Republicans, Boris Johnson, and "Soft" Authoritarianism

The historical memory of the 20th century has in many ways left us ill-prepared for 21st century threats to democracy. Most people hear "authoritarianism" and think of Hitler and Stalin, one party states, and concentration camps. For this reason anything short of those totalitarian scenarios isn't taken seriously enough. Modern day "soft" authoritarians know this and act accordingly.

Take the Republican Party. From 1992 to the present it has won the plurality of the popular vote in the presidential election only once, in 2004 with the benefit of incumbency. Despite that, a Republican has held the office for three terms in that period. This has been enabled by the electoral college. When Republicans have held the White House they have used their positions to flood the federal bench with young ideologues, altering the interpretation of the law for decades in a direction that is not popular. When Republicans do not hold the White House they do everything they can to deny Democratic presidents their nominees.

Republicans also use gerrymandering and voter suppression to maintain their position despite being unpopular. In Wisconsin a majority voted for Democrats for the state legislature, but gerrymandering produced a majority of Republicans in both houses. That legislature then stripped powers from the newly elected Democratic governor. In multiple states, including my home state of Nebraska, Republican legislators have refused to honor ballot initiatives where clear majorities of voters opted to expand Medicaid.

In this regard Trump is not an outlier, but a regular Republican. As president he has used executive orders to target Muslim immigrants, throw children in prison camps, and fund a border wall without Congressional approval. According to recent reports, Trump is demanding that land be confiscated for his wall, and is dangling pardons for any underlings who fear legal prosecution. By outsourcing work to Fox News, Trump does not appear to have a state-run propaganda machine, but Fox basically fulfills that function.

Fellow nationalist Boris Johnson has also figured out the tricks of soft authoritarianism. He maneuvered to have Theresa May stabbed in the back, able to become prime minister without having to win an election. Johnson, who does not have majority support, has also moved to prorogue parliament in order to force the UK into a very unpopular no-deal Brexit. He is essentially preventing the people from having any kind of voice in the matter.

Because neither Trump nor Johnson are putting tanks in the streets or arresting their opponents, most regular people do not see this as authoritarianism, but it is. It is a smarter authoritarianism attuned to the fact that overt moves to grab power by force won't fly in this day and age. The memory of the last century is a big reason why. However, that memory serves us poorly because we are stuck fighting the last war. Unless we oppose this soft authoritarianism with the vigor it deserves, it won't stay soft much longer.

The Age Of Resentment

I rarely tweet anything that more than two people retweet, so I was glad to see a bigger group of people respond to this tweet:

If Eric Hobsbawm were immortal I think there would be a book called The Age of Resentment coming out in about thirty years.

— Werner Herzog's Bear (@wernherzbear) June 24, 2016

I was referring to the now deceased historian's four books on modern world history, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes. Broad based synthesizing histories are not in vogue anymore, but I love them for their sweeping scopes and big ideas. I was being a bit flippant, but I do think that resentment is currently an overwhelming force in world affairs.

That resentment has expressed itself in nationalist terms. Putin has harnessed the resentment over Russia's fall from superpower status to burnish his authority and invade Georgia and the Ukraine. Dating to Sarah Palin in 2008, America's hard right wing has put all of its money on the resentment-fueled "take our country back" meme, culminating in the rise of Trump. And a slim majority of British voters opted to leave the EU in a campaign driven by fear of immigrants and promises of restored national prestige.

How to explain these resentments? One response is what I call the "blame it on neoliberalism" school. They see Trump and Brexit as reactions by the economically dispossessed who relish the opportunity to smack down the elites. I find that this explanation has limited power. In the first place, the arguments for Brexit were made in explicitly neoliberal terms: less money being redistributed and fewer regulations will make the economy grow!  Just because a group of people is economically hurting, that doesn't mean that its political choices are all a direct response to that fact. That's a fallacy that a lot of people are falling into, partially due to their own life experiences. It always makes me chuckle when bougie Vassar grads lecture others for "punching down" on the Archie Bunker types. Coming from a lower-middle class background in rural red state America, I can tell you that a lot of these people are just narrow minded bigots, pure and simple. There is no great mystery to solve there, especially when white supremacy gets threatened.

It would be terribly short-sighted, of course, to just blame the Age of Resentment exclusively on racial fear, even if it is a key element. What appears to be happening is that larger resentments brought on by the forty year contraction of the middle class in the wake of neoliberal globalization are being channeled towards nationalism, which is inherently populist. This has happened in large part due to the weakness of the left. In Europe, the old social democratic and socialist parties have been in retreat. In France, with Francois Hollande in power, the socialists have been forced to compromise.  Across Latin America left-oriented governments have fallen, as in Argentina and Brazil, or are in serious trouble, as in Venezuela and Bolivia. In America the radical left has become so intertwined with academia that the people who claim to be pushing for popular revolution are incapable of making a political statement devoid of grad student jargon. That'll get the working class fired up!

