Recession of democracy
On the day I began writing this (December 18), the depressing spectacle of the House of Representatives impeachment vote on Donald Trump occurred, and I happened to come across an even more depressing op-ed by Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post. Zakaria described a trend toward repression of minorities, tribalism, and incipient totalitarianism.
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- The widening schism between Hindus and Muslims in India, now being codified into laws that repress the latter. For a look at the rising persecution of Muslims in India, check out this in The New Yorker.
- Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Trumplike attack on the Israeli justice system, together with an accusation that the police and prosecutors are attempting a coup.
- Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s moves to silence opposition voices, curtail the power of local governments, and throttle immigration with fences and razor wire and a limit of 10 asylum applications per day.
- The massive government persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar.
- White-hot partisanship in the U.S. political system (compounded by the resurgence of White Nationalism), whipped up by a demagogue whose bent is toward autocracy.
Zakaria refers to the human rights watchdog group Freedom House finding a worldwide decline in global freedom over the past 13 years. He quotes Stanford’s Larry Diamond, coeditor of The Journal of Democracy, saying that we are seeing a worldwide “Democratic Recession.” Zakaria puts it more strongly: it may be a “Democratic Depression.”
Totalitarianism in the Information Age: the China model
To Zakaria’s list, we can add human-rights abuses in China, on the cusp of becoming a totalitarian surveillance state (more on that in later parts of Treading into Darkness). The Chinese leadership’s actions to control its population is pulling it so far away from democracy that democratic aspirations are destined to become an illusion for the people of China (no matter what the outcome in Hong Kong). The Artificial Intelligence-assisted mass surveillance system they have developed in the Xinjiang region to control, police, detain, sometimes torture, and imprison minorities (such as the Uighur Muslims) serves as a model to extend throughout China going forward.
Zakaria’s warning: “Across the democratic world, the institutions of liberty and law are under attack. If they give way, the fraying democratic fabric of our societies will ultimately tear apart.”
It should be noted (a positive note) that, while one of Zakaria’s examples of reversals in democracy is the passage of laws discriminating against Muslims in India, demonstrations protesting those laws have erupted throughout India. It is not clear what success these demonstrations will ultimately have, since the government has resorted to taking down internet connections and sending police to beat down protesters.
In the China to come, preemptive surveillance and piecemeal repression will obviate the need to physically beat down protesters in the streets, because the state will already have neutralized them, quietly and out of sight.
You can link to Zakaria’s ominous post here.
Can it be that bad?
Whew! Alarming stuff from Fareed Zakaria! Hyperbole? He implies we are nearing a tipping point. Perhaps it is prophecy. Perhaps it is hyperbole meant to stir us into action before the ailing democracies slide over a cliff. Perhaps it is no more than clickbait. (There is competition for clicks even among the punditocracy.)
I put a lot of credence in Zakaria’s political savvy. He is a true internationalist, with one foot in the India of his origins, the other planted in the West, where he has a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. in government from Harvard, and practices journalism, editing, and first-rate punditry in the U.S. and Britain.
Fractured America
The taking-off point for Zakaria’s editorial is a crisis of partisanship in the American political system, where one side is willing to embrace a completely illogical fabrication in defiance of the facts (in the Trump impeachment hearings), reminiscent of the doublespeak in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Zakaria is telling us, not to get so narrowly focused on our domestic affairs, because such threats to democracy are looming elsewhere in the world, and we can take lessons from them. We can also take lessons from 20th Century history, as laid out in Madeleine Albright’s book, Fascism: a Warning. (Read Albright’s book for a chilling foreshadowing of what might happen, even here.)
The partisanship on display in the House impeachment hearings has illustrated more starkly than ever the gulf between the two parties, where the one (Democrats) has been moderately partisan, with the excuse of reacting to Republican obstructionism, while the other (Republicans) has been so thoroughly partisan and fact-denying as to depart from sanity altogether. There were times when the rapid-fire volley of untruths from Doug Collins (Judiciary Committee’s “Ranking Member”) sounded like the ravings of a lunatic. I think the number of times Collins declaimed that President Trump had “done nothing wrong” may have exceeded even the count of all the times the Democrats combined have solemnly intoned, “no one is above the law.”
The fact is that Doug Collins is not a raving lunatic, as anyone who has witnessed his interviews with the press can attest. Instead, he is a consummate liar who is willing to put his party and his chances of re-election before the durability of the U.S. Constitution and the health of American democracy. He has a leading role in a perverse version of a morality play where the Republican moral is that the end justifies even the most depraved means. The end is to keep would-be tyrant Donald Trump in the White House. Here we have the marriage of evil ends with evil means, of a scope comparable to Nazism. worse than merely unjustifiable. It is frightening.
