10.4324 9780429347368-2 Chapterpdf
10.4324 9780429347368-2 Chapterpdf
10.4324 9780429347368-2 Chapterpdf
FROM A POLITICS OF NO
ALTERNATIVE TO A POLITICS OF FEAR
Illiberalism and Its Variants
Introduction1
Liberal democracy is in crisis. This much seems undisputed in the literature and
media comments that have proliferated since 2016, when the Brexit referendum
and the election of Donald Trump ignited new debates about the meaning and
limitations of liberal democracy. If anything, this verdict has been consolidated
by subsequent electoral successes of populist parties in other European states,
such as France, Austria, Italy, and Germany, as well as similar tendencies in
Australia and Ontario, Canada’s most populous and globally connected prov-
ince. The dissatisfaction with the status quo was equally expressed in the initial
shift toward the left in Southern European countries such as Greece, Spain, and
Portugal—and the rise of right-wing parties that followed. Beyond the West,
the election of Jair Bolsonaro as the President of Brazil, turmoil in former
Soviet states in Eastern Europe, and an autocratic reinterpretation of democ-
racy under Abe, Erdogan, Modi, and Putin only reinforce the sense that the
triumphant era of liberalism is over.
The engines of neoliberal, market-led globalization, which appeared un-
paralleled in power after the fall of the Berlin Wall, seem to have come to a
screeching halt. So, too, has the confidence or at least the hope that democ-
racy, in tandem with markets, was on an inevitable course to expand happily
ever after. In the West, what is common across otherwise wildly different
cases is a distrust for existing parties, deep inequalities coupled with extreme
polarization of the political spectrum, and the desire for anti-establishment
politicians to clean up corruption and restore responsiveness to their constit-
uencies. On both sides of the Atlantic, opponents of free trade and critics of
globalization are organizing; so are ethnic nationalists, who see an opening
4 Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann
for more authoritarian politics. More often than not, elections turn into tri-
bunals on the establishment, with the judgment turning against the elites and
the status quo.
On a global level, liberalism and theories of democratic peace seem to have
lost explanatory power and normative appeal. Hopes for global convergence
and integration are thwarted as the divide between the global north and the
global south deepens further. Humanitarian interventions are being refuted as
thinly veiled geostrategic maneuvers and the West seems to have lost its lure—a
process accelerating as its core countries seem to be themselves turning away
from the liberal creed. National interests are again dominating international
relations (IR), while more normative approaches seeking cooperation and inte-
gration tend to be rejected as naïve do-goodism. Supranational institutions of
the post-World War II era—the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank, and
the World Trade Organization—are eroding under the pressures of protection-
ism and neo-mercantilist trade conflicts. In short, Realpolitik is back. And so are
great power politics, weapons races, and zero-sum politics.
Illiberal forces quickly seek to fill the ideological vacuum left by a hollowed
out liberal idealism. Once in office, however, demagogues not only fail to de-
liver most of their promises, but also and perhaps more importantly, alter the
structures of the state and civil society in ways that are likely to inflict long-
term damage. Undoing checks and balances, in particular through interven-
tion in the judiciary, public officials’ conflicts of interest, and the defamation
of the media, they put essential pillars of democracy and core ideals of the
enlightenment under attack. In the absence of meaningful reform, strongman
leaders distract attention from their bankrupt political vision with xenophobic
appeals and a politics of indignation, further unraveling prior commitments to
liberal democracy. Meanwhile, they revise institutional and procedural pillars
of democracy, indicating that illiberal politics—a fear-driven, authoritarian
reorganization of the state around exclusive and patriarchal notions of an ethnic
demos that seeks to undo the norms and institutions of political liberalism—
will not be effaced easily with the next election, impeachment, or vote of no
confidence.
We contend that the variegated forms of illiberalism—much like variegated
neoliberalization patterns (Brenner et al. 2010)—materialize in otherwise very
different contexts at the same historical moment because they have a set of
common denominators. Illiberal tendencies seek to partially reshape neoliberal
practices and ideas of the past half-century—the politics of no alternative that pos-
ited the inevitability of globalization and the superiority of market solutions—
at a moment where these practices and ideas no longer seem legitimate in the
core countries of the North Atlantic. While progressives have been criticizing
neoliberalism for a long time, it is the right-wing critique of neoliberalism
that is much more successfully redoing neoliberalism, and, potentially, undoing
liberal democracy in the West and beyond.
