even clear the political air.
Let’s start with “bikini” concepts that cover the bare minimum and are distinct. I introduce three discrete and continuous rather than binary political dimensions that stretch between opposing poles. The following three dimensions are sufficient and necessary for understanding the political crises that followed 2008:
| Democracy | |--------------------------------| | Authoritarianism |
| Liberalism | |--------------------------------| | Absolutism (Illiberalism) |
| Technocracy | |--------------------------------| | Populism |
Though many associate the above left and right poles with each other to form unified Manichean good-versus-evil concepts (liberal technocratic democracy versus populist absolute authoritarianism), historically, these correlations were uncommon. I use familiar terms, democracy and authoritarianism, liberalism and absolutism, populism and technocracy in simpler and more limited, “bikini,” senses than is usual in political theory. I seek greater precision than in “fluid” journalistic ordinary language where terms flow into each other to create murky conceptual puddles.
Democracy vs. Authoritarianism
Democracy is often over-extended to include liberal institutional and cultural prerequisites. Democracy, civil rights, and the rule of law may well reinforce each other, but most democracies have not been liberal. If democracies that are not liberal and far from ideal in excluding resident aliens, or slaves, or the poor, or women, or have authoritarian elements, are excluded from the pure and pious democratic ideal, democracy becomes a utopian normative ideal that may not fit any historical regime and cannot explain the political world. Many democracies, including all the ancient ones, were surely more distant from the authoritarian pole than the democratic ideal pole, though none was liberal or respected rights. I use a minimal measure of democracy as the degree to which the government represents the citizens’ political choices in free and fair elections. On one pole there are authoritarian regimes that do not represent their citizens, while on the other pole there is pure proportional representation without a threshold, where all the citizens and residents vote. Hybrid authoritarian–democratic regimes that combine authoritarian features with limited political competition and unfair elections are in the middle (Levitsky and Way 2010). Closer still to the authoritarian pole are authoritarian regimes that allow limited representative elections, though the representative bodies do not govern, but represent or advise. Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, do not represent the political choices of their subjects, even when they reflect them. Even when the policies of an authoritarian regime happen to agree with what its subjects would have preferred had they been given the choice, they are 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,