Anne Applebaum and her husband threw two parties, twenty years apart: one in 1999, one in 2019.. What's happened in-between charts the crumbling of liberal societies.
Applebaum's new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, is a short work that bears much attention. It brings perspective and foreboding to the West, which of course includes the United States--which is a significant part of her analysis.
But most importantly, Applebaum provides perspective. As usual, we here in the U.S. tend to treat what's happened to us, particularly if it's bad, as something of a one-off and an exception to the "exceptional" label that we so quickly self-apply. And once again, that label has proven to be nonsense.
Authoritarianism began elsewhere before it got here, and has manifested itself in more places than most people have probably kept track: Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and Spain, to cite examples that she's most familiar with. And what happened that led up to those developments have closely mimicked what's happened here.
When you embrace authoritarianism, you reject democracy, which relies on agreement of facts and willingness to exchange ideas in the marketplace. You prefer that someone tells you what they believe is the truth and either respect or allow (little difference) references to someone else's information as, as in the now-common parlance, "fake news (which in fact more often than not, what the authority figure tells you is exactly fake)."
We have had democracy much longer than any of the abovementioned countries. So why has it also become just as fragile as it has overseas?
A bunch of reasons, Applebaum says. She interviewed Karen Stenner, an Australian political scientist, who has done much work on authoritarianism. Authoritarians aren't conservatives, she says; the latter want change to slow down, while the former resist any change at all. They seek phraseologies and hot button slogans that fit their worldviews.
Immigration, therefore, especially happening fast and with no apparent end in sight, takes strong action (another identifying characteristic) to hold back: Thus the wall, now partially built, during the last presidential administration. Such a contraption, regardless of whether it actually works, addresses the hyper-nationalism that authoritarianism invokes.
Much of the rest of the appeal can be summarized under simplifying matters. The world is too much with many of us; no one can debate that. Most of us adjust by absorbing what he believe we can and organize ourselves around that. But authoritarians reject all of it and project victimization instead. Although I won't generalize and call all of them authoritarians, it's like what you see on Facebook sometimes when someone looks up and publishes what things used to cost when the baby boomers were kids--as if we could magically revert to that time and have our present salaries with prices from 50 years ago.
The craving of nostalgia is a gateway to such attitudes: Don't you wish it could still be like the way it used to be? Except the mind often chooses to forget the bad parts and only remembers the good ones.
Racism, which is to say white supremacy, is a large part of that thinking, whether the authoritarians want to admit it or not. Mingling the races is always hard work. And based on the last few years, it's clear that attitudes haven't come nearly as far as many once thought.
But a frightening new development has reared itself: Violence as a deterrent to racial harmony. When the previous president responded to the hatred and a murder committed in Charlottesville in Spring, 2017 by saying that there were very good people on both sides, that unleashed a permissiveness that hasn't been seen before.
None of this is new. Lynchings have swept the country at times, hitting every part of it. But all those waves have subsided. This has come as close to overcoming us as anything else has ever done.
And events like well-publicized trials have also had their effects. (O. J. Simpson?) One that Applebaum brings up took place in France, another country that is faced with oncoming authoritarianism and is trying to head it off. Applebaum reaches back to 1896, when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer, was convicted for passing secrets to the then-hated Germans, who had won the Franco-Prussian War and seized a major chunk of France a quarter-century before.
The trial unearthed hyper-nationalist and reactionary attitudes and severe polarization. The country was, said Applebaum, "split right down the middle." Dreyfus was convicted, although he was later proved innocent and released 11 years later. But like here, today,
- What constituted the "truth" came highly into question;
- Reliance on provable science to prove Dreyfus' innocence was discounted; and
- His Jewishness came under severe prejudice, making a fair trial nearly impossible.
All that echoes until today. Marine Le Pen, a right-wing activist and former presidential candidate, is once again sending out feelers about running against president French President Emmanuel Macron, who has begun to tailor some of his former liberal policies to reduce the resistance. France has even deeper issues with Muslims than we do, post 9/11; recall a couple of massacres.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden tries to prove that, if you really do consider people first instead of yourself, democracy can accomplish plenty and relieve much suffering. If splintering Republicans still refuse to accept their losses, cut them, and retreat from an abyss of authoritarianism, if they continue to disrespect the normal behaviorist guardrails that keeps the checks and balances in effect, a balance of interests is unsustainable.
Winning, and the power that comes with it, cannot be its own goal. There must be something behind it that's worth cherishing, something that can rise above the pettiness and polarization that lead to violence. If not, democracy will fail. So will this nation. So will the world.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. Eleven days to a second vaccine shot. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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