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Neil A Abrams
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All content following this page was uploaded by Neil A Abrams on 20 April 2020.
Journal of Democracy, Volume 31, Number 2, April 2020, pp. 182-185 (Review)
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
The Polarization Paradox
reinforcing guardrail institutions and especially the “rule of law and inde-
pendent, impartial election administrations” (p. 268). Yet such measures are
scarcely possible while illiberal leaders are commandeering the courts and
electoral commissions to consolidate their own power.
The shortage of workable prescrip-
tions seems to stem from the authors’
One might argue choice of polarization as the central
that the champions lens through which to view the global
of democracy should crisis of democracy. In the concluding
aggressively propagate chapter, the editors fault polarization
their own potent for democratic degradation and illiberal
narratives about the one-party dominance. But the book’s
nation rather than evidence suggests that both severe po-
leaving patriotism to larization and the erosion of democracy
the illiberals. actually result from the rise of illiberal
leaders. In most cases of severe polar-
ization, a single demagogue is responsi-
ble for activating sociocultural divisions and aligning identities into binary,
“us-versus-them” categories. India’s Narendra Modi, Poland’s Jaros³aw
Kaczyñski, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdo¢gan show “how closely as-
sociated the emergence of severe polarization is with one particular figure”
(p. 263).
What’s more, the emphasis on polarization too easily lends itself to fault-
ing both sides. Carothers’ chapter on the United States argues that the Dem-
ocrats, having swung left by embracing civil rights, played their own part in
setting polarization in motion. Yet Carothers acknowledges that polariza-
tion accelerated even when the Democratic Party was, by his own descrip-
tion, led by moderates. In the United States, as elsewhere, the main driver
of declining respect for democratic norms and institutions has been the rise
of illiberalism on the right. In their chapters on India and Poland, Sahoo and
Fomina respectively show that both twenty-first–century extremism and
the growing threat to democracy emanate from the main illiberal party. It
follows that democracy’s defenders must defeat illiberals before they can
reduce polarization.
The book does not focus on strategies to oust illiberal parties, but its
insights provide intriguing clues. The case studies reveal that beyond divi-
sions based on group identity lurks a larger conflict over the nation. Illib-
eral leaders appear to be succeeding by promoting compelling narratives
about national identity and fate. At the heart of polarization and the rise of
Erdo¢gan, Aydin-Düzgit sees a “conflict over the soul of Turkey” that was
long repressed by secularizing elites (p. 17). As Sahoo observes, Hindu
nationalists began their ascent in the 1980s by reviving the old question of
“the idea of India.” He demonstrates how Modi has thrived by stirring up
controversy over national identity (p. 95). In Poland, argues Fomina, de-
bate no longer revolves around the contentious market transformation or the
Books in Review/M. Steven Fish and Neil A. Abrams 185