Daily Archives: December 6, 2020

Every man and every woman, it seems, knows Gilbert and Sullivans quipping lines from Iolanthe (1882): That every boy and every gal / Thats born into the world alive. / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative. When the lines were first sung, the labels matched up with Britains political parties, but they obviously have a wider applicationeach calling to mind, then and now, a cultural outlook, an inclination, a temperament, even a philosophy. Over time, of course, even the firmest definition will shift, making easy summary difficult and historical circumstancecontext, that iscrucial to our understanding of what liberalism is and how conservatism differs from it. These days, we may also ask: What sets the two sides of democratic politics so far apart?

Edmund Fawcett, a former editor and correspondent at the Economist, grappled with one end of this polarity in Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, published in 2014 and revised four years later. He now explores its opposing force in Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition. A self-described left-wing liberal, Mr. Fawcett believes that both categories of thought (and politics) are facing critical tests, making it all the more urgent that we grasp their genealogyhow they developed and what they have come to represent. He calls his explorations historical essays, and indeed they are written in a reflective mode, though at times in an impassioned style. Members of both thought-categories will find much to learn from both books, not least from the historical figures Mr. Fawcett brings into view.

Mr. Fawcett notes that, in the broadest terms, the modern era in advanced societies has been governed by a liberal outlook, one in which the liberty or freedom of the individual has been increasingly protected from the state or liberated from custom, hierarchy and the institutionsnotably, the churchthat once dictated social relations and guided mans understanding of himself. The origins of this outlook, he notes, can be traced to the Enlightenment, when reason was elevated to an exalted position and, it was believed, a rational scrutiny of both principles and institutions would lead humanity away from dark superstition and upward toward the light.

Enlightenment thinkers, Mr. Fawcett reminds us, encouraged the idea that society might be understood and thereby changed for the better. They also sought to sever moral codes from their traditional mooring, or at least to rethink them: As Mr. Fawcett puts it, David Hume and Immanuel Kant welcomed liberty from ethical tutelage so that men could determine their own standards of conduct. The German statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt saw education as a way to realize individual possibility rather than, as tradition would have it, train for an occupation or a social role. Benjamin Constant, in France, focused on the concept of liberty, which he defined as a condition of existence allowing people to turn away interference from either society or the state. Calling absolute power radically illegitimate, Franois Guizot insisted that human imperfection meant that no person, class, faith or interest should have the final say. Like other French liberals of his day, he sought a juste milieua place where interests and ideas could be balanced. Enlightenment philosophers on the Continent also challenged the assumptions of the ancien rgime, helping open careers to talent and remove restrictions on office-holding long governed by religion and class.

These currents of thought we associate with the 18th century, and for good reason, but after the shock of the American and French revolutions, they were dammed up by the Napoleonic Wars and an interlude of restoration. It was only in the 1830s that the dam broke. A period of rapid changebrought on by the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution, the railways remarkable shrinking of distance, and episodes of agricultural depression and financial crisisdemanded a re-assessment of established patterns of thought and governance. Enlightenment-driven liberalism was one mode of response; conservatism, one might say, was a response to the response.

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Conservatism and Liberalism: Two Books on the Great Divide - The Wall Street Journal

The failure of liberalism in the developed world was openly pronounced with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Hilary Clintons spectacular loss was partly blamed on the inability of the American liberal class to understand the true pulse of America. Or so we were told.

Since then, the rise of far-right and alt-right movements around the world have been eerily coincidental in countries which are seemingly considered liberal. Violent push backs against refugees and asylum-seekers from war-torn nations. Police brutality and racism against people of non-white origin. Crackdowns on rights supporters. These are just some examples of the rising intolerance in many Western nations over the last few years.

Is it the failure of the liberal populations in these apparently progressive countries, or the failure of the idea that liberalism is the only way to correct these injustices that has led to this? And if so, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Liberalism is commonly defined in political philosophy as an idea which brings together freedom, consent and equality of all before the law. It promotes individual rights, democracy, free trade and an openness to new ideas, among others. Over the years, it has included in its ambit gender and racial equality, open borders and recognition of individual identity.

A liberal likewise is identified as anyone who supports any or all parts of this definition, and there is a range of liberal belief systems. But the world today has clearly shown that liberal ideologies are fast failing even those who practise them.