Illiberalism and Its Variants 5
Unlike the left, which argues for reform through redistribution and decom-
modification to address the consequences of welfare state retrenchment and
deep inequalities, right-wing critiques operate from the understanding that
the demos—defined in exclusive, ethno-nationalist terms—is under attack by
overwhelming outside forces, while the state, corrupted by naïve or deluded
elites—the much-scolded establishment—is unwilling or unable to protect its
citizens. Calls for law and order, stricter security, and a reassertion of popular
sovereignty are at the heart of this politics of fear.2 From that perspective, reform
won’t do and the institutional safeguards of democracy, above all the separation
of powers and the protection of minority rights, become viewed as hindrances
to the defense of the “true” demos. Liberal democracy seems to stand in the
way of “true” democracy.
How does this challenge to liberal democracy compare across contexts? How
does the perceived failure of liberal policies and institutions in one region impact
the global standing of liberal democracy in others? How far has the politics of fear
progressed? And has a liberal vision of democracy been unseated? The chapters
that follow explore the current crisis of liberal democracies conceptually and em-
pirically, putting into perspective a wide range of country examples in the West-
ern and Non-Western context, to seek answers to these questions and develop
a vocabulary to better fathom illiberal tendencies. As they show, democracies
around the world are facing a two-pronged crisis. One part of the crisis brought
figures such as Trump, Johnson, and Orban into office in the first place. This is
very much a crisis emerging from within the neoliberal paradigm. The second
part of the crisis is currently unfolding as such political figures capture state power.
There is, of course, a risk of treating all these cases—Brazil and the US,
Germany, and India—the same. They are not. And we are not aiming to do
that. The danger of such an endeavor would be to misunderstand common
developments as though they naturally evolved in tandem developing such
internal propulsion as to become almost inevitable—a wave of autocratiza-
tion. What is the added value of bringing all these developments into one
perspective, then? Above all, it enables us to explore the global scope of related
phenomena and to stress parallels and potential pathways. This, in turn, helps
us to theorize certain patterns that we otherwise would not see because they
might appear conjunctural or coincidental in an individual context where they
are not. Trump, for instance, is not simply chaotic even though he is often por-
trayed as such. Viewing him in comparison helps to outline what is actually a
rather coherent pattern of policy visions.
While too much of the work on populism focuses only on state-by-state
unit-level idiosyncrasies, we also hope to identify a broader context in which
all this happens, common preconditions that facilitate the rise of autocrats, and
certain strategies that they use to mobilize their voter base, seize state capac-
ities, and act while in office. Although the empirical cases examined in this
volume reflect a wide range of political systems, different democratic traditions,
and economic contexts, the paths toward autocracy are contiguous. As such, we
can sketch out something like an ideal-typical trajectory of de-democratization
that we can witness in otherwise very different places—even if the starting
point and (therefore) the end results differ in important ways.
term populist equates all such movements regardless of political ideology and
direction, playing down actual fascist groups and aggrandizing fringe move-
ments, placing anyone skeptical of liberalism into a single category: enemies of
democracy. This is hampering an already fraught political discourse. We use
different terms to refer to critics of liberalism, (civic or ethnic) nationalists, and
fascists, and there are reasons for that.
From an analytical perspective, another crucial problem with the term pop-
ulism is that, if used uncritically, it ignores the more structural and discursive
factors that have given rise to widespread discontent in the first place. This, of
course, has far-reaching implications. If one interprets the rise of illiberalism
simply as the outbreak of a contagious craze at the populist fringes, the status
quo ante, that is, a return to neoliberalism, might suddenly appear quite ap-
pealing. But “global Trumpism” (see Hopkin and Blyth in this volume) has its
roots precisely in neoliberalization processes. It is not simply the result of an
irrational aberrance. This is why simply returning to the politics that paved the
way for illiberalism would do little to resolve the more fundamental problems
at stake that emanate from an internal crisis of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism’s Implosion
Deep are the roots of those thinkers who advocate for free market capitalism. But
Adam Smith (particularly in his Theory of Moral Sentiments), John Stuart Mill, and
Alexis de Tocqueville would all have agreed that homo economicus—as someone
who only strives for the maximization of their self-interest in a competitive
struggle for survival of all against all—is not enough; for liberalism to thrive, the
ideal subject would also have to be someone who can take informed choices and
sometimes prioritize the common good: homo politicus! For this political tradition
within liberalism, freedom of opinion, minority rights, and plurality mattered.
Social progress, its enthusiasts thought, depended on the openness of societies. Yes,
markets were important, but they were not sufficient, by themselves, for democ-
racy to succeed. There needed to be associations, free media, and a sensus communis
(not just “common sense” but also a sense of community) for democracy to be
actually possible (see Atanassow and Scruton in this volume).
