since the “logic of no alternative”
implied by globalized economy with free capital flows liberated governments
from the need to compete in policy terms for voters, establishing a cozy ‘cartel’
of parties offering fundamentally similar approaches to managing the market.
This arrangement survived for several decades, in part because the estab-
lished parties could live off the inertia of large numbers of partisan identifiers,
which only slowly declined, in part because of institutional advantages they
leveraged to exclude challenger parties from access to power (public financing
of parties, electoral system thresholds, control over the state machinery). The
financial crisis and the shock to incomes exposed the vulnerability of this ar-
rangement, particularly when traditional alternation between government and
opposition failed to produce any major changes in policy.
The anti-system wave can therefore be seen as a return of politics to the gov-
ernance of the economy on a global scale. Trump’s threats to impose unilateral
tariffs and reluctance to observe conventional protocols regarding the Federal
Reserve have been described as a fundamental threat to the American liberal
order, but they can also be located in the tradition of populist demands to
subordinate the interests of capital to those of citizens lower down the income
scale, which is part and parcel of that America’s multiple political traditions, as
Rogers Smith put it (Smith 1993). Trump is not the first populist America has
seen. Neither is Salvini Italy’s.
Trump may be an inarticulate and unreliable ally of the poor, but anti-system
politicians in many other Western democracies have adopted similar discourses,
from supporters of Brexit in the UK claiming to speak for a down-trodden
population threatened by inflows of cheap labor from Eastern Europe, to the
anti-system left in Southern Europe railing against the euro and the imposition
of harsh austerity measures that served only to bail out what many see as cor-
rupt governments working with greedy bankers.
The liberal order always faces a fundamental difficulty in that it cannot en-
tirely protect the market from political interference without the consent of the
electorate, and the electorate’s patience may be tested when the share of income
reserved for the bottom 90% of the population has declined substantially in most
Western democracies. If democracy is to uphold rather than subvert the market,
then governments will have to act in order to ensure the market economy distrib-
utes income and wealth in a fashion deemed fair by a large majority of voters. If
it does not, we can expect more Trumpets to sound and more populists to follow.
Global Trumpism 121
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8
THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY
The United States in Perspective
Christian Lammert
Introduction
Populist parties and politicians are on the rise in Europe as well as in the US.
Donald Trump in the US, Boris Johnson in the UK, Viktor Orban in Hungary,
as well as electoral successes by the Rassemblement National in France and the
Alternative for Germany: anti-establishment politicians and parties are suc-
cessfully mobilizing an electorate that lost trust and confidence in established
democratic procedures, actors, and institutions. Democracy seems to be on
the decline, at least if we follow the Economists Intelligence Units ranking of
democratic systems all over the world. Altogether, Western European’s average
score in the democracy index declined sharply for the third consecutive year,
to 8.35, from 8.38 in 2017 and 8.42 in 2014. A more extreme development can
be seen in the US. The US fell below the threshold for a “full democracy” in
2016, primarily because of a serious decline in public trust in US institutions.
In 2018, the US fell further in the global ranking, to 25th place, from 21st in
2017. Even in the latest Economics Intelligence Unit report, the US continues
to be rated as a “flawed democracy.”
How can we explain the deterioration in the quality of democracies in the
transatlantic region? What are the common denominators that might explain
the success of populist and anti-establishment forces at nearly the same point in
time? And what are more country-specific reasons that help explain those de-
velopments? I will argue in this chapter that the successes of anti-establishment
forces are the result of a specific set of policies that were implemented in nearly
all democracies in Western Europe and the US starting in the late 1980s and
early 1990s. These policies have been supported by left-wing and right-wing
political forces stating that “There is No Alternative” (TINA) to those policies
The United States in Perspective 125
(see Scruton in this volume for a critique of “TINA” politics from a conserva-
tive perspective). At its core, this neoliberal policy agenda is built around two
main blocks: welfare state retrenchment and restructuring on the one side and
a massive deregulation of market activities, especially in the financial markets
on the other side (see also Vormann and Lammert 2019).
Illiberalism in the Transatlantic Context: Broader Factors

Anthony Giddens coined the term “third way” to describe a position akin to
centrism that tries to reconcile right-wing and left-wing policies by advocating
a varying synthesis of center-right and centrist economic policies, on the one
hand, and some center-left social policies, on the other hand (Giddens 1998).
In the context of broader globalization processes, this set of policies led to
growing economic inequality within countries and triggered in large parts also
the financial crisis from 2008. The neoliberal policy agenda that we do find
on both sides of the Atlantic put the market above the state by stating that the
welfare of the people and the society is best served by the efficiency of private
actors and market instruments. It denigrates public goods as a waste of taxpay-
ers’ money, and regards state intervention as a clumsy interference. Economic
and social policy, according to this way of thinking, must adapt to the givens
of globalization. Everyone is responsible for him- or herself. Individualism and
self-responsibility are core concepts to understand this strand of policies.
On both sides of the Atlantic, those changes had two major consequences:
first, retrenchment and restructuring of the welfare system have affected the
visibility of the welfare state. ‘Visibility’ means that citizens identify the state as
the provider of welfare (Howard 1999; Morgan and Campbell 2011). Trends to-
ward privatization of social policy and the idea of self-responsibility are shifting
the focus away from the state and the public as the producers of social benefits
toward non-state actors, individuals, and the market more generally. This leads
to the second consequence: those shifts also affect the relationship between the
state and its citizens in general. Different studies have shown that the visibility
of social programs produces legitimacy for the political system and at the same
time encourages political participation among its citizens (Campbell 2003). If
the people don’t perceive the state as a producer of economic security and social
goods anymore, the system is losing legitimacy and trust in established political
institutions will decline (Lammert and Vormann 2020).
Populism and illiberal tendencies in North Atlantic states are therefore not
the cause of a crisis of governance, but its result. This crisis has been many de-
cades in the making, and it is intricately linked to the rise of a certain type of
political philosophy and practice that has extended across both sides of the At-
lantic. This dominant political dogma has seen marketization as the only pos-
sible and legitimate way of organizing societies in the context of globalization
processes. The shift from responsive governmental institutions to processual
126 Christian Lammert
and semi-private governance bodies has contributed to a depoliticization of all

things political (Vormann and Lammert 2019). Populism in Europe and the US
is an expression of this immanent crisis of liberalism in which economic ratio-
nalities have hollowed out political values and have led to an impoverishment
of the political sphere. The promises of the neoliberal revolution—individual
freedom and self-determination—have failed to materialize for too many. So-
cieties no longer pursue common projects but are reduced to the sum of their
individuals.
TINA Policies: Retrenchments and Restructuring

of the Welfare State
In the last three decades, social welfare and tax-related changes in the US and
several European countries have played a central role in the increase of income
inequality and the rise of poverty rates. Recent studies (Piketty 2014) indicate
clearly that taxes and transfers have frequently become much less successful at
reducing widening income gaps and that social policy reforms were at least
partly responsible for widening household-income gaps (OECD 2011). Politi-
cal elites described and justified those changes as policies without alternatives,
because the process of globalization and the integration into world markets,
so the argument, turned welfare states incrementally into ‘competition states’
(Genschel and Seekopf 2012). These competition states differ from the welfare
state in the sense that they promote increased marketization by liberalizing
cross-border movements of goods and people, re-commodifying labor, and
privatizing public services. Whereas the welfare state tried to domesticate cap-
italism, the competition state tries to be attractive for capital and investments
first (Cerny 1997). In order to be competitive in this sense, the state needs to
deregulate the market and lower tax rates on corporations. As a consequence,
this leads toward a downward spiral in social and public spending.
The origins of the transformation from the welfare to the competition state
in the US can be traced back at least to the 1990s. Criticism of the social welfare
system was so strong at the time that President Clinton, as a Democrat, began
his term in office with the call to “end welfare as we know it” (Weaver 2000),
which he then also did, with support from Republicans in Congress. The core
of this reform was to repeal and replace the family support program known
as Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). According to AFDC,
certain persons, especially mothers with children, had a right to social bene-
fits. With the elimination of AFDC and its replacement by a new program of
temporary assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), this
right was revoked and a time limit for receiving benefits from this program was
imposed. Welfare as a right was abolished. Welfare reform has become possible
in the 1990s because the dominant public discourse constantly made references
to globalization so as to point out that international competition simply made
it necessary to cut down public spending on welfare. The discussion focused

on welfare because conservative think tanks were successful in stigmatizing
welfare recipients in the 1980s as lazy and portraying the welfare system as
paternalistic and expansive. Further, racial connotations in the reform debate
further delegitimized welfare at that time. All in all, these factors made a suffi-
cient majority of the public support cutting back welfare programs.
Parallel to this, another mantra of neoliberal critique was integrated into the
social welfare realm: activation. The central idea here was that the programs,
above all, should re-integrate benefit recipients into the labor market. The fe-
tish of wage labor is clearly identifiable in all these programs and reforms. But
it is founded on the assumption that the market, specifically the labor market,
is actually able to carry out these functions—in other words, that it is capable
of providing everyone with a wage and sustenance. If someone fails, this is a
matter of personal responsibility. Overall, these ideas have led to a situation
where the US, in general and especially in times of economic crisis, can protect
its citizens only in the most rudimentary way from the failures of the market.
In situations where a person loses a job, and in cases of illness, there is the real
threat of a rapid loss of social position; indebtedness; and even, in many cases,
personal bankruptcy.
The US certainly does have a system that helps people facing specific so-
cial risks. But compared to European welfare models, it differs in two spe-
cific respects that also magnify the problem of a faltering labor market. First,
there is the significantly greater proportion of private social insurance. This
is especially true of retirement and illness, as reflected in total expenditures
for these programs. In the US, in 2013, according to figures provided by the
OECD (OECD 2019), the percentage of GDP devoted to private social expen-
ditures was 11.4%. By comparison, in Germany, only 3.3% was spent on pri-
vate social expenditures, and in the OECD countries, the average was a mere
2.6%. Furthermore, the US relies much more heavily than many European
governments on the tax system to generate social benefits. This happens in
two ways. On the one hand, private social expenditures receive massive tax
subsidies—from the purchase of a house to the cost of private retirement or
health insurance. On the other hand, social benefits are also disbursed directly
through the tax system. The most prominent example of the latter is the Earned
Income Tax Credit (EITC), in other words a tax credit on income.
And the result of the transition into competition states? According to OECD
data (2011), income inequality rose in 17 of the 22 OECD countries for which
long-term data is available, climbing by more than four percentage points in
countries like Germany, Sweden, and the US. We can see different patterns
across OECD countries over time. Income inequality started to increase in
the late 1970s and early 1980s in some English-speaking countries, notably
the UK and the US. Starting in the 1980s, the increase in income inequality
became more widespread. The latest trends since the 2000s showed a widening
gap between the rich and the poor, not only in some already high-income in-
equality countries like the US, but also in traditional low-income inequality
countries like Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, where inequality grew more
than anywhere else since the 2000s.
Wages and incomes in the US are currently as unevenly distributed as they
have not been since the era of the Great Depression, in the 1930s. Things are
looking great, above all, for the top earners, who have done better and better in
comparison to the rest of society. French economist Thomas Piketty (Piketty
2014) and his colleagues have made clear that it is the top 1%, in particular, who
have benefitted most from economic development since the 1970s. Deregula-
tion policies pursued by both the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations, starting
in the 1990s, did stimulate free market forces for a certain period, but it was the
rich, above all, who profited. The middle class and lower-income groups saw
hardly any rise in income.
The bottom 50% of income earners in the US have been more or less shut
out of the market for the last 40 years when it comes to increases in income.
Their average annual income in 2014, at $16,197, was a mere 2.7% greater than
their income in 1974. Over the same period, the income of the highest 10%
jumped by a staggering 231%. The government, via its tax and transfer system,
did very little during this period to balance out this unequal distribution of
market forces. On the contrary, tax reductions, for example, under George W.
Bush in the years after 2000, made the spread between rich and poor even more
extreme (Bartels 2005).
Precisely this toxic mixture of deregulation, privatization, tax reductions
for the rich, and cuts in welfare programs created the basis for dissatisfaction
and a loss of trust among broad sectors of society. Combined with the national
ideological overemphasis on individualism and self-reliance, ideas and ideolo-
gies were able to take root in the public discourse that ultimately led to social
division and also, quite concretely, to the 2008 financial and economic crisis.
This crisis was as serious as it was because it brought an already porous social
system, which is dependent on growth, to the edge of collapse. If we wanted to
tie it to a specific development, we could say that today’s crisis of democracy is
an aftershock of this same financial crisis.
Political Inequality, Money in Politics, Gridlock,

and Polarization
The economic and financial crisis of 2008 made very clear the extent to which
the American socio-economic model is dependent on a dynamic labor market,
and, more specifically, on a constantly growing low-wage sector. If the latter
is no longer able to absorb as many people, as happened during the recent
economic crisis, the country’s already quite fragile social balance comes un-
der threat. The 2016 presidential campaign demonstrated this very clearly. In
the camps of both political parties, candidates mobilized based on the difficult
economic situation. Bernie Sanders led a primary campaign among Democrats
that was mainly based on the growing social and economic inequalities, and
Donald Trump was able to mobilize voters and win votes especially in those
regions where the economic recovery was least felt and the unemployment rate
had climbed far above the national average.
Fundamental distrust in government has turned into an attitude of refusal
that makes the administration responsible for everything that goes wrong—but
that simultaneously also fails to acknowledge that it was precisely the cutbacks
in public social support systems that lit the fire under the crisis and then blew on
it. In the economic liberals’ thought model, it is not just that government plays
a subordinate role; rather, in both politics and public affairs, there is virtual
amnesia about the role that the American government has played up until now.
This, at least, is the conclusion drawn by American political scientists Jacob
Hacker and Paul Pierson in their recent book, American Amnesia (Hacker and
Pierson 2017). This memory loss is not somehow accidental. It derives from the
political culture of the US, and has been used strategically by powerful special
interests to advance their agendas. This includes mega-actors in private enter-
prise, above all Wall Street finance capital, which has been able to impose its
interests by means of massive lobbying.
It was primarily the economic crisis that again turned inequality into a
problem for the meritocratic style of American liberalism. But there is also a
political crisis that explains the crisis of democracy in a wider sense. Economic
inequalities transitioned into political inequalities. Against the background of
polarization, the structure of the political system itself has become a problem:
built-in blocking mechanisms, which are actually supposed to guarantee de-
mocracy, have led to a democratic standstill instead.
Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page also ask whether the category “oligar-
chy” would not be more apt for the US at this time (Gilens and Page 2014).
Their concerns center on the opportunities citizens have to influence politics:
for example, the extent to which elected officials, in their actions and policies,
act in accordance with the interests of the people who elected them. Politi-
cal scientists call this responsiveness. In the US, Gilens and Page find, elected
representatives are no longer attuned to the interests of the middle class or of
low-income groups. They now listen only to the interests of the super-rich
and the organized special interests that, with their campaign contributions and
lobbying, succeed in influencing politics.
Under these circumstances, democracy’s correction mechanism— elections—
is ineffective. The only way to break open this circle seems to be either to carry
out a political revolution (Sanders) or to drain the swamp (Trump). This per-
spective also makes abundantly clear that the neoliberal politics of the last 30
years in America were not policies without alternatives, but a concession to the
super-rich and the powerful interest groups that succeeded in getting the ear of
the political system. All this at the expense of the middle class and low-income
groups, whom no one listened to anymore, and who now wanted to make
themselves heard again by voting for radical political forces.
The influence of money in politics plays a decisive role in the lack of respon-
siveness. Elections in the US are expensive, and the politicians have to get this
money from somewhere or someone. In 2012, more than 40% of all private
contributions to the election came from the richest 0.01% in terms of income
(Open Secrets.com). In the 1980s, this percentage from the super-rich was still
only 10%! Generally speaking, both parties profited from the contributions,
although the Republicans had a significant advantage: 62% of these campaign
contributions ended up in their election accounts. The system of electoral fi-
nance is generally strictly regulated and formally transparent—at least where
the specific electoral team is concerned. In this case, there are firm rules about
how much money you can give to candidates, parties, and other groups during
an election. But alongside this, since 2008, another realm of election financing
has grown up, which is concerned not with the expenditures of the various
candidates and their campaigns, but with third parties that are not permitted to
be directly linked to the campaigns. This area is known as “independent ex-
penditures,” and here we again encounter influential and financially powerful
actors and special interest groups that seek to influence elections. In 2010, the
Supreme Court gave these actors the constitutional right, under the hallowed
concept of freedom of expression, to spend as much money as they want to (see
Dowling and Miller 2014).
But the influence of money is not the only problem bedeviling the American
political system, even if it is certainly one of the gravest when it comes to the
quality of democracy. The buzzwords “polarization” and “gridlock” are often
used to describe other aspects of the political crisis that have resulted from the
inequalities. Compromises no longer seem possible, and a politics of ideological
extremism is taking over—among progressives as well as conservatives. This
phenomenon is not entirely new, but it has become institutionally fixed and
threatens to explode the political discourse altogether.
As early as the 1990s, the phenomenon of polarization was being talked
about as a “culture war”—the buzzword for a cultural battle being waged by
the two political camps (Hartman 2019). At the center of this “war” were
abortion, the right to bear arms, the separation of church and state, drugs, and
homosexuality. Around these questions, two poles formed within the political
discourse. These two poles can no longer discuss things with each other on a
common basis. Since the 1990s, the split in society has expanded beyond the
above-named issues. At the core of the division, once again, we often find the
familiar question what role the central government should play in the US.
This division of society into two camps becomes problematic because in
the meanwhile the media landscape has adapted it. Under the pressure to sell
their news programs, in other words to attract stable consumer groups that will
generate advertising income, the media come up with exactly those messages
their consumers want to hear. Right-leaning media like Fox News complain
about the government and democratic politicians, in particular. Obama, for the
right-wing media, was the incarnation of evil. Now, left-leaning media, for
example, MSNBC, see Trump the same way. After his 2012 electoral victory,
Obama said that if he watched Fox News all day, he would not have voted for
his reelection (Hayden 2017).
Stations that once used to be politically neutral, like CNN, are ground
down by this competitive struggle. They carry on 24/7 with “breaking
news,” as a means of maintaining their market share among media consumers.
Scandal-mongering and one-sided reportage are the result. Now the only me-
dia outlet that is trusted is the one that broadcasts the messages a person wants to
hear; people scarcely venture out of these echo chambers. Everything the other
side reports is disqualified as “fake news.” In Germany, right-wing populists
refer to comparable but still noticeably tamer developments as “Lügenpresse,”
or “lying press”—a term that has unmistakable Nazi overtones.
Naturally, such a media environment is not inconsequential for the work
of Congress. This is a big problem especially for a presidential system, where
the party infrastructure plays a weaker role. The political system in the US is
candidate-focused. This means, first of all, that individual candidates, not par-
ties, get elected. Party lists of the kind that exist in Germany are unknown in
the US. Candidates organize their own run for office, raise their own funds,
and are ultimately responsible to their constituencies. Parties usually only get
involved in supportive ways, by offering a broader, philosophical, or ideological
framework within which voters can place their candidates. This system, natu-
rally, also makes the elected official more independent from the party organi-
zation or legislative fraction. This is the tradition.
No wonder, then, that in the 1960s, a Republican congressman only voted
with his party about 60% of the time (Stonecash 2018). Among the Democrats,
this even occurred only half the time. The electoral district at home was much
more important, in keeping with the politician’s interest in being reelected two
or six years hence. In this sense, members of Congress in the US have been
like “church steeple” politicians, who have seen only their home district and
thus looked no farther than they could see from the church steeple of their own
congregation. Questions of ideology played a secondary role in their voting
behavior.
But the situation has undergone a massive change. Today, coalitions or com-
promises with political opponents are as good as impossible, especially when
it comes to the kinds of issues that also divide society. In the House of Rep-
resentatives, today, 90% of Democrats and Republicans vote with their party
bloc (Stonecash 2018). Some commentators see the polarization of the political
elites as a direct consequence of the polarization of society. Others, though,
make reforms within Congress partly responsible for it—reforms that led to
the exercise of stronger control by party leaders. In this way, they argue, a
more informal discipline has developed within the party factions, which makes
non-partisan compromises hugely more difficult. Yet others explain the po-
larization of the political elites by the structure of electoral districts. In recent
years, thanks to gerrymandering and sorting, electoral districts have become
more and more homogenous and hence less politically contested. As a result,
moderate candidates are no longer as successful. Radicalism pays, because the
actual electoral decisions are no longer made in the election itself, but rather in
the primaries, since it is quite certain that one party—or the other—will win
the district.
Probably, the best explanation is one that takes all these factors into account.
What is important, though, is that these developments have very definitely led
to a gridlock of the political system. The established mechanisms within the
political system no longer correspond to the polarization of the parties. Media
polarization both mirrors this problem and renders it more acute, making it
more and more difficult to put together successful policies.
Trump: Draining the Swamp

In his election campaign, Trump was able to mobilize a broad voter coalition of
frustrated people, people left behind by TINA policies. ‘Make American Great
Again,’ ‘Draining the Swamp,’ and ‘bringing government back to the people’
resonated well with a lot of people, providing an alternative to the policies of
no alternatives. In his inauguration speech in 2017, Trump declared, “Today,
we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or
from one party to another,” peering out at a sea of supporters, “but we are
transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the
people” (White House 2017). But so far, Trump could not deliver on what he
promised. Polarization and gridlock prevented major policy reforms to happen
in Washington, D.C. So far, the only legislative success is a major tax reform
bill that benefitted corporations and the wealthy, leaving behind the middle
classes and lower-income groups (Slemrod 2018).
Instead of draining the swamp in D.C., Trump brought a lot of million-
aires and billionaires into the administration, thereby fostering special inter-
est policies, massive deregulation, and further privatization (Tindera 2019).
Shortly after Donald Trump launched his reelection campaign, he announced
that former Raytheon head lobbyist Mark Esper would replace former Boe-
ing executive Patrick Shanhanan as acting defense secretary. Interior Secretary
David Bernhardt is a former lobbyist for the coal and gas industry. Environ-
mental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler is a former lobbyist
for, among other interests, the coal industry. Along with lobbyists, Trump has
also named numerous former Goldman Sachs executives, the former head of
ExxonMobil, and billionaire investors Betsy DeVos and Wilbur Ross to lead
government agencies like the State Department, the Department of Education,

and the Department of Commerce. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex
Azar is also a former drug company executive who oversaw its lobbying efforts,
although he is not a registered lobbyist.
Already in the first week of his administration, Donald Trump signed an
executive order requiring all of his political hires to sign a pledge saying that
they would never lobby foreign interests, and they would never engage in
other lobbying for five years. But former administration officials have found
ways around that rule. As of February 2019, Pro Publica identified 33 former
officials from the Trump administration who were connected to lobbying in
some capacity. The most prominent is former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke,
who resigned in December 2018 after a series of ethics investigations. He an-
nounced a couple of months later that he is joining a lobbying firm, Turnberry
Solutions, which was started in 2017 by several former Trump campaign aides
(Kravitz 2019).
But the mere presence of lobbyists in Trump’s cabinet doesn’t raise the alarm
of government ethics experts. No doubt, the revolving door is a basic part
of the Washington establishment, and it is not hard to see why: government
agencies regularly deal with lobbyists when they are crafting regulations, so
that they tend to hire professionals who are familiar with the process. The
Trump administration does, however, seem particularly comfortable stacking
high-level posts with former lobbyists. As Pro Publica revealed in March 2018,
“At least 187 Trump political appointees have been federal lobbyists, and de-
spite President Trump’s campaign pledge to ‘drain the swamp,’ many are now
overseeing the industries they once lobbied on” (Kravitz 2018). With seven
lobbyists named to Cabinet-level positions, not to mention former industry
executives, Trump is far outpacing former President Obama, who named five
former lobbyists to his cabinet over two full terms, and George W. Bush, who
named three former lobbyists to Cabinet-level posts during his eight years in
office (Lardner 2019).
Furthermore, Trump is using the administration for personal and family
benefits, acting more like a medieval monarch than a modern democratic pres-
ident. That points to what critics call a troubling trend in the Trump admin-
istration: a tendency to rely on friends and family for policy advice and action.
In a robust, well-functioning democracy, there are many checks against the
abuse of power. There are institutions that establish procedures to regulate
decision-making and set limits. These institutions are run by people loyal not
to any particular leader, but rather to the rule of law itself. They understand,
in theory, that their job is to protect the citizens and the constitution, not their
bosses. When leaders rely on their friends and relatives to take key jobs, they
can subvert the power of institutions because those individuals (who often ar-
en’t experts coming into a position with a particular set of objectives) aren’t
loyal to the institution. They are loyal to the person in power.
Trump, who swept into office as an outsider with no government experi-

ence, has largely surrounded himself with people who are also light on gov-
ernment experience but heavy on personal loyalty. As political scientist Henry
F. Cary said:
The U.S. presidency has always been prone to sultanistic tendencies, but
under a Trump presidency what were once isolated incidents have pre-
dictably become a way of governing. When the closest advisers, both
institutional (like his daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law Jared
Kushner) and informal (in the case of his two adult sons), are dominated
by family members, the decision-making process will not only be erratic
and possibly influenced by private family interests but also tend to ignore
legal procedures that have also met the test of time.
(Cary 2017)
His constant attacks on the press and his aggressive communication style via
Twitter destroy a rational and open public discourse that is essential for a dem-
ocratic representative system to function. Fake news and mere opinions trump
facts. Trust in the public discourse is disappearing. In order to mobilize his core
voter base, Trump is constantly attacking his political opponents, thereby fur-
ther fostering polarization and politicization of the public discourse. For sure,
criticism of the political opponent is part of politics, especially in a context of
massive polarization. But Trump, unlike former presidents, never tried to be a
president for all Americans. He used his attacks on political opponents just in
order to mobilize his own political base. After Democrats announced to start an
impeachment process, Trump called it a Coup D’état on Twitter. What we do
see is a massive radicalization of political communication in the US and more
and more pundits fear what might happen if Trump has to leave the White
House, by an impeachment or through elections.
One way to understand Trump’s rhetoric and actions is populism and its
tendency to accuse corrupt elites (in this case, the Democrats) of betraying “the
people” by empowering their enemies: in this case, migrants allegedly involved
in criminal activities against law-abiding American citizens. As Müller (2016,
22–23) suggests, a key aspect of populism is the claim that “only the populist
authentically identifies and represents […] real or true people.” Trump’s popu-
lism is mainly based on mechanisms of exclusion and criticizing political elites,
and at the same time blaming specific groups—in most cases, minorities. This
distinguishes Trump’s populism from more progressive variants that focus on
inclusion (see also the Introduction to this volume). Clearly, Trump draws on a
right-wing version of this populism to label Democrats and those who disagree
with him on immigration as enemies of a narrowly defined “American people.”
Trump used this populist and nationalist rhetoric to motivate his base to
vote for Republican candidates in the midterm elections of 2018, urging them
to defeat Democrats and the threat to the American people he claims they
represent.
In the specific case of Trump, preying upon the collective anxieties of his
majority white base is a way to create a sense of urgency. His goal, prior to
the midterms in 2018, was to mobilize his supporters to show up at the polls
to thwart a purported assault on the US engineered by allegedly unpatriotic
Democrats who let migrants in and don’t stand up for America. What we’re
witnessing is a convergence of nationalism, populism, and the politics of inse-
curity. The exacerbation of collective insecurity stemming from seemingly un-
controlled immigration is coupled with nationalist claims about the existence
of an enemy within (the Democratic Party) depicted as being soft on crime and
on immigration.
Trump also promised deep cuts in regulations and bureaucracy to spur eco-
nomic growth. Early in his presidency, an executive order was issued to freeze
hiring in the executive agencies, not including Homeland Security and Veterans
Affairs. Data shows that the order accomplished its objective. OpenTheBooks.
com found 34,640 positions eliminated within the traditional paper-pushing,
tax, and regulatory agencies: Education, Health & Human Services, EPA, IRS,
Interior, and 114 others. Statistically speaking, the Trump re-prioritization of
the government occurred without a material increase in the number of employ-
ees. Compared against the peak year of 2016, the payroll at the Education De-
partment, for example, is down 657 employees, or 15% (OpenTheBooks.com).
And the hiring freeze is still in place. Perceived as one of the most entrenched
parts of the administrative state, a house cleaning in the State Department
has been underway. In 2016, there were 13,108 employees, and by 2018, only
11,582 remained. “Foreign Affairs” staffers were cut back from 2,571 to 2,135.
However, cuts have been across the board with 60 fewer office secretaries and
20 less public relations officers (OpenTheBooks.com).
In his campaign for the US presidency, candidate Donald Trump advo-
cated widespread deregulation of the US economy. It was a central plank of
his national economic and energy plans. He called for both a moratorium on
new regulations and an explicit process whereby Cabinet departments would
review existing regulations and repeal each one that was not necessary. Trump
has followed through with an aggressive program of deregulation. Operation-
ally, deregulation has meant first slowing the flow of new federal regulations,
second collaborating with Congress on the repeal or scaling back of selected
existing regulations, and third using executive power to repeal or curb the
scope of selected existing regulations. The Trump Administration’s most re-
cent Regulatory Agenda reports that 514 deregulatory rulemakings are ongo-
ing. This number is small compared to the huge stock of existing regulations
but larger than what the Reagan administration tackled over a similar time
frame. The deregulatory ambitions of the Trump administration are particu-
larly large in the environmental arena. One set of deregulatory proposals seeks
to simplify burdensome permitting processes for economic projects under the

National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. A second
set seeks to ease costly pollution-control requirements on energy developers
and producers, especially in the coal, oil and gas, and biofuels industries. A
third set is designed to limit future federal clean-water regulations that might
adversely impact small businesses, construction, manufacturing, and agricul-
ture (Spangler and Bomey 2018; Vogt 2018).
Another set of deregulations going on under the Trump administration can
be found in the financial markets and banking sector. Trump has signed a
massive rollback on bank regulations. The measure eases restrictions on all but
the largest banks. It raises the threshold to $250 billion from $50 billion under
which banks are deemed too important to the financial system to fail. Those
institutions also would not have to undergo stress tests or submit so-called liv-
ing wills, both safety values designed to plan for financial disaster. Trump has
announced further deregulations, but so far, the main policies implemented
under the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 are still in place.
Conclusion
So far, Trump has transformed the crisis of democracy into a constitutional
crisis that threatens the very foundations of the political system in the US.
Trump and his administration are not willing to play by the constitution-
ally established rules of the game. He does not accept the system of sepa-
rate branches of government sharing power. His zero-sum political style just
knows winners and losers, thereby fully ignoring the procedural mechanism of
a representative democracy like the US that is built on the condition and possi-
bility of bipartisan cooperation. Opposition to his illiberal style of governance
is growing, within the democratic institutions and on the streets. Massive pro-
tests and marches in the streets, Democrats winning a landslide in the midterm
elections, and impeachment procedure are visible developments in this regard.
But so far, it is not clear if that will build up trust again in the political system,
or if the people will get more divided and frustrated about the way politics is
done in D.C.
Until mid-2019, the administration was benefitting from a powerful eco-
nomic development that already started under the Obama administration, but
was further pushed by the Trump administration by massive deregulation and
tax cuts. The bad awakening will come with the next economic downturn.
Nearly 40 years of neoliberal restructuring of the welfare system and Trump’s
massive deregulation destroyed an important number of social buffers that are
meant to prevent growing poverty rates and income inequality in the next re-
cession. People will get more frustrated with politics in D.C.
In this chapter, I argued that the rise of illiberalism in the US and Western
Europe is primarily the result of a specific set of policies that Anthony Giddens
summarized under the term “Third way politics” that dominated the policy
agenda in Western countries at least since the 1990s. This is the common de-
nominator, explaining the rise and success of anti-establishment parties and
politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. If the welfare system is less and less
able to help poor people by redistributing market incomes from the top to the
bottom, the material base and legitimacy for political participation are threat-
ened. An increasing number of people—especially the poor, minorities, and
immigrants—will be disconnected from the political process, making the sys-
tem less democratic. That’s what has happened to different degrees in the US and
in Europe as well. As a result, people’s trust in the political system and its major
institutions declined massively. The crisis of democracy in the US is exceptional
because economic liberalism was already so pronounced there. The culture of
individualism, the drastically increased inequalities that followed the financial
crisis, and the growing polarization have driven the existing political structures
to the brink of dysfunctionality, much more than this is the case in Western
European democracies. Voters were looking for alternative policy approaches,
both on the left and the right. Illiberalism à la Trump seemed to be a successful
alternative. But so far, Trump was not able to provide a real alternative.
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9
THE EUROPEAN UNION AND ITS
CHANCES FOR DEMOCRATIC
REVITALIZATION
Claudia Wiesner
Introduction
Criticism of the EU’s democratic deficits is notorious at least since the 1990’s
(see below for an overview on the “democratic deficit” debate, see Folles-
dal and Hix 2006). The European Union is regularly included into critical or
pessimistic accounts on the state of democracy in general and the risks of its
deterioration. These critical accounts relate to the negative impact of economic
liberalism and its consequences on democratic standards. The EU has been reg-
ularly criticized for the downsides of internal trade liberalization, as expressed
in the pronounced concept of negative integration, i.e. the abolition of market
obstacles, and its negative effects on democracy and social standards (Scharpf
1999, see also below). Moreover, the creation of the inner market went along
with cutting down the powers of directly legitimized national democratic
institutions—a point classically mentioned in the democratic deficit debate
is power shifts from directly legitimized legislatives to executives, and perti-
nent legitimation problems. During the financial crisis, criticisms on the EU’s
democratic deficits intensified, as new EU-related governance setting were in-
troduced that bypassed existing democratic structures (see Streeck 2014; Offe
2015; White 2015, Wiesner 2019, 261–279)—a special issue of the European
Law Journal in this context raised the question if “authoritarian liberalism” was
pushed by the EU (Menéndez 2015).
In this context, I argue that the EU is—rather than an international
organization—a political system that has continuously been democratized and
relates to a multi-level system, including the current 28 member states and
their democracies. In this system, four core dimensions of democratic quality
The EU and Democratic Revitalization 141
are insufficient: agenda control as well as horizontal and vertical accountability,

responsiveness, and equality. These deficiencies are related to an accumula-
tion of seven problem fields: (1) over-bureaucratization, (2) expert bodies, (3)
over-constitutionalization, (4) differentiated integration, (5) negative integra-
tion, (6) the question of the EU’s common good, and (7) the split between the
EU citizens being citizens in a legal sense but only a limited sovereign and a
limited demos. In order to recognize these problem fields and chances to remedy
them, I start with a conceptual reflection on the basic principles of representa-
tive democracy and a short summary of central arguments concerning the EU
democratic deficit debate, followed by a critical analysis of the problem fields.
In conclusion, I will discuss the possibilities for democratic revitalization of the
EU’s political system, focusing especially on the development of a demos and
its politicization.
Conceptualizing Democracy and Democratic