In Pakistan too those who believe in equality of rights and freedoms of association are facing immense challenges in trying to influence or create equitable systems. And there are more than enough examples to show the sheer intensity of these challenges. From archaic practices like forced conversions and child marriages, to physical dangers such as rape and kidnapping, to rising religious conservatism, to an over-burdened financial system the list is endless.

In contrast, there are very few national movements (not of the PDM variety) and they are nowhere near reaching critical mass to put pressure on addressing any of these challenges, which is something we at least see in other parts of the developing world, such as the way the George Floyd protests galvanized public opinion against racism.

The burden of this falls on those who believe that addressing these challenges fall under the protection of liberal values. Yet, so far, Pakistans liberals have been unable to create any momentum that can push even a conversation forward on any of our challenges to equality and freedoms. Whats more, there are rising contradictions and confusions in who we identify as a liberal, in a country where there is such a stark contrast between rich and poor. And this matters because traditionally, liberalism in Pakistan and other such countries, has always been associated with wealth. It is only the rich who possess liberal values, because they have had access to the best education and opportunities of thought. Everyone else is therefore unable to possess such values.

We know this is completely untrue, especially when looking at Pakistan. Liberal values of freedom and equality are not connected to wealth in any way. But in Pakistan, liberals have always been seen through the lens of class and social status. Take the comparison of public versus private universities. The former are perceived as poorly managed state-run institutions with conservative values. The latter are seen as richly endowed private centres of learning afforded by the privileged few who actively believe in social justice. As a result, the former are allegedly ill-liberal and the latter supposedly liberal. No matter that both kinds of institutions may actually contain a mix of the two. The irony is that this never used to be the case. Public institutions like Karachi University were known for producing some of the countrys brightest and most liberal minds. Indeed, long before the onset of private higher education, such institutions are what laid the foundation for critical social and political thought in this country.

This illustration cuts right across Pakistans liberal vs conservative divide in which public space is seen as conservative and the private as illustrating the liberal ideal. Nothing could be further from the truth.

But in reality, there are several such dichotomies based on a number of different variables, that have done much to malign liberals and their causes in Pakistan.

Take the womens movement. While there has been a welcome and needed resurgence of the demand for equality by a new generation of Pakistani women, still in nascent stages, some argue that it is limited to the more urban, entitled woman. The actual movements, they argue, are those led by Baloch and Hazara women activists, or those in smaller towns and cities, who are excluded from this elitist urban movement. In actuality, each of these movements are worthy of merit and while each may be fighting for different types of rights, all firmly believe that improving the status of women in Pakistan is vital for our survival. And each movement is desperately needed to endorse that. But a divide is being created to show that one movement is liberal because it originates in a more affluent class, while the other does not.

On the other hand, some in this class are responsible for perpetuating the myth of the elite liberal (providing much needed ammunition to conservatives). For instance, the protest by the residents of the Defence Housing Authority in Karachi this past August, against the Cantonment Board Cliftons dismal performance of protecting some of Karachis richest residential neighbourhoods from extreme flooding. The protest was small, but it clearly juxtaposed the concerns of the privileged few against those of the rest of the city who were in far worse condition, with no one to hear their woes. The fact that the DHA residents protest was legally faulted back at them through an FIR lodged by the executives of the Board further showed that even the wealthy elite were circumvented by an even more powerful political elite, after which the former fell silent.

To be continued

The writer is an independent specialist and researcher in international development, social policy and global migration.

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Have liberals failed us? - Part I - The News International

This is fine. Photo: Joaquin Sarmiento/AFP via Getty Images

As Donald Trump started shambling toward the exit of the U.S. presidency last week, the U.S. left confronted the pivotal question hanging over our newfound interregnum: Who gets to say, I told you so?

