Democracy Against Liberalism. Aviezer Tucker

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СКАЧАТЬ not given the choice, and the regime does not represent them. Authoritarian regimes can be more or less popular, but they are not accountable to their subjects.

Liberalism vs. Absolutism

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

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

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

      Absolutism describes better the opposite pole to liberalism than illiberalism because it has been in use and debated for centuries. However, in the contemporary political context, illiberalism has become the entrenched dominant term in use, at least since Fareed Zakaria (2003) popularized the term “illiberal democracy,” and Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán dusted it off for his own needs. In this book I use illiberalism and absolutism interchangeably. I use neo-illiberalism, the main topic of this book, in contemporary contexts, and absolutism when writing about history, to emphasize that this is a new incarnation of an old type of regime.

Populism vs. Technocracy

Standard contemporary theories of populism associate it with social movements that emphasize the struggle of homogeneous “people” versus perfidious “elites.” (Canovan 2005; Norris and Inglehart 2019). Populism in the United States resulted partly from resentment against elite and expert blunders in initiating and conducting the Iraq War and in bringing about, not preempting, and failing to quickly end the 2008–2009 Great Recession to restore the prior trajectory of the economy. Subsidizing the managerial class, and bailing out the banks that caused the mess in the first place, added insult to injury. In this respect, it may be argued that George W. Bush’s administration successfully achieved a regime change, though not the one intended and not in the country targeted.

      This standard characterization is too broad. It would consider populist too many political episodes that are clearly not populist. It would also leave out much of contemporary populism. Representations of political struggles as those of the “people” in the depths of subterranean society against stratospheric elites have been characteristic of rebels, religious reform movements, socialists, anti-colonialists, and nationalist struggles in multi-national empires. Anti-intellectuals who resent better educated, artistically sensitive, and abstract-minded elites include human resources departments of major corporations and investment bankers, who resent academic “experimentation.” Since elites are by definition fewer than “ordinary people,” and their privileges or perceived privileges often generate some resentment, it usually makes good democratic politics to attack them. Parties that represented the interests of the poor, the rural, or the more religious, attempted to harness resentments against the wealthy, urban, and secular, without being “populist.” Socialist, small holders, and Christian parties are often not populist. Mere anti-elitist rhetoric is insufficiently distinctive of populism.

Anti-elitist concepts of populism are also too narrow because they exclude obviously populist movements that adore elite plutocrats (or apparent plutocrats) such as Berlusconi in Italy, Babiš in the Czech Republic, and Trump in the United States. Most ancient populist demagogues in Greece and Rome were scions of famous and old political families. Some contemporary populists respect and even admire wealthy elites and celebrities like the Italian populist leader Pepe Grillo and, of course, Trump. Trump’s fear of divulging his tax returns probably reflects status anxiety. He fears losing the respect and adoration of his followers should they realize that he is not much richer than they are. Contemporary populists do not necessarily resent professional politicians. Some populist leaders had been professional mainstream center-right or center-left politicians before adopting populist style and politics; for example, Hungary’s prime minister Orbán, the Czech president Zeman, and Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu. Though India’s Modi had modest caste origins, he was also a professional politician, the chief minister of Gujarat for over a decade, and his policies have been distinctly favorable to the upper castes. Brazil’s Bolsonaro was a professional politician for decades after being a military officer in a country with a traditionally political and authoritarian military. The Polish populist leader Kaczyński was both a celebrity actor and a professional politician. By contrast, virtually all the totalitarian leaders, Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their close associates, had no elite background of any kind.

      The political etymology of the term “populist” goes back to the late Roman Republic (133–27 BCE), when conflicts between the Optimates and Populares tore it apart in civil wars. Both groups were of elite Roman families, but the weaker clique sought popular support in its struggle with the stronger party that controlled the Roman Senate. The struggle was not so much between the people and the elites as between factions within the elite, some of whom did not shy away from attempting to use common people to support them. In response, the Optimates accused the Populares of demagoguery, the emotional manipulation of the political passions of the masses.

At least since Plato, upper-class authors and orators have attempted to associate the passions exclusively with the lower classes. Conversely, they associated self-control and reason with the upper classes. The oligarchic conclusion is obvious and fully developed in Plato’s political philosophy: An elite moved by reason rather than passion should rule, if not enslave, people who cannot rule their own passions. Democracy, the rule of common people who cannot control their passions and subdue them to reason leads to the politics of the passions, demagoguery, and eventually self-destruction.

      Elite propaganda aside, the ancient Greek and Roman elites were just as likely as the lower classes to succumb to passions, both political and personal. Passions for social domination, economic rapaciousness, СКАЧАТЬ