Liberalism consists of a set of practices and ideas that since the beginning of
the enlightenment era have foregrounded the importance of individual liberty,
private property, and the market in organizing societies. Importantly, however,
liberalism is a deeply ambivalent term. Two hearts beat in its chest. Whereas
economic liberalism emerged as a critique of the absolutist state and an attempt to
strengthen the emerging bourgeois classes in 18th-century Europe, what we
(along with others; e.g. Brown 2015) call political liberalism of the 19th century
foregrounds the need for a minimal, but nonetheless interventionist, state and
a strong civil society to hem in the outgrowths of the market and allow certain
civic and political rights for the citizenry.
8 Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann
countries, and health care and social security systems are today massively un-
derfinanced (see Lammert in this volume).
Not only did the blessings of the market, unanimously heralded after the
Cold War, fail to materialize; the market also did harm. Instead of the salutary
promise of “trickle-down” and the blooming fields of economic integration,
there followed stagnating salaries, exploding living costs, and an ever-widening
gap between rich and poor (see Hopkin and Blyth in this volume). In addition,
the privatization of public goods made the logic of the highest bidder spread
to many areas of life pushing the fragmentation of society to new extremes. As
wealth became concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of
individuals, the economization of society and politics began to threaten social
cohesion. In numerous countries, the fissure today runs along the divide be-
tween urban and rural areas, highly qualified specialists and individuals with
less education, self-designated elites and those who have been economically
left behind.
As globalization seemed inexorable (and ultimately beneficial to all), in-
creasingly technocratic politics did little to halt the hollowing out of market
protections (see Berkowitz in this volume). In the West, the so-called Third
Way of the immediate post-Cold War era instead promised many things to
many people: the center-right was appeased through cuts in social spending
in the name of competitiveness, while the center-left emphasized the cosmo-
politan potentials of globalization. Interestingly, the “bloated state” that had
been held responsible for the crises of the 1970s ultimately did not become any
smaller. Its priorities simply shifted: from redistribution to militarization, from
investments in public goods through federal and local governments to the so-
called public-private partnerships that mimicked private competition by shift-
ing costs and blame to the public actors—ultimately making these solutions
across policy fields neither less expensive nor less exclusive or more democratic,
for that matter. As flexible, precarious working conditions grew in number,
however, as systems to buffer social risk were left unfunded, and politicians
no longer seemed to listen to the citizenry (and sometimes were found to be
corrupted), the dissatisfaction with the status quo grew and these politics of no
alternative divided society along existing default lines.
Liberal democracy increasingly appeared as an empty shell. Even in those
presumably stable democracies of the West, whole segments of the popula-
tion no longer felt heard by politicians. Influence on the political process—a
core element of functioning representative democracies—appeared as a privi-
lege reserved for the lobbyists and water-carriers of business and the super-rich
(Gilens 2012). A deep rift therefore opened up between privileged populations
and those who feared losing their social status, an unsavory combination that,
as Jill Frank (2005, 74–75) notes, Aristotle already identified in Politics (Book
3, Chapters 1–4) as anathema for rule by constitution, i.e. for a politeia, the
“healthy regime type” where many share in rule that is aligned with and can
Illiberalism and Its Variants 11
democracies from Brazil to India indicate something deeper. Namely, that and
how the hopes of political emancipation, which still prevailed in the late 20th
century, have disappeared precisely alongside the expansion and integration of
the market within all spheres of politics.
This progressive critique did not end with calling into question the current
state of affairs. Many critics on the left even pointed to possible ways out of the
crisis. Particularly since the 2008 global financial crisis, some authors stressed
the role of the state as an important actor, despite globalization, and that, as in the
past, government should be called to account on matters that concern the public.
Since the government is responsible for constructing infrastructure and investing
in science and education, for instance, and since it exerts an often-invisible influ-
ence on the distribution of resources, it bears a significant share of responsibility
for social welfare (Peck 2010; Mettler 2011; Mazzucato 2015). Especially where
there is upward redistribution, the government must act in accordance with the
common good, not wealthy special interests—or so went the normative argu-
ment. In other words, the state needs to be foregrounded and held accountable.
This could indeed be a starting point for rebuilding the (center) left from its
ashes, because recognizing such responsibility means that the state does have
room for maneuver and therefore could engage in a politics of redistribution
and decommodification—politics, in other words, are not without alternative.
But, be that as it may, in practice, after every crisis, exactly the opposite seems
to transpire: the costs and indebtedness of private interests have been foisted
upon the public many times over, while the state has been regarded either as
helpless, wasteful, or inefficient. The global financial crisis is the best example.