Deficits in the EU
My argument relates to a basic set of conceptual and normative premises on
representative democracy (see Wiesner 2019, 1–49). If we try to distill the gen-
eral elements that classify most concepts of representative democracy (see Dahl
2000; Diamond and Morlino 2004; Palonen 2016), and if we also take into
account how representative democracy developed (Manin 1997; Urbinati 2006;
Pitkin 2009) in parliamentary democracies, there is a typical interrelation be-
tween three elements, or conceptual clusters: citizens vote for parliament and
hence legitimize it; parliament represents the citizens and elects the government;
government is responsible to parliament. I have termed this the triad of representa-
tive democracy (Wiesner 2019, 7). Obviously, in presidential systems, the triadic
relations work differently, especially regarding the relation between govern-
ment and parliament, and the role of head of state. The European Union has
similarities to a semi-presidential system where the executive is dual and the
role of head of state is ambiguously split between either the European Council
(EC) or its permanent president (Wiesner 2019, 165–84).
Irrespective of the type of political system at stake, following Lincoln’s well-
known formula (Lincoln 1863), democracy can be furthermore understood as
being government of, by, and for the people. Following this idea, three decisive
directions and components of the relations between citizens, their representa-
tives, and the government can be outlined for any of these types of systems.
The first is the input dimension: the citizens need rights and possibilities for
participation and contestation (government of the people), and they need the
right to elect their representatives (government by the people). Second, the rep-
resentatives must be accountable: election procedures of governance in the
representative system must be organized transparently and following the rule
142 Claudia Wiesner
of law, and the system should stick to the ideal of the separation of powers. This
is what has been termed “throughput” (Schmidt 2013). Third, representative
democracy has an output dimension: the decisions taken by the representatives
should satisfy the majority of the represented (government for the people).
Citizens constitute the demos, the core body that is at the base of the demo-
cratic practices, the sovereign. A demos should be active, since democracy from
a normative point of view must consist not only in rights to vote or democratic
institutions, but also in democratic practices. A core characteristic of most con-
ceptions of representative democracy therefore is that it must allow and open
up spaces for debate, participation, and contestation. As elections take place
only at relatively long intervals, it is an essential condition that representative
democracy is completed by such spaces and arenas for political participation,
debate, and contestation. Parliamentary debates are public, and issues can hence
be debated in parliament and also publicly. There must also be the possibility
to contest and protest against government measures. Citizens thus can express
their political opinions in between elections.
There are many good reasons to argue that these basic premises of repre-
sentative democracy need to be thickened: for instance, by deliberative mech-
anisms or social rights (see Barber 1984; Merkel 2004). But the question in
this chapter is not how we can institutionalize a strong, participatory, or even
deliberative democracy in the EU and its multi-level system. My goal is to dis-
cuss how the basic premises of representative democracy that were just sketched
can be safeguarded and revitalized. It is important to underline once more that
representative democracy in the EU context includes the multi-level system,
i.e. the EU member states. Adding the political level of the EU has at the same
time challenged the classical conception of a representative legitimation chain
ranging from citizens to parliaments, politicians, their decisions, and back. In
the classical conception, the sovereign demos elects a national parliament and
legitimates a national government, which is accountable to the sovereign via
the parliament. But in the EU multi-level system, legitimization chains become
longer, more indirect, and less transparent: national sovereigns still elect na-
tional parliaments and thus legitimate national governments—but many policy
decisions are now taken at the EU level, where neither the Commission nor
the Council is directly legitimized by EU citizens, even if the European Par-
liament (EP) has by and by obtained the right to vote upon the Commission’s
approval and also to influence the Commissioner setting to a certain degree (see
Tiilikainen and Wiesner 2016).
The EU: A Short Summary of the Democratic Deficit Debate

The EU’s democratic deficits have been intensively discussed in the last decades
regarding the institutional setting related to the treaties from Maastricht to
Lisbon. Controversy in this debate starts with the question what the EU
actually is. Should it be defined as a “polity sui generis,” i.e. as a kind of new
polity without precedent that accordingly cannot be grasped with the estab-
lished categories? Is it an international organization (see Magnette 2005)? As
sketched above, my argument is based on the position that (a) the EU is to
be seen as a political system (see Hix and Høyland 2011; Tömmel 2014) that
(b) has continuously been and still can be further democratized and (c) relates
to a multi-level system, including the current 28 member states and their de-
mocracies. From that standpoint, and based on the normative and conceptual
premises that have been lined out above, a number of critical points have been
raised in the “democratic deficit” debate.
EU institutions increased their competencies over the last decades without
adding a representative-democratic legislative component that equals the ones
in the nation-states. As at the same time national legislatives lost competencies,
executive powers increased on the whole in the EU multi-level system, and
legislative powers decreased (Mény 2003; Føllesdal and Hix 2006). Moreover,
powers also shifted to the judiciary realm. In sum, decision-making powers in
the EU multi-level system are constantly withdrawn from the realm of repre-
sentative democracy and political participation (Habermas 2001). The balance
switches in favor of an executive and judiciary dimension of the classical balance
of powers, at the expense of the legislative (Mény 2003; Diez Medrano 2009).
For many EU institutions, except the EP, not only are legitimation chains still
long and rather untransparent, but accountability is also not easily claimed. Input
legitimacy is thus still weaker on the EU level than in the democratic struc-
tures of member states (Beetham and Lord 1998; Bellamy and Castiglione 2003).
Since these continually lost competencies to the EU level by different ways and
means, European integration has led to a net loss of input legitimacy in the
multi-level system (Beetham and Lord 1998, 17–19; Habermas 1999, 186–87).
A New Perspective on the EU’s Democratic Deficits

Beyond this brief restatement of the arguments about the democratic deficit
in the EU, it must be stated that, actually, four core dimensions of demo-
cratic quality are insufficient in this context: (i) agenda control (Dahl 2000);
(ii) horizontal and vertical accountability; (iii) responsiveness; and (iv) equality
(Diamond and Morlino 2004). All in all, the EU thus appears as a kind of de-
fective democracy (Merkel 2004). These deficiencies are decisively linked to
the complexity of the EU’s system, which leads to an accumulation of the seven
problem fields described above and which can be briefly analyzed as follows (for
an expanded discussion, see Wiesner 2019, 281–301):
1. Over-bureaucratization: Consensus-building and bureaucracy dominate

in decision-making processes in the EU system (see in detail Tömmel
2014, 171) at the expense of democratic deliberation and publicity. Processes
144 Claudia Wiesner
such as trilogues (see below) and comitology that largely take place behind
closed doors and in expert circles depoliticize the EU and withdraw
decision-making from the realm of public and/or parliamentary deliberation.
2. Expert bodies: There are a number of expert bodies with executive
competencies that have been created over the years, and they are also
largely withdrawn and decoupled from the realm of public representative
decision-making. EU agencies, as well as private consultancy firms that
work for the Commission are examples here, but so are the Troika and
involvement of the International Monetary Fund (IMF, see below).
3. Over-constitutionalization: The treaties in themselves limit the possible
realm for democratic deliberation and decision-making, as they limit the
policy areas that are subject to it well beyond the extent that is usual in
national representative democracies (see Grimm 2017).
These three problem clusters have a strongly de-democratizing and depo-

liticizing effect. They limit the realm for public deliberation and politicized
decision-making, and they limit accountability in both horizontal and vertical
directions, as well as transparency. The case of trilogues—informal negotiations
between EP, Commission, and Council representatives on legislative projects
taking place before the parliamentary readings—illustrates what I mean here.
The introduction of legislative co-decision between the EP and the Council
has led to an extensive usage of such trilogues (Farrell and Héritier 2007; Ras-
mussen 2012). Committees or the plenary send a draft law to the trilogue body,
where it is negotiated between the representatives of the three institutions.
In most cases, trilogues lead to so-called early agreements on legislation. The
legislation in question is then usually prepared so that it is approved in the first
EP reading (European Parliament 2017; European Parliament 2018b, 2018c). In
other words, an agreement has been reached between Commission, Council,
and EP in the trilogue meetings, and parliamentary deliberation serves the
purpose of adding a rubber stamp. The number of legislative acts thus adopted
on the basis of the first reading has increased remarkably since the introduction
of co-decision, that is, in the legislature 2009–14, when 85% of the legislative
files were accepted on first reading (European Parliament 2018c). The degree of
first reading decisions has been going down slightly since. Between July 1, 2014
and April 5, 2017, 75% of legislative projects were decided upon in first readings
(European Parliament 2018a). While the EP claims that trilogues are linked to
a need for efficiency (European Parliament 2018c), non-governmental organi-
zations see it much more critically (EDRI) and so does the academic literature
(Reh 2014; Roederer-Rynning and Greenwood 2015). In short, parliamentary
deliberation, transparency, and publicity, principles embodied in the procedure
of having several parliamentary readings of a law in plenary, are decisively re-
duced by early agreements and trilogues. Decision-making is thus taken away
from the public nature of parliamentary debates and pushed into the realm of
non-public bodies without direct legitimation. This reduces the deliberative

function of parliament, as well as its control of, and responsibility for, decisions
ultimately taken.
The fourth problem cluster regards a diversification of governance modes
in the EU:
4. Differentiated integration: There are different degrees of integration

in different policy areas, and there are different degrees of integration
among different groups of member states. The EU is hence dispersed into
a great variety of different regulatory regimes and schemes, ranging from
co- decision in the common market to the intergovernmentally structured
Common Foreign and Security Policy, the Euro Group that simply unites
the Euro-Countries, to the Schengen System that is another structure half
apart. This dispersion of a polity as big as the EU also creates differing
patterns of legitimization and control. The diverse governance modes in
the EU and different modes of decision-making in the different fields ham-
per transparency and accountability because it is unclear who actually has
taken a decision and who is included, and how the decision-making pro-
cess went, even to experts.
The case of financial crisis governance illustrates the problem here: depending
on which level is concerned (EU or member states), which kind of measure
and instrument (European Stability Mechanism (ESM), Six-pack, Two-pack),
and which status the respective state has (debtor or creditor), the effects of crisis
governance on representative democracy vary. First, there are measures that
fall under the regime of the Lisbon Treaty and have been voted upon with the
participation of the EP, such as the Six-pack and Two-pack measures. Second,
other measures are excluded from the treaty framework, such as the ESM and
its predecessors and the Fiscal Compact. Those are based on new intergovern-
mental treaties and decisions and hence fall outside the official realm of the
Lisbon Treaty and the checks and balances it establishes. Third, implementation
of financial aid legislation has led to different kinds of attempts by governments
and executives to strengthen their powers at the expense of legislatures: for
instance, by using fast-track procedures in decision-making. These attempts
have been successful in several cases; in others, such as in Germany, they failed:
in the German case, the Constitutional Court stopped the executive attempt to
introduce fast-track procedures in financial aid decision-making (for an over-
view on these dynamics, see Maatsch 2017).
All this means that a system of supervision and new bodies emerged that
decisively limited the competence of national legislatures, leading to the de-
terioration or circumvention of national democratic institutions. The new in-
stitutions amplify existing EU accountability and transparency problems: it is
difficult to determine who is to be held accountable for budgetary decisions
146 Claudia Wiesner
and austerity. Moreover, all crisis governance institutions brought a power

shift from legislatives to executives and experts. In addition, the new inter-
governmental institutions bypass the progresses to supranational representa-
tive democracy obtained in the EU over the last decades by excluding the
EP. It is a decisive legitimization problem to have shifted substantial parts of
the decision-making competencies both outside EU and most of the national
representative institutions. Accordingly, crisis governance has been severely
judged in the academic debate (see Crum 2013; Majone 2014; Bellamy and
Weale 2015; in the following, see also Wiesner 2017b; Wiesner 2019, 261–79)
and in the public debate.
The fifth problem is also one that harms national democratic standards. Eco-
nomic liberalism, i.e. the creation of the internal market and the abolition of
market obstacles, led to cutting them down.
5. Negative integration: In the EU, negative integration dominates over

positive integration (Scharpf 1999). With this concept, Scharpf wants to
emphasize the fact that market creation in the European Union, much
more than on the creation of new rules and common standards (“positive
integration”), was based on what he terms “negative integration,” i.e. the
abolition or reduction of national social standards because they were con-
sidered as obstacles to market integration (Scharpf 1999).
The reasons for this dominance are manifold: on the one hand, negative integra-
tion has corresponded to policy preferences of governments and EP majorities. On
the other hand, the discrepancies between richer and poorer EU member states
favor negative integration. Negative integration is wished for by both as it facilitates
market access and trade. Positive integration, that is, raising new standards, is not
wished for by the poorer states, as they tend to profit from social dumping and a race
to the bottom (Hix and Høyland 2011, 209–15). This leads to regulatory diversity
and hinders the setting up of common new standards, for instance, regarding social
rights. Judgments of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) have added up into this
panorama. In numerous cases, they have led to abolishing social and democratic
standards, such as in the notorious cases of Rüffert and Laval. In the Laval case, the
ECJ decided that national governmental actors and also trade unions can only take
action in the few cases touched upon by a specific EU legal act, the posted workers
directive. In all other cases, legal action or strike against companies that sidetrack
national social standards is legally excluded (see in detail Wiesner 2019: 249–260).
The points discussed, finally, hint at two more problem fields that will be
discussed in the concluding section of this chapter:
6. The EU’s common good: All this underlines that, so far, there is no agree-
ment about what, if anything, constitutes the EU’s common good. There is
not even an agreement on the basic goals of the EU. Should it just continue
to create a common market? Should we rebuild and cut back the EU? Or
should it become a truly supranational federation?
These questions have been contested since the first conceptions of integration
were put forward (Wiesner 2019), and it seems necessary to open the debate
yet again. Besides a lack of debate, the institutional setting favors dissensus in
this respect. While the EU’s supranational bodies, the EP and Commission, are
oriented toward the EU, its intergovernmental bodies, the Council and EC, are
oriented toward the particular national interests (see Tömmel 2014, 324–30).
Moreover, while national governments work on the basis of a short-term logic,
as they want to be re-elected, EU institutions are much more independent
of electoral choices (see Hix and Høyland 2011, 334). This situation creates a
tension and a tendency in the EU’s system that, in a very general way, hinders
an overall orientation toward an EU common good. Such an orientation, how-
ever, should be a basic principle of all institutions of a polity.
7. The split between the EU citizens being citizens in a legal sense, but only a
limited sovereign and a limited demos, further accentuates these problems.
Approaching Possible Solutions

Having discussed the complex setting of the EU’s democratic deficits, what
can be done to safeguard and revitalize democracy in the EU? Regarding
the problem cluster of over-bureaucratization and expert dominance (1 and 2
above), its weight could be drastically reduced by just filling the democratic
bodies that there are with active life. The problem of trilogues, for example,
is not that they withdraw decisions from parliament, as parliamentary com-
mittees and the plenary are involved in trilogues from the beginning to the
end. The problem is one of weights and substance: if the most decisive part of
the decision-making process is carried out behind closed doors by experts in
non-transparent negotiating circles, transparency and democratic accountabil-
ity are decisively cut down, even if, in the end, parliament and its committees
are involved just as they should be formally and legally. But nobody, then,
prohibits the EP from using its co-decision powers to the fullest extent possi-
ble and shifting the substantial weight of parliamentary debates and decisions
back to the parliamentary and public bodies and arenas. Such a shift would
also increase the EP’s horizontal accountability and legitimacy, as well as its
responsiveness.
(3) Regarding over-constitutionalization, more room for democratic delib-
eration is possible and needed at the EU level and within the multi-level system.
This closely refers to the dimension of agenda control mentioned. A broad solu-
tion here would be to de-constitutionalize the EU and to turn a large part of
the EU’s primary law into secondary law. Thus, economic policy goals, which
148 Claudia Wiesner
are currently largely fixed by the treaties, would be made subject to political
debate and politicized decision-making—just as it is usual in most representa-
tive democracies, by having public debates and several parliamentary readings
on an issue. But this change would be a major treaty change, and in the EU’s
current situation, it seems highly unlikely that it could be obtained, especially
as not all the member states’ governments (and Germany first in rank) would
subscribe to the goal of politicizing, democratizing, and regulating economic
policy-making in the EU. Nevertheless, there are a number of policy areas that
are already potentially subject to political and controversial deliberation and
decision-making, both at the EU and at the national level. Existing differenti-
ated and non-transparent decision-making structures, in combination with the
preferences of national governments, hinder open debate in many cases. Why
shouldn’t we, for instance, debate austerity policies in all Euro Group member
states, in a similar vein as we debate national pension scheme reforms? And
why shouldn’t debates about EP decisions on the budget be subject to EU-wide
political discussion? Similarly, it can be asked why Council and EC do not have
more controversial and more public political debates: they are, on the one hand,
similar to governments that, according to the classical tradition of both parlia-
mentarism and presidentialism, do not meet in public. But, on the other hand,
they take on parliamentary functions when they discuss the EU’s budget or EU
laws. Accordingly these debates should be public as they are in parliaments. But
currently, Council sessions are only public when the Council acts as a legislator,
and EC meetings are never public.
The next two problem clusters, (4) differentiated integration and (5) nega-
tive integration, require solutions within the multi-level system. The question
is how to restore transparency and accountability, and how to limit the ef-
fects of negative integration, especially when it comes to achievements that are
crucial for democratic standards such as social citizenship rights. In brief (for
detailed discussions, see Wiesner 2017a, 2017b), there are two possible ways to
approach the problem of keeping up democratic standards in the multi-level
system, one that is narrow and one that is wider.
In the narrow solution, the EU continues to rule only part of the policies
that are carried out within the multi-level system and the member states, and
hence only part of those policies are regulated in accordance with the EU
treaties and the checks and balances they establish. The solution then is to
defend what there is to be defended, that is, to hedge the backfire effects on
national representative democracies and to protect transparency, accountabil-
ity, and vertical balances of powers. There would be a mechanism to safeguard
and protect national representative systems, for example, by defining a broad
set of core national social standards and a broad range of core rights for national
parliaments.
In the further reaching solution, the EU would be fully integrated. The
EU would then decide or co-decide on all, or almost all, of the policies that
are currently ruled by democratic nation-states. Differences between fully and

partly integrated policy fields and different modes of regulation, law-making,
and policy-making would be reduced and finally abolished. At the same time,
co-decision should become the legislative procedure in all of the EU’s policy
fields. This system of full integration would stop differentiated integration and
submit all policy areas to one mode of legitimation. Governance of financial
aid and the Euro Group would then need to be submitted to the EU treaties’
framework. But this, again, would require a thorough treaty change that is
neither realistic nor workable at the moment. When discussing which of these
solutions is realistic, it thus becomes apparent that the first one, the narrow
solution, will be much easier to obtain than the second.
Demos-Building via Politicization?

All this leads to the last two problem fields mentioned above. These merit
further substantial discussion, namely, how the EU common good could be
determined, how the distance between EU citizens and elites could be reduced,
and how the EU citizenry could turn into a stronger demos. On the one hand,
these problems are emphasized by the reaction of the citizens of EU member
states to the crisis and their withdrawal of support. The outcomes of prob-
lem clusters (1)–(5) have clearly diminished national democratic standards and
achievements; equally apparently, these outcomes are also less and less in tune
with citizens’ policy preferences. Decreasing support rates during the financial
crisis are just one indicator here, while the increase in support for EU-critical
parties throughout all EU member states is another. Simply put, EU citizens in
many member states disagree more and more with their elites’ way of ruling the
EU, especially in the crisis (Offe 2015).
But, as was described regarding the problem clusters (6) and (7), the problem
goes still deeper. Insofar as democratic practices are from a normative point of
view at least as important as democratic institutions for democracy, it will be
decisive for the democratic character of the EU to strengthen an EU-related
demos. This means that if EU citizens continue to participate in elections but
do not identify much with the polity they are voting on, and therefore would
probably not engage in much other political activity, then EU democratization
in general will stay weak. If we want more democratic practice and deliberation
in and about the EU, a demos that accounts for all this is needed. But how can
a positive interrelation between demos development and strong EU democra-
tization be conceptualized? One obvious step to both decrease the distance
between EU citizens and elites, and lay a ground for further EU democratiza-
tion by defining a common good is to open up the spaces and opportunities for
political debate and contestation and to allow for and enhance an open debate
on what is, what should be, the EU common good. Following what was said
above, if the institutional system of the EU were further democratized, and the
150 Claudia Wiesner
EP gained more parliamentary competencies, if the EU were more politicized,

this would increase the chances of an EU demos developing. The other way
around, it has to be said that every political activity directed to the EU will
actively contribute to the development of an active demos and stronger democ-
ratization. As Ankersmit has emphasized, the political act of representation cre-
ates the represented (Ankersmit 2002). This means that the actions of electing
representatives and then the representatives representing the citizens not only
establish a legitimizing link but also define both the representatives and those
represented in their roles.
This means, as I have said, that we need more EU-directed participation,
deliberation, and contestation. Other than remaining limited to expert cir-
cles, EU decision-making procedures, as well as the course of integration itself,
should become a subject of political and public debate and political and demo-
cratic decision-making. This, speaking generally, is what has been referred to as
politicization of the EU, or European integration, in the academic debate (see
Statham and Trenz 2013; Hutter et al. 2016; see also the discussion in Wiesner
Ed. 2019 and 2020b, as well as Kauppi and Wiesner 2018).
Conceptualizing the Link between Politicization and

Democratization of the EU
In a very general sense, the academic debate on EU politicization describes a
change in the actors and arenas that shape EU integration, switching from be-
ing an elite-driven project to a process that is influenced by different political
stakes in different arenas. The link between democratization and politiciza-
tion in this context is controversially discussed (on the following see in detail
Wiesner 2020a). An argument that discusses EU politicization as a potential
obstacle for EU integration stems from Hooghe and Marks (Hooghe and Marks
2009), who discuss the effects of politicization on national party systems. They
describe politicization as a key mechanism that has changed public support for
integration into “constraining dissensus”: as citizens no longer want to follow
and support the elite project without questions, their support for integration
declines; they want explanations for integration as well as political conflict
about it. For Hooghe and Marks, this endangers the integration process be-
cause parties and governments now tend to take into account their citizen’s
preferences and hence their EU-critical attitudes (Hooghe and Marks 2009, 9).
This is why Eurosceptic parties gain support, decisions in integration policy
get more public and more contested, political parties position themselves more
publicly with regard to integration, and last but not least, even the EU institu-
tions become internally politicized because the new cleavages are carried into
what formerly was the realm of experts. Possible consequences of politicization
that are discussed by Hooghe and Marks, finally, are two: either a differentiated
integration of the EU or its disintegration.
Hooghe and Marks conceptualize a negative interrelation between EU

politicization and effective EU integration—the end of permissive consen-
sus leading to politicization linked to citizen dissatisfaction, which enhances
euroscepticism, and this hinders EU integration. Their account presents part
of the reactions on EU politicization quite well, as the results of the Brexit
vote underline. In conceptual terms, however, this politicization model de-
picts only one possible relation between EU politicization and EU integra-
tion that I suggest to term a pessimist top-down model of EU politicization:
dynamics are conceptualized to work top-down (citizens are not active but
they grant or withdraw support and parties drive the politicization process)
and the interrelation between politicization and integration is a negative one
(politicization hinders integration). The trade-off that is implicitly claimed is
one between ongoing EU integration and politicization of the EU, or, more
sharply put, one between a continued integration and democracy and its possi-
ble effects— citizens being interested, criticizing the EU, and eventually voting
for Eurosceptic parties.
Still, even if in reality, we have seen an outcome along the lines of this pes-
simistic top-down model of EU integration—Brexit being the most prominent
current example—there is no necessary cause-effect relation. More concretely:
it is not a causal relation (in the sense of (a) entails (b)) that elites will neces-
sarily face opposition when integration becomes politicized, i.e. an issue of
political debate and conflict. Accordingly, politicization does not necessarily
create anti-EU opposition. Conceptually, there is a potential, but not a causal
link between the two—elites may face opposition with the end of permissive
consensus, but they also may not face such opposition. As such, there are several
possibilities as a result of the politicization of EU integration and attempts to
create more of an EU demos:
1. Elites continue the established train of integration—in that case, citizen

support will probably shrink more. This is very much what we saw hap-
pening in the peak of the financial crisis.
2. Elites stop integration.
3. There is increasing political debate on integration and this leads to in-
creased legitimacy and increased citizen support.
Classical functionalist and neofunctionalist accounts on politicization under-

line these arguments further. It is very useful to look at these classical texts of
EU integration theory that were written at a time when the integration pro-
cess was in its beginnings, as they contain fruitful reflections on the effects of
EU politicization. Three key texts by Schmitter (Schmitter 1969), Haas (Haas
1968), and Lindberg and Scheingold (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970) open dif-
ferent possibilities, dynamics, and directions of EU politicization. Following
the accounts by both Lindberg/Scheingold and Haas, we also encounter the
152 Claudia Wiesner
idea that upon the end of permissive consensus, elites will, or at least may,
face opposition. But this is not to say, and this is important to underline, that
this will cause problems for integration as Lindberg and Scheingold explicitly
state (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970, 41). Ernst Haas even sees rising economic
dissatisfaction as a possible source of more demands for political integration
(Haas 1968, 13). He mentions several possible pathways and positive linkages
between EU politicization and the continuation of integration. And Philippe
Schmitter’s (Schmitter 1969) account on politicization even conceptualizes a
potentially positive interrelation between politicization and demos-building: if
EU integration becomes more controversial, this leads to a widening of the au-
dience and more debate, and in consequence a manifest redefinition of mutual
objectives. As a consequence, we experience a shift in actor expectancies and
loyalty toward the new regional organization, i.e. the EU.
Schmitter, moreover, conceptualizes an interactive and dynamic relation-
ship between citizens and elites: instead of citizens being limited to granting
or withdrawing support, citizens can become audience, and they can redefine
mutual objectives (at least his model opens up the possibility). This political
process reminds us of what happens in nation-state representative democracies
as well: if citizens do not like a policy, they can debate and try to change it.
Hence, rather than a politicization, this account could also be termed a nor-
malization of EU politics toward the standards of representative democracy. I
suggest to term the ideas that were just sketched an optimist dynamic model of
politicization.
Four Politicization Models

What has been discussed above underlines that we cannot assume a pre-
established path for politicization and its effects on the EU—these can very well
be either detrimental for the EU or beneficial for its democratization (on the
following see in detail Wiesner 2020a). Politicization can lead to creating new
public spaces and enhance public debate, which will lead to more transparency
of policy debates and decisions, and enable an inclusion of civil society actors
(see also Statham and Trenz 2013).
In addition to a positive dynamic model and a pessimist top-down model of
politicization, I would like to argue that a pessimist dynamic model and an op-
timist top-down model are also possible, as the directions and pathways in EU
politicization can be various: in an optimist top-down model, actor involve-
ment into EU affairs might remain unchanged, but still—for example, because
the EU’s policy outputs were deemed more satisfactory by the citizens—EU
support could increase. Change in that model would be introduced top-down,
i.e. in the established way of EU elites making and implementing policy de-
cisions. In a pessimist dynamic model, which represents the downside of the
optimist dynamic model, citizens would engage much more actively in EU
affairs than used to be the case—but this would lead to them increasing not
their identification with the EU or their EU support but their EU criticism, for
instance, because EU policies still would not satisfy them.
I do not claim either of these models to be more realistic than another—
politics is marked by contingency, and one never knows the outcome of a
process before it ended. To look once more at the Brexit case, the Brexit ref-
erendum was an outcome mostly of a process fitting the pessimist top-down
model, in a mix with the pessimist dynamic model. But while, in October
2019, we still wait for a decision on when (or whether) Brexit will ultimately
take place, British turnout in the EP elections in 2019 decisively increased as
compared to 2014, which can be explained in terms of the two optimist models
of politicization. However, nearly one-third of the British voters voted for a
party that advocates Brexit, and this again fits the pessimist dynamic model.
Conclusion
To conclude, it is decisive to politicize the EU and to enhance political debates
about EU policies and the course of integration. This is not something that can
be declared or institutionalized, but it is something that can be done purpose-
fully by political parties, politicians, even bureaucrats, and also by interested and
active citizens and NGOs. In the same way that ideas and concepts on the EU
were brought forward by thinkers, intellectuals, politicians, and activists before
and in the early days of integration (Wiesner 2019), it can and should happen
anew today. There is no reason not to have an open, public, and political debate
about the EU and its political goals. On the contrary, if defenders of representa-
tive democracy do not want to have this debate, it will only be led by extremists,
populists, and anti-democrats. After what has been said, it does not seem an op-
tion just to wait and see. Lingering disintegration (Britain might not have been
the last candidate to exit), rising EU criticism, increasing problems of governance
and cooperation at the EU level (as in the field of migration and refugees), and
increasing inequalities both among citizens and among EU member states rather
put pressure to act on all the actors named—member states governments and par-
liaments, the EP, the Commission, and even the CJEU and the European Cen-
tral Bank (ECB). It is time for a new debate on the EU and its democratic future.
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10
EASTERN EUROPE’S ILLIBERAL
REVOLUTION
The Long Road to Democratic Decline
Ivan Krastev
Introduction1
In 1991, when the West was busy celebrating its victory in the Cold War and
the apparent spread of liberal democracy to all corners of the world, the polit-
ical scientist Samuel Huntington issued a warning against excessive optimism.
In an article for the Journal of Democracy titled “Democracy’s Third Wave,”
Huntington (1991) pointed out that the two previous waves of democratiza-
tion, from the 1820s to the 1920s and from 1945 to the 1960s, had been fol-
lowed by “reverse waves,” in which “democratic systems were replaced […] by
historically new forms of authoritarian rule.” A third reverse wave was possible,
he suggested, if new authoritarian great powers could demonstrate the contin-
ued viability of nondemocratic rule or “if people around the world come to
see the United States,” long a beacon of democracy, “as a fading power beset
by political stagnation, economic inefficiency, and social chaos” (Huntington
1991, quoted in Li 2016).
Huntington died in 2008, but had he lived, even he would probably have
been surprised to see that liberal democracy is now under threat not only in
countries that went through democratic transitions in recent decades, such
as Brazil and Turkey, but also in the West’s most established democracies.
Authoritarianism, meanwhile, has reemerged in Russia and been strengthened
in China, and foreign adventurism and domestic political polarization have
dramatically damaged the United States’ global influence and prestige.
Perhaps the most alarming development has been the change of heart in
eastern Europe. Two of the region’s poster children for postcommunist democ-
ratization, Hungary and Poland, have seen conservative populists win sweep-
ing electoral victories while demonizing the political opposition, scapegoating
158 Ivan Krastev
minorities, and undermining liberal checks and balances. Other countries in

the region, including the Czech Republic and Romania, seem poised to fol-
low. In a speech in 2014, one of the new populists, Hungarian Prime Minister
Viktor Orban, outlined his position on liberalism: “A democracy is not neces-
sarily liberal. Just because something is not liberal, it still can be a democracy.”2
To maintain global competitiveness, he went on to say, “we have to abandon
liberal methods and principles of organizing a society.” Although Orban gov-
erns a small country, the movement he represents is of global importance. In
the West, where the will of the people remains the main source of political
legitimacy, his style of illiberal democracy is likely to be the major alternative
to liberalism in the coming decades.
Why has democracy declared war on liberalism most openly in eastern
Europe? The answer lies in the peculiar nature of the revolutions of 1989,
when the states of eastern Europe freed themselves from the Soviet empire.
Unlike previous revolutions, the ones in 1989 were concerned not with utopia
but with the idea of normality—that is, the revolutionaries expressed a desire
to lead the type of normal life already available to people in western Europe.
Once the Berlin Wall fell, the most educated and liberal eastern Europeans
became the first to leave their countries, provoking major demographic and
identity crises in the region. And as the domestic constituencies for liberal
democracy immigrated to the West, international actors such as the EU and
the United States became the face of liberalism in eastern Europe, just as their
own influence was waning. This set the stage for the nationalist revolt against
liberalism seizing the region today.
People Power
Many have found the rise of eastern European populism difficult to explain.
After Poland’s populist Law and Justice party (known by its Polish abbrevia-
tion, PiS) won a parliamentary majority in 2015, Adam Michnik, one of the
country’s liberal icons, lamented, “Sometimes a beautiful woman loses her
mind and goes to bed with a bastard.” Populist victories, however, are not a
mystifying one-off but a conscious and repeated choice: the right-wing popu-
list party Fidesz has won two consecutive parliamentary elections in Hungary,
and in opinion polls, PiS maintains a towering lead over its rivals. Eastern Eu-
rope seems intent on marrying the bastard.
Some populist successes can be attributed to economic troubles: Orban was
elected in 2010, after Hungary’s economy had shrunk by 6.6% in 2009. But
similar troubles cannot explain why the Czech Republic, which enjoys one of
the lowest unemployment rates in Europe, voted for a slew of populist parties
in last year’s parliamentary elections or why intolerance is on the rise in eco-
nomically successful Slovakia. Poland is the most puzzling case. The country
had the fastest-growing economy in Europe between 2007 and 2017, and it has
Eastern Europe’s Illiberal Revolution 159
seen social mobility improve in recent years. Research by the Polish sociolo-
gist Maciej Gdula has shown that Poles’ political attitudes do not depend on
whether they individually benefited from the postcommunist transition. The
ruling party’s base includes many who are satisfied with their lives and have
shared in their country’s prosperity.
The details of eastern Europe’s populist turn vary from country to country,
as do the character and policies of individual populist governments. As Dalibor
Rohac (2017) reports, in Hungary, Fidesz has used its constitutional majority
to rewrite the rules of the game: Orban’s tinkering with the country’s electoral
system has turned his “plurality to a supermajority,” in the words of the sociol-
ogist Kim Lane Scheppele. Corruption, moreover, is pervasive. David Frum
(2017) quoted an anonymous observer who said of Fidesz’s system: “The benefit
of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, and
more the power to protect the guilty.”
Poland’s government has also sought to dismantle checks and balances, espe-
cially through its changes to the constitutional court. In contrast to the Hun-
garian government, however, it is basically clean when it comes to corruption.
Its policies are centered less on controlling the economy or creating a loyal
middle class and more on the moral reeducation of the nation. The Polish
government has tried to rewrite history, most notably through a recent law
making it illegal to blame Poland for the Holocaust. In the Czech Republic,
meanwhile, Prime Minister Andrej Babis led his party to victory last year by
promising to run the state like a company.
Yet beneath these differences lie telling commonalities. Across eastern Eu-
rope, a new illiberal consensus is emerging, marked by xenophobic nationalism
and supported, somewhat unexpectedly, by young people who came of age af-
ter the demise of communism. If the liberals who dominated in the 1990s were
preoccupied with the rights of ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, this new
consensus is about the rights of the majority.
Wherever they take power, conservative populists use the government to
deepen cultural and political polarization and champion what the American
historian Richard Hofstadter termed “the paranoid style” in politics. This style
traffics heavily in conspiracy theories, such as the belief, shared by many PiS
voters, that the 2010 plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski—the
brother of the PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczysnki—was the product of an assassina-
tion rather than an accident. This paranoia also surfaces in Fidesz’s assertions
that Brussels, aided by the Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros, secretly
plans to flood Hungary with migrants. Wherever they take power, conserva-
tive populists use the government to deepen cultural and political polarization.
Eastern Europe’s populists also deploy a similar political vocabulary, casting
themselves as the authentic voice of the nation against its internal and exter-
nal enemies. As the political scientist Jan-Werner Müller has argued, “Popu-
lists claim that they and they alone represent the people,” a claim that is not
160 Ivan Krastev
empirical but “always distinctly moral.” Fidesz and PiS do not pretend to stand
for all Hungarians or all Poles, but they do insist that they stand for all true
Hungarians and all true Poles. They transform democracy from an instrument
of inclusion into one of exclusion, delegitimizing nonmajoritarian institutions
by casting them as obstacles to the will of the people.
Another common feature of eastern European populism is a Janus-faced at-
titude toward the EU. According to the latest Eurobarometer polls, eastern Eu-
ropeans are among the most pro-EU publics on the continent, yet they vote for
some of the most Euroskeptical governments. These governments, in turn, use
Brussels as a rhetorical punching bag while benefiting from its financial largess.
The Hungarian economy grew by 4.6% between 2006 and 2015, yet a study by
KPMG and the Hungarian economic research firm GKI estimated that without
EU funds, it would have shrunk by 1.8%. And Poland is the continent’s biggest
recipient of money from the European Structural and Investment Funds, which
promote economic development in the EU’s less developed countries.
Support for illiberal populism has been growing across the continent for
years now, but understanding its outsize appeal in eastern Europe requires re-
thinking the history of the region in the decades since the end of communism.
It is the legacy of the 1989 revolutions, combined with the more recent shocks
delivered by the decline of United States power and the crisis of the EU, that
set in motion the populist explosion of today.
Liberty, Fraternity, Normality

