Ivan Krastev on Anne Applebaum and the different kinds of 1989ers

Ivan Krastev (The Tragic Romance of the Middle-Aged Western Liberal Foreign Policy 08/15/2020) has a sympathetically critical take on Anne Applebaum's current political perspective as expressed in her latest book, which is titled, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. Writing from a European liberal political perspective - Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies - he reflects on how recent developments have shown that what in America was conservative anti-Communism was only nominally liberal and pro-democracy:

The contest with Soviet communism guided how Americans thought about the core principles underlying their basic institutions. For American liberalism was, or at least appeared to be, Soviet totalitarianism turned inside out. Freedoms of speech and the press, as well as freedom of conscience, were idealized precisely because they were cruelly repressed under Moscow’s sway. In the same spirit, Americans underscored the freedom of movement, the right to form private associations, the right to a fair trial, and the right to vote in competitive elections where incumbents might be toppled from power. Likewise emphasized was the latitude to accumulate private wealth, on the assumption that a decentralized and unplanned economy alone could provide the basis of both prosperity and political freedom. [my emphasis]

What most of the world calls political "liberalism" is different from how the term is used in the US and Canada. The classical liberalism of the parties of the Liberal International (yes, there is such a thing) is pro-democracy, pro-civil liberties, pro-rule-of-law but strongly oriented toward "free-market" economic policies of minimizing regulation and very limited public social-insurance systems. The US-Canadian form was more similar to that of the social-democratic parties in Europe and elsewhere.

Krastev writes:

What Applebaum’s book makes clear is that for people like the Hungarian historian Maria Schmidt or National Review editor-at-large John O’Sullivan or the vocal Trump supporter Laura Ingraham, liberal principles were valued only because they were an effective instrument for destroying communism. When this goal was achieved, values like free media and the division of powers started to be viewed as a threat to Western civilization and traditional Christian values. The new prophets of illiberalism used all their talent to persuade their societies that the rights of others were a threat to their own rights and that the liberal system of checks and balances was not a way to preserve individuals’ freedoms but an instrument for elites to abuse the will of the people.

Applebaum is a very good writer; her style is lucid, and her arguments are bracing. This has made her one of the most powerful voices of the anti-populist resistance. But the strength of her new book is not so much in exposing the authoritarian nature of populists in power but in revealing the intellectual hollowness of the anti-communist consensus. [my emphasis]

He also has this intriguing thought, "What we see in countries like Poland and the United States is that a democracy of citizens has been replaced by a democracy of fans."

At first glance, this looks like a validation of the Situationists' notion of the "society of the spectacle." Although I have to confess, I've never been able to find a lot in the Situationists' outlook that seems particularly helpful in understanding the world.

But I've become leery of formulations like this about American politics. Because a defining feature of the last four decades of politics in the US is the stunning level of asymmetric partisan polarization. The metaphor of "fans" can be useful as a way of thinking about depoliticization, a trend of passive cynicism about the ability of politics to improve people's lives, which I do think affects the constituencies of both parties in the US.

But the almost-unbroken continuity of the radicalization of the Republican Party during those decades (Reaganism and the Christian Right) has not been remotely matched by a parallel intensity of polarization on the Democratic side, either on the party of the party leadership generally or on the part of Democratic voters. Obviously, Democratic-leaning constituencies are intensely mobilized in the uprising we've had in 2020. But the Democratic establishment is still remarkably attached to a duck-and-cover strategy in front of the Republicans. It's the difference in intensity between Make American Great [White] Again and Make American Boring Again. That's asymmetric partisan polarization.

Krastev continues directly:

While for a liberal citizen the readiness to point out and correct the mistakes of your own party is a sign of the highest loyalty, the loyalty of fans is zealous, unthinking, and unswerving. Enthralled fans, with their critical faculties switched off, are central to populists’ understanding of politics as a loyalty game: Their cheers reflect their sense of belonging. Trust-but-verify is replaced by rowdy adoration. Those who refuse to applaud are traitors, and any statement of fact becomes a declaration of belonging.

For the United States, we could rewrite that to be: While the Democratic establishment is ready to aggressively fight their own party's progressive wing, that rather than fighting the Republican Party is their sign of the highest loyalty. They want their voters and activists to be unthinking and unswerving in their support of corporate Democratic position, but they don't want to see any zeal on their supporters part for anything in their own platform that's not considered totally safe for corporate lobbyists. Zeal is for the dirty, annoying hippies and whoever all those kids demonstrating in the streets are.