Since well before Trumps election, progressives of various stripes have vigorously debated how to characterize the moguls brand of demagogy, and the threat that it posed to American life.Was Trump an authoritarian, a fascist, or a typical conservative? Was his open contempt for the rule of law a threat to Americans most basic freedoms, or an edifying illustration of our nations preexisting unlawful disorder, the moguls signature shamelessness making it easier for voters to see the rot in their republic, much as a caricature illuminates the flaws in a human face? Most critically, what was a bigger threat to the progressive project in the United States: the mainstream medias inveterate both-sides-ism and attendant complacency about the GOPs burgeoning contempt for democracy or the anti-Trump movements embrace of a tyrannophobic politics that obscured the material roots of right-wing populism, muted the ideological distinctions between Bernie Sanders and Bill Kristol, and privileged the defense of democratic norms over making our democracy responsive to the needs of working people?

The salience of this division waxed and waned over the course of the Trump presidency. But as the GOP incumbent settled on a reelection strategy that involved sowing doubt about the legitimacy of mail ballots, and preparing a legal strategy for disqualifying as many of them as possible, liberals and left-contrarians exchanged allegations of alarmism and complacency with renewed fervor. Their disputes only intensified after Election Day, as the president mounted his most unabashed and arguably, most impotent assault on democratic governance in the U.S. yet.

Since November 3, Trump and his allies have fomented baseless allegations of industrial-scale voter fraud in Democratic cities, filed a variety of spurious lawsuits aimed at halting vote counts in battleground states, implored Republican election officials to block certification of vote counts, and called on GOP-controlled state legislatures to simply nullify the will of the voters and appoint pro-Trump electors. In the process, they have convinced a majority of Republican voters that Joe Bidens minions stole the election from him.

And yet: Trumps lawsuits were laughed out of court, key Republican state legislatures rebuffed his requests to nullify the popular will, and the presidents administration, however belatedly, initiated the formal transition process last week. The Trump era ended with a whimper, not a bang. And a thousand Twitter debates over the definition of coup ensued.

Most progressive commentators took Trumps naked attempt to retain power through mass disenfranchisement as vindication of their darkest interpretations of his politics and presidency. Popular faith in the authenticity of vote counts is a precondition for a minimally healthy democracy. Trump waged war on that faith, as no losing president had done before. Whats worse, his quixotic attempts to overturn the results revealed that the bulk of Republican officialdom was prepared to either quietly abide anti-democratic treachery, or actively abet it. Liberal alarmism had, therefore, been realism all along. As my colleague Jonathan Chait recently put it, these weeks of chaos will remove all doubt of something Trumps critics have long maintained: The American experiment would never have survived a second Trump term.

To left-wing contrarians, meanwhile, describing Trumps antics as a coup was nearly as absurd as Rudy Giulianis legal theories. This was not a violent seizure of power aided by state security forces or paramilitaries. It was a litigious billionaire adapting his tantrums into legal briefs until Republican judges tossed them aside, and Republican officials (however belatedly) nudging him toward a tacit concession. To believe that the United States was on the precipice of autocracy was to fundamentally misunderstand the obstacles to left governance in this country. As the socialist historian Matt Karp argued, U.S. institutions arent weak at all, but in fact quite robust, against both the whims of lazy TV strongmen and also the will of the democratic majority.

There are very fine people on both sides of this dunk contest. Each general tendency has its insights. The left-contrarians are right that the risk of Trump retaining power through a coup whether a literal military putsch or a figurative judicial one was greatly exaggerated in some quarters, especially after it became clear that any such scheme would require invalidating tens of thousands of votes across multiple states. There is little incentive in the news media to frame novel developments in anything but the most incendiary terms that one can reasonably defend. Cable news faces more competition, from a wider array of televisual amusements, than ever before. The digital news landscape is largely populated by ad-supported outlets fighting each other for eyeballs in a content-saturated market, often to the death. For these reasons, coverage of Trumps flirtations with authoritarianism often err on the side of alarmism. And this has real costs (some of my own friends and family members were still living in fear of Amy Coney Barrett anointing Trump the elections victor long after that ceased to be a remote possibility).

More broadly, the contrarians aversion to presentism the medias tendency to exaggerate the novelty of emergent events and elide narrative-defying precedents is salutary. Trumps wildest ideas for perpetuating his own power are unprecedented in their authoritarianism. But his incompetence and unpopularity arguably rendered him a less effective agent of illiberalism than his Republican predecessor. Under George W. Bush, the U.S. government expanded its capacity for domestic surveillance by an order of magnitude. Military torture became official state policy. The Justice Department launched a years-long fishing expedition for evidence of voter fraud that could be used to rationalize vote-suppressing remedies. And, of course, the U.S. government launched a bloody war of aggression, which it sold to the public on the basis of lies.