Although eastern European populism was already on the rise by the beginning
of the current decade, the refugee crisis of 2015–16 made it the dominant polit-
ical force in the region. Opinion polls indicate that the vast majority of eastern
Europeans are wary of migrants and refugees. A September 2017 study by Ipsos
revealed that only 5% of Hungarians and 15% of Poles believe that immigration
has had a positive impact on their country and that 67% of Hungarians and 51%
of Poles think that their countries’ borders should be closed to refugees entirely.
As Elizabeth Collett (2017) discusses, during the refugee crisis, images of
migrants streaming into Europe sparked a demographic panic across eastern
Europe, where people began to imagine that their national cultures were under
the threat of vanishing. The region today is made up of small, aging, ethnically
homogeneous societies—for example, only 1.6% of those living in Poland were
born outside the country, and only 0.1% are Muslims. In fact, cultural and eth-
nic diversity, rather than wealth, is the primary difference between eastern and
western Europe today. Compare Austria and Hungary, neighboring countries
of similar size that were once unified under the Habsburg empire. Foreign
citizens make up a little under 2% of the Hungarian population; in Austria,
they make up 15%. Only 6% of Hungarians are foreign-born, and these are
overwhelmingly ethnic Hungarian immigrants from Romania. In Austria, the
equivalent figure is 16%. In the eastern European political imagination, cul-

tural and ethnic diversity is seen as an existential threat, and opposition to this
threat forms the core of the new illiberalism.
Some of this fear of diversity may be rooted in historical traumas, such as the
disintegration of the multicultural Habsburg empire after World War I and the
Soviet occupation of eastern Europe after World War II. But the political shock
of the refugee crisis cannot be explained by the region’s history alone. Rather,
eastern Europeans realized during the course of the refugee crisis that they
were facing a new global revolution. This was not a revolution of the masses
but one of migrants; it was inspired not by ideological visions of the future but
by images of real life on the other side of a border. If globalization has made
the world a village, it has also subjected it to the tyranny of global comparisons.
These days, people in the poorer parts of the world rarely compare their lives
with those of their neighbors; they compare them instead with those of the most
prosperous inhabitants of the planet, whose wealth is on full display, thanks to
the global diffusion of communications technologies. The French liberal phi-
losopher Raymond Aron was right when he observed, five decades ago, that
“with humanity on the way to unification, inequality between peoples takes
on the significance that inequality between classes once had.” If you are a poor
person in Africa who seeks an economically secure life for your children, the
best you can do for them is to make sure they are born in a rich country, such
as Denmark, Germany, or Sweden—or, failing that, the Czech Republic or Po-
land. Change increasingly means changing your country, not your government.
And eastern Europeans have felt threatened by this revolution.
The great irony is that although eastern Europe today is reacting with panic
to mass migration, the revolutions of 1989 were the first in which the desire to
exit one’s country, rather than to gain a greater voice within it, was the primary
agent of change. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many in the former commu-
nist bloc expressed their wish for change by immigrating to the West rather than
staying home to participate in democratic politics. In 1989, eastern Europeans
were not dreaming of a perfect world; they were dreaming of a normal life in
a normal country. If there was a utopia shared by both the left and the right
during the region’s postcommunist transition, it was the utopia of normality.
Experiments were forbidden. In 1990, Czech Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus
(who later became prime minister and then president) said of finding a middle
ground between capitalism and socialism, “The third way is the fastest way to
the Third World.” Eastern Europeans dreamed that European unification would
proceed along the same lines as German reunification, and in the early 1990s,
many Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles envied the East Germans, who were issued
German passports overnight and could spend the deutsche mark immediately.
Revolutions as a rule cause major demographic disruptions. When the
French Revolution broke out, many of its opponents ran away. When the
Bolsheviks took power in Russia, millions of Russians fled. But in those cases,
162 Ivan Krastev
it was the defeated, the enemies of the revolution, who saw their futures as
being outside their own country. After the 1989 revolutions, by contrast, it was
those most eager to live in the West, those most impatient to see their countries
change, who were the first to leave. For many liberal-minded eastern Europe-
ans, a mistrust of nationalist loyalties and the prospect of joining the modern
world made emigration a logical and legitimate choice. It was the legacy of the
1989 revolutions that set in motion the populist explosion of today.
As a result, the revolutions of 1989 had the perverse effect of accelerating
population decline in the newly liberated countries of eastern Europe. From
1989 to 2017, Latvia lost 27% of its population, Lithuania 23%, and Bulgaria
almost 21%. Hungary lost nearly 3% of its population in just the last ten years.
And in 2016, around one million Poles were living in the United Kingdom
alone. This emigration of the young and talented was occurring in countries
that already had aging populations and low birthrates. Together, these trends
set the stage for a demographic panic.
It is thus, as Fareed Zakaria (2016) argues, both emigration and the fear
of immigration that best explain the rise of populism in eastern Europe. The
success of nationalist populism, which feeds off a sense that a country’s identity
is under threat, is the outcome of the mass exodus of young people from the
region combined with the prospect of large-scale immigration, which together
set demographic alarm bells ringing. Moving to the West was equivalent to
rising in social status, and, as a result, the eastern Europeans who stayed in their
own countries started feeling like losers who had been left behind. In countries
where most young people dream of leaving, success back home is devalued.
In recent years, a rising desire for self-assertion has also caused eastern Eu-
ropeans to chafe at taking orders from Brussels. Although during the 1990s,
the region’s politicians, eager to join NATO and the EU, had been willing to
follow the liberal playbook, today, they wish to assert their full rights as mem-
bers of the European club. Eastern Europe’s integration into the EU mirrors
at a national level the experience of integration familiar from the stories of
immigrants around the world. First-generation immigrants wish to gain ac-
ceptance by internalizing the values of their host country; second-generation
immigrants, born in the new country, fear being treated as second-class citizens
and often rediscover an interest in the traditions and values of their parents’ cul-
ture. Something similar happened to eastern European societies after joining
the EU. Many people in those countries used to view Brussels’ interference in
their domestic politics as benevolent. Over time, they have started to see it as
an intolerable affront to their nations’ sovereignty.
The Return of Geopolitics

The final ingredient in eastern Europe’s illiberal turn is the deep current of geo-
political insecurity that has always afflicted the region. In 1946, the Hungarian
intellectual Istvan Bibo published a pamphlet called The Misery of the Small States
of Eastern Europe. In it, he argued that democracy in the region would always be
held hostage to the lingering effects of historical traumas, most of them related
to eastern European states’ history of domination by outside powers. Poland,
for instance, ceased to exist as an independent state following its partition by
Austria, Prussia, and Russia in the late 18th century; Hungary, meanwhile, saw
a nationalist revolution crushed in 1849, before losing more than two-thirds of
its territory and one-half of its population in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.
Not only did these historical traumas make eastern European societies fear
and resent external powers, but they also, Bibo argued, secured these countries
in the belief that “the advance of freedom threatens the national cause.” They
have learned to be suspicious of any cosmopolitan ideology that crosses their
borders, whether it be the universalism of the Catholic Church, the liberalism
of the late Habsburg empire, or Marxist internationalism. The Czech writer
and dissident Milan Kundera captured this sense of insecurity well when he de-
fined a small nation as “one whose very existence may be put in question at any
moment.” A citizen of a large country takes his nation’s survival for granted.
“His anthems speak only of grandeur and eternity. The Polish anthem, how-
ever, starts with the verse: ‘Poland has not yet perished.’”
If one effect of eastern Europe’s post-1989 emigration was to kick-start the
demographic panic that would later take full form during the refugee crisis,
another, equally important effect was to deprive countries in the region of the
citizens who were most likely to become domestic defenders of liberal democ-
racy. As a result, liberal democracy in eastern Europe came to rely more and
more on the support of external actors, such as the EU and the United States,
which over time came to be seen as the real constraints on the power of major-
ities in the region. Bucharest’s desire to join the EU, for instance, was primarily
responsible for its decision to resolve a long-running dispute with Hungary
about the rights of ethnic Hungarians in Romania. And the EU’s eligibility
rules, known as the Copenhagen criteria, make legal protections for minorities
a precondition for membership in the union.
The central role of the EU and the United States in consolidating eastern
Europe’s liberal democracies meant that those democracies remained safe only
so long as the dominance of Brussels and Washington in Europe was unques-
tioned. Yet over the last decade, the geopolitical situation has changed. The
United States had already been hobbled by expensive foreign wars and the fi-
nancial crisis before the election of Donald Trump as its president raised serious
questions about Washington’s commitment to its allies. In Europe, meanwhile,
the consecutive shocks of the debt crisis, the refugee crisis, and Brexit have
called the future of the EU itself into question. This came just as Russia, under
the authoritarian government of President Vladimir Putin, was beginning to
reassert itself as a regional power, seizing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and
backing a secessionist insurgency in the country’s east.
164 Ivan Krastev
Huntington predicted in 1991 that a strong, nondemocratic Russia would

pose problems for the liberal democracies of eastern Europe, and the rise of
Putin’s Russia has in fact undermined them. For eastern European leaders
such as Orban, already fed up with liberalism, Putin’s combination of au-
thoritarian rule and anti-Western ideology has served as a model to emulate.
For many Poles, the return of the Russian threat was one more argument
to vote for an illiberal government that could protect the nation. In other
eastern European countries, such as the Baltic states, Russia has simply acted
as a spoiler by attempting to spread disinformation. Across the region, the
return of geopolitical insecurity has contributed to the fading attractiveness
of liberal democracy.
An Illiberal Europe?
Eastern European populism is a recent phenomenon, but it has deep roots in
the region’s politics and is unlikely to go away anytime soon. “The worrying
thing about Orban’s ‘illiberal democracy,’” according to the Hungarian-born
Austrian journalist Paul Lendvai, is that “its end cannot be foreseen.” Indeed,
illiberal democracy has become the new form of authoritarianism that Hun-
tington warned about more than two decades ago. What makes it particularly
dangerous is that it is an authoritarianism born within the framework of de-
mocracy itself.
The new populists are not fascists. They do not believe in the transformative
power of violence, and they are not nearly as repressive as the fascists were. But
they are indifferent to liberal checks and balances and do not see the need for
constitutional constraints on the power of the majority—constraints that form
a central part of EU law. The main challenge posed by eastern European popu-
lism is therefore not to the existence of democracy at the level of the nation but
to the cohesion of the EU. As more countries in the region turn toward illib-
eralism, they will continue to come into conflict with Brussels and probe the
limits of the EU’s power, as Poland has already done with its judicial reforms.
Eventually, the risk is that the EU could disintegrate, and Europe could become
a continent divided and unfree.
Notes

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populism-march.
11
ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY OR
ELECTORAL AUTOCRACY
The Case of Turkey
Gülçin Balamir Coşkun and Aysuda Kölemen
Introduction
Liberal democracy, which has been the ideal and the norm in the Western
world since World War II, spread to other parts of the globe with the third wave
of democratization and the dissolution of the communist regimes in Eastern
Europe (Huntington 1991). A serious challenge to the legitimacy of liberal
democracy accompanied this last wave of expansion (Mounk 2018). A group
of critics questioned the democratic legitimacy of the EU by pointing out a
“democratic deficit” and a “bureaucratic despotism” in EU countries that result
from an empowerment of the EU bureaucracy (see Wiesner in this volume).
However, the perception of a democratic deficit has not remained limited to
the EU. Technocratic structures of nation states have also come under attack for
their inability to meet the needs of the public. This “undemocratic dilemma”
(Mounk 2018) is one of the factors that contributed to the surge of a direct
threat against liberal democracy, that is, illiberal democracy. Although the term
became popular after a speech by Viktor Orbán (2014) discussed by both Marc
Plattner and Ivan Krastev in this volume, Fareed Zakaria (1997) had coined it
earlier for describing regimes in which popular participation is respected by
holding regular elections, but civil liberties and freedoms are under attack.
“Illiberal democracy” is a convenient conceptual tool for populist leaders to
cast themselves as democratic, while dismantling liberal norms and institutions
by breaking the rule of law as well as violating civil rights and freedoms in the
name of “the people” under the guise of responding to the needs and concerns
of the voters that gave them a mandate through elections (Mounk 2018).
This chapter aims to illustrate that the term illiberal democracy is a con-
tradiction in terms that serves as little more than a rhetorical fig leaf for
The Case of Turkey 167
autocratizing regimes by examining the case of the AKP ( Justice and Devel-
opment Party) in Turkey. Liberal democracy is comprised of two pillars: con-
stitutional liberalism and democratic procedure. Constitutional liberalism
limits government authority and protects individual rights and liberties by
instituting the separation of powers and the rule of law, while democracy is
an “institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which in-
dividuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for
the people’s vote” (Schumpeter 1975, 242). Although constitutional liberal-
ism and democracy developed neither simultaneously nor harmoniously, they
are inextricably intertwined because fair and free elections are a prerequisite
for even the most rudimentary and procedural forms of democracy. Fair and
free elections are only possible if the oppositional forces have equal rights
to organize and a chance of winning office through elections as the incum-
bent (Przeworski et al. 1996, 50–51). This organizational capacity depends
on the existence of an “autonomous public opinion,” created and sustained
by a “polycentric structuring of the media and their competitive interplay”
(Sartori 1987, 98, 110) as well as on freedom of expression, freedom of ac-
cess to information, freedom of association, and the protection of individual
rights against arbitrary state intervention, all of which are fundamental ele-
ments of constitutional liberalism. Devoid of liberal rights and protections,
a strong rule of law, and governmental accountability, elections become un-
fair and unfree, and majority rule, which is declared to be the sole measure
of democracy by proponents of illiberal democracies, is undermined. Thus,
“illiberal democracies are always in danger of degenerating into electoral
dictatorships” (Mounk 2018, 100). Autocratizing regimes try to avoid a nega-
tive reaction from the international community by maintaining a democratic
facade and instrumentalizing elections in a thinly veiled effort to legitimize
their autocratic practices.
This chapter examines the degeneration of the fledgling Turkish democracy
of the early 2000s into an electoral autocracy over the course of the AKP pe-
riod. In the first section, we will provide a brief history of the emergence of
the AKP. In the second section, we will review how the AKP imposed itself
as the sole legitimate representative of the people by undermining checks and
balances on the executive branch and weakening governmental accountability.
We conclude that Turkey has devolved into an autocratic regime after 2007,
and note that this authoritarian turn continues to be contested and mitigated by
democratic forces in Turkish society.
The Rise and Transformation of the AKP

Turkey had never been a full democracy since its foundation in 1923. After
the transition to multiparty system in 1950, the socially and religiously con-
servative and free market-oriented Democratic Party (DP) won the elections
168 Gülçin Balamir Coşkun and Aysuda Kölemen
with a landslide over the CHP (Republican People’s Party) that had ruled the
country under a secular single party regime, of which the main ambitions were
modernization, industrialization, secularization, and nation-building (to the
detriment of religious and ethnic minorities) for almost three decades. How-
ever, after ten years in government, the DP was ousted by a military coup in
May 27, 1960. Over the following decades, the military which saw itself as the
true protector of the Republic against its enemies became an inextricable part
of Turkish politics. The March 12, 1971 coup was followed by the September
12 coup in 1980 and the military established its permanent presence behind the
seemingly democratic, electoral politics (Hale 1993; Gürsoy 2017). On Febru-
ary 28, 1997, the military forced the main partner of the governing coalition,
the Islamist Welfare Party (RP), out of the government in what was called a
“post-modern coup.” Despite periods of military rule that brought grave hu-
man rights abuses and curtailment of democratic rights and freedoms, Turkish
democracy managed to survive and flourish for brief periods until the next
crisis arrived.
What precipitated the AKP’s rise to power in 2002 was a series of crises
between 1997 and 2001. Economic stability and democratic reforms appeared
to mark the first term of the AKP between 2002 and 2007. However, after its
decisive reelection victory in 2007, the AKP began to reveal an authoritarian
streak that grew stronger at each turning point.
The Rise of the AKP to Power: An Era of Crises

Founded in 2001, the AKP was the latest incarnation in a series of Islamist
political parties that emerged from the National Outlook (Milli Görüş) move-
ment since the 1960s. Despite garnering 34% of the votes, the AKP gained
nearly two-thirds of the parliamentary seats in 2002 as a result of the Turkish
electoral system. Turkey had been ruled by coalition governments for over a
decade and the AKP did not only form the first single party government in a
long time but was also the first Islamist party to win a parliamentary majority
in Turkish history (Sezer 2002).
The confluence of three major crises—political, economic, and natural—
laid the groundwork for the disintegration of the fragmented center-right and
the unexpected electoral success of the AKP in 2002: the 1997 coup against
Islamists, the 1999 Izmit earthquake, and the 2001 economic crisis. The 1997
military coup against the Islamist-led government came first. The division be-
tween the secular center and the religious-conservative periphery had con-
stituted one of the most fundamental dynamics since the foundation of the
Turkish Republic (Sezer 2002, 15). The military had done little to disguise
its distaste for political Islam and deemed it a grave threat to the secular re-
public. The peripheral religious-conservative majority had typically voted
for center-right parties and Islamist parties remained a small but permanent
actor in the political arena. The hostility and tension between the military and
Islamists were heightened when the RP received the highest percentage of par-
liamentary seats and formed a coalition government with the center-right True
Path Party (DYP) in 1996 (Aslan 2016).
On February 28, 1997, the military-controlled National Security Council is-
sued a memorandum laying out a plan to fight Islamic reactionism that resulted in
the dissolution of the coalition government led by the RP. In January 1998, the RP
was banned by the Constitutional Court of Turkey (TCC) for engaging in anti-
secular activities. Following the coup, Islamist activists and politicians, including
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, were sent to prison, many NGOs associated with political
Islam were closed down, women with headscarves were banned from attending
university, and the tarikahs (Islamic religious orders) were investigated. The Virtue
Party (FP), which succeeded the RP, was also banned in 2001 (Aslan 2016).
The second crisis was the “failure of the Turkish government to deal ef-
fectively with the country’s earthquake hazard” and “the inadequacy of the
state’s response” during the 1999 Izmit earthquake which resulted in 17,000
deaths and many more injuries according to official numbers (although unoffi-
cial estimates range between 35,000 and 50,000) as well as 75,000 collapsed and
heavily damaged households and commercial buildings ( Jacoby and Özerdem
2008, 298). The inadequate response to a disaster of this magnitude led to a
precipitous decline of trust in the government. The ruling parties naturally
bore the brunt of the anger of the electorate.
The third crisis was the 2001 economic collapse, which significantly impov-
erished the nation and led to increased individual and family stress (Aytaç and
Rankin 2008). Many blamed the crisis on the unstable political environment
caused by ever-changing coalitions. The coalition government led by the center-
left Democratic Left Party (DSP) and its partners, the center-right Motherland
Party (ANAP) and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), started implementing
an IMF restructuring program that required belt-tightening and led to further
public discontent (Şenses 2003).
The Turning Points in the Transformation of the AKP

The newly established AKP inherited the political network and infrastructure
of the FP, but positioned itself as a centrist, conservative-religious party to fill
the vacuum left by the vanishing center parties of the crisis-laden late 1990s.
Once in power, the AKP benefited from the economic stability that followed
the IMF restructuring program the previous government had implemented and
the global economic boom that developing economies enjoyed in the 2000s.
Moreover, Erdogan promised and to a certain extent delivered democratic re-
forms to various ethnic, religious, and ideological groups that had suffered from
the dominant Kemalist ideology and the military tutelage of the Republic.
By challenging Kemalist authoritarian politics (Christofis 2018, 15), the AKP
secured support not only from “devout Muslims” but also from liberals and
Kurds who had long-standing grievances against Kemalism. The AKP prom-
ised them a public sphere in which they could participate with their ethnic, re-
ligious, and ideological identities. Simultaneously, the AKP reassured Turkey’s
Western allies and the global markets that had doubts about the Islamist roots of
the party by adopting a democratic and pro-European international discourse.
In this climate of economic stability and political democratization that many
attributed to the political stability provided by a single party government (as
opposed to the unstable coalition governments before), the AKP increased its
vote share to 46.6% in 2007 and 49.8% in 2011.
However, soon after the 2007 elections, the policies and practices of the
AKP began to look less and less democratic, and
what seemed to be a promising reform movement that started during the

early 2000s […] has been replaced by a grim picture of illiberal political
developments that are characterized by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s
power grab, loss of judicial independence, and electoral manipulations.
(Yeşilada 2016, 19)
What defined the post-2007 AKP period was an escalating series of turning
points that sent Turkey down the rabbit hole of autocratization. The first major
turning point was a product of the increasing tension between the government
and the Turkish military. In April 2007, the AKP nominated Abdullah Gül, an
“Islamist” politician, whose wife wore a headscarf, for presidency. The AKP
succeeded in electing Gül by simple majority in the third round of voting in par-
liament. The only opposition party in the parliament, the Republican People’s
Party (CHP), decided to boycott the first round and invalidate the voting because
they argued that a quorum required two-thirds of all members of the parliament
to be present for a presidential vote. After the first round, the CHP challenged
the election in the TCC, arguing that the quorum had not been attained. In
the meantime, the military issued a memorandum on its website stating that “it
should not be forgotten that the Turkish armed forces are a side in this debate
and a staunch defender of secularism” (BBC News 2007). On May 1, the TCC
found the argument of the CHP valid and annulled the results of the presidential
election, forcing Prime Minister Erdoğan to call for an early general election.
When the AKP increased its votes, Erdoğan started presenting himself as the
only representative of the people’s will. The AKP overcame the quorum prob-
lem with the support of the MHP, which had returned to parliament, and elected
Gül as the 11th president of Turkey. From this point onward, Erdoğan started
arguing that he had the electoral mandate to fight military and judicial tutelage.
The AKP government capitalized on its fresh electoral success by imple-
menting reforms that mitigated the role of the military in politics and by
launching judiciary investigations (Ergenekon and Sledgehammer) against
hundreds of active and retired military personnel in 2008 on charges of med-

dling in politics and conspiring to overthrow the elected government. Lib-
eral intellectuals initially welcomed both the legal reforms and the operations
against military officials even if they did not support the AKP because they
believed that the AKP could end the military tutelage in Turkish politics that
had plagued Turkish democracy since the first military intervention in 1960.
However, these reforms and operations were turned into a witch hunt against
secular opposition groups as well as critical groups to retaliate against the per-
secution that Islamists had suffered during the February 28 period and into
an operation against the critics of the government to counter the challenge of
their government during the presidential crisis (Rodrik 2011; Filkins 2013).
The trial and imprisonment of Ahmet Şık is emblematic of this new phase of
the Ergenekon trials. Şık, an anti-militarist journalist, was arrested and im-
prisoned from March 2011 to March 2012 for his investigative book on how
the Gülen movement had infiltrated the state (Şık 2017). The attacks of the
AKP on judicial autonomy started with these trials. Through its “strategic”
alliance (Taş 2018, 397–8) or “obvious marriage of convenience” with the
Gülen movement (an Islamic order that was actively involved in education,
politics, and bureaucracy), the AKP began to exercise an unprecedented level
of control over the judiciary (Şık 2017; DW 2018). The principles of fair trial
and independent judiciary, which had never been strong in the first place, fur-
ther eroded.
The Gezi protests constitute another turning point during the AKP rule.
Up until the Gezi protests, the AKP referred to the constitutional referendum
of 2010 and the third electoral victory in 2011 as conclusive evidence of pop-
ular support for its policies and practices. Erdoğan’s discourse emphasized that
they were acting for the people and in the name of the people. He targeted
the Kemalist military and judiciary elites and accused his critics of collaborat-
ing with them or with foreign enemies. However, the Gezi protests revealed
that contrary to what Erdoğan argued, Turkey had become an autocratic state
in which civil rights and freedoms were under attack. Among other things,
the Gezi occupation was a revolt against this authoritarianism (Tuğal 2013).
During these protests, police violence was so harsh that seven protesters were
killed and thousands of protestors were injured.
The surprising results of the 2015 general elections came with the promise
of a new era in Turkish politics. The critics were voicing increasing dissatisfac-
tion with the autocratic policies of the government on the eve of the elections.
Under the leadership of its co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş, the Peoples’ Dem-
ocratic Party (HDP) reached beyond the traditional base of the pro-Kurdish
political movement and “appealed to the Turkish secular middle class, which
was strongly disappointed by the policies of the AKP government and opposed
the introduction of a presidential system” (Grigoriadis 2016, 42). The HDP led
a surprisingly successful campaign and support for Demirtaş surged outside the
Kurdish regions, too. On June 7, 2015, the party received 13.1% of the votes (up
from around 6% that previous Kurdish parties normally received) and gained
80 seats (up from 40). More critically, the AKP lost its parliamentary majority
in losing many seats to the HDP and was forced to engage in coalition negoti-
ations for the first time since its establishment. However, in July 2015, multiple
terrorist groups began to mount attacks, killing large numbers of civilians in
cities across Turkey. Coalition talks failed and President Erdoğan called for
new elections on November 1. Although the majority of terrorist attacks were
linked to ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) cells in Turkey, the AKP cam-
paigned on an antiterrorism platform and succeeded in linking the terrorist
attacks with the HDP in the minds of many voters. As a result of this strategy,
the HDP lost votes and the AKP regained a parliamentary majority. Although
the share of votes of the HDP dropped to 10.8% due to the climate of terror
and conflict, it became clear that the HDP had become a permanent presence in
the parliament. Soon after the November 1 elections, President Erdoğan called
for lifting the parliamentary immunity of HDP deputies. After a temporary
suspension of parliamentary immunity, 12 HDP parliamentarians, including
the presidential candidate Demirtaş, were arrested.
The final and most drastic turning point that transformed post-2007 Turkey
into an autocracy was the failed coup d’état in 2016 and the declaration of the state
of emergency in its wake. Although the government alleged that the Islamist
Gülen movement was behind the coup attempt, the AKP rejected proposals to
open a parliamentary investigation about the coup, and President Erdoğan—
calling the coup attempt “a blessing from God”—used the coup as an oppor-
tunity to crush the democratic opposition—particularly Kurdish and leftist
movements—in its aftermath. The state of emergency lasted two years. During
this period, 94 elected mayors in Kurdish cities were replaced with government-
appointed trustees. Around 150 media outlets and 1,500 non-governmental or-
ganizations were closed down. More than 107,000 people were dismissed from
public sector jobs, and more than 50,000 people were imprisoned pending trial
(BBC News, 2018). The state of emergency was lifted after a referendum in 2017
that changed Turkey to a presidential system and gave the president vast powers
with virtually no checks and balances from the judiciary and the legislative.
There was no longer any need for the state of emergency because the state of
emergency had been rendered permanent by the new constitution.
Incremental Autocratization
The AKP incrementally undermined all democratic forces and institutions that
could check its expanding power and suppressed its opponents and critics. We
review how the AKP attacked and undermined four crucial spheres of power
in state and society that placed checks on executive authority: the media, the
judiciary, civil society, and academia.
The Media
The AKP government used various methods for bringing the mainstream me-
dia under its full control: reconfiguration of media ownership, intimidation
and criminalization of dissident journalists, broadcasting bans and financial
sanctions, and closing down news agencies, TV stations, and radio channels.
Some big corporations, such as Doğan Group, Doğuş Media, Uzan Holding,

and Çukurova Holding, dominated mainstream Turkish media in the pre-AKP
period, while the Islamist newspapers and TV channels had limited reach.
During the first term of the AKP (2002–7), especially Doğan Group tried to
have good relations with the new government and benefited from this cooper-
ation (Kaya and Çakmur 2010, 531). During the same period, some other me-
dia companies were placed under the control of the Savings Deposit Insurance
Fund (TMSF) because of their debts (Waldman and Çalışkan 2019, 390), which
facilitated the transfer of their broadcasting rights and assets to holdings more
sympathetic to the AKP in the following years. As soon as the AKP started to
monopolize the political power after 2007, it became easier for them to trans-
form the media landscape. It acquired full control of mainstream media in three
steps. First, Erdoğan directed his inner circle to buy or establish media con-
glomerates. One of Erdogan’s close friends, Ethem Sancak, established Kanal
24 immediately before the 2007 elections. Next, the government took over
the legal ownership of the second biggest media group comprising the newspa-
per Sabah and the leading TV channel ATV only to then transfer it—through
a public tender—to the pro-government Çalık Holding, the CEO of which
was Erdoğan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak. By 2008, the AKP had established
its own “partisan media.” The second step was the creation of Zirve Holding
media company in 2013 by pooling money from various pro-AKP construction
companies, which had won large state tenders during the AKP period. Çalık
Holding then sold Sabah and ATV to this newly created pool company, trans-
forming Turkish partisan media into what is now known as “the pool media”
(Diken 2014). Following the 2007 electoral victory of the AKP, the clientelistic
relationship between Doğan Media Group and the AKP suddenly broke down
and its owner Aydın Doğan was designated enemy number one of the gov-
ernment (Waldman and Çalışkan 2019, 392). Fiscal authorities heavily fined
Doğan Media Group for alleged tax irregularities. All Doğan companies were
banned from state tender bids for one year. Company executives and Doğan
family members were sued. In 2018, Aydın Doğan finally agreed to sell his
media companies to the Demirören family, one of Erdoğan’s associates. The
sale included Hürriyet, one of the most prestigious mainstream newspapers, and
Posta, the tabloid with the highest circulation, as well as two of Turkey’s main
entertainment and news channels, Kanal D and CNN Türk (RSF 2018). Today,
almost 95% of the mainstream media in Turkey is under the direct control of
the AKP government or, more precisely, President Erdoğan (IPI Report 2019).
The AKP government did not stop at controlling media corporations. It has
also utilized various strategies to control individual journalists. One strategy
has been to contact editors-in-chief of TV stations and newspapers and tell
them what to cover and what to ignore in the news. These messages are ac-
companied by threats or promises of rewards. Another method of control has
been to fire journalists who resist this censorship or force them to resign (Yeşil
2016, 93–94). The most extreme and internationally criticized measure against
critical journalists has been criminalizing the journalists who resist censorship
and continue to work in the “alternative” media by labeling them as terrorists
who support “FETÖ” (the Fethullah Gülen Terrorist Organization), the PKK
(Kurdish Workers’ Party), or both, by bringing legal charges against, and by
imprisoning them. Although the emergency decree laws have not introduced
substantive changes to criminal law, the criminal prosecution of journalists and
bloggers intensified considerably after the declaration of the state of emergency
(CDL-AD 2017, 4). The penal code, criminal defamation laws, and antiter-
rorism legislation have been employed to jail large numbers of journalists and
punish critical reporting. Judicial custody during trial has become a standard
method of punishment. As of 2019, Turkey has the highest number of incar-
cerated journalists in the world (TGS 2019) and the annual report of Reporters
without Borders places Turkey as 157th out of 180 ranked nations according to
the World Press Freedom Index (RSF 2019).
Despite bringing all mainstream media under its control and persecuting dis-
sident journalists, the AKP failed to create a monophonic media. Especially in the
aftermath of major events that may spark criticism of the government, the govern-
mental Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) routinely imposes publi-
cation and broadcasting bans. In addition, the RTÜK imposes financial penalties
on those media the government does not control. Erdoğan’s lawyers immediately
filed a complaint with the RTÜK when the president was criticized on a program
on Halk TV, a minor television channel owned by the main opposition party
CHP. The complaint accused the critics of “targeting, insulting, and threaten-
ing Turkish President Erdoğan, in addition to calling for a military coup against
the constitution.” RTÜK fined Halk TV eighty thousand Turkish Liras (fifteen
thousand US dollars), approximately 5% of their monthly advertisement revenue,
and placed a five-day broadcasting ban on the TV show in question (IPA 2019).
After the 2016 attempted coup, which we discussed among the crucial turn-
ing points during the AKP period, the Turkish government declared a state
of emergency and began to pass a large number of emergency decree laws
on matters not related to the state of emergency. In this political atmosphere,
the AKP intensified its attacks against all critical media outlets. Although the
initial targets were newspapers, news agencies, and TV channels connected to
Fethullah Gülen, after a brief period, the government started using the state
of emergency as a pretext to shut down any media outlet that challenged the
official line. The state of emergency was renewed at three-month intervals until
July 2018. During this period, 18 TV channels, 22 radio stations, 50 newspa-

pers, and 20 magazines were shut down by way of decrees in law (nos. 668,
675, 677, and 683).
The Decree Law no. 680 introduced some permanent changes to the Law
no. 612 on radio and television and gave broad authority to the Supreme Coun-
cil over broadcasting bans and licenses. The Supreme Council could now reject
applications for broadcasting licenses for reasons of national security and public
order, provided that the national intelligence bodies have information that the
applying media outlet executives or their partners had an affiliation or relations
with a terrorist organization (Article 19 of the Decree Law) (CDL-AD 2017,
07: 6). Thus, those who did not support the government could easily be labeled
terrorists and prevented from opening a television or radio channel.
In September 2019, the government extended the authority of the RTÜK
to internet television outlets such as Netflix. The cumulative effect of these
strategies—both intended and realized—was to suppress a “polycentric struc-
turing of the media and their competitive interplay” in Turkey, thereby imped-
ing the formation of “autonomous public opinion” (Sartori 1987, 98 and 110).
It is not surprising to see the similarities between this effort and that of the
Fidesz government in Hungary, which tries to “restrict by means of legislative
measures the independence of the public bodies overseeing private and public
media” (Polyák 2019, 283).
The Erosion of Judicial Independence: “Silivri Is Cold”

