Boris Johnson and the road to "illiberal democracy"

There's a difference between revolution and revolutionary methods. Sociologists and political scientists can come up with more-or-less well-delineated definitions to clearly distinguish them. For most people, the distinction is about as vague as it is irrelevant.

Britannica Online provides a useful general definition of the concept as it evolved since antiquity (Revolution, 2019), including references to these modern theories of revolution:

The 16th-century Italian writer Niccolò Machiavelli recognized the importance of creating a state that could endure the threat of revolution; but, at the same time, his detailed analysis of power led to a new belief in the necessity of changes in the structure of government on certain occasions. This new acceptance of change placed Machiavelli at the forefront of modern revolutionary thought, even though he never used the word revolution in his texts, and he was primarily concerned with the creation of a truly stable state.

The 17th-century English writer John Milton was an early believer in revolution’s inherent ability to help a society realize its potential. He also saw revolution as the right of society to defend itself against abusive tyrants, creating a new order that reflected the needs of the people. To Milton, revolution was the means of accomplishing freedom. Later, in the 18th century, the French, Haitian, and American revolutions were attempts to secure freedom from oppressive leadership. Modern revolutions have frequently incorporated utopian ideals as a basis for change. [my emphasis]

The Britannica editors also give credit to Immanuel Kant, who "believed that revolution was a 'natural' step in the realization of a higher ethical foundation for society," noting that the Kantian "idea helped serve as a basis for the American and French revolutions." Although in the former, more people got it directly from Thomas Paine rather than from Kant.

They even give credit to Hegel as "a crucial catalyst in the formation of 20th-century revolutionary thought" who "saw revolutions as the fulfillment of human destiny, and he saw revolutionary leaders as those necessary to instigate and implement reforms." A new biography of Hegel by Klaus Vieweg that emphasizes Hegel's republican thought rooted in the French Revolution, as suggested by its subtitle, Hegel: Der Philosoph der Freiheit [Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom] (2919). Hegel, like Thomas Jefferson, was deeply engaged with the political ideals of the French Revolution and supportive of them, while of course keeping a critical view of its actual outcomes. Paine himself was an elected deputy to the French Revolutionary National Convention, though his service was interrupted for a year when he was imprisoned for his criticism of the Terror.

In the United States for the last 40 years, Republicans have tended to be more comfortable than Democrats with using "revolution" to describe their goals, e.g., the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution. Although Bernie Sanders' use of "political revolution" currently has Republicans, corporate Democrats, and poor babbling Chris Matthews reverting to a more classical conservative view of at least feigning horror over the very notion.

But in our current, much-discussed trend in the world of rising authoritarianism, including in the US, Europe, Latin America, and India, some governments and parties are using and advocating methods that the Founding Father of modern reactionary thought, Edmund Burke, might have regarded as French Jacobin approaches.

The authoritarian, "illiberal democracy" that Viktor Orbán established after winning the Hungarian Presidency in 2010, he moved rapidly to build the current version of government in Hungary, using extreme gerrymandering, wide-ranging control of the press with help from allied oligarchs, politicized institutions of justice, without resorting to tactics like jailing or murdering journalists. Elections are still nominally free and competitive and people aren't arrested for political reasons. But the system is sufficiently rigged that Orbán's party can retain control without winning a majority in elections.

Peter Oborne has a thought-provoking take on Britain's Trumpish Prime Minister which is a reminder that there are various potential models for those seeking to get rid of democracy (Boris Johnson as a revolutionary figure, Boris Johnson is leading a revolution, and this time it's coming from the right Middle East Eye 02/08/2020:

Most of us were taught in college to think that revolutionary movements come from the left. It seemed to make sense: Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, Mao. It may be time to reconsider. Johnson is leading a revolution, and this time it's coming from the right.

He's either forgotten, does not know, or most likely does not care that the Conservative Party came into existence in the wake of the French Revolution as a defender of great institutions - monarchy, parliament, rule of law, the church - against abstraction, ideology and political violence.

This means that Johnson repudiates the doctrines of every Conservative leader from the Duke of Wellington onwards. Johnson's hostility to institutions is so striking that I don't believe he can be viewed as a Conservative in the way the term has been understood over the last two centuries.