My bet is that, with few exceptions, all the Republicans in the House know perfectly well that the President has done wrong—far more wrongs than the impeachment procedures have targeted—but they are sticking by him for fear of him personally and for fear of the Trump “base.” The “base” being a collection of anti-democratic factions who are likely to defeat anyone who in a primary should s/he utter one word of dissent—dissent from the Trump strategy of raging, spittle-emitting denial of facts and demonizing of the opposition. “Obstruction” is too mild a word. It is open warfare, without (so far) literal guns.
Still, fears of a second Civil War are overblown. Or are they?
So what’s the danger? Partisanship and division are quite the opposite of totalitarianism, no? Won’t the tension between the two ensure we do not lurch into extremism in either direction? Not necessarily: the problem is the temptation, when confronted with irreconcilable differences, to succumb to a populist who promises to sweep problems away once they have their hands on the levers of power. In the words of Donald Trump, envisioning a role as unchecked autocrat, “I alone can fix it.”*
Conscious of the possibilities for violence and chaos in a clash between a populist leader and more stable heads in the legislature, the Framers came up with the device of impeachment as a check against a rogue President (although it is safe to say that in 1787 the prospect of a shallow-minded, fraudulent mass-media celebrity such as Donald Trump is not what they had in mind). Impeachment was the remedy to check a President violating his oath of office—not the option taken by the Roman senators to check the rogue populist Julius Caesar by administering multiple fatal stab wounds, whereby the prolonged violence that followed paradoxically ended the Roman Republic.
If the legislature were to fulfill its Constitutional role enshrined in the U.S. Constitution as a check against executive power, then our government should be expected to strike a balance between the factions: often an uneasy balance, but with the potential for compromise.
But now we have a legislature with a sizable faction that has utterly abdicated its responsibility as a check on the president. Furthermore, the faction has actively defended the indefensible, sometimes merely twisting the truth, at others lying outright. Compromise—the art of which was once thought to be the key to success in politics—has become a dirty word.
This has a lot of folks astounded and outraged by those lawmakers’ fealty to President Trump. The commentators—who are, notably, not running for office—decry the legislators’ spinelessness, lack of principle, lack of patriotism, shortsightedness, and mendacity. But few of them have adduced the reasons for this state of affairs, other than (1) character flaws on the part of Donald Trump; and (2) a movement away from civility and toward acrimony that began with Newt Gingrich and gained momentum in the reaction against an African-American president.
Trump’s ill-will, character flaws, demagoguery, and racism, together with the ugly legacy of Newt Gingrich and hatred of Barack Obama, all deserve a lot of the blame for this scary state of affairs, but do not fully explain the bellicosity on the Right among legislators who should know better—and once did. They have absorbed the antagonism rising up from the Trump base and regurgitate it in slanderous insults, character assassination, charges of treason, and accusations—here is where we really get into the realm of paranoid delusions—that the Democrats are attempting a coup.
Yes, that’s right: these people, most of whom (unlike the President) have some grasp of world history, are actually parroting Trump’s deranged language. Do they actually believe it? I doubt it, but they are playing to the President and his base, who, in a paroxysm of paranoid self-pity, do believe it. Either way (whether they believe or not), their behavior is depraved. However, what we’re looking at is bigger than moral depravity—ugly as it is, it’s still a known quantity. No, we have to ask ourselves . . .
How can it have gotten so crazy?
In the last 30 years, human nature has not changed; the process of choosing legislators in the U.S., corrupt as it may be, has not greatly changed. The influence of Big Money in politics is tightening its grip, but it’s still an old story, differing only by degree from the past. However, what we’re experiencing at this time is not merely a matter of degree, it is a magnitude 9.0 quake in the political and cultural landscape, where norms are collapsing and truth is on the run. What happened?
It’s no more mysterious than . . .
The dark angels of the Internet and social media
Let’s save this complicated topic for Part II of Treading into Darkness, scheduled for January 4, 2020.
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* The saving grace (a peculiar word under the circumstances) of Trump’s dictatorial ambitions is that, unlike Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Mao, and Stalin, Trump’s feeble understanding of how the government works makes him clumsy at handling the levers of power. Demagoguery and fear-mongering he can do. Governing he cannot. What he is best at, is tearing down without building up. A sad situation for the country, but a lesser of evils when we consider what he might be doing if he were more capable: the construction of a truly autocratic state.