The AKP chipped away at judicial independence through three mechanisms: by
passing constitutional amendments that increased the powers of the executive
over the judiciary, by reorganizing the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors
(HCJP), and by encouraging lower courts to defy orders of higher courts.
In the September 12, 2010 referendum, citizens of Turkey were asked to
cast a single yes or no vote on a bundle comprising 25 constitutional amend-
ments covering a wide range of issues such as the provision of special protec-
tions for women, children, and the elderly people, collective bargaining rights
for public servants, the introduction of an ombudsman system, and changes
to the appointment procedures for members of the TCC and the HCJP. Al-
though the simultaneous voting for “several questions without any intrinsic
link” was criticized by the Venice Commission, the reforms were largely wel-
comed by the European institutions and Turkish liberals (Özbudun 2014, 163).
The opposition criticized the amendments concerning the TCC and the HCJP,
and referred to the referendum as “the Prime Minister’s court-packing plan”
(Yeginsu 2010). They argued that the goal behind the new design of the TCC
was to stump over the checks that the secular judiciary elites had set on the
government (for detailed analysis and different points of view on the TCC
decisions, see Arato 2016, 238–47 and Bâli 2013, 673–91).
The constitutional amendments that opened the path to court packing were
hidden among the many democratic and progressive constitutional changes in
the 2010 referendum. The democratic amendments enabled the AKP to garner
support for the constitutional reform from liberal circles which were eager for
amendments that would improve the 1982 constitution, which was the authoritar-
ian and militaristic legacy of the junta period. The distaste for the highly undem-
ocratic 1982 constitution led many liberal observers to optimistically downplay
the degree to which the amendment on judicial appointments would allow the
government to pack the courts. These amendments increased the number of per-
manent justices in the TCC from 11 to 17 and changed their appointment pro-
cedures. As predicted by the opponents of the constitutional referendum, these
new arrangements provided the executive with the opportunity to reorganize
the highest courts and establish tight control over them. Similar to other populist
and authoritarian governments, such as those of Juan Perón in Argentina, Alberto
Fujimori in Peru, or Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, the AKP attacked the higher
courts to eliminate any remaining resistance against its will (Arato 2016, 249).
Similarly, executives in Hungary and Poland have attacked constitutional courts
to gain control over judges and restrict the powers of the court (Fleck 2018;
Castillo-Ortiz 2019). As underlined by Pech and Scheppele (2017), these dra-
matic changes refer to an alarming process of “rule of law backsliding.”
The second stage of the erosion of judicial independence took place in 2013
after the breakdown of the alliance between the AKP government and Gülen
organization members after the scandals that came to light between December
17 and 25, 2013. In this series of scandals, four cabinet members, their relatives,
and certain bureaucrats were accused of corruption and prosecuted by the ju-
dicial police. In response, the government immediately introduced changes to
the “Regulation on the Judicial Police” on December 21, 2013 that made it
obligatory for police forces involved in a criminal investigation to provide pre-
liminary information to administrative authorities. They could thus no longer
carry out investigations without the prior consent of the executive authority.
Fifteen members of the HCJP issued a press release to protest the new regula-
tory rules leading to a swift reaction from Prime Minister Erdoğan. He openly
declared that the lack of government oversight over the HCJP was “a mistake”
(Hürriyet Daily News 2013). And shortly after this statement, the AKP govern-
ment prepared a bill that radically altered the HCJP Law. The new HCJP Law
(no. 6524) went into force in February 2014. A group of opposition MPs chal-
lenged the law in the Constitutional Court (TCC). However, the government
did not wait for the decision of the court to implement the new law, according
to which the Minister of Justice had the power to appoint and transfer judges
and public prosecutors. He promptly replaced judges and public prosecutors in-
volved in the corruption investigations against the government as well as HCJP
members with pro-government people. On April 10, 2014, the TCC annulled
some provisions of the law, including the Minister’s appointment authority.
However, since the decisions of the court are not retroactive, the displaced
judges and prosecutors did not have the right to return to their previous posts
(Özbudun 2015, 47–48).
The new constitutional amendments in 2017 offered a permanent solution
to the AKP’s problems with the judiciary. The HCJP was rearranged and
renamed to the Council of Judges and Prosecutors (CJP). This new council is
composed of 13 members, 7 elected by the parliament and 6 appointed by the
president, formalizing the influence of the executive on the CJP. The council
is responsible for the election of the members of the Court of Cassation and
the Turkish Council of State. Since these two bodies also play an important
role in the composition of the TCC, the restructuring CJP further strength-
ened the influence of the President in the composition of the TCC (Haimerl
2017).
The degree to which the judicial branch has become an extension of the
executive was revealed when lower courts defied higher court rulings to
satisfy the wishes of the president. When the TCC ruled that the rights of
the journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül had been violated and ordered
their release in March 2016, President Erdoğan responded by declaring that
he did not “recognize or respect this ruling” (Independent, 2016). On Jan-
uary 11, 2018, the TCC declared that the pre-trial detention of the journal-
ists Mehmet Altan and Şahin Alpay was unconstitutional and ordered their
release, but this time the courts of first instance refused to implement the
TCC ruling for months, although they eventually released the journalists.
This was nothing short of a “legalist rebellion against the Constitution and
the TCC” (Çalı 2018). “Silivri must be cold now” is a popular meme on
Turkish social media that has become emblematic of the utilization of the
judiciary to silence criticism. The statement humorously implies that the
speaker would like to criticize the government, but self-censors herself for
fear of being imprisoned at Silivri Prison where many political prisoners
remain incarcerated.
Civil Society in the Crosshairs

The Gezi protests were a turning point in the AKP’s approach to all civil society
movements and organizations. We will recount three cases in which the AKP
government suppressed a diverse array of civil society groups that share one
common trait: they were among the groups that carried “the protests forward
at critical instances” during the Gezi protests because they were “rehearsed in
their physical and theoretical confrontation with the police” (Nuhrat 2016).
These groups are football fans, the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers
and Architects (TMMOB), and the LGBTI+ community.
Tuastad provides examples from Jordan and Egypt to make the case that
football has a “seismic” potential to affect political change (Tuastad 2014).
Given the outsized influence of football teams in Turkish society, football and
politics have always been intertwined in the country. The AKP tried to have
its political supporters elected as presidents of major sports clubs in Turkey.
After a long struggle, the party managed to gain influence over the Football
Federation. In typical clientelist fashion, the AKP directed funds to previously
small, poor teams that Erdoğan had personal ties to: Kasımpaşa, the neighbor-
hood Erdoğan grew up in; Rize, his parents’ hometown; and Siirt, his wife’s
hometown (Kılıç 2006). The AKP also funneled a lot of money to the Istanbul
Metropolitan Municipality team (ISM). In 2014, the city sold ISM to Başakşe-
hir Spor (Başakşehir is a new neighborhood of Istanbul characterized by gated
communities inhabited mostly by upper-middle-class AKP voters), which had
been bought by AKP cronies. Başakşehir is one of the richest and most suc-
cessful football teams in Turkey now. Much to Erdogan’s chagrin, it does not
have a fan base and is viscerally hated by anti-AKP football fans (Sözmen 2018).
Beşiktaş football team is the polar opposite of Başakşehir. It is a club with
a long history, devout fans all over Turkey, and a very local core fan group.
The club’s core supporters are youths from the Beşiktaş district of Istanbul and
they go by the name of Çarşı group, which refers to the marketplace (çarşı) that
forms the center of Beşiktaş. Çarşı played a big and well-publicized role during
the Gezi protests thanks to its “repertoire of resistance” (Turan and Özçetin
2019). In response, 35 leading Çarşı members who had played a prominent
role during the Gezi protests were arrested and charged with a number of
crimes, including attempting to overthrow the government, revealing how the
fan group was viewed as a political threat (Eder and Öz 2017, 65). They were
acquitted in 2015.
When fans of many teams continued Gezi-style protests in the tribunes af-
ter the Gezi protests themselves had ended, the AKP responded in two ways.
First, a pro-AKP Beşiktaş fan group called 1453 (referring to the year in which
the Ottomans took Istanbul from the Byzantines) sprang up to counter these
protests. The group disappeared when Çarşı protests against AKP subsided.
Second, the AKP brought the new passolig passes, which require fans to buy
seasonal tickets instead of purchasing individual tickets for each match. The
practice puts fans with low purchasing power in a difficult position and prevents
spontaneous fan reactions. The introduction of passolig was partially motivated
by a desire to prevent political protests at football matches (Türkiye Barolar
Birliği 2014).
A second group that was targeted by the AKP after the Gezi protests was the
TMMOB. An occupational association with a legally defined role, the TM-
MOB has always had a contentious relationship with governments that desired
to sustain patron-client relationships through construction projects with no
oversight or opposition. During the AKP period, the TMMOB successfully
blocked many government-backed construction projects and resisted the ur-
ban transformation policy that defined the AKP era, but most importantly,
the TMMOB and one of its prominent members, Mücella Yapıcı, played a
front and center role in the Gezi protests. Erdoğan retaliated by physically,
symbolically, and legally hollowing out the TMMOB (Akyarlı Güven 2013).
The headquarters of the Chamber of Architects at Yıldız Park in Istanbul were
requisitioned by the government and added to Erdoğan’s presidential residence
at the park on May 20, 2016, the anniversary of the Gezi events. Moreover,
those members who resisted being thrown out of the building were charged
with resistance to the police (T24 2016), but they were later acquitted. How-
ever, the real blow to the TMMOB was taking away most of its legal rights
and rendering it toothless by changing the 70-year-old law regarding the rules
and regulations that govern the Union (Radikal 2013). As of 2019, Yapıcı was
on trial (along with some human rights activists and actors) for her role in the
Gezi protests.
Gezi was also an unexpected turning point for the mainstreaming of the
LGBTI+ movement in Turkey. LGBTI+ activists were front and center in the
protests. They were also very well versed in how to deal with police brutality
due to their long history of encounters with it. They did not act as individuals
who also happened to be LGBTI+, but as LGBTI+ activists, and gained the
sympathy of many protestors with their activist experience and their upbeat
resistance style, chanting irreverent slogans such as “fags are here, where is
Tayyip (Erdogan)?” (Karakayali and Yaka 2014). Right after the Gezi protests
ended, the Pride month started. The pride parade had grown from a few dozen
people to several thousand over two decades. The 2013 pride parade was the
11th in Istanbul in over 20 years, and its theme was resistance. Tens of thou-
sands of people (and according to some estimates, over a hundred thousand)
joined the pride parade to stand in solidarity with the LGBTI+ community as
a result of the “intimate and affective ties that [had] emerged and grown be-
tween queer groups and other protestors” at the Gezi protests (Zengin 2013).
It was an act of solidarity from fellow protestors. Izmir (the third largest city in
Turkey) held its first pride parade in June 2013. The Istanbul Pride Parade drew
even bigger crowds in 2014, befitting the theme of the year: contact. Other
cities such as Antalya (a touristic city on the Mediterranean coast), Malatya (a
relatively conservative city in eastern Turkey), and Samsun (an industrial city in
the Black Sea region) held their first pride parades that same year.
The government reaction to LGBTI+ activities took a harsh turn after 2015.
Istanbul Pride Parade was dispersed with water cannons by the police in 2015,
and it was been banned after 2016. In 2017, during the state of emergency,
Ankara governorship banned all LGBTI+ activities until further notice, citing
societal sensitivities, public safety, protection of public health, and morality
as reasons (HRW 2019) until a court lifted the ban on April 19, 2019. Izmir,
however, continued to organize a pride week and a pride parade every year
without intervention until 2019, when the governorship banned the activities
of the seventh Izmir pride week. An administrative court stayed the execution
of the ban, but the police nevertheless attacked the parade and arrested some ac-
tivists. Pride weeks were also banned by governorships in Antalya and Mersin
in 2019 (AMER 2019). However, the LGBTI+ activists continue to resist the
bans by challenging them in the courts, while some activists in Istanbul defy
these bans, clash with the police, and get arrested every year.
Academic Freedoms
Turkish higher education has never been a paragon of academic freedom, but
under the AKP regime, existing academic freedoms were incrementally lost.
The government opened new universities and staffed academia with its sup-
porters, canceled rectorship elections, changed the disciplinary code, closed
down universities, purged critical academics from academia, arrested and sued
academics, and denied “problematic” academics promotion and research fund-
ing (HRFT 2019).
In the aftermath of the 1980 military coup, many leftist academics were
purged from Turkish universities, while academic freedoms and autonomy
were severely limited by the establishment of the Higher Education Council
(HEC), a government institution that was tasked with monitoring all Turkish
universities (Göcek 2016). Despite their lack of autonomy under the HEC,
universities continued to provide space for dissent. By 2016, mainstream media
and large sections of civil society had already been silenced by the autocratizing
regime, but academics continued to publicly criticize the government. True to
his modus operandi, Erdoğan turned a crisis into an opportunity and disposed of
many of his critics in academia.
The AKP did not have the human resources to bring its own cadres into
academia. One strategy was to lean on Fethullah Gülen’s religious movement.
After the 2016 coup attempt, the AKP government closed down 15 foundation
universities for being affiliated with the Gülen movement, and dismissed over
6,000 academics from state universities (Kural and Adal 2018) most of whom
were accused of being Gülenists. This massive purge revealed the extent to
which Gülenists had taken a hold in Turkish academia. Former ÖSYM (Stu-
dent Selection and Placement Center) president Ali Demir is on trial for stealing
all exams between 2010 and 2015 for the Gülen movement during his tenure
and Gülenists confessed in court that they stole exam questions from ÖSYM
(Birgün 2020). ALES (Academic Personnel and Postgraduate Education En-
trance Exam) is an ÖSYM exam that academics have to enter to be accepted
into graduate programs and find employment. An investigation revealed that
over 20,000 people had suspiciously received perfect and near-perfect scores in
this exam, mostly in 2008 and 2009 (CNN Türk 2017). The second strategy of
the government was to open new universities—which critics derisively labeled
as nameplate universities—that offered little beyond a name, an address, and
plenty of cadres to be filled with government supporters who had little merit
(Arap 2010, 23). The number of universities ballooned from 79 to close to 200
in the first 15 years after the AKP took control of the government. However,
the AKP failed to establish a presence within the elite universities in metropol-
itan cities, which largely continued to be populated by secular, left, and liberal
leaning academics who were less than sympathetic to the AKP regime.
Two events created the perfect opportunity for Erdogan to purge his most
ardent critics from academia. The first event was the signing of a petition by a
group called Academics for Peace that called on the government to stop massa-
cring civilians in the conflict between the Turkish military and armed Kurdish
groups after some Kurdish cities had declared autonomy. On January 12, 2016,
after an ISIS attack that killed 13 German tourists in Istanbul, Erdogan declared
that “whoever the members of terrorist organizations are, those who use their
language are the same,” referring to the 1,128 signatories of the Peace Petition
(Cumhuriyet 2016) and called them “cruel and vile” in a speech he gave on Jan-
uary 15 (Sendika 2016). The prime minister and other government officials, the
AKP media, and a mafia godfather were pointing their fingers at the peace ac-
ademics, whose numbers had increased to over 2,000 after Erdogan’s speech (a
few days later, the petition was closed to signature). Erdoğan invited universities
to take action against the signatories. Some of the petitioners received threats
on their lives, their faces and names were published on government-backed
media websites, some private universities fired their faculty members for sign-
ing the Peace Petition, and four signatories were arrested and kept in prison for
months (HRFT 2019). However, faculty members in Turkish state universities
could not be fired due to their protected status as state employees. Most of the
peace academics refused to withdraw their signatures despite Prime Minister
Davutoğlu’s suggestion that they do so.
The second major turning point for academic freedoms was the July 15,
2016 coup attempt. On July 21, the government declared a state of emergency
and proceeded to pass emergency decrees with the force of law. The first order
of business was to close 15 universities that were under Gülenist control, and
their students were distributed to universities from all over Turkey by another
emergency decree (KHK 667). A total of 6,081 academics were dismissed from
academia by decrees (TİHV 2019a). Although most of these academics were
suspected to have ties with the Gülen movement, 406 of them were peace aca-
demics (BAK 2019). Some members of leftist unions who had always had a con-
tentious relationship with the Gülenists were also dismissed. Most of the people
who were removed from academia had not been formally investigated and no
charge or evidence had been brought against them. Among other things, they
lost their jobs and benefits, their pensions, their passports, and the right to
travel abroad and work in the education sector (Öğreten 2020). Over 100,000
people were fired from state employment by emergency decrees, but academia
suffered the largest proportional loss. Dismissal by decree was aptly labeled
“civil death” (Newsweek 2018). In December 2017, the government started
suing each signatory to the Peace Petition individually for disseminating ter-
rorist propaganda through the media. As of September 9, 2019, 739 signatories
had undergone trial and 204 of them had received prison sentences ranging
from 15 to 36 months (BAK 2019). On July 27, 2019, the TCC reviewed the
case of one of the signatories, and ruled that signing the petition was protected
under the constitutional right to “freedom of expression” (Üstel et al. 2019).
On September 6, 2019, lower courts started acquitting peace academics based
on the TCC ruling.
With the Emergency Decree Law no. 676, the government abolished rec-
torship elections at universities. Currently, the president appoints all university
rectors, and the rector does not have to be from the university to which she will
be appointed. The government has the right to decide which universities will
specialize in which fields, demolishing the last remnants of institutional au-
tonomy. In the meanwhile, critical academics complain that TÜBİTAK (The
Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey), the main Turk-
ish research agency, engages in practices such as defunding critical academics
and informally asking academics to cut ties with their black-listed colleagues
if they desire to receive funding, while some chapters written by signatories
are silently removed from newer editions (TİHV 2019b, 17). Dissenters are
removed from editorial boards of academic journals. Many universities avoid
holding events and issuing publications that may displease the government. A
large number of persecuted Turkish academics moved to European countries
after 2016 where they continue to work under precarious conditions and face
an uncertain future (Baser et al. 2017, 26).
Conclusion
This brief account of the incremental autocratization process in Turkey aims
to demonstrate why the label illiberal democracy is misleading. The Turkish
regime is neither democratic nor competitive at this point. Without an inde-
pendent media, reality bends to the shape of what the government desires it to
be. A large section of society does not have access to alternative media outlets
and knows only what the government allows the mainstream media to cover.
Without an independent judiciary, the rule of law descends into judicial anar-
chy and courts become instruments of oppression and persecution. Without a
free media and a functioning judiciary, civil society groups are atomized and
crushed. Sources of dissent such as academia are hollowed out and subdued.
Bureaucracy serves only partisan interests at the expense of the public. Political
competitors that pose an actual threat to the authority or the reelection of the
incumbent are silenced and, if need be, prosecuted and imprisoned. Local ad-
ministrations that place checks on the central government are crushed.
It is not possible to hold fair and free elections in an environment in which
information is not available and dissent is punished by the loss of livelihood and
imprisonment. Although the loss of the Istanbul municipality to the CHP in

the March 2019 elections may be seen as evidence of democratic competition,
the real lesson that the Turkish public learned was that when all else fails, the
AKP tries to cancel the elections, while appointing trustees in place of elected
mayors in Kurdish cities. Ultimately, the AKP had to concede the election
to the CHP after a second round because the public firmly stood behind the
mayor-elect. After examining the evidence from 17 years of AKP rule, we con-
tend that without an ecosystem of strong democratic institutions, democracy
cannot survive with elections alone. However, a lesson that is equally—if not
more—important is what autocratic governments have always understood all
too well. Democratic resistance has the capacity to survive in the nooks and
crannies as well as the periphery of government institutions and civil society.
When the most visible and prominent democratic institutions fail, the job to
resist the encroachment of autocracy may fall on the shoulders of football fans
and research assistants. Ultimately, the most decisive democratic battles may be
fought in parks, stadiums, and classrooms.
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12
INDIA’S UNOFFICIAL EMERGENCY
Nandini Sundar
Introduction
On August 5, 2019, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime tabled a
bill in Parliament fundamentally changing the Constitution and Indian politics.
Article 370, the clause related to the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir
( J & K) that was incorporated into the Indian Constitution as a condition of
the kingdom’s accession, was virtually abolished, and the former state of J &
K was bifurcated into two Union Territories (UTs), which have fewer powers
than a State within the Indian union. Article 35A which disallowed outsiders
from buying land in the state was abolished, potentially opening the state to
land grabs on a large scale. Misogynist and racist members of the ruling party
followed this up by claiming that it also made available “fair Kashmiri girls” for
marriage to outsiders (Times of India, ANI, 2019).
Even as the government has consistently claimed that Kashmiris are happy
with the changes, which were for their own good (Times of India, PTI, 2019),
in anticipation of resistance, 40,000 extra troops were moved into the state,
adding to the existing roughly eight hundred thousand; over 4,000 people were
arrested under the Public Safety Act, including all the major political leaders
(AFP 2019); phone and internet lines shut down; and the Kashmir Valley was
placed under an indefinite curfew. Even on the eve of the announcement, the
Governor denied any plans to change the Constitution or divide the state. The
Home Minister also lied in Parliament that former Chief Minister of J & K and
now Member of Parliament, Farooq Abdullah, was ‘enjoying himself at home,’
when he was actually under house arrest.
An already pliant media went overboard with triumphalism, with headlines
like ‘historic moment,’ ‘geography being redrawn,’ ‘surgical strike,’ etc., both
India’s Unofficial Emergency 189
reflecting and mobilizing popular support for the change (on the variance be-
tween domestic and international coverage, see John and Grewal 2019). Worse,
opposition Members of Parliament, including those from regional parties which
stand to lose the most from this blatant violation of federalism, supported the
downgrading of Kashmir, with the result that the bill was passed by a major-
ity in both houses of parliament within the day. When asked to intervene to
remove the communications blackout, free opposition leaders, and address the
constitutionality of the changes to Article 370, India’s Supreme Court deferred
to the superior wisdom of the executive, postponing a hearing of the petitions.
On January 10, 2020, over 150 days after the internet ban, the Supreme Court
ruled that banning access to the internet was a violation of the fundamental
rights of expression and speech, but instead of immediately ordering a lifting of
the restrictions, it referred the issue back to the government for review. Public
anger hardened into non-violent civil disobedience, but as far as the wider
nation goes, the people are totally invisible.
In his discussion of “democratic recession,” Larry Diamond (2015, 144)
argues that one major methodological problem in deciding whether a country
is or is no longer a democracy is fixing a date for the collapse. But in India,
one might well point to August 5, 2019, though as with all such phenomena,
the degradation into a non-democracy has been a long time coming. With the
media, parliament, and the courts abdicating their responsibilities to maintain
a system of checks and balances and ensure the rights of minorities, and the
public overlooking the lies of the government, all that appears to remain of
democracy in India is that the government is chosen on the basis of an elec-
toral majority or what one might call mere ‘electoralism’ (for the term, see
Richards 1999).
Defining the Politics of Contemporary India

There are many terms being proposed to describe the phenomenon creeping
across the world—illiberal democracy (Zakaria 1997; Diamond 2015; Hansen
2019); competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky and Way 2002); ethnic democ-
racy (as applied to Israel and India, see Smooha 2002; Jaffrelot 2019); authori-
tarian populism (see Hall 1979; Brown et al. 2018; Morelock 2018); ur-fascism
or proto-fascism (see Eco 1995; Ahmad 2017; Stanley 2018). In India, several
edited volumes have attempted to capture this visibly new slide in democratic
politics (see essays in Chatterji et al. 2019; Hariharan and Yusufji 2019; Jayal
2019; Nilsen et al. 2019).
Defining democracy is, of course, key to much of this debate. Zakaria
(1997), for instance, argues that democracy which involves a form of govern-
ment chosen by the majority should not be confused with constitutional liber-
alism which involves separation of powers. The term ‘illiberal democracy’ thus
denotes regimes which combine electoral democracy with illiberal features
190 Nandini Sundar
such as human rights abuses, executive authoritarianism, weak separation of

powers, etc. Others would argue that freedom of speech, separation of powers,
rule of law, minority protections, and participation in governance are intrin-
sic to democracy, and that democracy is a basket concept rather than a single
concept denominator. In this section, I select three terms—illiberal democracy,
authoritarian populism, and fascism, and discuss their applicability to the Indian
context. I argue that in the game of labeling, all regimes till 2014 would count
as regular ‘illiberal democracies’; the ‘Emergency’ (1975–77) would qualify as
a period of ‘authoritarian populism,’ while the BJP under Modi (2014 onward)
is well on the road to a form of fascism.
It is important to mention the Emergency because the only struggle that
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the BJP,
a deeply chauvinist and exclusionary Hindu majoritarian organization, has
ever waged since its inception in 1924 has been against the Emergency, and
it constantly uses this to claim how democratic it is by contrast. The RSS was
not involved in India’s freedom struggle from the British. Under the Emer-
gency (1975–77), fundamental rights and elections were formally suspended,
and various independent institutions like the media and judiciary suborned (see
Prakash 2019). However, the Emergency was mostly a top-down process. The
Congress did not have the same reach into society as the RSS currently does,
and while the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, was personally popular even
among those affected by her policies of sterilization and displacement (Tarlo
2003), her government did not create the kind of social divisions one now sees,
and the fundamental challenges to the constitutional idea of a secular, diverse
India. In terms of its authoritarianism, the current period is very similar to the
Emergency but the fact that it is not officially declared and rests on widespread
consent in society makes it perhaps even more dangerous.
Illiberal Democracy?
India has always been an illiberal democracy, at least for significant sections of
its citizens, though the sheer size and diversity of the country has precluded its
being labeled as one. Even as elections take place with regularity and there is
considerable investment in representation by political parties, this is accompa-
nied by high levels of violence against religious and caste minorities and a shaky
rule of law.1
Large parts of the country have been militarized. For decades, geographi-
cal peripheries like the Northeast and Kashmir have been under ‘emergency’
laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which empowers the
army to shoot to kill on mere suspicion (Baruah 2014). A wave of repression
in the 1970s did not fully succeed in wiping out the Naxalite or armed Maoist
guerilla movement, representing some of India’s poorest peasants. The move-
ment resurfaced again in the early 2000s. Since 2005, several hundred thousand
paramilitary armed forces have been poured into central India to fight Maoist
guerillas, resulting in thousands of killings, rapes, and large numbers of villages
being burnt (Sundar 2019). Almost none of the civilian victims of counter in-
surgency have got judicial redress.
Organized pogroms of minorities in which members of the ruling party
or administration have played a leading role or at least stood by in complic-
ity include the massacre of Sikhs (Delhi 1984), Muslims (Gujarat 2002), and
Christians (Kandhamal, Odisha, 2008), to name just a few. Every day, extra-
judicial killings, custodial deaths and disappearances by the police and armed
forces, especially but not only in conflict areas (see Hoenig and Singh 2014), vi-
olent clashes over land acquisition for industry (see Levien 2015), and atrocities
against women, lower castes, and minorities, add to the insecurity of ordinary
citizens.
After the BJP took power in 2014, a series of mob lynchings, mostly of
Muslims accused of cow-smuggling, but also of scheduled castes and scheduled
tribes, have taken place. In the majority of cases, the vigilantes have been fronts
of the RSS, but the desire and ability to kill has percolated more widely into
society, with people also being lynched on suspicion of theft and child stealing.
The attacks have been videographed and circulated, in most cases by the per-
petrators themselves, confident in the impunity they enjoy (The Quint 2019).
As against the artists, writers, film-makers, and others who protested against
the lynchings by returning their state awards, the RSS/BJP has propped up
counter movements of pro-government personalities to claim that the critics
were ‘anti-national.’ Hindutva (a term used for Hindu chauvinism) groups have
killed rationalist intellectuals who they disagreed with, while the application
of ‘sedition’ charges to dissenters is increasingly widespread (see essays in Har-
iharan and Yusufji 2019; Tiwary 2019). In July 2019, the BJP enacted a dra-
conian amendment to the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) which
permits the government to declare individuals to be terrorists, in addition to
organizations, a provision that is widely expected to be used against critics of
the government.
Authoritarian Populism?
Much of the analysis explaining the 2014 and 2019 victories of the BJP has
focused on the person of Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, whose rhetorical
talents and personal charisma, albeit heavily mediated (Chakravarty and Roy
2015), have undoubtedly played a major role in the BJP’s victories. Modi’s
relentless campaigning in both state and federal elections, his weekly mono-
logues aired on the radio, the ubiquity of his images in the public sphere, the
expenditure on advertisements promoting the achievements of the govern-
ment, and choreographed events with world leaders and non-resident Indians
have all served to identify the government with his personality. Carefully
192 Nandini Sundar
cultivated myths about the way in which he overcame a difficult past to be-
come a selfless politician help Modi to portray himself as a man of the people
against an entrenched dynastic political elite (on Modi’s populist connect, see
Ghassem-Fachandi 2019; on the 2014 campaign, see Price 2015; Sardesai 2015;
for an analysis of the 2019 results, see Hindu-Lokniti-CSDS 2019). It is import-
ant to note that this communication overkill is entirely one-way—Modi has
not addressed a single press conference since he took power in 2014.
Similarities in style with other right-wing, majoritarian leaders like Trump,
Erdogan, Orban, or Bolsanaro have led to scholars using the term ‘authoritar-
ian populist’ to describe this type of regime. As Morelock defines it,
‘authoritarian populism’ refers to the pitting of ‘the people’ against ‘elites’

in order to have the power to drive out, wipe out, or otherwise dominate
Others who are not ‘the people.’ Generally, this involves social move-
ments fuelled by prejudice and led by charismatic leaders that seek to
increase governmental force to combat difference.
(Morelock 2018, xiv)
The term, as initially defined by Hall (2017 [1979], 174), referred to “an excep-
tional form of the capitalist state—which, unlike classical fascism, has retained
most (though not all) of the formal representative institutions in place, and
which at the same time has been able to construct around itself an active pop-
ular consent” (Hall 2017 [1979], 174). The ability to transmit messages through
the personality of a charismatic leader in a manner which unifies contradictory
discourses (in Modi’s case, being both pro-corporates and pro-poor) and makes
people complicit in the destruction of their freedoms and economic well-being
in the name of a greater, usually neo-liberal goal certainly captures much of
what is going on in India today. The best example perhaps is the acquiescence
of the public at large to the havoc caused by demonetization or a decree in
November 2016 rendering 87% of all currency in the country invalid. This
decision which seems to have been taken by Modi with little consultation with
economic experts or even his own cabinet caused enormous hardship, with
some immediate deaths, small businesses closing, and the loss of some five
million jobs. Demonetization brought little of the promised benefits like end-
ing black money or corruption as nearly all the money came back into the banks
(Kumar, 2017, Azad et al. 2019). Yet demonetization paradoxically enhanced
Modi’s reputation as a strong leader willing to take on the big corrupt guys.
Proto-fascism
A focus on authoritarian populism, while capturing several elements of the
Modi regime, leads one to obscure the cadre base of the RSS, and its long-term
fascistic ideology as well as organizational links (Casolari 2000). Golwalkar,
one of the RSS’s founding fathers, famously advocated the emulation of Hitler’s
final solution to deal with India’s non-Hindu minorities.2 The RSS describes
itself as a “movement for the assertion of Bharat’s national identity” which they
equate with Hindu identity. Its main goal has been to “organize Hindus” and
“to restore the Hindu psyche to its pristine form” after centuries of “alien rule”
(rss.org). The RSS sees Muslims and Christians as outsiders who must be taught
their place in a Hindu nation; they yearn for the recognition of the glories of
ancient (“Hindu”) India, and organize citizens on militaristic lines to achieve
these goals (on RSS ideology, see Sharma 2007, Noorani 2019).
Starting from its foundation in 1925, the formerly secretive Sangh has pro-
liferated into hundreds of fronts which work with different sections—students,
soldiers, women, workers, peasants, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, etc.
The RSS claims to have nearly 700,000 members and some 57,000 shakhas or
cells which hold daily meetings (see rss.org). The ruling BJP is merely the polit-
ical front of the RSS, and currently all leading institutional figures are members
of the RSS, including the President, Prime Minister, the Governors of States,
Vice Chancellors of universities, and the heads of various research institutions,
among others.
Unlike Trump or Bolsanaro, Narendra Modi is a long-term pracharak, or
evangelist of the RSS, and acts not as a single individual but as the most effec-
tive electoral instrument that the RSS currently possesses. As Pralay Kanungo,
a long-term observer of the Sangh, has noted, “while Modi’s undisputed writ
runs through major areas like the economy, commerce, foreign affairs and
security, the RSS gets a free hand in determining the social, cultural and edu-
cational agenda; besides, the RSS chief extends his role as the ‘philosopher and
guide’ beyond the RSS by legitimating and expanding Hindutva in a larger
public sphere” (Kanungo 2019, 134). In its second term, the Modi govern-
ment has come out openly to prioritize the RSS’s long-standing themes—the
building of a Ram temple at Ayodhya, the abolition of Article 370, ‘love jehad’
(preventing marriages across religions), population control (a coded term for
controlling Muslim fertility), land jehad (taking over Muslim mosques while
accusing them of encroaching on public space, ignoring similar Hindu en-
croachments), and ghar wapsi or reconversions (targeting Christian converts).
The cadre base is one factor which makes the Modi regime unique among the
current crop of right-wing governments. The combination of a state monopoly
over the police and army meant to enforce law and order and state-sponsored
vigilantism, which I have previously described as a “public private partnership
in the industry of insecurity” (Sundar 2013), is now a pronounced feature of
governance, and extends beyond authoritarian populism to a form of fascistic
politics (see also Banaji 2017 on state support to stormtroopers as a key symp-
tom of fascism).
While the jury on what counts as fascism is still out (see Payne 1980; Jacoby
2016) with several scholars wishing to restrict fascism to a particular inter-World
194 Nandini Sundar
War European phenomenon, there are certain features which bear a close fam-
ily resemblance to fascist politics. Organizational forms include a mass mobi-
lizing party with a cult leader, support by the most powerful forms of capital,
and the role of organized propaganda in purveying half-truths and distortions.
Culturally, we see anti-intellectualism, the creation of an internal enemy, re-
sentment by the hitherto dominant transformed into claimed victimhood, the
focus on a mythic past, and the continuous shifting of focus indentifying plots
against the nation and its leader (see Eco 1995; Banaji, 2017; Stanley 2018).
In its emphasis on military training through the shakhas or cells it runs;
emphasis on Muslims as the enemy within; denunciation of all critics as anti-
national; attacks on free speech and critical thought in universities; its reference
to plots to destabilize the nation;3 its justification of upper-caste Hindu resent-
ment against affirmative action for scheduled castes and tribes, which then get
embodied in policies like affirmative action for poor upper-castes; the arrests
of people for social media posts critical of the government; the capture of the
media to spread hate against minorities and blank out criticism of the govern-
ment’s policies; the relentless trolling by Modi supporters of critics; and the
legal impunity provided to right-wing terror accused and vigilantes—the Modi
government has employed all the elements of fascist politics. The entrenchment
of bitter resentment against minorities and dissenters as the primary emotion of
the Hindu majority is a product of and further enables the government’s fascist
agenda.
The Immediate Context for Electoral Wins