The party he leads has detached from its moorings, while Johnson himself should be understood as part of a group of populist leaders that includes Donald Trump, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and most relevantly Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. [my emphasis]

He cites various examples of Johnson's authoritarian bent, including trying to politicize the courts, attacked and restricted journalists Trump-style, and a five-week shutdown of Parliament last fall that the British Supreme Court ruled illegal.

Oborne also calls attention to the often-mentioned charismatic leader in building an authoritarian political order. He cites an article by New Statesman international editor Jeremy Cliffe (Central Europe’s authoritarians show where an unleashed Boris Johnson could lead Britain 12/18/2019) on authoritarianism in the Visegrad nations - Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Cliff sees Boris Johnson as having just followed an "electoral narrative of 'people versus politicians' requiring rescue by a muscular father-of-the-nation type" that "is straight out of the Visegrad playbook."

But I try to be cautious about the notion a single charismatic leader as a ncessary element of authoritarian rule. All movements, including democratic ones, need leadership. Conventional wisdom often equates populism with authoritarianism and rightwing politics. I take a more restrictive view of populism as a way of doing politics that pose an antagonism between "the elite" and "the people." There are left and democratic versions of populism. And charismatic leadership does not equate to authoritarian or antidemocratic political goals.

But the institutional moves toward dismantling democracy and the rule of law need to be taken very seriously. And in the United States, the Democrats need to take "revolutionary" actions by the Republicans as the sign of asymmetric polarization that need to be countered within the rule of law. But they need to give up the fantasy that they can be countered with covering and "bipartisan" platitudes.

How do we identify "illiberal democracies"? And define "liberal democracy"?

Defining political systems can be tricky. But not impossible.

Historian Christopher Browning wrote a piece that is helpful in understanding the current rise of authoritarianism in the world, The Suffocation of Democracy NYBooks 10/25/2018.

Browning makes some well-grounded points about the process in Germany that led to Hitler taking power and sees some broad parallels for US isolationism in the interwar period to the situation that could develop from Trump's program of thoughtlessly trashing the existing international order.

But Browning also argues "that current trends reflect a significant divergence from the dictatorships of the 1930s." He writes:

The fascist movements of that time [the interwar period] prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and selfenrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies. [my emphasis]

If we put these into a PowerPoint type list, it would be something like this:

• Have elections with functioning opposition parties but rig the system so that the ruling party retains decisive control even when a solid majority votes for other parties
• Establish effective control of the press without overtly bringing them under government control and censorship, including intimidation or acts of violence against journalists
• Use extensive corruption to favor allied oligarchs and to insure that the ruling party's policies are established even when they are unpopular
• Neutralize, exile, or kill prominent critics
• Use Carl Schmitt-ian polarization and demagoguery to generate support for the ruling party Explicitly encourage authoritarian attitudes through fear of crime and other themes

I'll stipulate here that none of Browning's points or my bullet-point elaboration of them are not immune to nit-picking criticism from sophomore political-science students or FOX News commentators.

But we're not talking mathematical rules of logic or religious dogmas here. These issues are about forms of government in the real world. Browning refers in particular to the current governments of Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and the Phillipines.

For Americans, making these distinctions has special twists. If we start from a viewpoint like that of, say, Hillary Clinton in 2016, that America is "the greatest country that has ever been created on the face of the earth for all of history," it would be natural to measure how democratic another country is by how much its government looks like that of the United States. (Quote from Hillary Clinton addresses military veterans at the Democratic National Convention Telegraph 07/25/2016, just after 1:10 in the video)

But there are also other measures, including centuries of history, political theory, and legal reasoning. One of the best known set of standards are provided by the European Union. Most of whose governments are some form of parliamentary system, by the way, which looks significantly different than the American government. To qualify for admission to the EU, a country has to demonstrate its compliance with a range of democratic standards: representative government with democratic elections and universal suffrage; separation of powers (executive, legislative, judicial); competitive and independent political parties; a free press; an established legal system with effective rule of law; control on corruption; minimal standards on human rights - including having no death penalty - and compliance with international law.

The sophomore poli-sci student, or a graduate student in philosophy, might stress that ultimately all this implies some minimum level of agreement on what all those things mean. The graduate student might bring some particular Wittgensteinian or Habermasian insights to the argument. And it's true. That's why the EU has elaborate procedures and established decision-making processes to reach effective determinations on this. (The Bannonites would say, "Hey, man, George Soros and the globalists just call whatever they want "democracy," everybody knows dat.")

