How to Lose a Country: The Seven Warning Signs of Rising Populism. Ece Temelkuran

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СКАЧАТЬ Well, I have to. These days, thanks to our leader, it is perfectly clear who Socrates is. We know very well who Socrates is! You cannot deceive us any more about that evil guy.

      ARISTOTLE: Are you joking?

      POPULIST: This is no joke to us, Mr Aristotle, as it may be to you. Socrates is a fascist. My people have finally realised the truth, the real truth. The worm has turned. You cannot deceive the people any more. You were going to say, ‘Therefore Socrates is mortal,’ right? We’re fed up with your lies.

      ARISTOTLE: You are rejecting the basics of logic.

      POPULIST: I respect your beliefs.

      ARISTOTLE: This is not a belief; this is logic.

      POPULIST: I respect your logic, but you don’t respect mine. That’s the main problem in Greece today.

      This is a simple example of the basic populist logic that, with variations, is employed in many countries today. However, even in this fictitious conversation there are at least five fallacies according to the general rules of rational debate, the fundamental rules of logic that we have been using for centuries in everyday life, even if we don’t know any Latin:

      1. Argumentum ad hominem (rebutting the argument by attacking the character of one’s adversary rather than refuting the substance of the argument) – You and your kind have ruled …

      2. Argumentum ad ignorantiam (appealing to ignorance by asserting that a proposition is true because it has not yet been disproven) – See? You can’t prove that all humans are mortal.

      3. Argumentum ad populum (assuming that a proposition is true simply because many people believe it) – The real people of this country think otherwise.

      4. Reductio ad absurdum (attempting to prove or disprove an argument by trying to show that it leads to an absurd conclusion) – You’d kill everybody to prove that all humans are mortal.

      5. Ad-hoc reasoning (explaining why a certain thing may be by substituting an argument for why it is) – Democracy is about respecting ideas, so respect my idea.

      Although the fallacies committed in the above conversation seem egregious, they did not appear childish to half of Britain when Boris Johnson and his ilk in the Conservative Party and the Leave campaign exercised them liberally during the Brexit debate. As Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian on 16 October 2016: ‘You’d hope for consistency and coherence; in its place, the bizarre spectacle of a party claiming to have been against the single market all along, because Michael Gove once said so.’ In other words, argumentum ad ignorantiam. Michael Gove was the man who – bearing a striking resemblance to the populist driving Aristotle crazy above – declared that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’. It was comments like this that led the other half of Britain to believe that pro-Brexit arguments were too puerile to take seriously, and that only children could fall for them. Like millions of people in Europe, they also thought that if populist leaders were repeatedly portrayed as being childish, they would never be taken seriously enough to gain actual power.

       ‘I will tell you one description that everyone [in the White House] gave – that everyone has in common. They all say he is like a child.’

      Almost a year after the Brexit referendum, Americans were exercising the same ‘adult strategy’ on the other side of the Atlantic. When Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published in January 2018, its author Michael Wolff repeated this punchline in several TV interviews. The concerned nods of the composed presenters, together with Wolff’s expression of someone bringing bad news, created the impression of a parent–teacher meeting being held to discuss a problem child. Each interview emphasised Trump’s infantile behaviour, providing a comfortable underestimation of the situation for worried adult Americans. He’s just a wayward child, you know, and we are grown-ups. We know better.

      For any country experiencing the rise of populism, it’s commonplace for the populist leader to be described as childlike. Reducing a political problem to the level of dealing with a naughty infant has a soothing effect, a comforting belittlement of a large problem. On 5 January 2018, the New York Times published a reader’s letter that included the sentence: ‘Looking at Thursday’s headlines [on the war of words between Trump and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon] makes me wonder whether we have a government or a middle school student council.’ The confidence of being the only adult in the room must have made the letter writer feel somehow secure. Just as the first minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, must have felt on 15 November 2016, when he said, ‘This is like giving a chainsaw to a child,’ in response to Nigel Farage’s name being put forward as someone who could help boost trade relations with Trump’s America.

      Portraying populist leaders as infantile is not the only trap that is all too easy to fall into. Scrutinising their childhoods to search for the traumas that must have turned them into such ruthless adults, and by doing so bandaging the political reality with some medical compassion that the populist leader didn’t actually ask for, is another common ploy used by critics to avoid feeling genuine political anxiety. Poland’s former populist prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński and Turkey’s Erdoğan have both undergone such examinations in absentia by prominent psychiatrists, and have likewise been described as broken children. Elżbieta Sołtys, a Polish social scientist and psychologist, diagnosed Kaczyński as a traumatised child. In one interview she said it was probable that his low emotional intelligence was connected to his loveless and strict upbringing, adding that his current fury was an explosion following years of suppression. Erdoğan’s diagnosis was similar. His father used to hang him by his feet in order to stop him swearing, and as a result an entire country now has to suffer his volatile mood swings.

      The primary consequence of calling these leaders infantile, and psychologising their ruthlessness, is simply to make their critics feel more adult and mentally healthy by comparison. It attributes childish politics entirely to the populist leader and his supporters. As if everyone else (including the writer of this book, and its readers) were completely immune to an infantilised perception of the world. Well, it’s not like that. You know that, right?

       ‘Why do you watch these films? These are just fairy tales for kids. You’re grown men, goddamn it!’

      It is 2016, and my friend Zeynep is talking to some Turkish male friends of ours in Istanbul. We are all in our forties, and the men she is reprimanding are all successful, upper-middle-class, well-educated. They have just finished playing fantasy football on the PlayStation, and are now trying to choose which movie to watch. Although they are the same age as the prophets and the revolutionary leaders of the last century, with their backpacks dumped on the sofa they look like adolescents just back from school. Their political activity is limited to voting, mostly because they consider politics beneath them. Of course they are not as infantile as the people who believe a bigot who keeps repeating the fairy tale of ‘making Turkey great again’. However, they do have a soft spot for fairy tales; it’s just that theirs involve vampires, superpowers and Cristiano Ronaldo. As Zeynep refuses to make light of the situation, the men first try to fend off her attack with laughter, just as boys would. But Zeynep insists: ‘I mean, seriously. Why?’ They then choose to watch The Hunger Games, perhaps as an attempt at conciliation, but she’s still waiting for a substantial answer, some sign of self-awareness or self-criticism, as girls do. The men quickly move to hawkish diplomacy. One of them, not jokingly, says, ‘Well, you watch cartoon movies, don’t you? You’re no better than us, Mom!’

      Zeynep and I take our adult discussion into another room. She talks about how infantile this generation of men are, СКАЧАТЬ