In many countries, it was renamed a sovereign debt crisis (which it never was)
to shift both burden and blame from the private to the public. Mark Blyth, on
this subject, talks about the “greatest bait-and-switch operation in modern his-
tory” (Blyth 2013, 73). All this was happening before the backdrop of historical
economic inequalities and, in many countries, long-term real wage stagnation
for the majority of workers (Runciman 2018). Is it surprising that there would
be anger against economic and political elites?
Under these conditions of frustration and disillusionment, of deep inequalities
and precarious labor, little events can spark turmoil. Think of the fuel hikes in
France that unleashed the yellow-vest movement and of the increase in public
transportation prices in Santiago that triggered some of the largest protests of
Chilean history. Add to this a series of external shocks, such as natural disasters
(as in Turkey), terrorist attacks (as in France), foreign interference (as in the US),
and an already frail system seems much more vulnerable than the immediate
post-Cold War era would have made seem possible. The 20th century’s hopes
of equality and freedom, and of global peace and progress have been called off.
However, responses to the global crisis of neoliberalism are not preordained.
What progressive voices offered as an alternative was to reject the dangers of
market-led economic liberalism and embrace more political visions of society.
They reasserted political liberalism to point out the divisiveness of market rule
and the responsibility of the state. However, the left, despite movements such as
Occupy Wall Street or Blockupy, was much less successful in articulating that
political vision and translating it into electoral victories than the right.
Illiberalism and Its Variants 15
performing its basic tasks. That it no longer holds the monopoly of violence and
can no longer protect citizens from foreign invasion and inner disintegration,
and that the citizen has to take self-defense in their own hands.
No longer, obviously, is this the left critique of inequality and the injus-
tices of globalization that could be faced by addressing the shortcomings of
the state in terms of redistribution or decommodification. It is a critique that
shifts the blame from the economic inequalities between the haves and the
have-nots, between the nation as a group of citizens and workers below—the
99%—against the 1% at the top (see OWS) to a critique of inside and outside:
the ethnic nation that defends its traditional values and is under threat by over-
whelming external forces that the state seems unwilling (because of its multi-
cultural politics and openness to trade) or unable (see the critique of reduced
state capacities that is shared with the mainstream discourse) to mitigate.
Under these circumstances of perceived emergency and threat to the very core
of the populace, the institutions and procedures of liberal democracy no longer
seem to hold. Everyone who opposes the ‘will of the people’ is an enemy: the me-
dia that spread fakenews to distract us from what is really going on, the foreigner
who is taking away resources, the parliament that is dysfunctional and has been
doing nothing but talking (“all talk, no action”). And so the essential pillars of the
rational enlightenment, necessary to make democracy possible, are toppled. The
checks and balances are unfit to tackle the challenges and are set aside. Govern-
ment operates by decree and by state of emergency. The politics of fear, such as
those we see in the wake of the still-unfolding global pandemic, make pluralistic
debate impossible. They pose political problems as life or death questions. Once
this threshold is passed, there is simply no place for reason and reasoned argument.
As such, illiberalism is not only a reaction to the inner tensions and contradic-
tions of neoliberalism. It has productive capacities. To attain power, would-be au-
tocrats reinforce the climate of anxiety—by creating fears of an ethnic exchange
(a conspiracy theory of the extreme right), instrumentalizing dissatisfaction with
migration inflows (such as European political mobilizations against refugees since
2015 and candidate Trump’s call to “Build That Wall!”), and creating an impres-
sion of constant threats to physical safety from terrorists and other criminals (as in
Duterte’s war on drug dealers). By demonizing others, demagogues can demand a
partial reversal of globalization processes, insisting on popular sovereignty, while
at the same time reinventing the demos as an ethnic, rather than civic group,
united by birth and territory rather than common values and interests.
What is at stake, then, is not just a conservative attempt to address the true
grievances (that the political left would accept do exist) by shifting the focus
from economic inequalities to outside threats and the blame to political rivals.
Rather, it is to impose a different form of society. Illiberal actors seek to replace
the multicultural and emancipated vision that was used under neoliberalism to
paint economization in humanistic and cosmopolitan colors, by a more nation-
alistic vision of a new (but really very old) social project.
18 Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann
deliberation in the public sphere but through authority and tradition. Journal-
ists and the free press constantly challenge this authority and therefore become
themselves enemies of the people. The same holds, of course, for ivory tower
intellectuals; spoilt middle-class students; and children environmentalists, à la
Greta Thunberg, who are seen as part of the privileged elites who want to take
the last shirt off the hard-working people’s back.
