in Spain, the Democratic Socialists who supported Senator Bernie Sanders, and so on “left-wing populists.” Neo-illiberal governments, whether of the right or left, must have conflicts with liberal institutions such as the judiciary. For example, during the years 1935 to 1937, F. D. Roosevelt’s executive came into such conflicts with the judiciary branch of government in the United States over the new deal’s left-leaning reforms. The Supreme Court attempted to block the new deal and, in response, Roosevelt planned on packing the Supreme Court with political loyalists, which in effect would have curtailed its independence. That would have been an aspect of left-wing illiberalism.
But nothing of the sort happened during the four years (2015–2019) Syriza was in power. I have seen no evidence that any of the “left-wing populist” parties or groups between social democracy and the Trotskyite vanguard have any such intentions. While the Greek governments that preceded Syriza were definitely populist (though not necessarily left wing) because their policies led to the destruction of the Greek economy, Syriza’s policies, aside from its ideology, were not populist. To avoid austerity, they did not want to pay back the loans of the Greek state. This was in the Greek national interest. It came into conflict with the interests of the European Union in general and Germany in particular. Since the latter held all the cards, they imposed their interests on the Greeks. This is not populist politics, but realist politics of interests. Maybe, if Syriza had not been so constrained, it would have embarked on economic populism that would have seriously hurt the Greek economy, but the fact of the matter is that it did not.
If populist left-wing rhetoric became policy, it may lead to a Venezuelan-type implosion through state over-spending beyond its means and credit. But it is far from clear that any of the so called “left-wing populist” parties would actually follow their own rhetoric. More significantly, it is unclear whether, if facing clear and immediate “Venezuelan” prospects, they would not step back from the brink, change course, and accept the constraints of the world we live in to become ordinary center-left governments. For example, when François Mitterrand’s socialists came into power in a coalition with the Communist Party in 1981 France, they sang the International on the day of their victory and attempted to implement left-wing populist policies. Within two years, they had to correct their course to prevent a crisis turning into a catastrophe, and ruled for the rest of the 1980s successfully as conventional center-left social democrats. As governments have come to rely increasingly on refinancing their debts on the international markets, the first sign of distress is usually rising costs of borrowing, which makes it more difficult for governments to pay their bills. They must choose then between default (as the populists do) or anti-populist austerity and reform (as ordinary center-left politicians do). Politicians, including “left-wing populists,” make promises that they cannot or do not intend to fulfil. The real test of populism is of policy.
The undoubtedly passionate aspect of left-wing politics is the fanatic insistence of left-wing populist voters on voting for a politician who expresses precisely their convictions, ideals, and passions. Populist left-wing voters shun compromises for the sake of building a broader, less ideologically purist, coalition that can actually stand a chance of achieving a democratic majority and face the test of cold reality. This is passionate political populism in its obvious self-destructiveness, guaranteeing fragmentation and political defeats.
Weimar, Jackson, Singapore
This book is a late addition to the burgeoning “political apocalypse now” genre of books about the death of democracy, the twilight of civilization, and the return of ideological mortality to history. It benefits from this late coming. This is not a knee jerk or hysterical reaction to a shock, nor a desperate cry for help, nor the thought of somebody who was pushed off a skyscraper and tells himself half way down “so far so good.” The theoretical analysis I propose in this book offers a historically and comparatively founded theoretical alternative to a few earlier popular interpretations of the politics of the second decade of the twenty-first century, which I call Weimarian, Jacksonian, and Singaporean:
Weimarian interpretations perceived a global acidic wave of authoritarianism, corroding and washing away the achievements of the postwar reconstruction in Western Europe, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and the “third wave” of democratization in Southern Europe, Latin America, and East Europe. An apparently similar “tidal wave” in the 1920s and 1930s undid the achievements of the post-First-World-War Wilsonian world order of self-determining liberal-democratic nation-states in a peaceful community of nations. The current “wave,” like its predecessor almost a century earlier, does not have a single common source or explanation. It resembles an unconditional zeitgeist, a historical trend that spreads partly by imitation and partly for unknown common or separate reasons, like colonialism or nationalism. Weimarians tend to conflate authoritarianism, illiberalism, and populism and, taken to extremes, reduce them all to “Adolf.” If this analysis is correct, the liberal institutional defenses are so weak that a chance occurrence, such as a terrorist attack like the one that burnt the Reichstag in 1933, or the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, may provide the excuse to bring down the democratic house of cards and establish illiberal authoritarianism. It may be that by pure luck there has been no such destabilizing terrorist attack and liberals let their guards down, until Covid-19 reshuffled the political cards and took all political bets off.
If this process is beyond anybody’s control, we might as well try to enjoy cabarets, while waiting for the gestapo. This interpretation emerged following the surprising rolling shocks of the successes of Trump’s rhetoric, Trump’s victory in the republican primaries and, above all, his victory in the 2016 elections. People who experienced or were directly affected by the Second World War (Albright 2018), or historians specializing in the study of that period (Snyder 2017), were particularly receptive to this kind of interpretation, though other historians who studied Nazism (Herf 2016a, 2016b) acknowledged some of the similarities, but also emphasized the differences. As Runciman (2018, 31) put it, Europeans and North Americans are too prosperous, old, networked, and with knowledge of history to repeat the end of Weimar. “Political violence is a young man’s game.” Too much of the 1930s is missing: current illiberal democracies have no militias and no unemployed risk loving and not just taking military veterans to man them. Most European countries have experienced demographic declines, especially in post-Communist countries where mass emigration combined with low fertility. Wealthier societies and welfare states have lower levels of misery in severe recessions than poorer and less secure workers did during the 1930s. Populist leaders this time depend on weak and fickle popular support that is not sufficient for starting costly wars, unless they can be won quickly and decisively. The liberal institutions in some countries with neo-illiberal governments or movements are more resistant and resilient than those of the Weimar Republic. As Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) emphasized, globally the number of democratic backslides is balanced by democracies that stabilized. The total number of democracies in the world has not changed much since 2005. Thomas Carothers, who attacked the transition-to-democracy “paradigm,” co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs entitled “Democracy is not Dying: Seeing through the Doom and Gloom.” There may be an illiberal wave, but it is far from a tsunami, and there are other waves pushing the ships of state in opposite directions.
History, however, rhymes rather than repeats itself. The final dramatic push toward authoritarianism from neo-illiberal democracy, “the burning Reichstag,” kind of event some analysts were expecting, as I write now in April of 2020, may not be terrorism, as many had worried, but the return of a pandemic plague after a hundred years – the spread of the coronavirus. The kinds of authoritarian measures that may be necessary to contain the spread of the disease are conducive to a permanent state of emergency and a permanent slide from neo-illiberal democracy to authoritarianism. A telling sign is that Hungary’s Orbán entirely abolished the constitutional power of the parliament that his Fidesz Party controlled anyway. In March of 2020, the Hungarian parliament passed a law that rhymed with the German Enabling Act of March 1933, which gave Hitler the right to rule by decree, following the burning of the Reichstag and a disinformation campaign about an impending Communist coup. The Hungarian parliament suspended its own constitutional powers and transferred to the government the right to rule by decree