A couple of thoughts, here. One is that the United States obviously doesn't meet the EU's minimum standards just by having the death penalty alone. And whether our Citizen's United system of campaign financing would pass the EU's corruption standards, I don't know.

Currently, the EU has formal reviews under way for Hungary and Poland for not maintaining the minimum democratic standards. Just three months ago there was an important court decision on judicial independence in Poland: Jon Stone, European Court of Justice orders Poland to stop purging its supreme court judges Independent 10/19/2018.

The general public assumption right now is that Hungary has gone the farthest of all the EU countries in the direction of "illiberal democracy," a term that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán uses with approval. Poland is considered the next most concerning example. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic are known as the Visegrad countries, and the latter two have also have some troubling developments in the same direction as Hungary and Poland. Far-right parties are part of the governing coalitions in Italy (the Lega) and Austria (Freedom Party, FPÖ). The same is also true for EU members Bulgaria, Denmark, Greece, and Latvia, and for non-EU countries Switzerland and Norway. (Caelainn Barr et al, Vom Flackern zum Feuer Der Freitag 01/2019, 04.01.2019)

Latin America's largest and most populous country Brazil recently elected a rightwing authoritarian President, Jair Bolsonaro, after years of the Brazilian oligarchs pursuing their version of Browning's point, "Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another." One of the main tools was a highly politicized anti-corruption investigation called Operation Car Wash, with which former center-left President Lula da Silva was imprisoned on dubious charges. And his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was removed from office in 2016 by a "soft coup" under charges that were transparently frivolous.

Bolsinaro is often and understandably described as a fascist. (Jair Bolsonaro: Brazil's firebrand leader dubbed the Trump of the Tropics BBC News 12/31/2019; Federico Finchelstein, Jair Bolsonaro’s Model Isn’t Berlusconi. It’s Goebbels. Foreign Policy 10/05/2018; Fascist? Populist? Debate Over Describing Brazil's Bolsonaro VOA 10/24/2018; Paul Mason, Brazil shows how the elite responds when forced to choose between fascism and the left New Statesman 10/30/2018)

Among historians and other students of far right political movements, defining "fascism" in a rigorous way is a notoriously aggravating problem. Sometimes it can make you feel like adapting a version of Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964): "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

That would mean: I don't know how to define fascism, but I know it when I see it!

One approach to the historical question that I find helpful is to look at the actual international connections between governments and movements. For instance, since Mussolini headed the Fascist Party, there's not really any dispute about calling them fascist. Austrian Prime Minister Engelbert Dollfuss established authoritarian rule in 1933 and formalized it into a dictatorship in 1934, one modeled explicitly on Italy's at the encouragement of Mussolini's government and the Catholic hierarchy. Its own self-description was Standestaat, or corporate state. ("Corporate state" in the sense of "estates" or social classes, not business corporations). But it was and is referred to as the Austro-fascist or clerical-fascist regime.

Similar associations and similarities can be applied to contemporary cases of "illiberal democracy."

A final comment on defining fascism. As Frederico Finchelstein notes in the article linked above:

In Brazil and elsewhere, right-wing populists are increasingly acting as the Nazis did and, at the same time, disavowing this Nazi legacy or even blaming the left for it. For post-fascist members of the alt-right, acting like a Nazi and accusing your opponent of being so is not a contradiction at all. Indeed, the idea of a leftist Nazism is a political myth that draws directly on the methods of Nazi propaganda.

According to Brazilian right-wingers and Holocaust deniers, it is the left that threatens to revive Nazism. This is, of course, a falsehood that comes straight out of the Nazi playbook. Fascists always deny what they are and ascribe their own features and their own totalitarian politics to their enemies. ...

... Fascists have always replaced reality with ideological fantasies. This is why Bolsonaro presents the left’s leaders as latter-day emulators of Hitler when in fact he is the only candidate close to the Führer in style and substance. [my emphasis]

For American rightwingers and Republicans making a similar charge against the Democrats (not just against people who could legitimately be considered far left), Jonah Goldberg's tendentious propaganda tract, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change (2008) provides a template for this nonsense. Dave Neiwert organized a set of reality-based responses to that book, or slogan in the form of a book, for History News Network (2010).