Even while trying to explain Modi’s unprecedented popularity and the spread
of the RSS, it is important to note that the BJP has still not won a majority
of the popular vote. In 2014, the BJP’s vote share was 31% which went up to
nearly 37.4% in 2019, with the NDA (National Democratic Alliance, the coali-
tion of which the BJP is the leading member) getting 38.5% in 2014 and 45% in
2019. Further, on both occasions, the opposition was in considerable disarray.
In 2004, the UPA (United Progressive Alliance, of which the Indian Na-
tional Congress is the leading member) government came in on a compas-
sion and change platform. The campaign run by the then BJP government
(1999–2004), ‘India Shining,’ flopped because, in fact, the economy was not
shining at all. The anti-minority venom that became daily feed under the BJP
(with the ‘moderate’ Prime Minister Vajpayee declaring at one election rally
that they did not need Muslim votes) gave way to a conversation on economic
growth. For a few years, the government appeared to want to steer a middle
path between a pro-business ‘reform’ agenda and an acknowledgment that In-
dia remained, largely, a poor, peasant country, even if urbanization and the
knowledge economy were claimed to be the face of the future. The ‘social
agenda’ of the National Advisory Council which was reflected in landmark
legislation like the Right to Information Act 2005, the National Rural Em-
ployment Guarantee Act 2005, the Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional
Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006, and the Right to
Education Act 2009 coexisted with the Special Economic Zones Act 2005,
which involved the acquisition of huge tracts of agricultural land, significant
tax concessions to corporate houses, and a space where regular labor laws did
not apply. “Growth,” it was argued, was what enabled social welfare programs
like the rural employment guarantee act, though even a cursory attention to
the struggles over these acts would show that they owed less to those in power
and more to the persistence of social movements. Similarly, expanded oppor-
tunities for affirmative action for ‘other backward castes’ (OBCs) in education,
and the setting up of a Commission under a retired Chief Justice of the High
Court (the Sachar Commission) which showed how badly Muslims were doing
on every indicator (education, employment, etc.) produced the sense of a gov-
ernment which cared about disadvantage.
In the second term of the UPA, however, 2009–14, that narrative of ‘ balance’
began crumbling, and even though the government amended the Land Acqui-
sition Act in 2013 to include social audits, consent, and rehabilitation, frequent
land clashes had already begun to generate disaffection. On the other side, busi-
ness complained of policy paralysis. What really did the UPA government in,
however, were the allegations of corruption and crony capitalism.4 The India
Against Corruption movement, some of whose members later formed the Aam
Aadmi Party, became the most visible symbol of public disgust with this. How-
ever, it was the BJP which successfully capitalized on this, with Modi promising
to end corruption, bring development (vikas) and good days (ache din), propagat-
ing the alleged successes of his tenure as Chief Minister of Gujarat in attracting
industry, building roads, etc. This was showcased as the ‘Gujarat Model.’
In short, lower growth rates, growing inequality, corruption allegations,
and a general sense of ennui with Congress leadership led the public to want
the aspirational politics that Modi held out. There were two other elements,
however, that actually managed the BJP’s electoral victory: first, money and
second, hands-on electoral management relying on data analysis (see Jha 2017).
In 2014, the BJP spent almost as much on media advertising alone as Obama
spent under all heads in the 2012 presidential elections (Varadarajan 2014).
Once in power, the BJP passed an electoral bond scheme, which enabled donors
to buy electoral bonds anonymously—with the identity of the donors known
only to the government. Inevitably, 95% of the funding from the electoral
bonds went to the BJP (Vishnoi, 2019, Wire Staff 2019). This, among other
things like the government’s continuing power to tweak policy in favor of
certain corporates, and the ability to investigate recalcitrant businesses or po-
litical opponents for tax evasion,5 ensured that the BJP has managed to become
the richest party in India, outspending its rivals by a huge margin. In the 2019
elections, on which 8.65 billion USD was spent, according to a report by the
196 Nandini Sundar
Centre for Media Studies as reported in Scroll, the BJP spent Rs 27,000 crores
or nearly 45% of the total election spending:
(a)round Rs 12,000 crore to Rs 15,000 crore was distributed directly to

voters, while Rs 20,000 crore to Rs 25,000 crore was spent on publicity.
Logistics accounted for about Rs 5,000 crore, formal expenditure was
between Rs 10,000 crore and Rs 12,000 crore, while miscellaneous ex-
penses were about Rs 3,000 crore to Rs 6,000 crore.
(Scroll 2019)
By 2019, it appears that ‘democratic recession’ (Diamond 2015) has been accom-
panied by an economic recession in the Modi regime (see Azad et al. 2019). But
expectations that the loss of jobs, growing rural distress, or a downturn in invest-
ments, would lead to a disenchantment with the Modi regime have been proven
wrong. With the help of a punitive air strike on Pakistan in February 2019, cheer-
leading media, unprecedented funds, and subversion of all independent institu-
tions, the BJP came back to power in 2019. The BJP’s skillfully marketed welfare
schemes like providing gas cylinders may also have had some impact (Atri and
Jain 2019). Overall, however, it was clearly a vote for a strong leader, muscular
nationalism, and Hindutva. The singular mark of fascism is how people have
subordinated their own personal economic issues to vote in the interests of the
‘nation’; and how the normal indifference to the problems of people from other
communities, regions, religions, classes, and castes has given way to active ha-
tred for Muslims in particular, and disadvantaged groups in general (though the
contours of the majority keep changing with even other oppressed groups like
scheduled castes and tribes taking part in anti-Muslim pogroms or lynchings).
Institutional Subversion
In addition to cadre-based mobilization, state-supported vigilantism, and the
diffusion of hate in society, two other features of the current BJP regime stand
out: first, the use of legal processes and state institutions to frame opponents
and acquit sympathizers, including those accused of terror; second, institutional
capture—almost every independent regulatory institution which is intended to
provide a system of checks and balances has been subverted. This has, of course,
been in the making for a while, especially when it comes to ‘national security’
where the independent institutions of democracy have been enfeebled over time.
The list of institutions which have suffered a loss of autonomy since 2014
is fairly exhaustive. Two governors and one deputy governor of the Reserve
Bank of India resigned, indicating governmental interference (Ghosh and Go-
pakumar 2019); an inconvenient director of the Central Bureau of Investiga-
tion, India’s premier investigative agency into corruption and major criminal
cases, was divested of his job overnight (Venu 2019); Army chief Bipin Rawat
was promoted over two other officers, violating the principle of seniority the
Army previously followed (India Today 2017); two members of the National
Statistical Commission quit over a delay in releasing employment statistics
( Kumar 2019); the Election Commission which was hitherto a model for the
independent conduct of elections was seen as blatantly partisan in 2019, in the
way it fixed the election schedule to favor the BJP and did not censure Modi’s
hate speeches, and refused to respond to concerns over the electronic voting
machines (Mishra, 2019). Universities have come under severe stress with in-
terference in appointments, right-wing attempts to control the syllabi, and
physical attacks by the ABVP, the BJP student wing, on seminars and extra-
curricular events which challenge the government narrative (see Sundar 2018,
essays in Apoorvanand ed. 2018). The majority of the mainstream print and
television media has been silenced, bought over, with pressure being brought
to bear on corporate owners. They become willing purveyors of genocidal lies
(see Varadarajan 2019). Since its electoral victory in 2019, the BJP has also in-
ducted several MLAs from opposition parties, breaking these parties, and sub-
verting the principle of electoral representation. While the BJP publicly claims
that this is because of the superiority of its nationalist ideology, the war chest it
has amassed surely has something to do with the switch.
The promotions of judges who have ruled against the BJP have been put
on hold, while an unprecedented press conference held by four Supreme Court
judges questioning the manner in which cases were being allotted to benches
indicated governmental subversion in the higher judiciary too (see Khosla 2019).
In major criminal cases involving Hindutva politicians or officials, the in-
vestigative agencies appeared to have purposefully botched the investigations
or not appealed (see, for example, Apoorvanand 2019). BJP MP Sadhvi Pragya
who is on trial for a 2008 bomb blast in Malegaon where ten people were
killed, and 82 injured, was put up by the BJP as a candidate in 2019 to show
that ‘Hindu terror’ does not count as terror in their books. Millions of people
in Assam are in danger of being put indefinitely into detention camps on the
grounds that they are foreigners, and the process is likely to be extended to the
whole country. Disturbingly, this entire process of denying fundamental rights
is taking place under the supervision of the Supreme Court.
Conclusion
The BJP’s electoral victory in 2014 was closely bound up with the state of
India’s faltering economy with its growing inequality but rising expectations.
Despite its claims to be for “minimum government and maximum gover-
nance,” and its election-time contempt for welfare policies and subsidies for
the poor, the BJP has continued to broadly follow the same neo-liberal policies
as the Congress (pro-corporate policies on land and environmental clearances
coupled with some welfare schemes), leading Arun Shourie, a leading journalist
198 Nandini Sundar
and former BJP member to describe the BJP regime as ‘Congress plus cow.’
However, where it has departed radically from earlier regimes is its willing-
ness to abandon basic principles of the Constitution, its openly majoritarian
agenda (the Congress was mostly opportunist in this regard), and its redrawing
of the lines of political as well as social propriety. Major institutions have been
suborned such as the army, judiciary, and media; inclusiveness has given way
to a strident Hindu nationalism and indifference and hatred have become the
ruling emotions. It is not clear whether and when India will recover from this
to become a regular democracy.
Notes
1 Frequent victims of violence include religious minorities, indigenous people,
or what are officially called Scheduled Tribes, former untouchables or Sched-
uled Castes. The term Scheduled comes from lists or Schedules drawn up by the
Government for the purposes of affirmative action.
2 “To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by
her purging the country of the Semitic Races—the Jews. Race pride at its highest
has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it
is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimiliated
into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by”
(Golwalkar 1939, 35).
3 In 2018, several well-known civil liberties activists were arrested on accusations
that they were out to kill Modi in what is known as the Bhima-Koregaon case.
4 The more prominent ‘scams’ include the allocation of mobile telephone spectrum
to cherry-picked companies for an estimated loss of $40 billion to the treasury (the
2G spectrum scam), overpriced contracts for the Commonwealth games favoring
associates of the chairman of the organizing committee, the illegal diversion of
government land to the Karnataka Chief Minister’s sons, which was then resold
for a huge profit, the Adarsh housing society scam in Mumbai in which flats meant
for war widows were given to influential politicians and senior members of the
armed forces; the ‘Coalgate scam’ in which leases for coal mining were handed out
practically free to favored companies by governments of both parties acting at both
state and central level, and the allegations against the son-in-law of Congress Chief,
Robert Vadra, for collusion with a big real estate company.
5 Bhattacharya and Guha Thakurta (2019) note that while India’s position has come
down in the Economist’s crony capital index, the contours have perhaps changed
rather than disappeared, and media silencing may in fact be keeping scandals from
being investigated. Certainly, the Rafael aircraft deal with France in which Anil Am-
bani’s group was awarded offset contracts without any prior experience and which is
the subject of ongoing litigation before the Supreme Court would seem to indicate so.
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13
JAPAN
Land of the Rising Right
Kristin Surak
Introduction1
On May 1, 2019, Japan welcomed a new emperor. The aging Akihito allowed
his 59-year-old son, Naruhito, to take over a lineage reputed to be the oldest
unbroken line of royals in the world. In comparison to its European counter-
parts, Japan’s imperial family is at once more unassuming and more withdrawn
from the people it represents. Nowhere are the extramarital affairs, drug scan-
dals, offensive statements, and awkward sexual proclivities that feed the media
machine around the Windsors. The top gossip in recent years has been a po-
tential marriage between a royal granddaughter and a law school student with a
(gasp) indebted mother. The in-coming monarch yields little additional fodder.
He is a royal with a reputation for steadfast competence, international curios-
ity, and the incongruous desire to never really stand out. His two-year stint at
Oxford University resulted in a book on waterways bracingly titled The Thames
and I. He even switched from the violin to the viola, explaining that the larger
instrument, which typically supplies a supporting role rather than the melody,
is more appropriate for his tastes.
May 1 marked the beginning of a new era, and quite literally: the imperial
calendar, used in much bureaucratic and official business, changed from the 31st
year of Heisei to the 1st year of Reiwa.
At the same point a generation ago, the future of Japan could not have
looked brighter. When Emperor Akihito began his reign in 1989, the economy
was the second largest in the world. Nominal per capita GDP outstretched that
of the US by a margin. The country was producing the most cutting-edge
consumer technology of the day, including Nintendo entertainment systems,
Sanyo stereos, Canon cameras, and Panasonic VCRs. Pundits predicted, and
Japan: Land of the Rising Right 203
sometimes feared, a new Japan-led era of global growth (Vogel 1979). Within
months, however, the stock market crashed, the economy flatlined, and the
country never recovered. Though Japan remains economically more powerful
than any country in Europe, it is now easy to forget that fact in the shadow of
its much larger neighbor, China, which is a reason for pause. Indeed, many of
the issues that Japan faces are not so different to those of another set of islands,
off the coast a more powerful EU (even if the aging British monarch has proved
far more tenacious).
Abenomics and Japan’s Low-yield Economy

Japan is a sobering test case of just how obstinate a low-yield economy can be.
The GDP has barely budged over the past 30 years and economic growth rarely
breaks 2%. Initially, the government attempted to end the malaise through
deregulation, particularly of the labor market. In the country once known
for lifetime employment, 40% of the labor force now works on temporary
contracts. With job security a thing of the past for many, so are the generous
pensions, health coverage, and unemployment insurance that came with life-
time employment. The precarious future has driven marriage and fertility rates
to record lows. One in three people in their twenties expects to work until
they die.
Guiding Japan through these challenges is Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. A
strategic conservative, he is the jammy heir to two powerful political dynasties:
his father was a minister, his paternal grandfather an MP, and his great-uncle
was one of the longest-serving prime ministers. But the most conspicuous or-
nament in the family tree is his maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who
ran the brutal conscript labor system in Japanese-occupied Manchuria (Driscoll
2010). Held for war crimes, he was released before trial and eventually became
prime minister, calling—unsuccessfully—for the revision of the Constitution
and the expansion of Japanese military capabilities. However, the hound-
faced Abe lacks the social skills of his extrovert grandfather, whom he lauds in
speeches. Indeed, when he took power in 2013, few expected him to last long
or accomplish much. They had seen him in the role before, in 2006, but he held
on for less than a year before resigning in the face of gaffes, money scandals, and
parliamentary losses. His second go, however, could hardly be more different
in perseverance, with Abe set to become the country’s longest-serving prime
minister (on Abe’s family past, see Hayashi 2014).
Distinguishing his first stint from his second is ‘Abenomics,’ a powerful
economic salvo that was to jolt the Japanese economy back to life. The com-
bination of monetary easing, fiscal stimulus, and structural reform aimed to
lift inflation to 2% and produce a virtuous cycle of business expansion and
consumer spending. But instead, the economy rebounded like a dropped dead
204 Kristin Surak
cat: a small bounce, then nothing. The effect on the national debt has been far
greater. It now stands at an eye-watering 250% of GDP (Pilling). (By contrast,
even Greece at the height of its economic crisis in 2012–13 never broke 180%.)
A long-planned sales tax hike, meant to pay for the mammoth borrowing, is
likely to be delayed yet again as economists fear that it will drag the fragile
economy back into recession. As in the UK, economic stagnation has not been
accompanied by mass unemployment—just mass under-employment, if mea-
sured by the amount of money people have to live on. Though over 97% of
people who want jobs are working, inequality has grown substantially, with
Japan now one of the most unequal countries in the OECD (OECD 2019).
Compared to Europe, only in Lithuania and Latvia is the poverty rate higher.
More than 1.5 million Japanese households survive on welfare. And the future
is not promising: one in six Japanese children lives in poverty (Foreign Press
Center Japan 2017).
Still the meager economic growth is remarkable when one considers the
shrinking population, which has been on the decline since 2008. The fertility
rates in both Japan and the UK—1.45 and 1.80, respectively—are below re-
placement levels of 2.1%. But in the British case, immigration helps maintain
the population growth at a mild 0.6%, due to both the influx of people and their
higher average birth rates If Brexit removes this strut, policy makers might turn
to Japan to gauge the effects. From the point of view of economic growth and
social provision, it’s not a very attractive prospect. Japan is losing more than
400,000 people per year, and the rate is accelerating as the baby boomers wane.
Bureaucrats hope to sustain the total population at 100 million, a fifth smaller
than its present size (Tsuya 2015). But no one knows how this will work—or
how the pension and public health care systems will be kept afloat—without
significant immigration. Even as the government looks into robotics to plug
some of the gaps, it is clear that in many industries, such as elderly care, there
are limits to how far machines can substitute for human services. Plus, robots
do not pay taxes or pension contributions (Pilling 2014).
Nativists in the West may hail Japan, with its foreign population of around
2%, as a model to follow. But on the edge of the Pacific, even arch-conservatives
realize that the system is untenable. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, known more
for his chauvinism than multiculturalism, has been expanding migration chan-
nels, rather than closing them down. In the past year, the government was
gratified to see foreign workers increase by nearly 15% to 1.5 million, a total
that has tripled over the past decade (Ministry of Justice, Immigration Con-
trol Report 2018). It is not only innocuous programs to attract highly skilled
workers that are driving this growth; the government now courts low- and
medium-skilled foreign workers to fill labor gaps in agriculture, construction,
manufacturing, and care work. It’s even opened the way for settlement and
family reunion, options previously unavailable to low-paid workers meant to
leave once their labor was unwanted (Endoh 2019). The conservative state is
still hesitant to call the mix anything like “immigration,” and Japan is hardly a
choice destination of migrants (it ranks below Estonia and Taiwan on its ability
to attract and develop talent; see IMD World Competitiveness Center). But
the Minister of Justice has described the new system as a way to accept foreign
workers to fill labor shortages, and the government expects that it will attract
an additional 345,000 foreign workers over the next five years.
A Nationalist Reawakening
In the wake of the Allied victory in World War II, the American occupying
army ensured that economic ties with a communist China were not revived
and that Japan’s economic lot was thrown in with the capitalist West. Its Prime
Minister at the time, Yoshida Shigeru, gave his name to the system under
which Japan would hand over responsibility for its defense and foreign policy to
the Americans, while focusing its efforts on economic growth (Dower 2000).
And with remarkable success. In the space of a decade, Japan’s GDP doubled.
In return, Japan relinquished large swaths of the country to the American mil-
itary. The greatest surrender is in Okinawa, where US bases cover over 15%
of the main island—and where locals have most fervently resisted the foreign
presence, both at the ballot box and through spectacular demonstrations. Yet,
Tokyo has turned a deaf ear to the protests of the Okinawan people, many of
whom are of aboriginal Ryūkyū extraction, who themselves were colonized
by Japan in the 19th century (McCormack and Norimatsu 2012). Still today,
around two-dozen bases and 50,000 US soldiers remain in the state that is
also host to America’s Seventh Fleet, the largest abroad. It pays for this, too:
Japan shoulders three-quarters of the cost for America to extend its military
reach deep into Asia. If the UK has a “special relationship” with the US, it is
not alone.
With few exceptions, Japan has toed the line when it comes to American
demands. It’s easy to see what is forthcoming in Japanese military developments
by reading reports drawn up by the Harvard political scientist and influen-
tial foreign policy mandarin, Joseph Nye, and his associates in Washington
(Armitage and Nye 2012). These have called for legalizing “collective secu-
rity” or collective self-defense, revising the Japanese Constitution, increasing
military spending, allowing Japanese forces to be regularly dispatched overseas,
and integrating Japanese military systems into the US ones.
The same pliability holds for the economy, despite Japan’s reputation for
hardball. When Americans began buying up Japanese consumer products in
the 1980s, the Japanese simply lent the dollars back by purchasing US debt—a
tactic that China has learned from. And perhaps too well. In 2010, China over-
took its neighbor to become world’s second largest economy, a tango turn that
has been complicated for Japan. Though China is the country’s largest trading
partner, the island nation still cleaves close to the US (McCormack 2007). After
206 Kristin Surak
Trump was elected, Abe raced to New York to become the first foreign leader
to meet the president-to-be. But since then, he has found that the Americans
are not as reliable as they once were. The US jumped ship on his treasured
Trans-Pacific Partnership (the “everyone but China club”); Japan has been shut
out of meetings with North Korea, much to Abe’s chagrin; and the most recent
round of trade negotiations with America has proceeded only haltingly. If na-
tionalist resurgence has rendered rapprochement with China, South Korea, and
Taiwan tricky, some in Japan wonder if tagging along with the US is worth the
cost of turning away from the country’s economically important and geopolit-
ically powerful neighbors.
The hype around Abenomics has distracted attention from the Prime Min-
ister’s more ominous policy successes (for a substantial overview, see Nakano
2016). Within a year of election, Abe side-stepped debate to pass a State Se-
crecy Law that greatly expands the government’s remit for designating infor-
mation a state secret. Now even environmental and health information can be
rendered virtually inaccessible to the public. Pundits were quick to dub it an
anti-whistle blower law for the steep prison penalties it levies on leakers and
reporters (Repeta 2013). But the media seems unlikely to present much of a
threat. Within days of taking office, Abe installed at the helm of the national
broadcasting agency one of his hard-right cronies, who immediately confirmed
that the most-watched television network would remain complacent: “If the
government says right, we won’t say left,” he declared (Uemura 2016). The
following year saw the ouster—or surrender—of several of the top journalists
and news hosts in the country. Meanwhile, the UN and Reporters Without
Borders have expressed concerns about the erosion of freedom of the press.
By 2014, Abe had moved on to the military. Though Article 9 of the Consti-
tution forbids Japan from waging war, he decided to reinterpret the foundational
law to allow it to take up arms for its allies. His explanation was weak: it would
enable Japan to come to the aid of America—a difficult situation to imagine,
given that the US military is greater than that of the next seven countries com-
bined. Over 200 legal scholars declared the interpretation unconstitutional. Still
more worrying were the tactics Abe used to get it through. Rather than letting
the Supreme Court adjudicate how the Constitution should be read, the Prime
Minister’s office made the call, in an egregious example of executive overreach.
“Reiwa”: Nationalist Agenda-setting and “Normalizing” Japan

Most recently, Abe employed his hallmark legislative style—ramming through
Acts by short-circuiting debate and votes—to pass a new Anti-Terrorism Bill.
He pitched the law, which criminalizes over 250 actions, as necessary to pro-
tect the country during the upcoming Olympics. The Japan Federation of Bar
Associations has noted that many of the forbidden deeds—like sit-in protests
or copying music—do not have the remotest connection to terrorism, merely
offering pretexts to squelch grassroots political movements.
But these are mere side stories to Abe’s main agenda, which is to “normalize
Japan”—shorthand for revising the Constitution and creating a standing army.
The Japanese Constitution, written largely by American occupiers, has been a
bugbear of the political right since inception. Abe’s own Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP) has hoped to replace it for more than 60 years. But no Prime Min-
ister has come as close as Abe to achieving this. The reform he seeks is no light
overhaul. LDP proposals call for rewriting nearly all of the 103 articles, weaken-
ing the protection of individual rights, strengthening the preeminent importance
of public order, qualifying basic freedoms, and underscoring the centrality of the
emperor to the nation. Central to this endeavor is the revision of Article 9, which
bans Japan from maintaining an army. The government spends around 1% of its
budget on its “self-defense forces,” but the country’s economic size means that
these still constitute the eighth largest military in the world. Still, the difference
between a de facto and a de jure army leaves its once-colonized neighbors—China
and the Koreas—on edge. The Americans, by contrast, are in full support. They
have worked for years to ensure that the Japanese forces are “interoperable” with
US counterparts, rendering them an extension of the range of the Pentagon. For
Washington, a well-armed Japan is both cheaper and more expedient, especially
as Beijing expands its reach into the Pacific.
Variations on a Global Theme?

Abe’s strong-man approach to rule might be seen as part of a broader global
trend. But unlike the waves of supporters who showed up at the polls for Bolson-
aro, Trump, Modi, and Duterte, voter turnout in Japan has plummeted. If there
are any lessons for Britain’s Labour Party, they are not from the Democratic Party
of Japan, the main counterbalance to the conservative LDP over the past two
decades. In the last election, this Blairite formation hoped to take down Abe by
throwing in its lot with a break-away center-right group. Each collected just 10%
of the available seats, against the LDP’s thumping 60%. The poverty of viable
options at election time has meant that nearly half of the population—and 70%
of the voting-age youth—no longer bother to cast a ballot.
Into this space of political inaction has stepped the Nippon Kaigi—“The
Japan Conference.” The stated aim of this right-wing organization is to
“build a nation with pride” (Tawara 2017). Its goals are not just nationalist but
neo-imperial, inspired by a selective memory of Japanese “greatness” at the
height of colonial expansion. The group seeks a new Constitution recalling
that of the Meiji Era, when the Japanese were duty-bearing subjects rather
than rights-bearing citizens. It hopes to return the emperor to the center of
political power, in a throwback to the rhetoric and image-system used to rally
the populace during World War II. Traditional family values—women in the
kitchen, off the throne, and under their husband’s family name—form another
area they want to strengthen. The Conference claims nearly 40,000 members,
but more important is who they are. Its reach into political offices and Shinto
208 Kristin Surak
religious organizations is long: around 60% of parliamentarians are members of

the Nippon Kaigi, which uses its networks to rally voters to the polls. So far,
the group’s biggest success has been in schools. It’s led the suppression of “mas-
ochistic” views of history, as well as “excessive” focus on human rights, and has
pressured governments and school boards to revise curricula accordingly (on
the Nippon Kaigi, see: Mizohata 2016; Tawara 2016).
Current calls for greater pride and sovereignty in Japan are as inconsistent a
mash-up of imperial imaginings, if not hallucinations, as they are in the UK.
It’s little wonder, then, that the name for the new imperial era selected by the
Abe government has unsettling overtones. Emperor Naruhito’s reign will be
called “Reiwa.” The term, taken from classical poetry, means “auspicious har-
mony.” In the official translation, it’s rendered “beautiful harmony”—a choice
that recalls Abe’s own multiple appeals to create a “beautiful Japan” (Abe 2007).
By itself, the character for “rei” also means “command” or “order.” In everyday
speech, the semantic overlap may be innocuous—few English-speakers pause
to reflect on the common Greek origin of “hospitality” and “hostility,” or that
the root of “pharmacy”—pharmakon—contains both “remedy” and “poison”
among its meanings (Derrida 1981).
How the reign-name will be understood depends a lot on how Naruhito
defines his role—a job not as easy as one might think. The separation of the
monarch from any political issues is so complete that when Emperor Akihito
floated the possibility of stepping down, commentators debated whether he had
exceeded his station. Nonetheless, the retiring royal carved out a role for himself
by supporting social welfare causes. In contrast to his distant father, he went
out to the streets to offer solace and consolation to the underprivileged, disaster
victims and others in need. His actions were so unexpected that even the most
mundane gestures—squatting to talk to an old woman sitting on the floor of an
evacuation center—grabbed headlines. Outside the country (and to the chagrin
of ultra-nationalists), he made a point of recognizing Japanese wartime aggres-
sion with a remorse that rang truer than Abe’s pro forma apologies (on Emperor
Akihito, see Breen 2019). It remains to be seen what path his son will take amid
a landscape of continuing economic stagnation and escalating nationalism.
Note
1 This chapter was originally published in the New Statesman. The editors gratefully
acknowledge the permission of the author and the New Statesman to publish a
slightly revised version in this volume.
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14
“IT’S ALL CORRUPT”
The Roots of Bolsonarism in Brazil
Esther Solano
Introduction
The Bolsonarist tsunami ran over Brazilian politics with unexpected force. Jair
Bolsonaro won the elections, despite having only managed eight seconds of
television campaigning. He managed to earn the Social Liberal Party (PSL),
until then an insignificant player in Brazilian electoral politics, 52 deputies.
This defied the classic analyses of political science, which assumed, categori-
cally, that without enough time for TV campaigning, and without a significant
political party, there was no chance of the candidate reaching the Presidency.
As if that were not enough, some of the new state and federal congressmen of
the PSL had massive voter support, like Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jair’s son, who
received the highest vote total of anyone running for the Federal Congress in
History.
What can explain this unprecedented and unpredictable success? Jair
Bolsonaro built his popular legitimacy on elements that had strongly consoli-
dated within society and the electorate in Brazil since the impeachment process
in 2015 and 2016. The elements include anti-system rhetoric; anti-partisanship;
anti-petism, i.e. opposition to the Workers’ Party (PT); anti-leftism; conser-
vative ideology; neoliberalism; and support from evangelical and militarist
political bases (Solano 2019). Bolsonarism and its electoral success is not a phe-
nomenon restricted to an individual; rather, it is an ideological matrix with
strong social roots. This chapter seeks to characterize the elements that brought
electoral success to Bolsonarism and which made it plausible for Bolsonaro to
present himself as the only candidate with workable solutions for the economic,
political, and moral crises of Brazil today.
The Roots of Bolsonarism in Brazil 211
Bolsonaro and the Economic Crisis: More Neoliberalism

for the Neoliberal Crisis
At the heart of the current crisis of representative democracy is the crisis of neo-
liberalism itself that has brought a new political form to life: post-democracy.
Crouch (2004) defines post-democracy as a political system with a democratic
facade, beneath which the system is totally captured by neoliberal logic. De-
mocracy is being replaced by corporocracy, becoming an accessory to market
logic, which comes to rest at the very heart of the system of political representa-
tion. Decision-making power is removed from the electorate and placed in the
orbit of large companies and political oligarchies. In this system, neoliberalism
is the center and nucleus of everything. Everything belongs to it and noth-
ing out of it survives. The conditions of existences and subjectivities are built
within, and only within, the logic of neoliberal rationality (Laval and Dardot
2016). Brazil presents a striking example of this situation of economic capture
of the democratic representation: among 513 members of Federal Congress
elected in 2018, 248 declared to the Electoral Justice to have a fortune over R$
1 million in a country where the average monthly income is R$ 928 according
to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
Flexibility, hyper-productivism, home-office, and young people who lack
horizons for personal and career development, precariousness, accelerated vul-
nerability, millions of disposable people in chronic unemployment situation,
and impoverished middle class are the result of this new labor morphology.
According to the data from the IBGE, in 2018, the number of Brazilian infor-
mal workers was 38.3 million (41.3%); in 2019, unemployment reached 13.2
million and 3.8 million Brazilian workers list applications such as Rappi, Uber,
UberEats, or iFood as their main source of income. In this scenario of in-
creasing informality in the labor market, constantly increasing precarity is the
reality for most workers. According to a survey by the Institute Locomotiva in
2018, 56% of formal workers in Brazil said that they were dissatisfied with their
working conditions.
Achille Mbembe (2014) describes this process as the universalization of the
black condition, which causes permanent existential uncertainty in the worker,
who feels increasingly insecure, having his ways of sociability disintegrated
(Castel 2005). In parallel, the classical structures of representativeness, such
as unions, are immensely weakened. According to data from the ICJBrasil of
2017, only 29% of Brazilians trust unions.
The harshness of the labor market has as an immediate consequence the
increase of psychological suffering of society. This suffering, however, is not
perceived as collective and produced by contemporary capitalism; rather, it is
perceived as individualized, giving rise to feelings of failure and guilt. Meri-
tocracy takes the place of the politicization of suffering. Individualism is the
212 Esther Solano
prevailing logic. Individual and private dynamics prevail over collective and
public dynamics. It is the time of the entrepreneur who thinks that the State is
only a burden, of the citizen who wants a weapon at home to protect himself
because the State is not able to protect him or her, and of the person who pre-
fers to be informed by WhatsApp because he or she doesn’t trust the big press.
In this environment, the so-called “prosperity gospel” prospers in Christian
churches, teaching that you can enter the Kingdom of God by working hard
and contributing financially with the church. The rhetoric of the minimum
state, the privatization of public services, and the logic of the self-made man
appear as the only solutions to economic crises.
The political disenchantment of the most popular classes in Brazil who feel
totally absent from state protection is enormous. Millions of Brazilians only
count on family, neighborhood, or religious protection networks in a country
of the Global South where, in 2018, the 10% of the poorest population held
0.8% of the income mass, while the 10% richest concentrated 43.1% (IBGE).
Due to this situation, the Lavajatistic rhetoric of criminalization of politics and
the State on the basis of anti-corruption discourses echoed with great force
during recent years.
Operation Lava Jato (Car Wash Operation) conducted by its chief judge, the
current Minister of Justice, Sergio Moro, imposes an anti-corruption strategy
based on a moralistic, punitive, spectacle justice (Casara 2018), which places
politics and the State as enemies. In the rhetoric of Moro and Bolsonaro, if
the State is intrinsically corrupt, dishonest, ineffective, and spends too much
money, the way out of the economic crisis, which is a political and moral crisis,
is the replacement of the State by a private initiative and the replacement of
public policies by entrepreneurial and individualistic dynamics and minimum
state system. This is the context through which we can understand the justifi-
cation for the anti-popular pensions reform initiative that will impoverish the
poorest classes in Brazil even more, the privatization of important State com-
panies such as Petrobras or Eletrobras (oil and energy companies), and the labor
reform that decreases workers’ rights enormously.
We, the poor worker, can always change our life, of course. You’ll hear
“no” many times, but you can do it, just need to work hard in life. There
are lots of poor people who do not want to work, they are lazy, they just
want to depend on the State
Interview 23
The State is corrupt and ineffective, politicians just want their privi-
leges. We should privatize everything, education, health, even the State
itself! No politicians, just CEOs. Only private services, like companies.
Public companies are total failure.
Interview 25
Bolsonaro and the Political Crisis: Anti-system,

Anti-partisanship, and Anti-petism
Like other politicians representing the extreme right, Bolsonaro builds himself
electorally on the basis of scapegoat logic, transforming fear, insecurity, anger,
frustration within the poor classes but also among the increasingly impover-
ished among middle classes, into political hatred. The logic of the enemy—
defined as PT, cultural Marxism, teachers who indoctrinate students, feminists,
LGBTs who want the end our Christian way of life, and black people of the
periphery—these scapegoats are responsible for our suffering. The mystification
of a more existentially secure past where the old social hierarchies ordered the
world is part of this whole process. It is the politics of enmity (Mbeme 2017).
Anti-system, Anti-partisanship Rhetoric

One of the issues that most insistently appears in my interviews as justifying
voting for Bolsonaro is that he represents “someone different”: an outsider ca-
pable of facing a totally corrupted political logic. The word “hope” or “change”
was linked to the figure of Bolsonaro appearing in all interviews. Bolsonaro is
seen as honest and authentic, an anti-mainstream figure, capable of capturing
the protest vote, channeling the frustration and anger against the political sys-
tem. Traditional parties are perceived as equally dirty and concerned only with
their own privileges. It is the binary conception of the old versus the new and
the new is a category of enormous political impact. The old, traditional politics
are rejected and the political novelty appears as a value in itself.
Corruption is at the heart of this argument. Not only would professional
politicians be dirty and corrupt, but politically making itself. The State bu-
reaucracy, even the representation system, awakens negative affections such as
shame and rejection. Sergio Moro appears characterized in the interviews by
concepts such as hero, savior, someone who “has a task,” “is an envoy,” and
even more, “will clean Brazil” of corrupt politicians who, in a moralist and du-
alistic point of view, represent evil, the enemy to be exterminated, “a cancer.”
In the interviewees’ speeches, the concept of “cleaning up” appears much more
than the concept of “doing justice.” A messianic, militant, and criminalizing
justice increases the collective feeling that politics and political parties are de-
spicable and heinous. Regardless of the many real cases of corruption involving
the largest political parties in the country, what this chapter seeks to emphasize
is that Operation Jet Lava was a key element in the rise of Bolsonarism. The
way in which former judge Sergio Moro (current Minister of Justice and Public
Security under Bolsonaro) conducted the anti-corruption operation, with a
promiscuous relationship with the press, full of selective leaks, and very con-
troversial spectacular maneuvers popularized the idea that political system as
a whole was corrupt and that an outsider like Bolsonaro should be elected.
214 Esther Solano
Paradoxically, the main victim of this anti-system rhetoric was not the PT,
as Dilma Rousseff impeachment or the imprisonment of Lula might suggest.
Rather, it is one of that party’s traditional rivals, the PSDB (Party of Brazilian
Social Democracy), which went from 34.8 million votes in the first round of
the 2014 elections to five million in 2018.
They’re all the same. PT, PSDB. Power is power. They don’t care about
us. It’s all corrupt, dirty, everything… I don’t vote for left or right, I vote
for the person. Left and right is all the same. Oh, I think Bolsonaro is
different and can change all that. We believe in him. We have faith in
him, hope, he is not the same.
Interview 15
In the research I conducted with Pablo Ortellado and Lucia Nader during the
pro-impeachment demonstrations throughout 2015, social pre-Bolsonarism
was, in retrospect, already evident.1 At the August 16, 2015 demonstration
against PT on Paulista Avenue, 96% of those who demonstrated said they were
not satisfied with the political system, 73% said they did not trust the political
parties, and 70% did not trust politicians. Anti-partisanship and the rejection
of the figure of the traditional politician appeared with great force. When we
asked who inspired the most trust, Bolsonaro’s name came first: 19.4% trusted
him very much. In that same demonstration, only 11% said that they trusted the
PSDB (party in which the majority of the people demonstrating voted in the
2014 election) and 1% trusted PMDB (the party of the Vice President Michel
Temer that would occupy the Presidency of the Republic if the impeachment
requested by the demonstrators were successful). Fifty-six percent agreed with
the sentence “someone outside the political game would solve the crises,” 64%
said “an honest judge” would, and 88% an “honest politician.” At that time,
one could already detect the nascent creation of the figures of Bolsonaro and
the judge Sergio Moro as the honest outsiders who could serve as saviors of
the nation. The solution should come from outside the system. Faced with a
scenario of perception of increased political corruption, values such as honesty
and ethics appeared as indispensable in the prototype of the desirable politician.
Along with the disapproval of politics, collectivist solutions, and politicians
generally, one sees a growing appeal for the logic of the private, of the intimate,
and of personal relationships: personal effort, family, and religion reappear as
the main circles of sociability and problem solving.
Anti-petism and Anti-leftism