That the public figure who orchestrated all this was a jovial man of faith fluent in our politys pieties rather than a malignant narcissist with a penchant for public cruelty made Bushs brand of authoritarianism more culturally dominant than Trumps ever was: When a national crisis struck on Bushs watch, cable-news networks clamped down on dissent while the American public rallied behind their leader. From the Trump eras first days, on through the COVID pandemic, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post (rightly) took a more adversarial posture toward a sitting president than they ever had before (or at least, in the case of the newspapers, at any point in their modern histories). Meanwhile, the American people responded to Trumps election by drowning the ACLU in donations, organizing the largest protests in U.S. history, and mobilizing the largest midterm and general-election turnouts in over a century, which respectively dealt Trumps party a historic rebuke and then disempowered the billionaire himself. Taken together, this amounts to a plausible argument that Donald Trumps tenure has made America into a more democratic and less authoritarian society (even if it also rendered the GOP a less democratic and more authoritarian political party).

But in protesting the erasure of past presidents affronts to democracy, contrarians sometimes risk obscuring the current ones own assaults. One doesnt need to stipulate that George W. Bushs authoritarianism was less damaging than Trumps has been in order to acknowledge that the latter has yielded unique harms. Singularly unconstrained by our politys unwritten rules, Trump has exposed many presumed limits on presidential power as polite fictions. The president can, in fact, openly monetize his public power, gas peaceful protesters without provocation, make personal loyalty to the president an official requirement for leading the Justice Department, promise his lackeys presidential pardons if they refuse to cooperate with investigations that threaten his interests, withhold congressionally approved funds in order to coerce foreign governments into smearing his domestic rivals, commandeer U.S. troops and federal property as campaign props, funnel billions in relief payments to favored constituencies without congressional authorization, declare the press an enemy of the people, accuse the opposition party of orchestrating an invasion of the United States, and dispossess hundreds of thousands of longtime, legal U.S. residents, among other things.

Trump has not only shown that the president can do these things without being impeached or prosecuted. Hes also shown that if the president is a Republican (and thus, running with a built-in three-point popular-vote handicap) they can do these things and still retain an excellent shot at reelection, so long as they avoid botching a world-historic pandemic. These are lessons that a president Jeb Bush would not have had the interest or imagination to teach. But they are now available to the next Republican president, who will likely have more message discipline and administrative competence than the current one. Which is to say: If Trumps gift for illuminating the rot in our republic is edifying for liberals who wish to repair it, it is also instructive for reactionaries who wish to further degrade it.

Trumps coup was surely quixotic. But it delegitimized our electoral system in the eyes of a large minority of the public, while also creating incentives for Republican officials to administer elections in a more partisan manner going forward. Before November 3, Georgias Republican secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, was a rising star in GOP politics. After the Peach State went blue, and Trump cried fraud, both of Georgias GOP senators called for Raffenspergers resignation, all for the crime of administering an election that a Democrat won. Americas aberrant practice of having partisan officials oversee elections has always been hazardous. Now that Republican secretaries of State know that presiding over a Democratic victory wont just cost their party in the short term but, quite possibly, cost them personally in the long run, the temptation to tailor election rules to the GOPs advantage will be all the greater.

In the face of all this, it is hard for me to see much cause for alarm at liberal alarmism. Criticizing media hyperbole and semantical imprecision can be an end in itself, and I dont begrudge anyone their God-given right to be quarrelsome on the internet. But some who object to descriptions of Trump as fascist, or his legal machinations as a coup, or his migrant detention facilities as concentration camps insist that their antipathy to such histrionic diction has high political stakes. And I really dont think it does.