The Republicans, on the other hand, from the highest elected officials to the ordinary habitual Republicans voters, are willing to be "enthralled" by the Leader of the moment, even such as repulsive one as Bunker Boy. They are proud of practicing "loyalty of fans" in being "zealous, unthinking, and unswerving ... with their critical faculties switched off."

Finally, Krastev describes a group including Applebaum and apparently himself as "89ers", an analogy to the 68ers:

Applebaum is a classic ’89er; like many of us, she was shaped by the Cold War without ever really experiencing it. For the ’89ers, the Cold War was what the anti-fascist resistance was for the West’s student revolutionaries of the 1960s, the ’68ers—a time of inspiring heroism and moral clarity. In her worldview, the marriage between democracy and capitalism was made in heaven, and most of the conflicts in the world were not about a clash of interests but about a clash of values. It was this mindset that made many ’89ers first to detect the danger coming from Vladimir Putin’s Russia but also the last to condemn George W. Bush’s ugly war in Iraq. [my emphasis]

The Iraq War and the Cheney-Bush Administration that ginned it up may one day look like a more important turning point for American democracy than the election of Bunker Boy as President or the institutional homicide against the Post Office in 2020. The arrogance of American Exceptionalism in its post-Cold War triumphalist form came to full flower under that administration. The bipartisan tolerance toward the blatant lawbreaking and corruption of that administration set the stage for Donald Trump as Mob Boss of the American government. I know "corruption" gets tossed around casually in political rhetoric. But for the Cheney-Bush Administration's version of it, I'll just quote a line from a protest song of the time: "Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton, what else do I have to say?"

"2020", the Bonus Army in 1932, and asymmetric partisan polarization in the US

We don't know yet whether in 5, 10, years from now classes on Contemporary History with have units on "2020" as an iconic year like "1968". (Hopefully not like "1914"!)

But three historians are giving us a preliminary look in current articles. One is Millsaps College historian Bob McElvaine, who in The Political Price of Military Assaults on Americans Medium 06/17/2020 looks at Herbert Hoover's human and political fiasco with the brutal military suppression of the Bonus Army protest in 1932. He also discussed that and the Great Depression as well in a recent English-language interview with Thomas Seifert from the Austrian Wiener Zeitung, Interview with Prof. Robert McElvaine, Author of "The Great Depression" 06/12/2020:

The German translation of the interview has the title, "'The deepest recession of all time'": "Die tiefste Rezession aller Zeiten" 14.06.2020. In the Medium piece, he writes about the attack on the Bonus Army protesters, commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who is a heroic figure in the rightwing pantheon:

Though MacArthur had acted in direct disobedience of his orders, Hoover chose to take responsibility for what the military leader had done. The President was making a calculated move to the right, to stand in the fall election for law and order. The immediate reaction of major newspapers was generally in favor of the assault. The New York Times referred to the Bonus Army “insurrection.” “We are confident,” the paper’s editors affirmed, “that the decision of the President will be sustained by the great majority of our citizens.”

That confidence was misplaced, as the Democratic nominee understood. “Everyone could see what was there,” Franklin Roosevelt said of the man in the White House, “and they wouldn’t like it.” Hoover, Roosevelt remarked, had “set Doug MacArthur on those harmless vets.” Instead of sending troops and gas, FDR said, Hoover should have sent coffee and donuts. “There was nothing inside the man but jelly,” the challenger said of the incumbent. “Maybe there never had been anything.” [my emphasis]

Sean Wilentz also looks at the Bonus March and its possible relevant for the 2020 Presidential campaign, The Disgrace of Donald Trump Rolling Stone 06/15/2020. He also looks at more recent times, and gives the following description that is a key part of the story of asymmetric partisan polarization in the US. Picking up with the Bush 1 Administration, he writes:

When no conservative in Reagan’s mold successfully claimed his mantle, leadership of the GOP fell to those elements of the traditional party that had accommodated themselves to the Reagan revolution, personified by George H.W. Bush, the Connecticut Yankee reborn as a Texas conservative. Bush well understood that to win the presidency, he would need to claim and then agitate the Reagan base; and as his campaign manager Lee Atwater, steeped in the wiles of South Carolina politics, understood just as well, this meant stirring racist fears, an evil art at which Atwater excelled. When, as president, Bush ran afoul of supply-side dogma, old faces like the reactionary Pat Buchanan and new faces like the firebrand Georgian Newt Gingrich challenged his leadership of the party.