Along with the denial of politics as a collective activity, anti-leftism was one
of the elements most exploited by Bolsonaro’s campaign. One of the most in-
teresting facts at the symbolic level of the campaign was the resurgence of
anti-communism in electoral propaganda. The anti-petism (anti-Workers’

Party) rhetoric so prevalent during the pro-impeachment demonstrations of
2015 and 2016 could be easily converted into angry anti-left speeches during
the 2018 elections.
Mara Telles and her research team studied this phenomenon at the pro-
impeachment demonstration on March 12, 2015 in Belo Horizonte (Telles
2017). The demonstrators expressed their indignation with corruption (36%),
but also their dissatisfaction with politics (18%). However, more than cor-
ruption, the theme that most connected the demonstrations was anti-petism.
Ninety-one percent said that PT did great harm and 82% gave a score of 0 to
PT government. The anti-petism can also be found in the judgment they made
about their leaders: 81% considered Lula to be one of the country’s main male-
factors; 82% agreed that Rousseff was too. Professor Telles affirms that anti-
petism is based on a powerful class factor and anti-egalitarianism.
Most of the demonstrators disagreed with PT government policies on social
inclusion, such as Bolsa Família (77.8%), stating that people assisted by social
programs can “become lazier.” Already 37% of those who protested alleged
that minorities, such as black people, women, and homosexuals, have too many
rights in Brazil, and the racial quotas on university admissions are rejected by a
majority of citizens: 70.1% declared that they should be eliminated. The pres-
ence of Cuban doctors in primary health-care programs in the poorest regions
of the country, where many Brazilian doctors refuse to go, is also disapproved
by 70.7%. A wide majority (75.6%) declared that the poor make poor political
decisions.
Anti-petism, anti-leftism, anti-communism. In the first television electoral
program of the second round of 2018 elections, Bolsonaro’s propaganda exhib-
ited supposed connections between PT and São Paulo Forum, which would
be “a political group with left-wing communist ideology led by Lula and Fidel
Castro” created in Latin America to spread communism. The electoral propa-
ganda also exploited the PT’s relationship with Venezuela and the Bolivarian
countries and the danger of “Venezuelanism” in Brazil if PT won the elections.
Only Bolsonaro, it was argued, could save Brazil of this imminent communist
danger.
But the antagonism is not only built on the perceived danger of the PT.
During the Bolsonaro campaign, the figure of the enemy is enlarged to include
the entire progressive camp. The Bolsonarist conservatism built itself on reli-
gious values and romanticizing a better past, in which the traditional family,
the heteronormative model, was of essential appeal, offering a binary, scapegoat
logic of the good citizen versus the bandit, where the good citizen conforms
to conservative and meritocratic standards, while the bandit, or the criminal,
is anyone who opposes this figure: feminists who are too radical and anti-
family, LGBTs who are too obscene, left-wing protesters who are “a bunch of
vagabonds.”
216 Esther Solano
I am a good citizen who works, pays taxes, has a decent life and is unpro-
tected. Where’s the victim’s human rights? Human rights end up being
bad because it’s for bandits, for criminals, for lefties, for feminists… what
about us? The State does not protect us but Bolsonaro will change this
situation PT created. He will protect good honest citizens.
Interview 1
For Bolsonaro voters, even the poorest, the crisis that is devastating Brazil is not
the result of neoliberalism or a brutal unequal structure, a racist and colonial
heritage; rather, it is fundamentally a crisis of values, where leftists, feminists, or
gays are dangerous categories. It is the strategy of cultural wars (Hunter, 1991)
of the moralization of politics and the demonization of opponents transforming
them into enemies.
Bolsonaro and the Moral Crisis: Christianization and

Militarization of Politics
Wendy Brown (2006) explains how in recent decades we have witnessed a
new phenomenon that is the confluence of neoliberalism and neoconserva-
tism. In order to rise as a regulatory force of subjectivities and collective life,
neoliberalism needs a set of values and ethical configurations that reinterprets
economic crises as moral crisis and the abandonment of traditional values. This
is where the role of religion as the moral legitimizer of neoliberalism enters
specifically in its meritocratic model of the theology of prosperity and the logic
of sacrifice. This is also where, in front of the austerity policies, long-term un-
employment, precariousness, impoverishment, and the traditional patriarchal
and heteronormative family as the main social nucleus come into play. In this
context, nationalism becomes attractive, as does the figure of the “good man”
as a form of social cohesion against threats posed by “others.” This further leads
to the militarization of the political and public spaces to maintain the law and
order necessary for the market to operate. Nancy Fraser (2017) interprets the
advance of right-wing governments in the world as the end of what she called
“progressive neoliberalism,” an alliance between neoliberalism and certain
emancipation ideas (feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQ rights). Thus, the Bolson-
aro government represents this alliance between neoliberalism and neoconser-
vatism, and resistance to the putative identity politics of the left is yoked to (at
least token) resistance of economic globalization.
Current Bolsonaro’s government composition is a perfect example of this
combination between neoliberal and neoconservative politics. The Minister of
Economy, Chicago Boy Paulo Guedes, an ultraliberal referent, who calls for a
minimal state, can serve together in Bolsonaro’s cabinet with a fundamentalist
Christian pastor, the Minister of Family, Women and Human Rights, Damares
Alves, for whom women should remain at home, and with Ernesto Araújo,
Minister of Foreign Affairs, for whom cultural Marxism is guilty of “global-

ism” and of forgetting God’s role in History.
Identity movements are the main target of attack within this aspect of
Bolsonarism. According to his voters, Bolsonaro is not misogynistic, racist, or
homophobic; rather, he acts correctly in speaking shamelessly what he thinks,
reacting against the dictatorship of political correctness. Identity movements
are the guiltiest of the moral chaos of society. Still, for those who support
Bolsonaro, the belief is that collective struggle does not guarantee the conquest
of more rights; rather, personal effort and meritocracy do so.
That homophobia thing didn’t have it before. Now it’s homophobia ev-
erywhere. Before there wasn’t so much violence against gay people, but
now it seems that they show off too much. Partially, they are guilty of the
violence against them because they show themselves too much.
Interview 21
I’m against race quotas for public University. What about poor white
people? There are rich black people. There is less and less racism now.
There are many people who want to take advantage of being black. Slav-
ery was a long time ago, you don’t have to remember that all the time.
There is racism on both sides.
Interview 2
Bolsonaro often cites in his public appearances the Bible verse, John 8:32
“and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” Although born
Catholic, he was baptized on May 12, 2016 in the Jordan River by Pentecos-
tal Pastor Everaldo, president of the Christian Social Party (PSC). The word
God was one of the most repeated both in his campaign and in his inaugu-
ral speech on January 1, 2019 in Brasilia. A Datafolha survey of October 25,
2018 estimated the number of valid votes for Bolsonaro by religious segments:
29.9% Catholic, 21.7% evangelical Christian versus 28.7% Catholic, and 9.7%
evangelical Christian of valid votes that went to Fernando Haddad. The evan-
gelical Christian universe positioned itself with Bolsonaro by a wide margin
after Bishop Edir Macedo, the powerful leader of the Universal Church of
the Kingdom of God and an ally of PT until impeachment, and Bishop Silas
Malafaia, the powerful leader of the Assembly of God Church, publicly sup-
ported him. Both leaders saw a great opportunity to increase their political
influence under Bolsonaro’s government in a moment where the relations of
the big Christian Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal churches with PT were very
weak and became even weaker when, during the campaign, PT candidate,
Fernando Haddad, said to the press that Bishop Edir Macedo was a charlatan.
Politically, evangelical Christian neoconservatism is emerging strongly
in Brazil, especially since 2002, with the idea that the traditional family is
218 Esther Solano
threatened and still recovering the anti-communist debate. The Evangelical

Parliamentary Front (EPF) was created in 2003. Since then, and with PT gov-
ernments, their influence and importance have grown. Valle (2018) explains
that, although there were differences between PT and various evangelical
groups, fundamentally Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal, the novelty already
present in the 2014 presidential elections, which gains more strength in the
municipal elections of 2016 and is consolidated in 2018, is the willingness of
pastors to hold a speech of confrontation with the PT within the churches.
In his research on the Assembly of God Ministry of Belem in Campo Limpo,
São Paulo, Valle states that from 2014, the verbalization of anti-petism within
the church starts to be vehement mainly using the debates on family related
to LGBT policies happening with PT governments and corruption. Not only
did he perceive this change among Christian leaders but also among the people
attending those churches, including those who had voted for PT, among whom
he observed a change in the political trajectory with a progressive disappoint-
ment with the Dilma government, fundamentally because of the economic de-
terioration, the centrality of the anti-corruption discourse, and the rhetoric of
valuing the family and Christian ethics. On April 6, 2016, the EPF declared its
support for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. Of the 81 congressmen who
make up the EPF, also known as the Evangelical Bench, 75 voted in favor of
the admissibility of impeachment. Knowing that PT would lose impeachment,
evangelical leaders were preparing themselves and their bases for a new conser-
vative government with more space for religious influence.
According to the information from the Interunion Parliamentary Advisory
Department (Diap), based on data available on the website of the Supreme Elec-
toral Court, in 2014, there were 75 federal deputies who followed the evangel-
ical Christian doctrine, grouped into 18 parties. In 2018, 84 federal deputies
were elected, identified with the evangelical Christian belief. The criminaliza-
tion of abortion is one of the most representative bills of their agenda. They are
strongly against the approval of bills such as PL 122/2006 (Anti-Homophobia
Law), or PL 612/211 that allows the legal recognition of same-sex marriages.
I vote for Bolsonaro because he defends our families; he’s on the religious
side. The PT wanted to make our kids gay, was going to release the pris-
oners, and children could choose in the birth certificate if they want to be
boys or girls. PT would destroy families. They don’t respect religion. They
even had that gay bible thing. Good thing Bolsonaro won. All these people
think about is sex, prostitution, orgies… Bolsonaro took an attitude, had
courage…We are in a battle God against the demons. This time God won.
Interview 11
Among Bolsonaro supporters, the role of religion as a regulator of social life is

essential. One of the main causes for which we are in this crisis of values is the
abandonment of religious ethical principles. The return of religiosity as a moral

vector of society is fundamental, even the religious education in public schools
is highly valued. Not only was the support of the evangelical leaders crucial for
Bolsonaro election, but he also knew how to explore electorally religious nar-
ratives to deeply connect with evangelical Christian public. The main subtext
of the moral content of Bolsonaro’s campaign was that PT and the left were
against religious values and only he would stand up for religion as the source
of ethics that must guide private and public lives. This strategy of moralization
and Christianization of politics matches very well with the Car Wash idea of a
corrupted and “dirty” State:
What we have today is a total crisis of values. Everything’s backwards.

It’s all wrong. Television teaching you how to be gay. Kids don’t have the
values we had… You should have religious education in schools, yes, to
learn ethics, to know what is right and what is wrong.
Interview 2
In parallel to religion, the militaristic ground is also highly valued by Bolsonaro

supporters. This ethical and moral chaos is also due to the lack of discipline,
lack of authority, and lack of respect and hierarchy. Order is one of the most
repeated words in my interviews. The left is responsible for this situation of dis-
order, chaos, and confusion, which can only be overcome by retaking military
values as the foundation of social life.
The kids don’t care about anything now. We used to be raised with dis-
cipline at home and at school. It was “yes, sir,” it was respect, it was
authority. I am in favour of military school, yes, singing the anthem, the
flag, because we have to teach children to have responsibility, discipline,
if not is a mess.
Interview 16
According to Datafolha, in 2018, seven out of ten Brazilians (68%) declared

they had no confidence in political parties, 67% declared they had no confi-
dence in the National Congress (the highest index in the historical series), and
64% in the Presidency of the Republic. In contrast, the Armed Forces were
evaluated as the most reliable institution in Brazil for the majority of the pop-
ulation. Seventy-eight percent said that they trusted them.2 In parallel to the
anti-partisanship discourse and the rejection of the traditional way of doing
politics, the Armed Forces gain credibility in the Brazilian public space.
Bolsonaro and his Vice President, General Hamilton Mourão, raise the
presence of the military in public life in Brazil to historic highs during the
democratic era. People for the Armed Forces have nine Ministries, some of
them very important as the Government Secretary (General Carlos Alberto dos
220 Esther Solano
Santos Cruz), General Presidency Secretary (General Floriano Peixoto Vieira),

or Institutional Security Cabinet (General Augusto Heleno). In addition to
this military presence in government, Bolsonaro’s militaristic rhetoric has been
present throughout the whole campaign. The only effective implementation
of his electoral program on public security has been three changes: making it
easier to carry weapons; reducing the age of criminal majority from 18 to 16
years; and changing the rules of engagement to be more tolerant of the use of
lethal force by police.
While discussing the centrality of militarism to Bolsonaro’s administration,
we must remember the militarization of the National Congress. As discussed
earlier, evangelical Christian politicians are organized in Brazil around the
EPF, popularly known as the Bible Group. In public safety sector, we have the
same format. Ex-military, police, and firefighters are part of the Parliamentary
Front for Public Security, known as the Bullet Group with a punitive security
ideology with the support of the arms industry, such as the company Taurus
and the Brazilian Cartridge Company (CBC). According to the survey of the
Congress in Focus, in 2019, this Bullet Group went from 36 national congress-
men to 102, with 93 congressmen and 18 senators (had none in 2014) being
most of them members of the Liberal Social Party, Bolsonaro’s party.
Bolsonaro in Government: Where Is the Left?

In the first year of his Presidency, three sets of measures stood out in the new
government: (1) those with a neoliberal profile, such as the reform of the social
pensions system that attacks the most impoverished, the flexibility of labor laws,
the end of legislation against labor in conditions analogous to slavery, the flexi-
bility of controls against child labor; (2) the anti-environmental measures, with
the release of 239 new pesticides, the attempt to abandon the Paris Agreement
and the decree that gives the power of delimitation of indigenous lands to the
Ministry of Agriculture dominated by the landowners; (3) direct attacks on
public education, with a 30% budget reduction for federal universities and in-
quisitorial rhetoric and persecution of professors and activities critical to the
government. In parallel, Bolsonaro follows the Trumpist model of government
communication via Twitter by attacking the press repeatedly. In the same way,
the rhetoric of the enemy and the warlike and reactionary tone against the oppo-
sition and progressive sectors remains the same as during the electoral campaign.
Until now, the difficulties the Bolsonaro government has faced in implement-
ing its policy prescriptions are fundamentally due to the structure of Brasilia
itself. Brazilian political architecture is based on coalition presidentialism. The
president invariably needs to have a solid allied base in Congress. Dilma Rousseff
lost it and ended up in impeachment. But the powerful machine of the Brazilian
Congress is not for beginners. There are 513 deputies from 30 different parties,
the largest number of parties since the Brazilian re-democratization. Instead of
building his political base, Bolsonaro devoted himself to attack the old politics,
trying to impose his agenda in an undiplomatic way and not respecting the Con-
gress. He has thus earned many enemies. This political impotence has meant that
the current control of Brasilia is much more in the hands of the President of the
Chamber of Deputies, Rodrigo Maia, than in Bolsonaro’s. Likewise, the new
President accumulates negative editorials from even the country’s most conser-
vative newspapers, such as Estado de São Paulo and Veja magazine, which sup-
ported him during the electoral campaign and are widely known for their strong
anti-PT positions. According to a survey published in early April 2019 by the
Datafolha Institute, 30% of Brazilians consider their government bad, an increase
of 8% over the previous survey published in February. This also represents the
highest disapproval rating for any President after the first 100 days in office since
re-democratization in 1985. For context, Lula had a disapproval rating of only
10% at this point in his Presidency.
As for the opposition in the streets, the situation is more ambiguous. The
education sector has so far been the only one capable of staging huge anti-
Bolsonarist demonstrations in defense of public, free and quality higher educa-
tion. However, questions such as unemployment, the injustices of the pensions’
reform, and the precariousness of work or unemployment do not succeed in
mobilizing Brazilian citizens who feel defrauded by the unions. The polit-
ical opposition doesn’t have an easy life either. On the one hand, Fernando
Haddad (PT) got 44.87% of the votes and with 56 deputies PT has the largest
parliamentary group in Congress. In addition, PT continues to be hegemonic
in the northeast, where, for example, in the first round, Rui Costa won the
government of the very important State of Bahia. At the same time, how-
ever, the Workers’ Party has also lost much of its capacity for mobilization and
anti-petism continues to be very powerful, fundamentally among sectors of the
traditional white middle class in the South and Southeast of Brazil. For these
groups, anti-petism is based on a strong class feeling against PT public policies
for the poorest. According to Datafolha statistics, Bolsonaro obtained up to
75% of the votes in Brazilian municipalities with medium and high incomes,
but did not reach 25% in the poorest localities. Likewise, PT has also lost votes
among the new middle classes, benefited by these same policies, but which now
adopt the imaginary and subjectivity of the traditional middle class by adopting
meritocratic and anti-petism discourses. But perhaps the major drama of PT is
due to the loss of votes among the most popular sectors, in this case heavily in-
fluenced by the Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal churches, whose anti-petism
is built on their conservative arguments for the protection of family and faith.
In order to address these problems, several sectors within PT affirm that the
Workers’ Party should go through a whole new foundation: returning to the
poor peripheries abandoned when PT came to power, and renewing his pro-
gram and his communication in a Brazil that is no longer the same as the one
that led Lula to the Presidency in 2002. But how to build the post-Lulism when
222 Esther Solano
Lula is imprisoned in Curitiba, presenting himself as a victim of a politicized

judicial process and both the present and future of the PT?
What is certain is that, until now, the stronger political alternative to the
Bolsonaro government is being built around the idea of some kind of center-right
policy, with a totally neoliberal perspective, which is also presented as “new pol-
icy,” “technical,” “neither right nor left” but which, unlike Bolsonaro, is more
sophisticated as both a political and ideological force. This movement is built by
and around politicians with higher education and good international relations,
who avoid the hard edges of moralism and cultural conservativism as well as re-
actionary rhetoric. João Doria, businessman and current governor of São Paulo
for the PSDB (the traditional center-right party) and very likely candidate in the
next elections in 2022, represents this possibility. In other words, the long-term
continuity of neoliberal policies (the politics of no alternative seen around the
world since especially the 1990s) does not seem to be at risk.
Conclusion
The victory of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 is figured as an unparalleled event in Bra-
zilian politics that was already going through very critical moments fundamen-
tally since the impeachment process of President Dilma Rousseff and the arrest
of former President Lula. His victory was a great perplexity for a large part of
the political class, academia, and progressive social groups that refused to ac-
cept the categorical fact that Brazil had chosen as president a representative of
the extreme right after 14 years of PT governments. This chapter is an attempt
to overcome this perplexity and understand Bolsonarism as a phenomenon
with profound implications for Brazilian social life, describing the elements
that characterize Bolsonarism, some of them with deep and historical roots in
Brazilian society such as religiosity and others more recent as anti-PT rhetoric.
This should also serve as a wake-up call so that, from the academic sectors,
we have the sensitivity and intellectual perspicacity to study those dynam-
ics or political personalities that represent the absolute opposition of liberal
democratic ideals. Groups, leaders, and movements of the right and extreme
right, especially when they show themselves as principled opponents of liberal
democracy, must be well studied. We must move from our intellectual comfort
zone to understand the profound dynamics that on various occasions place our
democracy at risk.
Notes
1 Quantitative research with 571 demonstrators. Complete results, https://brasil.
elpais.com/brasil/2015/04/14/politica/1429037495_877092.html Date of last con-
sultation 27-08-2019
2 Complete data available at https://datafolha.folha.uol.com.br/opiniaopublica/
2018/06/1971972-partidos-congresso-e-presidencia-sao-instituicoes-menos-
confiaveis-do-pais.shtml Date of last consultation 01-12-2018
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Taylor & Francis
PART III
Epilogue
Persevering through a Crisis
of Conviction
Taylor & Francis
15
POPULISM AND DEMOCRACY
A Long View1
Craig Calhoun
Introduction
‘Populism’ is often a derogatory label for anti-democratic but popular leaders,
and for popular voices raised in anger and resentment to condemn elites and
politics as usual. But populism is not, in general, an attack on democracy.
First, populism expresses one core dimension of democracy, the will of
the people. This can be positive, demanding attention to important issues and
potentially expanding political inclusion. But populists purport to speak not
just for but as ‘the people,’ unmediated and whole. Others may point out that
the populists of the moment are not even a majority, let alone the whole of the
people. The populist response is often just that the other people have not yet
awakened to how they are threatened. Or, populists may say, those others are
not part of the ‘real’ people. They are elites, or immigrants, or minorities, or
deviants, or even enemies of the people. The claim to express a Rousseauian
‘general will’ is typically tendentious.
Second, populism predates democracy. It flourishes in non-democratic so-
cieties so long as there is some notion of popular political membership and the
idea that political legitimacy might derive at least ultimately from the will or
well-being of the people. It can be a demand for more democracy.
Third, claiming to speak directly for the people, populists challenge liberal
and republican constitutional provisions. These are intended to achieve greater
justice, e.g. by ensuring wide political representation and protecting minorities;
to minimize corruption by promoting civic virtue and punishing self-dealing;
and to stabilize democracy by ensuring that reflection has a chance to override
transitory passions and that winners and losers work together after contentious
elections. But the liberal and republican provisions produce a representative
228 Craig Calhoun
rather than direct democracy and a mixed government in which laws, courts,
and legislative processes check and limit immediate expressions of popular (or
executive) will. They give disproportionate influence to educated elites and
professionals from lawyers and judges to journalists and scientists. On republi-
can principles, these may govern or shape policy on behalf of the whole society.
But they add to the frustration of populists when they feel that they are being
ignored or even denigrated by elites.
Populism Has a Long History

Many ancient Greek political philosophers thought that all democracy tended
toward populism. For this reason, they distrusted it. They thought it would be
unstable, driven by resentment and other passions, and vulnerable to dema-
gogues who could transform it into mob rule and then make that a short path
to tyranny. Plato took it as exemplary that that the citizens of Athens compelled
the death of Socrates precisely when they were organized as a democracy.
Greek thinkers typically saw all government as likely to cycle through
phases of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—or worse, their degenerate
forms of tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy or mob rule. But democracy in their
eyes was the least stable and most dangerous form of government.2 Plato, espe-
cially, bequeathed this anxiety about democracy to the ensuring centuries of
political thought.
While surely not an advocate for unalloyed democracy as practiced in his
time, Aristotle saw a greater place for the expression of popular will, or at least
recognition of popular grievances against elite monopolization of power and
economic resources. He therefore recommended a form of political rule that
came to be at the center of the republican tradition: mixed government. This
is an attempt to stabilize politics by balancing elements from each of monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy in a virtuous polity. Jill Frank (2005) describes the
result as a “democracy of distinction.” Crucially, it is only partly democracy.
The Roman Republic gave proof that this project could work. It achieved
considerable stability with a mixed constitution that gave all citizens the right
to participate in electoral decisions, but unequally. Aristocrats had more votes
and dominated the Senate and the actual work of government. A faction of
Populares represented plebeians—commoners—including many farmers. A
rational for this hierarchy was that plebeian citizens were thought less able to
prioritize public over private interests and cultivate civic virtue. More complete
exclusions affected non-citizens including women and slaves). But there were
also ‘tribunes of the people’ to limit the power of the aristocratic Senate and
magistrates. This arrangement did not resolve conflict between the different
‘orders’ of citizens, but for 400 years, it tamed it.
The Republic ended in the wake amid civil wars and intrigues. A pop-
ulist leader, the victorious general Julius Caesar, attempted to seize power,
Populism and Democracy: A Long View 229
becoming in effect the first Emperor. He was assassinated by rivals with a range
of motives, but in the name of defending of the Republic, leaving posterity
with an enduring moral drama. The Republic had become corrupt, chaotic,
and disorganized. But writing in self-imposed exile, the aristocratic former
consul and philosopher Cicero gave enduring articulation to republican ideals
even as the Republic died.
Empire and monarchy (including the peculiar combination of imperial and
monarchical elements in the Catholic Church) dominated Western European
political structures through the middle ages. The republican tradition lived on
only in urban enclaves. At larger scale, there was no attempt to organize public
affairs through citizenship. Memories of local rather than distant kings and in
some places ‘tribal’ notions of self-government were kept alive and later could
inform Romantic nationalism as well as populist calls for voice and self-rule.
But most people were simply subjects, with no voice in larger polities, with
limited autonomy to self-organize at very local levels.
Feudal hierarchy was imposed with different degrees of severity. There was
more freedom in Western Europe than the institutions of serfdom allowed in
the East. Ethnic and regional solidarities underpinned opposition to consolida-
tion of monarchical rule – as for example Anglo-Saxon England resented the
‘Yoke’ of Norman domination. Thus King Arthur mythically ruled with his
Knights of the Round Table not simply over them. The Lords who got King
John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215 secured protections and liberties for
themselves and for the Chuch – and at least in principle greater rule of law - but
nothing like a republican government. Outside cities, neither citizenship nor a
notion of public was prominent.
Common people might attempt to avoid military service, resist specific im-
positions of power, or even on occasion rebel. They wanted to be treated in
ways they considered right. But they did not claim inclusion in a political public
because there was none. In that significant sense, they were not populiats. Not
only rulers but people throughout the social hierarchy understood political
authority to be a matter of divine right, legitimate inheritance, or sometimes
conquest - not popular will or well-being. This changed in the early modern
period.
As some Italian city-states grew wealthy from banking and trade, their elites
renewed the old Roman struggle between central power and republican citi-
zenship. The Florentine Republic, for example, was dominated by aristocratic
families joined together by a strong ethos of mutual restraint and a normative
order forbidding corruption—on pain of death!—and demanding that all of-
ficeholders be clearly committed to the public good over private interest. The
Republic thrived on the basis of trade and banking and Florence grew into a
major center of art, literature, and learning—the Italian Renaissance. How-
ever, the richest Florentine banking family, the Medicis, made their wealth the
basis for enough political power to supplant the Republic (and indeed to engage
230 Craig Calhoun
in politics beyond the city, even eventually securing control of the papacy).
This establishment of something close to monarchy was a defeat for republican
ideals of government by citizens. But it should not be thought that the Floren-
tine Republic was a democracy, since only some 3,000 of Florence’s perhaps
50,000 residents were entitled to vote.
Corruption and inequality brought a populist sense of grievance among
those who lived in the city but were not granted much say in its governance.
Simultaneously, Florence was threatened by an invading army under Charles
VII of France.
In this context of domestic and external threats, the Dominican Friar Girol-
amo Savonarola became perhaps the first modern populist leader. His followers
expelled the Medicis and established a ‘popular’ republic. This relied on election
to popular office with an expanded proportion of Florentines able to partici-
pate, notably, artisans, who had previously been excluded, were enfranchised.
At the same time, Savonarola was always prepared to call his followers into the
streets and bolstered by this extra-institutional pressure. He could be dictatorial
and expect acclamation rather than debate from elections. Promising essentially
to Make Florence Great Again —“richer, more powerful, more glorious than
ever”—he launched a puritanical campaign against the decadence of both elite
secular society and the Church (Weinstein 2011). Processions through the city
culminated in “bonfires of the vanities” burning books, paintings, fashionable
clothes, and even cosmetics. This brought down the wrath of the rich and of
the Church. Savonarola was excommunicated and in due course executed. The
Medicis regained power.
The travails of early modern Florence are especially prominent in politi-
cal thought because they were the context and focus for the work of Niccolò
Machiavelli, the first modern political theorist.3 His enormously influential
work is subject to numerous competing interpretations, not least because he ex-
plored both the potential to adapt and renew Roman Republicanism to make
a virtuous polity and the best strategy for a leader whose concerns were with
power not virtue—or, to follow Pocock (2016), with stabilizing rather than
reforming the polity. Machiavelli served both the Florentine Republic and the
Medicis, and wrote his most famous book, The Prince, hoping to gain a more
prominent position with the Medicis. Neither a democrat nor a populist, he
was nonetheless in agreement with much of Savonarola’s program, including
replacing hereditary government with elections, expanding political participa-
tion in the Republic, and trying to curb corruption. But he saw politics under
the priest as rooted too much in passion and too little in reason. This made him
dependent on crowds. He “was ruined with his new order of things immedi-
ately the multitude believed in him no longer” (Machiavelli 2015, Book VI).
Crucially, Savonarola lacked the capacity to stabilize the polity and secure its
defense from external threats, both of which were necessary to enjoying the
benefits of a reformed republic.
In the background to the drama of Machiavelli’s Florence was the disunity

of fragmented Italy and its weakness before foreign invaders. Venice and Genoa
were maritime powers, and trade linked the Renaissance city-states through-
out the Mediterranean and on to Asia, the European North, and impressively
much of the world. Contact with Arab civilization helped spark the intellectual
Renaissance, both because they had preserved Greek thought that Europeans
had lost and because of their own innovations. Trade helped the Italian city-
states grow rich and this wealth supported art and architecture. For all the
homages done to Greek and Roman antiquity, writing in Italian grew more
prominent, not least in the work of Machiavelli himself. But there was no
Italian state and little political coordination. The republican model worked at
the level of cities not countries. The Church maintained a huge political role in
Italy, even as its grip declined in Northern Europe. But the Pope was not able to
defend himself, let alone Italy. Corruption in the Church made it less effective
in worldly power struggles, ironically, even while the attention of many in the
church hierarchy came to be more focused on material ends and less on God.
Martin Luther’s critique of corruption in the Church came a mere 20 years after
Savonarola. He nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenburg castle church in
1517 (at least according to legend).
The ensuing Protestant Reformation and related wars of religion helped to
make the modern European states and nations. Reading the Bible promoted
literacy in vernacular languages. Citizen armies encouraged identification
among ‘the people’ of countries in a way mercenary armies couldn’t (as in-
deed Machiavelli himself noted in The Prince). Efforts to administer religion
proceeded alongside administration of trade and taxation and the marshaling
of resources for war. Northern Europe grew richer and the cultural life of its
cities flourished ina. Continuation of the Renaissance. But countries remained
kingdoms even as they also became far-flung empires. This combined trade and
resource extraction with a new theater for competition among European states
and missions to save souls. The story vastly exceeds our current scope, but two
conclusions are crucial.
First, the scale of political and social integration was transformed. As the
modern state was consolidated, the modern ‘nation’ appeared as the correspond-
ing embodiment of ‘the people.’ States were not the whole story, of course, as
economies and cultures were increasingly organized in national structures.
Second, the place of individual choice in social participation was trans-
formed. From the spread of literacy and increasing education to wider social
mobility to religious emphasis on personal salvation to the rise of entrepreneur-
ship, on the one hand, and a consumer society, on the other hand, a much wider
range of people claimed distinctive individual identities and the right to make
choices based on them.
Which came first, nation or state, was and is a moot point. There was a
prior history to what became modern national identities. An ‘ascending’ view
232 Craig Calhoun
of political authority had ancient roots in the ‘folkmoot’ and other pre-feudal
assemblies and these had spokespeople to claim them (and eventually poets
and composers to celebrate them).4 This combination of history and myth was
complemented by new cultural production shaping the European nations (as
eventually others). But throughout Europe, political thinkers also laid claim to
“the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” and to the repub-
lican tradition of citizen government.5 Modern democratic politics is shaped by
both the solidarity of nations (and perceived threats to it) and formal constitu-
tions and institutions with their rights and procedures. Ideally complementary,
these are sometimes in tension. Partly because of its emphasis on individuals,
liberalism is closely identified with formal institutions. Populism more often
articulates the solidarity of nations.
In 17th-century England, the contest between monarchy and aristocracy
was replayed in a Civil War. Religious struggles were part and parcel of politics
and vice versa. Cromwell arguably played the part of Savonarola, though the
analogy is imperfect. But Cromwell’s New Model Army was in part a populist
representation of The People. Arguably, the people were more often off-stage
in the Civil War drama, with different more elite political figures either threat-
ening to call them in or denouncing this possibility (see Morgan 1989). But
in addition to the populist elements in mainstream Parliamentarianism, there
were Levelers and Diggers and others who proclaimed the rights and needs
of the people (Hill 1984). And there was what J.G.A. Pocock has called ‘the
Machiavellian moment’ (Pocock 2016). This is the point at which promotion
of a new and better republican constitution, including one open to more of ‘the
people,’ confronts the need for institutional capacity to achieve stability and
security. But this is also a moment of risk that capacity for leadership can bring
a shift from democracy to dictatorship. Caesar’s story informed the widespread
notion that democracy would be but a waystation on the path to tyranny.
Democracy still remained a radical idea in the late 18th century, when the
founders of the US enshrined democracy in its Constitution. Overall, the text
is more indebted to republicanism, but it does begin with the very populist
invocation of ‘We the People.’ Democratic demands from below had long been
growing, but this was the first large-scale acceptance of democracy by an edu-
cated, propertied, elite.
Many among the founders were strong republicans and reluctant democrats.
Some, like John Adams, were close readers of Machiavelli. Particularly in the
South, desires for limits on direct popular action were strong. In an abundance
of caution, the US founders restricted the vote to free men with property.
Slaves, women, and most of the working classes were initially excluded. They
protected the rule of law with a strong judiciary, including judges with lifetime
appointments. They gave Senators longer terms than other congressional rep-
resentatives seeking to establish a reflective elite more able to take a long-term
view. Not least, they almost immediately amended the Constitution with a Bill
of Rights protecting pluralism, minorities, and public action outside govern-

ment control. In addition to stability, they sought security, both for property
and in relation to external threats. Though much of this comes from the re-
publican tradition rather than liberalism per se, it is more or less what is meant
today by liberal democracy.
Still, even if anxious, the founders’ embrace of democracy was remarkable.
They called for much more popular participation in and guidance of govern-
ment than any other country allowed at the time. They also set in motion an
uneven but ongoing deepening of democracy that gradually reduced restric-
tions on popular participation. This didn’t happen smoothly. It took waves of
popular agitation and social movements, including not least recurrent popu-
lism. Indeed, some say that the US really became a democracy only with the
Andrew Jackson’s populist presidential election in 1828.6 For the first time, a
majority of white men had the chance to vote.7 Jackson had enormous personal
appeal, not least as a general victorious against both the British and the native
Americans with whom the US shared the continent. He rode a wave of popu-
lism rooted in the greater inclusion of ordinary citizens as voters.8 His famously
rowdy presidential campaigns helped make politics a spectator sport. They were
framed both as appeals to the common man and as criticisms of a corrupt aris-
tocracy. He charged, in essence, both that there wasn’t enough democracy and
that existing democracy had degenerated.
Like many populists, Jackson played to one image of the people, implying
that this was the only possible one. Famous for his war exploits against the
Indian tribes of the interior South, once in office, Jackson signed the Indian
Removal Act of 1830. And though he personally worried about the growing
tensions over slavery, he presided over growing political polarization, especially
over slavery. He remained active after leaving the presidency and supported
bringing Texas into the Union as a slave state—a move that increased tensions.
As often happens, agents of inclusion on one dimension are voices for exclusion
on others.
The French Revolution followed the US one in short order and was sig-
nificantly more radical in its embrace of the equality of citizens. But though
it produced the powerful democratic slogan, liberté, égalité, fraterité, it did not
prove stable. It contained its own drama of elite republican reformers pressed to
play to the emergent political force of The People—sometimes with democracy
and sometimes with violence.
Both liberal and conservative political traditions derive in part from observ-
ing that it did not adequately protect liberty. The conservative tradition also
emphasizes the extent to which the French Revolution failed to protect frater-
nity, that is the solidarity of citizens, especially in families and communities.
Radical and socialist traditions join conservatives in asserting the importance of
solidarity and criticizing liberals for allowing versions of liberty to be corrosive
of social cohesion. Of course, socialists and conservatives have different ideas
234 Craig Calhoun
about how to secure solidarity and especially how it relates to economic life.
Socialists, conservatives, and liberals differ on the virtue of equality.
From both the mostly positive US example and the degeneration of the
French Revolution into terror, the most successful builders of modern democ-
racies drew the conclusion that democracy should be only part of a democratic
constitution, not the whole. In any case, many argued, in a large-scale and
complex society, government would necessarily be carried out by formal orga-
nizations led by an elite, not a matter for direct participation of all the people.
The main democratic process was choosing the elite, not running the govern-
ment. Democracy would be representative, not direct, and it would require
stable institutions not constant mass mobilization. But it was also a democratic
process to protest when elites failed to act in the interests of all citizens.
The Present Wave