With the left unable to properly harness resentment (partially due to the siren call of white supremacy), the radical right has had a field day. Anger and resentment at globalization is not being directed at multinational corporations, but at immigrants. As far as America is concerned, the Occupy Movement and the Sanders campaign certainly show the presence of left wing populism, but both tend to skew towards the young and the more educated, and both have had problems with attracting people of color. The right wing variety is much more robust, and it has a secret weapon in its media presence. In Britain, the Sun and other tabloids gushed out geysers of misinformation. In America talk radio and Fox News not only reach millions, but they crucially influence their outlooks. I still remember a relative one day who started railing about how "America is a republic, not a democracy," then realized they had been watching Glenn Beck.

What I would like to see coming out of this is a left self-critical enough to understand its shortcomings. I see so much leftist vitriol directed at liberals, for instance, without any analysis of why leftist ideas are not gaining traction. I see so many Bernie supporters wailing about a "rigged" system rather than thinking long and hard about how and why they could attract more voters of color. There is a lot of resentment out there, and it runs especially high in the white working and middle classes of this country, where it feeds on the power and attraction of nationalism and white supremacy. Combatting it will require a lot of hard work, as well as some political hard-nosedness. No more beautiful losers. No more elevating a single person in messianic status. No more blaming the right whenever the left fails. No more empty self-righteousness. In this Age of Resentment, it is time to put away childish things, and it is time to roll up our sleeves and give the fight of our lives. The loss will not be a noble defeat, it will be unthinkable.

Brexit And The Post Post-Cold War World

Things have changed since the days of the Marshall Plan

I know I am repeating myself, but it is a point that bears repeating: we are experiencing a worldwide resurgence of nationalism and the nation state and are now effectively living in a post post-Cold War world. This development frightens me, because a similar spike in nationalism, which came amidst the explosion of the global economy in the period from the 1850s to the 1910s, led two horrific world wars. It wasn't until the 1990s that the level of global trade returned to 1913 levels.

Evidence of this shift is everywhere, from Putin's invasion of Ukraine on nationalist grounds to China's invocation of nationalism to Donald Trump's appeals to ethno-nationalism to new nationalist governments in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Tomorrow the people of the United Kingdom are voting on whether to stay in the European Union, and right now the vote looks very close. While there is a tiny pro-Brexit left, most of the push is motivated by nationalists drawing on fears of immigration and the effects of multiculturalism. (The EU can be criticized on many legitimate grounds, but it is nationalism first and foremost that is driving this.)

This is a remarkable turnaround of events. The 1991 Maastricht Treaty, which turned the European Community into the European Union, was hailed in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall as the sign of a new, peaceful Europe free from the specter of war. Of course, the wars in the Balkans raging already in 1991 proved such hopes were overstated, and were perhaps a more accurate harbinger of the future than Maastricht.

There is no doubt that the EU has failed immensely in the last quarter century. It failed to meaningfully intervene in the Yugoslav wars. It overextended the euro, putting countries like Greece onto the currency that had no business being there, harming the Eurozone economy and making it difficult for Greece to recover due to it not having any control over its own monetary policy. The EU's organization itself is maddeningly bureaucratic, often undemocratic, and almost impossible to understand. When I taught a class on postwar Europe I didn't even bother trying to explain it to my students because I actually wanted them to be interested in their education.

So yes, there are reasons to want to change the EU, and I think it is in dire need of rethinking. However, the response in Britain (specifically England) has been motivated by notions of national sovereignty, rather than any desire to improve the EU or any real interest in its goals. So for me it is not the backlash against the EU that unnerves me, it's the nature of that backlash. Nationalism was responsible for a tremendous amount of bloodshed in the 20th century, including murderous campaigns blamed on communism that were actually part of larger projects of nation building. (I am thinking here especially of Stalin's Russia and Mao's China. Putin and Xi are just new players in an old and continuing nationalist narrative.) Not all nationalism ends in the concentration camp and bloody battlefield, but it is usually accompanied by narrowed minds and marginalization of the "other."

The European project originated out of a need, after the cataclysm of 1914-1945, to use economic integration as a way ensure peaceful coexistence. In that respect, it has been a massive success, so successful that so many are forgetting the fragility of that success. After World War I, the architects of the post-Versailles world system thought it would be permanent and were confident in its success. By 1933, it was already practically extinct, torn apart by nationalist demagogues and worldwide economic decline. Does that sound familiar to anybody? We are entering a new phase in world history, time will tell just what that means.