From that point forward, a radicalizing dynamic overtook Republican national politics. Constituencies that the traditional GOP had tried to absorb to build its post-1960s majority - conservative white Southerners, including, more broadly, white evangelical Christians - became the party’s heart and soul. Establishment Republican leaders vying for the presidency — Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney - had to appease an ever-hardening right-wing base, centered in what has become the solidly Republican white South. When those leaders lost - as they did twice to Bill Clinton and twice to Barack Obama - the base despaired of anything resembling conventional conservative politics. The one GOP victor, George W. Bush, did win over the party base, thanks in part to his Svengali, Karl Rove, and in part to the patriotic surge that followed the attacks of 9/11. But Bush disastrously invaded Iraq, and he ended his presidency with the start of the Great Recession and the birth of the radical Tea Party, which went on to hound President Obama at every turn. [my emphasis]

And that "radicalizing dynamic" is still running wild in the Republican Party, the sideshow of the NeverTrump Republicans notwithstanding.

And Rick Perlstein reflects on the current consequences of four decades of Reagan-Thatcher economic and cultural dogma, aka, neoliberalism, although he doesn't use the term here: Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us In These Times 06/17/2020. He writes:

Covid-19 has sucked the world into a vortex of interlocking crises that demand collective sacrifice to resolve. The world’s most powerful nation has revealed itself as tragically unequal to the challenge - unwilling to transcend private interest. From the deranged Republicans running the White House and the Senate to the penny-pinching Democrats running the House of Representatives, from ordinary folks who can’t be bothered to wear a mask to corporate titans scouring the horizon for profit-taking opportunities - it all marks the distillation of a national ideology: selfishness, über alles.

He also reminds us how bipartisan this push was:

President Carter ... declared, in his 1978 State of the Union, "Government cannot solve our problems, it can't set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy." Two years later, Carter ran for reelection against Reagan by holding himself up as Reagan's deregulationist equal: The party of FDR now believed, "We ought to get the government's nose out of the private enterprise of this country. We've deregulated rail, deregulated trucking, deregulated airlines, deregulated financial institutions, working on communications, to make sure that we have a free enterprise system that's competitive." [Carter]

That larger project, of writing public obligation out of business's social contract with the people, was bipartisan. "Business is entitled to its decade, and I will try to help them get it," the Democratic chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski, told a business association in 1981. By 2020, the surrender to market logic had advanced so far along that when the moral equivalent of war came, America's arsenal to fight it proved quite nearly bare[.] (my emphasis)

That represents the other side of the asymmetric partisan polarization. The Republican Party has spent four decades in the throes of Wilentz' "radicalizing dynamic." He suggests in the article is better dated to 1992, but his description of Old Man Bush's more moderate course running up against the Reaganized Congressional party is accurate.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have mostly been dominated for the last four decades by a tendency of what I'll call radical centrism, because that sound politer than the alternatives that come to mind. There has been durable opposition to the course of those decades, represented in Presidential politics by the campaigns of Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, Jerry Brown in 1992, and Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Ted Kennedy mounted a substantial primary challenge to Carter in 1980, attempting to keep the party more on the New Deal/Great Society track. Including, yes, national health insurance.

I don't want to get too caught up into the Presidential-level references. But Obama's 2008 campaign was generally perceived as a progressive work, particularly compared to his establishment Dem rival Hillary Clinton. But in his policy priorities, he quickly proved to be on board with the chronic centrism. And is still there in 2020, when he helped in the emergency operation to consolidate the donors quickly around Joe Biden. Biden's record, if it can be fairly called centrist at all, is a centrism titled toward the conservative side.

Donor influence and the steady increase of massive amounts of money in politics, particularly since Citizens United decision in 2010, has been the most important influence in this asymmetric polarization process. But some of it is also due to the duck-and-cover style the Democrats have developed, in which they embrace Republican framing of issues and a general duck-and-cover impulse they can't shake:

A final thought on Carter's deregulation policy in 1976-80. On the whole, it was clearly a bad general direction. But the Democrats' position on deregulation at that time was not simply surrender to business lobbies. It was also one of the response to the inflation that seemed to be intractable, the idea being that establishing more price competition could restrain inflationary pressures. Even figures clearly identified at the time as being on the pro-labor left of the party, including Ted Kennedy and Fred Harris, also adopted some form of this approach.

Jimmy Carter is also a special case, because after his Presidency, he has become a figure possibly more respected for his stances, which at times look radical in comparison to those of timid duck-and-cover Democrats. For instance, his book Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005) was a more searing indictment of the Cheney-Bush Administration that established Democrats in Congress could muster. He has said publicly that he voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016, although in 2020 he expressed concern that both Biden and Sanders were too old to start a Presidency.