The present wave of populism comes after 50 years in which ruling elites tol-
erated and often personally benefitted from economic transformations that did
not reflect popular will or serve to benefit ordinary people: rising financializa-
tion, globalization organized largely to benefit corporations and capital, abrupt
deindustrialization. Of course, these transformations also brought gains—not
least a variety of new technologies. But they left individual lives, families, and
communities devastated. It was salt in the wound that the elites called this
progress and called those who resisted or complained backward.
The dominant political elites of this whole period were more or less lib-
eral. There were conflicts between political parties, but policy differences were
muted. Ostensibly socialist or social democratic parties stopped seeking deep
economic transformation. Conservatives were not reactionary opponents of
democracy or the liberal order. Indeed, one of the staples of the period was
reference to ‘post-ideological’ politics (see Berkowitz in this volume for a fur-
ther discussion of this issue). All major parties embraced the basic project of
liberal democracy, including pluralism and rule of law. All embraced the basic
marriage of liberal democracy to capitalism. They differed mainly on how
much they wanted to extend liberal rights in a project of pluralist inclusion—
of women, minorities (including immigrants), and alternative lifestyles or
personal identities.
The ‘mainstream’ parties of Western democracies were more committed to
economic growth than to equality. They supported finance-led globalization,
embracing the project of competitiveness even when it meant curtailing social
spending and trying to limit unions. Most were influenced by neoliberalism, an
ideology that proclaimed liberty to be rooted in private property and insisted
that government efforts to use tax revenues to improve social conditions were
an illegitimate intrusion on these private rights.9 They were more attentive
to the progress of wealth, as measured, for example, by stock market indices,
than to the welfare of those whose lives were disrupted by the path of growing
wealth—for example, workers who lost both their jobs and their communities
to deindustrialization. They embraced the growing power of finance, the idea
of free markets, including free trade, and globalization.
There were differences among parties on specific issues, and sometimes
sharp conflicts. In the UK, for example, Thatcherite Tories were committed
to destroying unions and Labour was not, though Labour didn’t do much to
reverse the slide in union strength. Labour didn’t pursue privatization as Tories
had done, though it didn’t undo it either or regulate finance as much as it
might have. Labour did improve benefits for senior citizens. Austerity was a
distinctively conservative imposition. In the US, Republicans undermined
government agencies more (though government budgets still grew). They more
actively denigrated the idea of public action to serve public interests, but even
Democrats were also usually closer to Wall Street than unions. Perhaps the
biggest difference was in judicial appointments with litmus tests for issues like
abortion rights. In neither country did either leading party attempt serious
reversal of growing inequality. Nor did those in most other developed capital-
ist countries—though as Thomas Piketty (2014) has shown, France did limit
inequality more than most and for a longer time.
Populism is largely a complaint against the conduct of government by these
liberal elites. It is not just a grievance against inequality and the existence of
elites. It centers on the charge that liberal elites were poor stewards of the over-
all collective good. It complains bitterly that the conventional governing classes
of all major parties lived well while others suffered and spoke of progress, while
others bore the costs of change. And crucially, say the populists, those elites
didn’t care about us, listen to us, or even recognize fully that we existed and
had a legitimate stake in the country. Populist charges against established elites
are often unfair. They underestimate pressures and limits and indeed accom-
plishments. But they are not entirely false.
Populism is typically angry, resentful, reactionary, and illiberal. It can be a
problem for democracy, but this is not because it is inherently undemocratic. It
is because immediate representation of (ostensible) popular will is at odds with
institutional arrangements that stabilize democracy and secure greater justice.
Such institutional arrangements produce the hybrid political form commonly
labeled liberal democracy (though in fact they derive at least as much from
republicanism as liberalism). Populists are almost essentially illiberal; they re-
fuse to prioritize the liberties and rights of individuals or smaller groups over
popular will and what they understand to unite the people. Their anger at elites
is often based on the view that those elites have put minorities ahead of the
majority, and that they have managed public affairs to secure their own benefit
more than that of the real ‘people’ of a country.
Populist anger has many sources, from economic grievances to a sense of cul-
tural insult. Claiming and inflaming this anger is the stock-in-trade of populist
236 Craig Calhoun
demagogues from Donald Trump to Marine Le Pen to Victor Orban—or their

more Leftist counterparts. Rightwing versions of populism are dominant in the
present era, but Leftwing populism has been important in Spain and Greece.
It is present among supporters of Brexit and of France’s Yellow Vests.10 Indeed,
populism is more of a political style than it is a political ideology. In itself, it is
neither Leftwing nor Rightwing. But it can be harnessed to Left-Right politics
and co-opted by more conventional political parties and agendas.
When Hungary’s Orban named his populist regime ‘illiberal democracy,’
he was playing rhetorical games, but he was not all wrong.11 His regime did
command widespread popular support. But it not only represented largely a
non-metropolitan Hungary against more cosmopolitan Budapest, it was deeply
engaged in manipulating public opinion. It offered only a very thin version of
democracy, the chance to offer the regime popular acclaim and plebiscitarian
approval. To shout ‘Hurrah’ or ‘Lock them up’ when opponents are mentioned,
or to vote merely ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ is not to participate seriously in government,
policy-making, or organizing life together.
Populists have many targets, from professional elites to immigrants to for-
eigners exerting undue influence over their nations. Politicians may pander to
pre-existing senses of grievance or they may seek to persuade populists to adopt
targets of their own alongside those with deeper roots among ordinary people.
Specific grievances and resentments differ among countries. Indeed, populism is
always so embedded in the specifics of different national contexts, time periods,
and relationships to mainstream politics that there are serious limits to trying—
as I do here—to discuss populism in general. Nonetheless, there are also com-
mon themes and there is an inverse potential error in discussing each instance of
populist mobilization only inside a particular national story and set of symbolic
references. Throughout modernity, populism has been shaped by shared patterns
in international political economy, demographic transitions like urbanization
and immigration, and ever more intensive networks of communication.
Very commonly, liberalism itself is among populists’ targets, as well as spe-
cific liberal elites. The rights liberals defend can seem like special treatment for
minorities. In the decades since the 1970s, liberals focused more on cultural
inclusion than on economic welfare. Many liberals defended a disempowering
economic order on the grounds that it had roots in private property rights. Too
many embraced globalization uncritically, as though it derived simply from
legal equality and sheer modernity. They looked the other way as finance-led
reorganization of global capitalism benefitted investors more than workers and
eroded place-based communities and whole regions through deindustrializa-
tion. And when financial crisis struck, they spent billions of dollars rescuing
banks and other companies but not helping people who lost homes, savings, or
jobs in the crisis.
Liberals may not have been the primary drivers of these disasters, but they
were among beneficiaries as well as blinded by the hegemonic ideology of
the day. Not surprisingly, this encouraged populist resentment. This is often
expressed in unfortunate ways, like protesting against public health measures
in the coronavirus pandemic. But the distrust of liberal messages about what is
best for the public good has reasons.
It is easy to talk about ‘liberal elites’ who mismanaged democratic govern-
ment. We can imagine we mean others: elected representatives, people richer
and more influential than us. Perhaps these do bear more responsibility and de-
serve more blame. But it is important to realize that most of ‘us’—that is to say,
educated, mainly middle-class participants in the political public sphere—have
been complicit. We have allowed our societies to grow more hierarchical—
with universities in the lead. We used what resources we had to fight for our
own positions in the hierarchies, while many of our fellow citizens found their
opportunities much more severely blocked. We have embraced the attractively
‘cosmopolitan’ side of globalization and paid less attention to the domination
of financial capitalism. Indeed, we embraced a certain cosmopolitan style and
attitude that made it harder for us even to see what was going on in the dam-
aged communities of those whose style was not so sleek or educated or globally
cultured or dignified.
As members of this privileged class, we were at ease talking about progress
and feeling confident in it. This was reinforced when we saw things getting
better in many ways. Partly, looking close to home, we saw an improvement
in our living standards. We grew more likely to own houses; cars grew fancier;
we enjoyed a rush of new consumer technologies (though sometimes we might
be uncomfortable to realize how much all of this was based on debt). We lived
mostly in places where we were not confronted directly by the downsides of ei-
ther deindustrialization or globalization. But at least as basically, we focused on
those gains that could be achieved without limiting economic growth or chal-
lenging the extent to which it was organized to advance wealth accumulation.
Specifics, of course, varied with national context, but there were major and
important gains in equality of opportunity on lines of gender, race, sexual ori-
entation, differential ability, and other dimensions. These co-existed, however,
with dramatic increases in overall inequality. We let returns on invested assets
define national prosperity more than earned incomes and standards of living.
Educated professionals may not have been the cause of the inequality, dam-
aged communities, and other downsides to the era of neoliberal globalization.
Many of us were at least sympathetic to Left populist critiques such as that of
the Occupy movements, if not active in pursuing structural change. So, we
were shocked to find ourselves the face of the problem and focus of resentment
for Rightwing populists. But when there is support for upper-class politicians
who say “we have had enough of experts” who else is being targeted?
If experts really deserve their status and salary, critics suggest, they should
have seen the mess their fellow citizens were in and fixed it. This is a disingen-
uous charge coming from someone like Michael Gove, an Oxford-educated
238 Craig Calhoun
Conservative Minister and author, who declared during the Brexit campaign
that “people in this country have had enough of experts.”12 But it is a charge
that resonates with many less elite citizens who sense that the educated profes-
sional class looks down on the mostly non-metropolitan kinds of citizens drawn
to populism.13 Centrally, populists complain that elites—including experts—
do not value and pay attention to the opinions of ordinary citizens—though
this would be democratic.
Accelerating inequality is one of the causes of populism, though this does
not mean that all populists see equality as the solution. While populists on the
Left are commonly egalitarian, those more on the Right often see the issue
not as inequality, but as who gets the good positions in an unequal system.
They complain that liberals and experts have been behind distributing more
of opportunities (like elite university admissions) and more of benefits (like
good jobs) to minorities, immigrants, and women. It has been hard for liberals
to realize that what they regard as successes like more equal opportunity seem
like affronts to those who believe that they have a prior right to the relevant
opportunities. But mainstream liberals have not been consistently egalitarian.
Many accepted radically unequal access to educational and other institutions,
seeking to ensure only that the inequality did not derive from certain protected
categories like race or gender. They saw this as a matter of merit, not money or
privilege (and ignored the possibility of creating less hierarchical institutions).
The liberal focus has typically been on fairness in allocating unequal oppor-
tunities, not on how much inequality there should be. Implictly, they have
accepted that so long as ‘merit’ determines access, scarcity in quality provision
is acceptable. In somewhat different national packages, they have allowed edu-
cation and health to be treated as private rather than public goods.
Critics of minorities and immigrants commonly stress the burden on welfare
systems. But at least as important to populists are perceived blocks on upward
mobility. Immigrant and minority success stories do not alleviate the concern
but exacerbate it. As those Arlie Hochschild interviewed for Strangers in their
Own Land put it, it’s like these new claimants are cutting in line, but that’s who
liberals support.14
Populism is not inherently an ideology of Left or Right. It is a rhetoric of
complaint against elites and self-assertion of ‘the people’ that can be drawn
more in one way or the other. “We are the 99%” is as populist a slogan as “We
are the Real Americans.” The former is more centrally a critique of the power
of wealth; the latter is obviously more explicitly national, and thus more easily
linked to racism and hostility to immigrants. But both are claims to the im-
portance and solidarity of The People. Populist movements are generally not
composed of veteran politicians or policy wonks. They tend to be stronger on
complaints than concrete policy proposals. They may develop more of these
from within if they become well-organized enough and last long enough. The
Farmers Alliance did in the late 19th-century US.15 More commonly, political
parties and ideologues with more resources try to harness populists to their
causes. And a weakness of populist movements is the frequency with which
they are claimed and mobilized, and manipulated by demagogues. Indeed, be-
ing motivated in part by the sense of being ignored or denigrated by one set
of elites, populists are all too vulnerable to other elites who flatter them with
attention—from Peron to Trump.
The Ambiguous People

Populism is not a precise analytic concept. It is a political term that is used
as an accusation as often as it is claimed by ostensible populists. Sometimes,
people say “I’m a populist. I speak for the people. I speak in the name of the
people.” But more often the label ‘populist’ is applied to those seen as violating
the norms of conventional liberal democracy. It is applied to people held to
be emotional rather than rational. It is a charge of having failed to appreciate
complexity. The accusation of “populist” is likely to be made by those who
believe in the knowledge of experts and seek a reasoned, rational debate on
policy questions. These are hallmarks of liberal and republican thoughts added
to democracy to improve it. But they do privilege some modes of participation
in politics, and not the most popular.16
The moral standing of The People remains important. It is, however, more
complicated than often acknowledged. Is there a singular people? Do we mean
some people? Most of the people? What is the representation of the people that
is involved? Often, appeals to The People are in truth appeals in the name of
all the people against some of the people. But there are other moral claims. The
native-born may claim to be the real people against immigrants. Youth may
claim to be the morally significant people because they will live the future—
and, say, face the potential devastations of climate change. The elites who are
betraying the rest of the people, or those standing in the way of necessary action
are seen to be legitimately excluded from the salient sense of The People.
In this reliance on ‘we the people,’ populism is often closely related to na-
tionalism. Though populism and nationalism overlap, each appears in many
forms and attached to many different ideologies. They overlap but are not iden-
tical. Nationalism shapes diplomatic relations and trade conflicts that are in no
sense populist. Populist rhetoric informs local appeals against central states.
Throughout the modern era, however, nationalism has been the primary rhet-
oric for appeals to citizen solidarity and rights at the scale of states—which
are not surprisingly often described as nation-states. This can be as readily the
basis for domestic projects, like providing early childhood or old-age bene-
fits to a whole nation without discrimination, as for international rivalry or
conflict. Demagogues too often find it easy to link nationalist and populist
domestic solidarities to international enmities—mobilized against other coun-
tries or against immigrants. Nationalism is sometimes bellicose, and populist
240 Craig Calhoun
resentments can exacerbate this. Frustratingly, for those who would like good
and bad dimensions of social life to remain more neatly separate, domestic sol-
idarity may be enhanced by mobilization for war.
Populist politics are likewise rooted in an appeal not just to the people as a
population but to the people as legitimate participants in a way of life.17 The
shared culture and social order makes a whole people rather than a series of in-
dividuals. It extends from families and local communities to the nation. It also
reduces any potential sense of contradiction in excluding culturally or racially
different fellow citizens from the category of the real people. There is a special
pathos to this point today as many aggrieved citizens imagine the disappearance
of people like them. From white nationalists to Evangelical Christians to True
Finns, to Englishmen who fear the loss of Britain and those like the former
Trump advisor Steve Bannon who see the eclipse of the West on the horizon,
there is a widespread anxiety about the disappearance of ways of life—and pop-
ulist identification of The People with these ways of life.
What populists seek to protect and advance cannot be reduced to either
a particular set of people at one moment in time, or their material interests.
Populists do have material grievances, of course, but populism is not merely a
form of interest group politics. Indeed, populists typically reject interest group
politics as little more than bargaining among elites. Its implicit logic of arith-
metically counting the interests of individuals or responding only to organized
power-groups downplays the politics of loyalties and values.
The oppositions of trade unions to business, urban to rural areas, young to
old do have some predictive power in explaining who is more drawn to pop-
ulist campaigns. Those organizing campaigns are realistic and know where to
hold rallies and what symbols to invoke. But populist rhetoric tends to down-
play these interest groupings. These imply legitimate divisions among the peo-
ple, rather than populism’s more typical distinction between the real people, as
a whole, and others. They also imply a politics of compromises and diversity,
which is not the populist style.
Contemporary populism is not just the national story of the US or France
or Britain or Australia or Hungary or any other country. It is a shared story of
this moment in globalization when there is a lot of pushback from people who
feel that it is not working for them; when destabilizing socioeconomic change is
causing fundamental problems. For both populists and nationalists, these prob-
lems put pressure on who ‘we’ are. They make ‘us’ ask: What is happening to our
way of life? Will our children live in societies that are recognizably still the kind
of societies that we know? Will they have opportunities and will they be pre-
pared to seize them? When people think that maybe their children will be losing
out, they tend to ask who is winning. In fact, a feature of populist politics is often
a search for scapegoats or the people who are winning that should not be, or who
are winning more than they should be. The scapegoat search is not a neutral
analysis; it is largely constructed in first person terms. It is an effort to identify
those who are getting ahead at ‘my’ expense or that of people like me. Material
issues are entwined with cultural. It is misleading to ask whether the issues are
mainly inequality or mainly the ‘values’ and ‘identity’ concerns of ‘culture wars’.
They are both at once, each exacerbating anxieties with roots in the other. It is
not that poor people join populist campaigns because elites are rich. Many have
been baffled by the enthusiasm for a billionaire like Donald Trump when people
simultaneously complain about the injustice of inequality. For some this may be
a cynical evaluation of what politician is most likely to address their issues. For
many it is an expression of contempt for politics as usual. But it is also important
to recognize that populists who do not like the professional classes may nonethe-
less respect rich people. They have something ordinary people want and perhaps
can imagine having. It is harder to identify with those whose standing is based
on education, professional attainment, and cultural polish.
Populists rhetorically appeal to The People—as though the referent is clear.
But of course the mental image is culturally constructed, in processes that are
not at all transparent. The People is never just a counting of votes, or an accurate
representation of the various plural and differentiated groups in modern societies.
The People becomes particularly important in contexts of polarization, where
people live in somewhat different versions of the same country. There is a geogra-
phy to it, as well as an element of social differentiation that makes it such that peo-
ple do not just bump into people with different views. A common feature of the
2016 US Presidential election, the Brexit campaign, and others was the number
of people who said: “I don’t even know anyone who voted the other way.” In the
case of Brexit, there were a number of people in the North-East of Britain and
certain generational and occupational groups who did not know anyone who was
voting to stay in the European Union (EU). Conversely, there were a number of
people in London who did not know anyone who was voting to leave the EU.
The same thing was true in the US, and it is important to reflect about why
this happened. Thirty years ago, there was a viewership of a small number of
television channels that would broadcast things like the evening news. People
might have complained that it was all pretty much the same: ABC, NBC, and
CBS showed the same news. The anchor person would have been different but
equally centrist. What has happened over time is the decline of the audience for
that kind of newscast and the rise of other kinds of much more differentiated
channels so that different people could get different accounts of the news. This
shapes what I have called “parallel media worlds.” We live different versions
of our countries, getting different news stories, even though we are still in
the same nation. Geographical division has reinforced class, ethnic, political,
and other views. The US has its blue and red states—and insulting terms like
“flyover communities.” In Britain, London became an even richer and more
diverse global center, while much of the rest of the country—ex-industrial or
ex-agricultural—declined. La France profonde is angry at Paris. Budapest is a
cosmopolitan city resented by much of Hungary.
242 Craig Calhoun
Steve Bannon, the former editor of the Rightwing website Breitbart and
one-time senior advisor to President Trump, has been active in weaving an
alternative narrative. This combines anxiety about the rise of China and
America’s declining global power with the notion of an end to Christian civi-
lization and the argument that white people are threatened with ‘substitution’.
He says that the mainstream liberal press—the New York Times narrative of
what it means to be an American—is deceitful. This is part of the Donald
Trump story: “They are lying to you, here is the truth.” The demagogues may
pander to prejudices, instead of trying to give you a factual account, an account
rooted in social science to possibly correct received opinions. They may play
on them and build on them, promote a paranoid world view, or, what goes on
most of the time, position real legitimate concerns and problems that people
have in tendentious and not-so-realistic accounts of why they have those prob-
lems. In this context, populism is a sort of wake-up call, but it is not a program.
One of the things we know in the case of Trump, Brexit, and other cases is that
populists in power often do not have a full set of policies.
Populism is a politics of grievances, not of aspirations. It is about what has
gone wrong, more than a program for what should go right. Yes, there is a
program of America first, or Australia, or France… There may be a national-
ist program in that sense. But not a detailed program. It is not a plan. To look
for the plan that is going to lift people economically in populist politics is
to misunderstand, to think that it is a set of policy proposals rather than this
more emotional reflection of grievances. It is a defensive and often resentful
response to the state of the world. Populist identity claims may have histor-
ical roots, but they also involve accentuating differences from denigrated
others. Resentment is a problematic guide: it leads people to focus on what
they do not have rather than what they do, or on past injustices and not ways
forward.
Having a legitimate grievance does not necessarily give one a reasonable
analysis or a sensible view of where to go. Donald Trump spoke to widespread
anger about deindustrialization and job loss when he claimed to save an air
conditioner factory in Indiana by talking to its owners and providing a federal
subsidy. This was advertised as bringing jobs back from Mexico. But in fact
the subsidy sustained the factory as it was automated. Machinery rather than
globalization still put workers out of work. Transformation of labor markets
in the world’s richer economies did involve internationalization in search of
lower-wage work, but also long, computer-managed supply chains not just
the transplanting of individual factories. It was accompanied domestically by
increased automation and a massive shift from industrial to service jobs. These
were often less well-paid and less supported by unions. Crucially, they gener-
ally went to different people, not least women rather than men. In this transi-
tion, the interests of capital dominated over those of labor. There was too little
retraining, too little support for stricken communities.
Manufacturing industry provided good jobs from the period of World War
II to the 1970s when they began to erode, country after country. They were
not all wonderful jobs, but relatively well paid, secure jobs. Deindustrialization
could have been addressed as a high-priority problem in each country. Miti-
gating damages could have been at the top of policy agendas. The destruction
of communities—and lives—could have been minimized, the coming of an
opiate epidemic averted. Instead, elites focused more on the winners of the
story: global investment bankers and traders and people with computer science
degrees or shares in Google or Apple.
Populism reflects a collapse in trust— among ordinary people as well as
in the government. Distrust among ‘the people’ is reflected in extremes of
political polarization. But interpersonal trust has also declined. The corona-
virus pandemic spurs gun-buying in the US because people do not trust their
fellow-citizens.18 And at the same time, trust in the government has fallen
sharply in almost every advanced democracy. In the US, trust in government
has fallen from approximately 60% to 20%, whereas in Norway, it has fallen
from around 95% to 75% (Pew Research Center 2019). There are places where
people trust the government more, but overall, there has been a widespread
loss of trust (either due to corruption or lack of recognition). A key feature
of this trend is the loss of trust and faith in conventional political parties. The
political party system is in large part broken. It is not just that people think that
one party is bad and the other is good; they don’t think that any of them really
speak to what they need and want. They think that the political parties are all
full of people just seeking to benefit themselves or that they are representing
other people, not them; or that they have made so many compromises that you
cannot distinguish their stances. Multiparty parliamentary democracies work
well when parties forge compromises, bring groups of people together, all of
whom will get some of what they want and none of whom will get everything
they want. In this way, they cooperate in order to achieve electoral majorities.
This is becoming a less common feature of the party system. France offers an
extreme example. Emmanuel Macron essentially ran as an independent against
all parties. Whatever else his victory meant, it was very bad for the way French
democracy had previously worked. Now, no established political party is re-
sponsible for working together to solve problems.
Conclusion
We, educated elites, spend too much of our time being angry at populists and
not enough time being angry at the betrayal of the broad public interest by gov-
erning and economic elites in our societies. To address any of these issues would
require us to rebuild social solidarity and to rebuild the cohesion of our soci-
eties. There is no addressing it by simply by making a new political announce-
ment. It would take rebuilding the current political system from the ground
244 Craig Calhoun
up: having moral economies and (re-)introducing the idea that there can be
moral and social values in the economy. There is no law of nature that says that
the economy must be approached with no analytic metric besides profit and
the accumulation of capital. Why can’t it be approached by asking whether it
creates jobs? Why can’t it be approached by asking whether it creates good jobs
for people? Why can’t it be approached by asking whether the economy delivers
on social and moral solidarity in society? Well, it can be; it just isn’t most of the
time or hasn’t been approached this way in the past 40 years.
Though the scale and durability of modern democracy are new, the very
word incorporates an old ambiguity. Demos is the Greek word for the people.
But it can be used to refer to all the people—the way the framers of the US
Constitution claimed to speak as ‘We the People’—or it can be an elite ref-
erence to the lower classes, the ordinary people, the commoners who were
not normally powerful and influential participants in government. Populism
derives from the distance between the two usages. Populists seek to bridge
the gap, to transform democracy run by elites into democracy run by all the
people. In doing so, they often abandon the protections of pluralism, minori-
ties, free expression, due process, and even rule of law that distinguish liberal
democracy. But populists are not intrinsically anti-democratic. And waves of
populism are commonly responses to genuine failures of the ruling elites to act
with appropriate consideration for ordinary people, or indeed, to listen.
Notes


246 Craig Calhoun
Ober, Josiah. 2008. Democracy and Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Pew Research Center. 2019. “Public Trust in Government.” Pew Research Center.
www.people-press.org/2019/04/11/public-trust-in-government-1958-2019/.
Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Pocock, John Greville Agard. 2016 [1975]. The Machiavellian Moment. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Strathern, Paul. 2016. Death in Florence: The Medici, Savonarola, and the Battle for the Soul
of a Renaissance City. New York, NY: Pegasus Books.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2003 [1835/1840]. Democracy in America. London: Penguin.
Weinstein, Donald. 2011. Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet. New
CONTRIBUTORS
Ewa Atanassow is Junior Professor of Political Thought at Bard College Ber-

lin. She is the co-editor of Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy (2013) and
Liberal Moments: Reading Liberal Texts (2017). Her current book project, Liberal
Dilemmas: Tocqueville on the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century, reexamines
democracy and liberalism through the lens of Tocqueville.
Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt

Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Human Rights,
and Philosophy at Bard College. His research interests range from Greek and
German philosophy to legal history and from the history of science to politics
and constitutional democracy. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and
the Modern Legal Tradition (2010).
Mark Blyth is the William R. Rhodes ’57 Professor of International Economics

at Brown University. His research focuses upon how uncertainty and random-
ness impact complex systems, particularly economic systems. He is the author
of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth
Century (2002) and Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2013).
Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State

University and Centennial Professor of Sociology at LSE. His publications ad-
dress politics, economics, the impact of technology, and cultural and social
change, and include Nations Matter: Citizenship, Solidarity and the Cosmopolitan
Dream (Routledge, 2007), The Roots of Radicalism (2012), and Does Capitalism
Have a Future? (2013).
248 Contributors
Gülçin Balamir Coşkun is Einstein Fellow at the Institut für Sozialwissen-

schaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her work focuses on authoritari-
anism, theories of democracy, media, and refugee movement. She has lately
published with Aslı Yılmaz Uçar on local responses to the Syrian refugee
movement in Movements - Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies.
Jonathan Hopkin is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics in the Depart-

ment of Government at the London School of Economics. He has published
widely on European politics and political economy, with a particular focus on
political parties, finance and politics, corruption, and inequality, especially in
the UK, Spain, and Italy. His most recent book is Anti-System Politics: The Crisis
of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies (2020).
Aysuda Kölemen is a research fellow at Bard College Berlin. Her current re-
search interests include autocratization and discourses on gender and family
policies in Turkey. She has previously worked on the differences in public
discourses on the welfare state in Europe and the USA and the political dimen-
sions of new religiosities in Turkey.
Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and
permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna. A found-
ing board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a con-
tributing opinion writer for the New York Times, he was awarded the 2020
Jean Améry Prize for European Essay Writing. His most recent book The Light
that Failed (Allen Lane, 2019; with Stephen Holmes) won the Lionel Gelber
Prize.
Christian Lammert is Professor of Political Systems in North America at Freie

Universität Berlin. He has published widely on nationalism and regionalism,
social policy in comparative perspective, and the politics of health care reform
in the United States. His most recent publication is Democracy in Crisis: The
Neoliberal Roots of Popular Unrest (2019, with Boris Vormann).
Brian Milstein teaches international political theory at Goethe-Universität Frank-

furt. His research focuses on questions related to crisis theory and the concept of
crisis in social and political thought. His work has appeared in the European Journal
of Philosophy, European Journal of Political Theory, and Philosophy & Social Criticism. He
is author of Commercium: Critical Theory from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (2015).
Marc F. Plattner is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and the
co-chair of the Research Council of the National Endowment for Democracy’s
International Forum for Democratic Studies. His books include Democracy
Without Borders? Global Challenges to Liberal Democracy (2008).
Contributors 249
Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who has published more than
forty books in philosophy, aesthetics, and politics, translated in multiple languages.
A fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Senior
Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C., he taught in both
England and America, lastly in Philosophy for the University of Buckingham.
Esther Solano is Professor of Social Science at Federal University of São Paulo

and teaches in the Master program on Latin America and the European Union
at University of Alcalá (Spain). Among other publications she has recently
edited: Is there a way out? Critical essays on Brazil (2017); Hate as politics (2018);
and Brazil in collapse (2019).
Nandini Sundar is Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics,

Delhi University. Her recent publications include The Burning Forest: India’s
War in Bastar (2019); Civil Wars in South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development
(co-edited with Aparna Sundar, 2014); and Inequality and Social Mobility in
Post-Reform India, Special Issue of Contemporary South Asia (co-edited, 2016).
Kristin Surak is an Associate Professor of Japanese Politics at SOAS, University

of London whose research on international migration, nationalism, and politi-
cal sociology has been translated into a half-dozen languages. She is the author
of Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice (2013), which re-
ceived the Book of the Year Award from the American Sociological Associa-
tion’s Asian Section.
Boris Vormann is Professor of Politics and Director of the Politics Section at Bard
College Berlin. His research focuses on the role of the state in globalization and
urbanization processes; nations and nationalism; and the crisis of democracy. His
most recent books are Democracy in Crisis: The Neoliberal Roots of Popular Unrest
(with Christian Lammert, 2019), and Contours of the Illiberal State (2019).
Michael D. Weinman is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College Berlin. He

is the author of three books, most recently, The Parthenon and Liberal Education
(2018, co-authored with Geoff Lehman), and the editor (with Shai Biderman)
of Plato and the Moving Image (2019). His research focuses on Greek philosophy,
political philosophy, and their intersection.
Claudia Wiesner is Professor for Political Science and Jean Monnet Chair at
Fulda University of Applied Sciences and Adjunct Professor in Political Science
at Jyväskylä University. Her main research interests lie in the comparative study
of democracy, political culture, and political sociology in the EU multilevel
system. Her most recent monograph is Inventing the EU as a democratic polity:
Concepts, Actors and Controversies (2018).
Taylor & Francis
INDEX
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
Abdullah, Farooq 188 anti-intellectualism 194

Abe, Shinzo 3, 203, 204, 206–8 anti-leftism 214–16
Abenomics 203–5 anti-partisanship rhetoric 213–14
ABVP (BJP student wing) 197 anti-petism 214–16
Adams, John 232 anti-system parties, types of 116
AFDC see Aid for Families with anti-system politics: dominant forms of
Dependent Children 117; nature of crisis and variations in
Afghanistan 11, 12 119; in Western democracies 101–20
AFSPA see Armed Forces Special Powers Act anti-system rhetoric 213–14
Aid for Families with Dependent Children Apple 243
(AFDC) 126 Araújo, Ernesto 216–17
Akihito 202, 208 Arendt, Hannah 30, 86, 91, 92–3; rule of
AKP (Justice and Development Party) nobody 94; on totalitarianism 95, 96
167–83; National Outlook movement Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA)
168; rise of 168–9; transformation of 190
169–72 Aristotle 10–11
Albayrak, Berat 173 Aron, Raymond 161
Alienated America (Carney) 63 Arthur, King 229
Alpay, Şahin 177 Australia 3, 49, 240
Altan, Mehmet 177 Austria 3; geopolitics in 163; refugee crisis
Alves, Damares 216 160–1
Ambani, Anil 198n5 authoritarianism 35, 48, 50, 51, 59, 88,
American Amnesia (Hacker and 109, 157, 164, 171; competitive 189;
Pierson) 129 executive 190
American Declaration of Independence 74 authoritarian populism 191–2
Ankersmit, F. R. 150 autocracy 6, 22–3; electoral 166–83;
anti-capitalism 116 liberal 46
anti-communism 215 autonomous public opinion 167
anti-elitism 103–5 Azar, Alex 133
anti-globalization 103–5 Azari, Julia 66
252 Index
Babis, Andrej 159 Caesar, Julius 228–9

