You’ve got to hand it to Joe Biden; the man has a positive outlook. He repeatedly says, as he did at his February State of the Union address, that over the past two years, “democracies have become stronger, not weaker. Autocracies have become weaker, not stronger.”
It’s a claim that flies in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary. The annual democracy index issued by The Economist found democratic government in steady decline worldwide during the first two years of the Biden presidency. A similar report from the nonprofit group Freedom House, which monitors democracy and human rights internationally, found global freedom ebbing in 2022 for the 17th consecutive year, with only 20% of the world’s populace still living in “free” countries.
Undeniably, democracy is in its worst shape since World War II, and Western civilization’s main philosophical inheritance from the ancient Greeks is in an existential struggle for survival, not least in Joe Biden’s own country. That was the actual state of things as the administration held its second Summit for Democracy, a three-day White House event, in late March. A broad definition of “democracy” allowed for the participation of 120 countries. The leading proponents of antidemocracy, Russia and China (never really democracies), were of course not invited. Also conspicuous by their absence were Hungary and Turkey, formerly stable democracies that have both gone over to the dark side.
There were some questionable inclusions in the invitation list. Israel, for example, which under its dictatorial leader Benjamin Netanyahu has steadily drifted in an autocratic direction, embracing a form of apartheid vis-à-vis the Palestinians and undermining a once-independent judiciary, was an awkward participant. So was Narendra Modi’s increasingly repressive India, where the leader of the political opposition was recently jailed on trumped-up charges and barred from participating in an upcoming election.
Then, there’s the disturbing case of France, one of the world’s oldest and most hallowed democracies. That President Emmanuel Macron, a political centrist with autocratic tendencies who holds the organized parties of the left and right in open contempt, pushed an unpopular pension reform through Parliament is widely known. How he did it is less understood and ominous for democratic government.
Macron’s governing model is President Charles de Gaulle (1959-69), an authoritarian personality himself. De Gaulle led in the creation of France’s present Fifth Republic, fashioned explicitly for him under a constitution that established an all-powerful executive. To carry out Gaullist policies, the constitution incorporated Article 49.3, allowing certain emergency laws to be enacted without a parliamentary vote, typically budgetary measures.
It was this loophole that allowed Macron to by-pass the French Parliament, whose lower house would certainly have rejected his reduction of the national safety net. This unilateral action by France’s mini-Napoleon (reelected in 2022 by a largely discouraged public persuaded that the alternative, hard-right candidate Marine Le Pen, would have been worse) provided no vote of confidence in democratic government.
The posture of Macron, a supposed democrat, illustrates the precarious state of the world’s representative democracies. He’s no doubt responding to the atmosphere developed by today’s ruling authoritarians and what they’ve been able to do with few negative repercussions.
The present slide into autocracy began in earnest under Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a onetime anticommunist moderate who, upon attaining office in 2010, determined to create a one-party state he called an “illiberal democracy.” Orbán was motivated by having initially won Hungary’s prime ministership in 1998 and then lost the next election, an eventuality he swore would never be repeated; so far (13 years and counting), it has not been.
The key to establishing modern neofascist authoritarianism, the form Orbán pioneered, is to use democracy against itself, building an undemocratic governmental structure while calling it democratic, applying a perverted version of democracy, and proceeding on the assumption that few will notice what’s happening. It’s a sophisticated approach.
Outright intimidation or jackbooted physical violence is rarely present — at least at the start. Regular elections are held, and political opposition allowed to contest them. Meanwhile, subtle “reforms” to the system ensure the desired outcome. These include gerrymandered election districts, voter suppression, direct or indirect control of the media, restricted political rights, and an end to oversight by an independent judiciary.
In the longer run, other expedients come into play for the autocrats, principally control and direction of the educational system, expanded police power, a narrowed definition of citizenship, and arrest and detention of potential political opponents. Ultimately, there’s the autocratic pièce de résistance, the emergence of a cult of personality, self-generated or otherwise, surrounding the indispensable leader.
Most of these things are true to one degree or another for the neofascists, or aspiring neofascists, who have followed Orbán and built on his antidemocratic precedents, prominent among them President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and Prime Ministers Narendra Modi of India and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. All have undermined an independent judiciary, seen as the decisive key to authority. Modi and Erdoğan have also seized control of media and education, and jailed opponents. Netanyahu has sought to politicize police and security forces. To date, the formula has been successful. Erdoğan has been in power for 20 years, Modi for nearly a decade, and Netanyahu for most of the last quarter-century.
One unique characteristic in particular distinguishes the modern autocrats and sets them apart from most fascists of the past: They seek to impose forms of theocracy based on narrow sectarianism, capitalizing on the widespread contemporary hunger for doctrinally pure religiosity. The pattern was formulated by Orbán, who sees himself as chosen to lead a religious transformation of secular Europe on behalf of White Christian conservatism.
Erdoğan, for his part, wants to instill a revived doctrinaire Islamism in place of the long-dominant Western modernism put in place by Turkey’s founder Kemal Atatürk a century ago. Modi is determined to rid India of minority secularist and Muslim influences in favor of Hindu nationalism. And Netanyahu, a Jewish religious nationalist, has joined with Israel’s extreme ultra-Orthodox believers to promote an intolerant conservative Zionism.
The Orbán model, hailed by Republican reactionaries, has lately crossed the Atlantic. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis penned a speculative novel on a possible American fascist takeover entitled “It Can’t Happen Here.” In 2023, it appears it could. The “faith-based” Ron DeSantis project unfolding in Florida is straight from the Orbán playbook. We may soon be testing Joe Biden’s thesis on democracy.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prize winning books.
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2023
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