Illiberal politicians seek to stabilize their power by surrounding themselves
with loyal nepotists and family in public offices, intimidating and seeking polit-
ical dirt on their opponents at home and abroad, and changing the rules of the
electoral system. Gerrymandering and other political tools are used to reduce
the competitiveness of political opponents, and electoral defeats are generally
viewed as the result of irregularities—how could the demos not vote their true
leader who is clearly the only one defending their interests? Only rarely, so far (as
recently in the case of Poland), do illiberals advance (limited) social policy pro-
grams for the lower middle classes. What this indicates, nonetheless, is that they
cannot act only by submission. This need to sustain their legitimacy leads such
decision-makers to also accelerate economic growth through hyper-deregulation
and privatization and the sell-off of remaining public goods, while at the same
time pacifying economic elites (tending to be part of the majority population and
not fearing resentments against minorities) through tax breaks and pro-business
legislation. Securing the benevolence of the upper (middle) classes through major
tax cuts contradicts earlier critiques of wasteful spending by old elites, but that
does not seem to be important any more. Concerns with clientelism and conflicts
of interest are equally brushed aside, claiming that everybody would rationally
act this way, and that what was more important than focusing on these marginal
details were the injuries inflicted on the true demos by others.
We are by no means saying that illiberalism automatically leads to fascism.
But illiberal actors create a political climate in which lies, corruption, and
violence become acceptable everyday phenomena and where democracy dis-
integrates to a point where these forces can gain power. In some cases, this
process is incremental—Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warn us that often
“[d]emocracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible” (2018, 6)—in others,
it is accelerated by external shocks and systematically used states of emergency,
i.e. attempted coups (see Coşkun and Kölemen in this volume), terrorist attacks
or when these are absent, the potential for such (see Surak in this volume), and
interethnic violence (see Sundar in this volume), inter alia. The suppression of
opposition and the creation of a de facto one-party state through changes in
the electoral system can be and are being legitimized along the same lines, as
much as is the curtailing of political rights and the militarization of society.
From that point onward, the distinction between this sort of democracy and a
dictatorship, resting on little more than the fact of holding elections, but incit-
ing political violence against political opponents and intimidating oppositional
voices, becomes blurred.
Illiberalism and Its Variants 21
fundamentalism of the past, but as a set of political ideas and practices in their
own right (see Wiesner in this volume for the case of the European Union).
Can the specters of illiberalism and hatred be overcome? It certainly has been
done before and we do also see hopeful signs for a democratic revitalization,
such as the repoliticization of public discourses, marches against antiplural-
ists and racists, and solidarity between democratic actors in civil society. Even
though they have been instrumentalized for the wrong purposes, we believe
that there are indeed political values worth salvaging in the liberal tradition
(Katznelson 2013). Political liberalism articulates social ideals that help provide
mechanisms for (an approximation of ) self-rule in modern large-scale society
while seeking to protect the rights of individuals and minorities in a pluralistic
society. It can bring with it a culture of political liberty and social emancipa-
tion that no other regime can. Liberal democracy will need to be reinvented
to find a way out of its self-made crisis of legitimacy and an important part of
this will be to rethink liberalism as a project in political economy, rather than
a merely political or economic policy program. Only thus will it be possible to
address the rightful concerns and true economic and ecological grievances that
untrammeled market rule has brought with it.
Notes
24 Michael D. Weinman and Boris Vormann
the authors of this longer-standing critique highlighted that the market form can
present a political problem of its own. Nancy Fraser (2016), Robert Kuttner (2018),
Jamie Peck (2010), Fran Tonkiss, and Don Slater (2001) are only some among a
whole list of authors who emphasize that the logic of the market is, after all, fun-
damentally not consistent with the logic of democracy, or even, to refer to Karl
Polanyi’s (2001 [1944]) seminal argument many of these authors build on, corrosive
to the survival of society itself.
5 In the US, by and large, it is only the super-rich and/or the corporations that store
and expand their wealth that are still heard in the political process, while the inter-
ests of the middle class and lower income groups have become background noise
that is barely perceived at all (Gilens 2012). In such a context, elections degenerate
into a public spectacle of democracy, while political decisions are made behind
closed doors, with the support of influential lobbyists (Bartels 2008).
6 Indeed, the attempt in this volume to include commentary from across the ideo-
logical spectrum alongside analysis that aspires to impartiality evidences that we, as
editors, have our own concerns about the insularity of academic discourse.
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