Baiocchi, Gianpaolo 23n2 Calhoun, John C. 89
Bannon, Steve 240, 242 Çalık Holding 173
belonging, forms of 78–9 Calvin’s Geneva 78
Bergson, Henri 71, 72 Canada 3, 49
Berman, Sheri 67 capitalism 32, 82, 116, 211, 234, 236; crisis
Bernhardt, David 132 tendencies 30; crony 195; financialized
Between Facts and Norms (Habermas) 31, 38 27–40, 237; free market 7, 31; laizzez-
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 188, faire 29; liberal 9, 33; liberal-competitive
191, 194–7 39; managed 110, 120; market 45;
Bhattacharya, A.K 198n5 monopoly 35; state-managed 28–31;
Bible Group 220 welfare-state 37, 39, 126; Western 110
Bibo, Istvan 163 Carney, Timothy 63
BJP see Bharatiya Janata Party cartelization of the political partys 36, 37
Blair, Tony 31, 90 Cary, Henry F. 134
Blockupy movement 14 Castro, Fidel 215
Bolsonarism 210–22 CBC see Brazilian Cartridge Company
Bolsonaro, Jair 3, 44, 210; and economic central bank independence 111
crisis 211–12; in government 220–2; Central Europe 19
and moral crisis 216–20; and political Centre for Media Studies 196
crisis 213–16 Charles VII of France 230
Brazil 5, 6, 13; anti-leftism 214–16; Chávez, Hugo 176
anti-partisanship rhetoric 213–14; child labor 23n4, 220
anti-petism 214–16; anti-system China 47, 104, 205; authoritarianism
rhetoric 213–14; Bolsonarism in 157
in 210–22; Brazilian Institute of Christian democracy vs liberal
Geography and Statistics (IBGE) 211, democracy 48–9
212; burning down of rainforests in Christianization 216–20
16; Christianization and militarization Cicero 229
of politics 216–20; crisis of democracy civic nationalism 77
85; democratic transitions in 157; civic privatism 37
economic crisis 211–12; 2018 elections civil rights 89, 93, 166, 171
44; Interunion Parliamentary Advisory Civil War 232
Department (Diap) 218; Liberal classical liberalism 54
Social Party 220; Operation Jet Lava clientelism 16, 20, 21
213; Operation Lava Jato (Car Wash Clinton, Bill 31, 89, 90, 105, 106, 126, 128
Operation) 212, 219; PSDB (Party Clinton, Hillary 90, 104, 108
of Brazilian Social Democracy) 214, CNN 131
222; Social Liberal Party (PSL) 210; CNN Turk 173
Venezuelanism in 215; Workers’ Party Cold War 10, 12, 14, 15, 54, 85, 89, 157
(PT) 210, 221, 222 collectivist nationalism 92, 94–5
Brazilian Cartridge Company (CBC) 220 Collett, Elizabeth 160
Bretton Woods institutions 11, 110 Communist Manifesto 82
Bretton Woods order 8 conformism 35
Brexit 3, 28, 79, 101, 106, 108, 109, 120, conservatism 45, 54, 55, 71, 80, 81,
151, 153, 163, 204, 236, 238, 241, 242 83; Bolsonarist 215; fiscal 11;
Britain see United Kingdom (UK) neoconservatism 216, 217–18;
Brooks, David 90–1 perspective of open society 71–84;
Brown, Wendy 216 social 51
Bulgaria 162 constitutional democracy 45
bureaucratic despotism 166 constitutionalism 18, 46, 59
Burke, Edmund 73 constitutional liberalism 167, 189
Bush, George W. 12, 89, 90, 128 Corbyn, Jeremy 103
Index 253
Cordero, Rodrigo 28, 32 Democratic Party 135

corporocracy 211 democratic procedure 124, 167
corruption 3, 20, 39, 104, 159, 176, 192, 195, democratic recession 189, 196
196, 213–15, 227, 229, 230, 231, 243 democratic sovereignty 58, 65
cosmopolitanism 16, 22, 94–5, 116 democratization 21, 61, 62, 66;
Costa, Rui 221 Brazilian re-democratization 220–1;
Costa Rica, 2018 elections 44 de-democratization 6, 144; of EU
creditor–debtor relationships 114 149–52; political 170; third-wave of 46,
The Crises of the Republic (Arendt) 96 166; waves of 8, 157
crisis consciousness, crisis of 27–40 demos 4, 5, 13, 15–19, 20, 21, 141, 142,
crisis of democracy ix, 3, 15, 16, 27, 29, 31, 244; building via politicization 149–53
40, 86–9, 124–138 Deneen, Patrick 53–4
Cromwell’s New Model Army 232 Denmark 161; income inequality in 128
crony capitalism 195 DeVos, Betsy 132
Crouch, Colin 27, 37 Diamond, Larry 189
Cruz, Carlos Alberto dos Santos 219–20 differentiated integration 145–6, 148–50
Çukurova Holding 173 digital revolution 86
culture war 130 Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 136
Czech Republic, illiberal revolution in Doğan, Aydın 173
158, 159 Doğan Group 173
Doğuş Media 173
Dahl, Robert A. 11, 64 Doria, João 222
debt crisis 14, 114, 116, 163 Dubai, cosmopolitan elites in 88
decommodification 5, 14, 17, 36, 114, 118 Dündar, Can 177
deliberative democracy 142 dystopian ideology 88
Demir, Ali 180
Demirtaş, Selahattin 171 Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) 127
democracy: constitutional 45; crisis of ix, Eastern Europe 12, 19; fraternity 160–2;
3, 15, 16, 27, 29, 31, 40, 86–9, 124–138; geopolitics 162–4; illiberal revolution in
definition of 189; deliberative 142; 157–64; liberty 160–2; normality 160–2;
enemies of 7; equality of conditions people power 158–60
93–4; free 64; guardianship 64; illiberal ECB see European Central Bank
ix, 11, 16, 43–56, 58–68, 158, 164, economic liberalism viii, ix, 7–9, 11,
166–183, 189–191, 236; liberal viii, 3–6, 13–16, 21, 89, 137, 140, 146
8, 10, 11, 15–17, 21–23, 27, 29, 31, 40, economic nationalism 104
43–46, 48–56, 60, 62, 68, 85–97, 110, EC see European Council
157, 158, 163, 164, 166, 167, 222, Ecuador 48
233–235, 239, 244; vs. liberalism EDRI see European Digital Rights
61–2; post-democracy 27, 38, 211; Initiative
representative 88, 89, 92, 94, 96, 97, Egypt 177
136, 141; revising 18–19; social equality EITC see Earned Income Tax Credit
vs. popular rule 62–4; sovereign 11, electoral autocracy 166–83
59; Western 8, 9, 19, 22, 46–8, 76, 91, Eletrobras 212
101–20, 234, 245n10 elite failures 86–9
Democracy in America (Tocqueville) 66 elite prejudices 92–6; collectivist
democratic deficits 58, 94; economic nationalism 94–5; cosmopolitanism
origins of 112–14; in EU 140–53, 94–5; individualism 94–5; individual
166; demos-building via politicization rights 93–4; moralization of political
149–53; new perspective on 143–7; opposition 95; security over freedom,
possible solutions, approaching 147–9; prioritizing 95–6
short summary of 142–3; problem fields Emanuel, Rahm 90
141, 143–7 embedded liberalism 110
democratic freedom 63, 65, 66, 68, 93, 96 Endangered Species Act 136
254 Index
Enlightenment 4, 7, 8, 17, 72–6, 78 Florentine Republic 229

EP see European Parliament Fortuna, Gerardo 52
EPF see Evangelical Parliamentary Front Foucault, Michel 30
EPP see European People’s Party Fox News 104, 131
Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 3, 169, 172, 173, France 3; aristocracies of the 18th century
177–80 in 87; crisis of authority 88; 2017
Escape from Freedom (Fromm) 34 elections 43; Rassemblement National
ESM see European Stability Mechanism in 124; terrorist attacks in 14
Esper, Mark 132 Frank, Jill 10, 228
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta 36 Frankfurt School 30
EU see European Union Fraser, Nancy 19, 24n4, 28, 31, 38, 216
Europe 102, 137; anti-system left 117; fraternity 160–2, 233
center-right parties in 56; changes freedom of speech 19, 81, 190
in political-party landscape 43; crisis free individuals 72–3, 83
of liberalism 11, 13; Eastern Europe, free market capitalism 7, 31
illiberal revolution in 158–64; economic free rational agency 73
growth 204; history of modern 78; free trade agreements 9, 105
illiberal 164; legitimation crisis 29; Fromm, Erich 34–5
populism in 126; radical problems Fujimori, Alberto 176
77; recent electoral battle in 50–1; Fukuyama, Francis 77, 85
understanding of and commitment to
the basic law/constitution 80; welfare Gandhi, Indira 190
and labor market arrangements 117–18 GATT agreement 111
European Central Bank (ECB) 153 Geithner, Timothy 90
European Council (EC) 141, 144 geopolitics 162–4
European Court of Justice 111 Germany 3, 6, 161; crisis of authority 88;
European Digital Rights Initiative 144 crisis of democracy 124; differentiated
European Monetary Union 111 integration 145; divided past 5; 2018
European Parliament (EP) 142, 144, 147, 153 elections 43–4; Hartz IV reforms 114;
European People’s Party (EPP) 50, 51; income inequality in 127, 128;
emergency resolutions 52 right-wing populists 131; weak climate
European Stability Mechanism (ESM) 145 pact in 16; Weimar 67
European Structural and Investment gerrymandering 20, 132
Funds 160 Giddens, Anthony 136–7
European Union (EU) 18, 54, 81, 162, Gierke, Otto von 244n4
241; common good 146–7; democratic Gilbert, Andrew Simon 32–3
deficits of 140–53; member states’ fiscal Gilens, Martin 129
policies 111; technocratic forms of global economic order, Global Trumpism
governance 28; see also Europe and 119–20
Eurozone crisis 117 global financial crisis of 2008 14, 27, 30,
Evangelical Parliamentary Front (EPF) 31, 125, 128
218, 220 Global Trumpism: anti-elitism 103–5;
anti-globalization 103–5; anti-system
Farage, Nigel 103 parties, rise of 106–10; democratic
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 108 deficit, economic origins of 112–14;
FETÖ (the Fethullah Gülen Terrorist financialization 114–15; and global
Organization) 174 economic order 119–20; ideologically,
Fidesz party 47, 50–2 locating 105–6; neoliberal growth
financialization 15, 31, 32, 36, 114–15, 234 model 110–12; right and left
financialized capitalism, legitimation responses 115–19; see also Trump,
crisis under 27–40, 237; crisis of crisis Donald
consciousness 36–9; Habermas on Goodhart, David 77
29–32; modern concept of 32–5 Google 243
Five Star Movement 44 Gove, Michael 237–8
Index 255
governance 72, 120, 125, 126, 136, 140, Orbán in 47–50; strange history of
141, 149, 153, 190, 193, 197, 230; crisis 45–7; and struggle on the right 43–56;
145, 146; democratic 11, 59; elite 86; Tocquevillean perspective of 58–68; see
global 11; technocratic 28, 66, 86, 91 also liberal democracy; individual entries
Gramsci, Antonio 28 illiberalism: global variants of, comparing
Great Depression 128 5–7; productive capacities of 16–18;
The Great Transformation (Polanyi) 8 in transatlantic context 125–6; see also
Greece 3; crisis of authority 88; economic liberalism
growth 204 IMF see International Monetary Fund
guardianship democracy 64 India 6, 13, 47; Armed Forces Special
Guedes, Paulo 216 Powers Act (AFSPA) 190; Article
Guha Thakurta, Paranjoy 198n5 370, 188, 189, 193; Article 35A
Gülen, Fethullah 174, 180 188; authoritarian populism 191–2;
Gül, Erdem 177 demonetization 192; electoral wins
Gurri, Martin 85–8 194–6; illiberal democracy in 190–1;
India Against Corruption movement
Haas, Ernst B. 151, 152 195; institutional subversion 196–7;
Habermas, Jürgen 28, 29, 35–8, 77, 80; on National Advisory Council 194;
financialized capitalism 29–32 National Rural Employment Guarantee
Hacker, Jacob 110, 129 Act 2005 195; politics of 189–94;
Haddad, Fernando 217, 221 proto-fascism 192–4; Right to
Haivry, Ofir 55 Education Act 2009 195; Right to
Halk TV 174 Information Act 2005 195; Scheduled
Hall, Stuart 192 Tribes and other Traditional Forest
Hamilton, Alexander 55 Dwellers (Recognition of Forest
Hayek, F.A. 9, 53 Rights) Act 2006 195; Special
Hazony,Yoram 54–5 Economic Zones Act 2005 195;
Hegel, Friedrich 72, 73, 79–80 Unlawful Activities Prevention Act
hegemonic politics 31 (UAPA) 191; unofficial emergency
Heleno, Augusto 220 188–98
The Hell of Good Intentions (Walt) 12 Indian Removal Act of 1830 233
Hindu nationalism 198 individual freedom 9, 45, 52, 53, 55, 64,
Hobbes, Thomas 73 71–3, 126
Hochschild, Arlie 238 individualism 13, 94–5, 125, 128, 137,
Hofstadter, Richard 159 211–12; Enlightenment 76; liberal 71,
homo economicus ix, 7 72, 78, 79, 83
homo politicus ix, 7 individual rights 8, 13, 46, 47, 59, 93–4,
Hong Kong 45 110, 167, 207
Hooghe, Liesbet 150, 151 Institute Locomotiva 211
The Human Condition (Arendt) 91 institutional subversion 196–7
humanity 59, 73, 75, 76, 96, 161 institutions 5, 17, 38, 60, 61, 63, 64, 77,
human rights 59, 64, 74, 93, 168, 179, 190, 88, 96, 110, 115, 116, 124, 125; Bretton
208, 216 Woods 11; democratic 8, 16; financial
Hungary 162, 176, 236, 240, 241; crisis 28; Keynesian 9; liberal 47, 58, 66, 68;
of democracy 85; Fidesz 47, 50–2, of liberal democracy 43, 65; of political
158–60, 175; illiberal policies 51–2; liberalism 4; supranational 4, 18;
populist politics in 91; postcommunist technocratic 112; welfare 117
democratization in 157; refugee crisis 160 intellectual trap 48
Huntington, Samuel 8, 157, 244n6 International Monetary Fund (IMF)
144, 169
Iglesias, Pablo 103 international relations (IR) 4, 11, 12,
illiberal democracy ix, 11, 16, 158, 164, 22, 222
166–83, 189–191, 236; definition of Iraq 11
189–90; in Eastern Europe 158–64; IR see international relations
256 Index
Isaac, Jeffrey C. 48 Lendvai, Paul 164

ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) 172 Le Pen, Marine 103, 236
Israel 5; crisis of authority 88 Lepore, Jill 68
Italian Renaissance 229 Levitsky, Steven 63
Italy 3; crisis of authority 88; crisis of LGBTQ community 18
democracy 85; 2018 elections 44 liberal autocracy 46
liberal capitalism 9, 33
Jackson, Andrew 233, 244n7 liberal-competitive capitalism 39
Japan 202–8; Abenomics 203–5; Anti- liberal democracy 4–6, 8, 10, 11, 17, 21,
Terrorism Bill 206; Japan Federation 43–6, 48, 50–5, 59, 60, 62, 68, 110–57,
of Bar Associations 206; Liberal 158, 163, 164, 166, 167, 222, 233–5,
Democratic Party (LDP) 207; low- 239, 244; challenges to 22, 85–97; crisis
yield economy 203–5; nationalist of ix, 3, 15, 16, 27, 29, 31, 40; defense
reawakening 205–6; Reiwa 206–7, 208; of 55; distinguished from Christian
State Secrecy Law 206 democracy 48–9; transformation of 53;
Johnson, Boris 124 see also illiberal democracy
Jordan 177 liberal elites 58, 92, 110, 235–7
liberal individualism 71, 72, 78, 79, 83
Kaczyñski, Jarosław 53 liberalism 7, 58–9; classical 54; constitutional
Kaczynski, Lech 159 167, 189; vs. democracy 61–2; economic
Kaczysnki, Jaroslaw 159 viii, ix, 7–9, 11, 13–16, 21, 89, 137, 140,
Kanal D 173 146; embedded 110; global crisis of
Kant, Immanuel 73–5 11–13; markets and 13–14; neoliberalism,
Kanungo, Pralay 193 x, 4, 7–11, 13–17, 19, 22, 31, 45, 110, 115,
Katz, Richard 37 210–212, 216, 234; political 4, 7, 8, 11, 14,
Kaufmann, Eric 94 15, 19, 21, 23, 49; undemocratic (purely
Kemalist authoritarian politics/Kemalism economic) 16; see also illiberalism
169, 170 liberal order 12, 21, 74, 102, 110, 114, 116,
Kennedy, John F. 89–90 119, 120, 234
Keynesian-Fordist welfare state 16 liberal rights 59, 167, 234
Kishi, Nobusuke 203 liberty viii, 61, 160–2, 233, 234;
Klaus,Vaclav 161 democratic 64; ethical and psychological
Kohl, Helmut 50 preconditions for 63; individual 7, 13;
Kolnai, Aurel 79 political 23; threat to 62
Koselleck, Reinhart 34 Lindberg, Leon N. 151, 152
KPMG 160 Lisbon Treaty 142, 145
Kundera, Milan 163 Lithuania 162; economic growth 204
Kuttner, Robert 24n4 Locke, John 55, 72
loyalty 76–8, 81, 84, 134, 152
labor market 112, 115–18, 127, 128, Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio 215, 221–2
203; deregulation 9; harshness of 211; Luther, Martin 231
institutions 118; reform 21; reregulation
of 22; transformation of 242 Maastricht Treaty 111, 142
laizzez-faire capitalism 29 Macedo, Edir 217
Latin America 11, 43, 44 Machiavelli, Niccolò 230–2
Latvia 162; economic growth 204 Macron, Emmanuel 43, 90, 243
Laurent, Pech 176 magical thinking 71
left populism 6 Maia, Rodrigo 221
Legitimation Crisis (Habermas) 28, 30–2, 38 Mair, Peter 37
legitimation crisis, under financialized Malafaia, Silas 217
capitalism 27–40; crisis of crisis managed capitalism 110, 120
consciousness 36–9; Habermas on market ix, 3, 4, 10, 16, 23–4n4; capitalism
29–32; modern concept of 32–5 45; deregulation of 36; failure 9,
Legutko, Ryszard 52–5 23n2; free viii, 7, 31, 32, 37, 45, 46,
Index 257
90, 128, 235; fundamentalism 8, 19, NATO see North Atlantic Treaty
21, 22–3; globalization 9, 11; labor Organization
(see labor market); and liberalism 13–14; negative integration 140, 141, 146, 148
society 8, 13 neoconservatism 216; evangelical
marketization 12, 31, 112, 113, 125, 126 Christian 217–18
Marks, Gary 150, 151 neoliberal growth model 110–12
marriage 82–3 neoliberalism 16, 17, 45, 110, 115, 210,
Marxist nationalism 163 234; crisis of x, 4, 13–15, 211–212;
Marx, Karl 72 implosion of 7–11, 22; progressive 19,
Mbembe, Achille 211 31, 216
Mearsheimer, John J. 12 Netflix 175
media 3, 4, 17, 47, 48, 104, 130–1, 167, New Deal 89
177, 180–2, 188–90, 194–8, 202, 206; New Economy 19
advertising 195; corrupted 19; free 7; nihilism 87, 88
mass 37–9; incremental autocratization Nippon Kaigi 207, 208
173–5; polarization 132; trust in 88 normality 31, 158, 160–2
Merkel, Angela 50, 90 North America 13, 102
Michnik, Adam 158 North American Free Trade
militarization of politics 216–20 Agreement 104
Mill, John Stuart viii, 7, 8, 13, 22, 80 North Atlantic Treaty Organization 4,
The Misery of the Small States of Eastern 11, 162
Europe (Bibo) 163 Nye, Joseph 205
Mises, Ludwig von 80
mixed economy 110 Obama, Barack 12, 89, 90, 105, 131
Modi, Narendra 3, 191–3, 195–7 Ober, Josiah 244n2
monetary sovereignty 116 Occupy Wall Street movement 14, 89
money in politics, influence of 130 OECD see Organization for Economic
monopoly capitalism 35 Co-operation and Development
morality 73, 179; Enlightenment 75; O’Neill, Onora 75
universal 31, 73 openness, definition of 79–80
moralization of political opposition 95 open society, conservative perspective
moral law 73–5 of 71–84; belonging, forms of 78–9;
Morelock, J. 192 conservative response 80–1; conservative
Moro, Sergio 213 doubts 82–3; Enlightenment 73–5;
Mouffe, Chantal 6 liberal doubts 81–2; loyalty and trust
Mourão, Hamilton 219 76–8; misconception 75–6
MSNBC 131 Operation Jet Lava 213
Muhammad’s Medina 78 Operation Lava Jato (Car Wash Operation)
Müller, Jan-Werner 6, 47, 59, 134, 159–60 212, 219
muscular nationalism 196 Orbán,Victor 11, 16, 45, 51, 52, 55, 87,
88, 124, 158, 159, 166, 236; on illiberal
Nader, Lucia 214 democracy 47–50
NAFTA see North American Free Trade Organization for Economic Co-operation
Agreement and Development (OECD) 127, 204
Naruhito 202 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt) 95
National Environmental Policy Act 136 Ortellado, Pablo 214
nationalism 22, 54, 55, 81, 105, 115, 116, Orthodox Marxism 29
135, 208, 216, 239; civic, opposed to O’Sullivan, John 53
ethnic58, 77; collectivist 92, 94–5; over-bureaucratization 143–4, 147
economic 104; Hindu 198; Marxist over-constitutionalization 144, 147
163; muscular 196; Romantic 229; Oxfam 75
xenophobic 159
National Rural Employment Guarantee Page, Benjamin 129
Act 2005 195 “the paranoid style” in politics 159
258 Index
Parfit, Derek 75 Protestant Reformation 231

Parliamentarianism 232 proto-fascism 192–4
Parsons, Talcott 29 Prussia, geopolitics in 163
Peck, Jamie 24n4 public freedom 35
people power 158–60 public–private partnerships 10
Perón, Juan 176 Public Safety Act 188
Perreira, Everaldo Dias (“Pastor Purdy, Jedediah 90
Everaldo”) 217 Putin,Vladimir 3, 5, 11, 119, 163, 164
Petrobras 212
Pierson, Paul 129 Radio and Television Supreme Council
Piketty, Thomas 13, 102, 128, 235 (RTÜK) 174
Plato 72, 228 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
Plattner, Marc 16, 60, 166 190–4
Pocock, J.G.A. 232 rational thinking 71
Podemos 114 Rawat, Bipin 196–7
Poland 18, 20, 176; geopolitics in 163; Reagan Revolution 89
Law and Justice (PiS) party 18, 47, 52, Reagan, Ronald 9, 104, 135
53, 158–60; people power 158–9, 160; Realpolitik 4
postcommunist democratization in 157; redistribution 5, 14, 17, 112, 113, 115
refugee crisis 160; transition to liberal refugee crisis 17, 58, 104, 116, 160–1
democracy 53 Reiwa 206–7, 208
Polanyi, Karl 8, 12, 24n4, 103 Reporters Without Borders 174, 206
Polanyi, Michael 79–80 representative democracy 88, 89, 92, 94,
polarization 3, 5, 129–32, 134, 137, 157, 97, 136; triad of 141; weakness of 96
159, 233, 241, 243 Reserve Bank of India 196
political freedom 8, 46, 94 Right’s crisis of neoliberalism 15–16
political inequality 128–32 Right’s struggle, illiberal democracy and
political liberalism 4, 7, 8, 11, 14, 15, 19, 43–56
21, 23, 49 Right to Education Act 2009 195
political theory, conflict in the realm Right to Information Act 2005 195
of 52–6 Riker, William 111
politicization: and democratization, link Rodrik, Dani 119
between 150–2; demos-building via Rohac, Dalibor 51, 159
149–53; models 152–3 Romania: illiberal revolution in 158; rights
Politics (Aristotle) 10–11 of ethnic Hungarians in 163
Popper, Sir Karl 72–4, 79 Romantic nationalism 229
popular sovereignty 5, 15–17, 23n2, 59, Romney, Mitt 105
61, 64–7 Roosevelt, Eleanor 74
populism 5, 29, 125, 134, 227–45; Ross, Wilbur 132
ambiguous people 239–43; anti-politics Rousseff, Dilma 214, 215, 218, 220
of 90; authoritarian 191–2; definition of RSS see Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
227–8; history of 228–34; left 6; present rule of law 15, 45, 46, 48, 52, 59, 81, 133,
wave of 234–9; problems with 6–7; 166, 167, 176, 182, 190, 229, 232, 234,
right-wing 109 244
Portugal 3 rule of nobody 94, 97
post-democracy 27, 38, 211 Russia 47, 48, 61; authoritarianism in
Pragya, Sadhvi 197 157; geopolitics in 163, 164; populist
“primary ties” of traditional authority politics in 91
34, 35
The Prince (Machiavelli) 230, 231 Salvini, Matteo 103
productive capacities of illiberalism 16–18 same-sex marriage 218
progressive neoliberalism 19, 31, 216 Sanders, Bernie 91, 103–5, 108, 129
progressivism 49; contemporary 54, 55 Sargentini, Judith 51, 52
Index 259
Scharpf, Fritz W. 146 Taft, William Howard 89

Schäuble, Wolfgang 27 TANF see Temporary Assistance for Needy
Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional Families
Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Tea Party movement 89, 91
Rights) Act 2006 195 technocratic fallacy 89–91
Scheingold, Stuart A. 151, 152 Telles, Mara 215
Schengen System 149 Temer, Michel 214
Scheppele, Kim Lane, 159, 176 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
Schmitter, Philippe 151, 152 (TANF) 126
Schröder, Gerhard 31 Thatcher, Margaret 9
Schumpeter, Joseph 111 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith) 7
security over freedom, prioritizing 95–6 “There is No Alternative” (TINA) policies
separation of powers 4, 5, 8, 19, 21, 59, 124–8
142, 167, 189, 190 third-wave of democratization 46, 166
Shanhanan, Patrick 132 Third Way politics 10, 31, 90, 125, 137
Shigeru,Yoshida 205 Thunberg, Greta 20
Shourie, Arun 197–8 TINA see “There is No Alternative”
Şık, Ahmet 171 policies
Silicon Valley 19 TMMOB see Union of Chambers of
Singapore 47 Turkish Engineers and Architects
Singer, Peter 75 Tocqueville, Alexis de viii, 7, 8, 13, 22,
six-pack measure 145 93, 245n17; perspective of illiberal
Slater, Don 24n4 democracy 58–68
Slovakia 158 Tonkiss, Fran 24n4
Smith, Adam viii, 7, 8, 13, 22, 73 totalitarianism 72, 95, 96
Smith, Rogers 67, 120 transatlantic context, illiberalism in 125–6
social cohesion 71 Trans-Pacific Partnership 206
social equality vs. popular rule 62–4 Treaty of Trianon 77
Socrates 228 Trump, Donald 3, 5, 6, 12, 22, 27,
Soros, George 49–50, 159 28, 63, 87–9, 105, 124, 129, 163, 236,
South Sea Bubble of 1720 33 241, 242, 244n7; “America First”
sovereign debt crisis 14 approach 103–4; conditions of equality
sovereign democracy 11, 59 93–4; ‘Draining the Swamp’ policy
sovereignty 21, 72, 74, 78, 162, 208; 132–6; Global Trumpism 7, 101–20
democratic 58, 65; monetary 116; trust 63, 71, 76–81, 86, 88, 124, 125, 128,
national 16, 79, 81; popular 5, 15–17, 134, 136, 137, 169, 214, 243; mutual 83,
23n2, 59, 61, 64–7; state 58 84; social 67, 82, 83
Spain 3, 116, 236 Tsipras, Alexis 103
Special Economic Zones Act 2005 195 Tulip Mania (1630) 33
state 4, 7, 18, 32, 33, 36, 55, 61, 83, 84, 94, Turkey 47, 48; AKP (Justice and
102, 119, 120, 159, 163; administrative Development Party) 167–83; National
30, 90, 135; bloated 10; democratic Outlook movement 168; rise of 168–9;
social 63, 64, 73; of emergency 17, transformation of 169–72; Article 19 of
172, 174–5, 179, 181; power 5, 74, the Decree Law 175; CHP (Republican
112; remaking 19–20; role of 14; People’s Party) 168, 170, 183;
shortcomings of 17; sovereignty 58, 74; Constitutional Court of Turkey (TCC)
welfare (see welfare state) 169, 170, 175, 176, 181; constitutional
state-managed capitalism 28–31 liberalism 167; Democratic Party
Strangers in their Own Land 238 (DP) 167–8; democratic transitions
Strathern, Paul 244n3 in 157; emergency decrees 182; Gezi
Streeck, Wolfgang 30–2 protests 171, 177, 179; High Council of
Sweden 161; income inequality in 127, 128 Judges and Prosecutors (HCJP) 175–7;
Syriza 114 Higher Education Council (HEC) 180;
260 Index
incremental autocratization 172–82; crisis and surge in suicides 19; populism

academic freedoms 180–2; civil society in 126, 233, 235; populist politics
in crosshairs 177–80; media 173–5; in 91; spirit of townships 93; State
Islamist Refah Party (Welfare Party) Department 133; Tea Party movement
168; Islamist Welfare Party (RP) 169; 89, 91; technocratic fallacy 89; and
LGBTI+ movement 179; PKK (Kurdish Trans-Pacific Partnership 206; trust in
Workers’ Party) 174; populist politics government 88; two-party system 5;
in 91; Savings Deposit Insurance Fund understanding of and commitment to
(TMSF) 173; True Path Party (DYP) the basic law/constitution 80
169;Virtue Party (FP) 169 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 74
two-pack measure 145 Unlawful Activities Prevention Act
(UAPA) 191
UAPA see Unlawful Activities US see United States
Prevention Act Uzan Hoding 173
Ukraine 163
UK see United Kingdom Vajpayee, Atal Bihari 194
UN see United Nations Valle,Vinicius 218
undemocratic (purely economic) Venezuela 48
liberalism 16 Venice Commission 175
Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers Vieira, Floriano Peixoto 220
and Architects (TMMOB) 177–9 The Virtue of Nationalism (Hazony) 54
United Kingdom (UK) 5, 12, 43, 55,
162, 205–6, 240; “alt-right” in 44; Walt, Stephen 12
anti-system parties, rise of 108; Brexit Washington Consensus 11
vote in 106, 108–9, 120; crisis of waves of democratization 8, 157
authority 88; crisis of democracy 85; Weber, Manfred 51
democratic deficit, economic origins welfare state 8, 19, 31, 112, 114, 118;
of 112; economic growth 204; income capitalism 37, 39, 126; compromise
inequality in 127; Labour Party 207; 29; institutions 110; Keynesian
liberal democracy in 92; neoliberal 29; Keynesian-Fordist 16; postwar
growth model 111; Thatcherite Tories 30, 36; retrenchment 5, 9, 11, 125;
235; unified sovereign order 81 retrenchments and restructuring of
United Nations (UN) 4, 18, 74, 206 126–8; visibility of 125
United States (US) 6, 24n5, 43, 49, 55, ‘we’ of political order 78–9
61, 89, 92, 158, 205, 234; Congress Western capitalism 110
131; Constitution: freedom of religion Western democracies 8, 9, 19, 22, 46–8,
82; ‘we’ of political order 78–9; 76, 91, 234, 245n10; anti-system politics
constitutional system and political in 101–20
culture of 64; crisis of authority 88; Wheeler, Andrew 132
crisis of democracy 85, 88, 124–38; Wodak, Ruth 76
crisis of liberalism 11–12; Democratic World Bank 4
Party 50; Department of Commerce World Press Freedom Index 174
133; Department of Education World Trade Organization (WTO) 4,
133; Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 18, 111
136; Endangered Species Act 136;
environmental protection agency in 16; xenophobic nationalism 159
foreign interference in 14; geopolitics
in 163; income inequality in 127, Yugoslavia 81
128; Indian Removal Act of 1830
233; legitimation crisis 29; National Zakaria, Fareed 45–6, 162, 166
Environmental Policy Act 136; Occupy Ziblatt, Daniel 63
Wall Street movement 89; opioid drug Zirve Holding 173

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“This rich book is an act of guardianship.

Filled with fascinating and incisive

“In presenting a multiplicity of perspectives on the broad and timely issue of

As illiberal and authoritarian trends are on the rise—both in fragile and in

• Part I explores tensions between liberalism and democracy in a longer-

The Emergence of Illiberalism will be of great interest to teachers and students of

Michael D. Weinman is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College Berlin. He

Edited by Boris Vormann and

ISBN: 978-0-367-36626-1 (hbk)

List of Contributors 247

7.1 Electoral Volatility 1950–2018, Western Europe 107

ideological differences, both articulated a vision of liberalism grounded in val-

Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann

Comparing Global Variants of Illiberalism

The Problem with the Term Populism

In short, economic liberalism is mostly concerned with market freedoms and

compromise and the post-World War II order. The conservative revolution of

degenerate into demokratia, the “popular” regime. As Robert A. Dahl (1989,

Cascading Effects: The Global Crisis of Liberalism

Eastern Europe, as the fallout from an imperial overstretch. In that context,

America’s pursuit of liberal hegemony poisoned relations with Russia, led

Like Walt, John J. Mearsheimer highlights the impossibility of the “liberal

Progressive Critiques: Liberalism Is Not Rule by Markets

The Critique from the Right: Who Belongs?

to even strengthen market rule, while bracketing all democratic protection of

Not Just Reaction: Illiberalism’s Productive Capacities

This restoration of a deeply conservative, imaginary primordial state of

Revising the Demos

In Western democracies, it is telling that upon closer examination, it is

Remaking the State

Conclusion: Illiberalism Is Not Only Anti-Liberalism

cause that led to the implosion of neoliberalism, particularly in the core group

autonomy and legitimacy by international financial institutions and encroach-

the way crisis-conscious citizens bring their experiences and understandings of

More to the point, Habermas’s account of the legitimation crisis of state-

Despite the above-named problems, Habermas’s model of late-capitalist le-

The Modern Concept of Crisis

The rationality of the system of production, in its technical aspects, is

Crisis consciousness is awareness of the conflict wherein it remains to be de-

Financialized Capitalism’s Crisis of Crisis Consciousness

value” (Habermas 1975, 36). In Habermas’s assessment, legitimacy under cap-

Control over politically relevant news and information, a resource vital to

Political systems under post-democratic conditions thus find themselves doubly

in the formulation of solutions, leaving them with a Frommian “sense of insig-

The Battle over Terminology

the protection of individual freedom. Consequently, features such as the rule of

The Strange History of “Illiberal Democracy”

Western democracies, a commitment to constitutionalism, the rule of law, and

Viktor Orbán Transforms the Debate

time that his philanthropies make generous grants to organizations working

The Recent Electoral Battle in Europe

Orbán acknowledges that elections for the European Parliament generally

The approval of Sargentini’s report launched a process that is still ongoing.

The Conflict in the Realm of Political Theory

is not liberal democracy as it was understood by, say, Winston Churchill

Indeed, O’Sullivan goes on to say that Legutko “hyphenates liberal- democratic

What we need today are practices fostered in local settings, focused on

Hazony’s philosophical-historical account claims to find a solid foundation

Many other conservatives, of course, including most of the still dominant

Introduction: Illiberal Democracy?