The Decline of Liberal Democracy and the Rise of Authoritarianism: Insights from Professors Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes, and Rob Riemen

The chill that runs down the spine of Mexico and much of the Western world is seen by various thinkers as the decline of the liberal and democratic society that arrived in the 90s and is now saying goodbye.

I highlight, in this last column of the year, two valuable books whose reading I recommend: The Light That Goes Out, by professors Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes (Debate), and The Art of Being Human, by the Dutch thinker Rob Riemen (Taurus), who a few years ago taught classes in Mexico.

That liberal consensus of the 1990s, say Krastev and Holmes, had to do with “individual legal and constitutional rights, such as freedom of the press, the right to vote for rulers in periodic elections.”

Liberalism “associated with the ideals of equal opportunities, freedom of movement and transit across borders, the right to dissent, access to justice and government responsibility for public demands.”

And now we find ourselves facing the offensive of regression that, “to justify the dismantling of the independent press and the autonomy of the judicial system, as well as the crude attacks on dissidents and critics, raise the need to defend the nation against the internal enemies ‘of a foreign spirit’.” (They studied postgraduate degrees in foreign universities, one hears it said in Mexico).

A chapter of The Art of Being Human consists of a letter from the author, Rob Riemen, to his students in Mexico, in which, without catastrophism, he points out our future if polarization and bitterness deepen:

“In 1941, (Erich Fromm) convincingly demonstrated, in his book The Fear of Freedom, that not only war causes fear, but the reverse also happens: fear causes wars. Autocrats rule as false messiahs, and since a just and harmonious society can never be built with demagoguery, propaganda and lies, a civil war is inevitable. Speaking of ‘false messiahs’, for me your president López Obrador is an archetypal example of that species.”

Later he quotes one of the philosophers he admires, Erich Vögelin: “It is a sign of a fatal misunderstanding of historical forces to believe that a handful of men can destroy a civilization before it has committed suicide.”

It speaks, therefore, of the responsibility of society. Pages ago he quotes Freud in the same vein:

“Do you really believe that a handful of ambitious and immoral frauds would have managed to unleash all those evil spirits if the millions of followers were not their accomplices?”

Professors Kastrev and Holmes dedicate a good part of the book to the Trump phenomenon as a symbol of that “fading light, liberal democracy, and point out:

“…in the name of loyalty to one’s own partisan faction, it leads us to one of the most drastic transformations that Trump has caused in American public life: he has turned the republic of citizens into a republic of fans. Some enthralled fans, whose faculty of criticism has been suppressed…”

They add: “For him (Trump), someone loyal is not the one who supports him when he is right, even with the political winds against him, but rather the one who supports him even when he is wrong, whatever the price.”

The fans of the messianic leader, they point out, “give up the opportunity to live in a common world, together with citizens who do not think alike. Consequently, what they do is destroy the possibility of offering and accepting mutual concessions to settle political differences in a peaceful way.

They dedicate ample space to the phenomenon of the popularity of these leaders, and focus it on the Russian autocrat, but very well on the case of the President of Mexico:

“In Russia, ‘popularity’ is a consequence and not a cause of the power held.” Thus, “the prefabricated absence of plausible alternatives makes Putin’s ‘popularity’ impossible to measure in absolute terms.”

We have entered to live in the world of lies of political illusionists, says Professor Riemen:

“Now, 40 years after (the almost universal advent of liberal democracies), it is a different time: it is 2020. In many countries, demagogues, the lying politicians par excellence, have conquered power in a democratic way: Trump in the United States, Orban in Hungary, Ortega in Nicaragua, Maduro in Venezuela, and López Obrador, its President, also belongs to that category.”

For the times in which we live, I stick with the line that I highlighted from Riemen’s book, which is a verse by the Austrian poet Rainer María de Rielke:

“Who talks about victories? Resisting is everything.”

We meet again in this space on Tuesday, January 2. Congratulations.

2023-12-22 08:43:01
#Regression #books