Language will never perfectly represent a world whose complexity is beyond human comprehension. All of our abstract concepts are expedients manufactured to facilitate shared understanding and useful action. Debates over whether to call Trumps politics fascist are fundamentally arguments about whether it is more useful to embrace a definition of that term expansive enough to encompass both the Fhrer and the Donald, or to heed the many distinctions between Trumps politics and Mussolinis. Im partial to the latter view as an academic matter. But in a partisan political context, it seems plausible that emphasizing the commonalities between the presidents politics and a political creed that Americans are socialized to regard as antithetical to their ideals is worthwhile. Trump has spent his presidency broadcasting incendiary lies about vulnerable minority populations while promising that national decline can be reversed through the extralegal expulsion and monitoring of such internal enemies. The impulse that led Trump to pardon an unrepentant war criminal or separate migrant children from their families as a form of asylum deterrence which is to say, the impulse to dehumanize the powerless for political or ideological gain reaches its apotheosis in Auschwitz. Of course, our country has hosted its own genocidal horrors, the legacy of which is more closely bound up in Trumpism than any foreign analog. But if describing Trumps politics as fascist makes Americans more alert to Trumpisms hazards, then the description is defensible. And much the same can be said of calling his ham-fisted attempts to retain power undemocratically a coup.

More generally, given the very real harms of Trumps tenure, a bias toward exaggerating his malfeasance seems preferable to the alternative. Especially in a context where a powerful right-wing media apparatus is perpetually propagandizing on his behalf, while the mainstream media faces strong institutional pressures to interpret his actions with undue generosity. Early in Trumps tenure (most egregiously, during his theatrical missile strike against Syria), the mainstream press made its desire to give the president the conventional degree of deference unmistakeable. Trumps dogged refusal to temper his illiberal tantrums made normalizing him impossible. But it seems likely that the steady drumbeat of dissent from the progressive media, Indivisible, the Womens March, and other #Resistance organizations much of it voiced in catastrophizing terms helped move CNN and the New York Times toward the unabashedly adversarial posture it adopted during the 2020 campaign. Regardless, we can at least say that the dominant rhetorical mode in progressive media over the past four years was not incompatible with generating a blue wave midterm followed by the rare defeat of an incumbent president.

Critics of anti-Trump tyrannophobia argued that liberals obsession with Trumps authoritarian pretensions would distract attention from the underlying social and economic problems that were the true source of democratic decline. As the (generally incisive) Yale law professor Samuel Moyn and Oxford University historian David Priestland argued in August 2017, It is easier to believe that democracy is under siege than to acknowledge that democracy put Mr. Trump in power and only more economic fairness and solidarity can keep populists like him out A dysfunctional economy, not lurking tyranny, is what needs attention if recent electoral choices are to be explained and voting patterns are to be changed in the future.

This was less of a substantiated argument than a profession of social democratic faith. Americas rapacious economic system so thoroughly shapes our social reality, it was surely implicated in the 2016 elections outcome. But whether promises of sweeping economic reform can reliably produce electoral victory in our democracys present context remains unproven (though there is some cause for hope that the actual implementation of progressive reforms might expand and/or realign the electorate). Regardless, even as progressives carried on insisting (with increasing plausibility) that democracy was under siege, Democrats proved quite capable of centering their broadly successful 2018 campaigns on vows to protect social insurance and raise the minimum wage. Condemnations of Trumps migrant concentration camps proved compatible with calls for more economic fairness.

Perhaps the most compelling objection to progressives obsessive attention to Trumps attacks on democratic norms and institutions was that it served to obscure the anti-democratic nature of many American norms and institutions. The most formidable threat to popular sovereignty in the United States is undoubtedly the increasingly anti-majoritarian nature of its constitutional design. The Electoral College made Trumps presidency possible. The Senates wild underrepresentation of urban America makes the GOPs plutocratic program politically tenable. And the American judiciarys expansive conception of judicial review lent Trumps coup its scintilla of plausibility. Put simply, the conservative movement could not be so radical or authoritarian if existing institutions did not free it of the obligation to be majoritarian. For these reasons, combating minority rule in the U.S. requires distinguishing between democratic norms and institutions that must be preserved, and anti-democratic ones that must be reformed. And this is a distinction that the right wing of #Resistance politics often elides.

The dominant strain of tyrannophobic anti-Trumpism, however, has evangelized for structural reform as incessantly as it has publicized Trumps attacks on democratic norms. The leading organs of anti-Trump liberalism, from Pod Save America to Vox to Slate to this publication, have made calls for filibuster abolition, adding new states, and reforming (and/or packing) the Supreme Court into hobbyhorses. Far from distracting the left-of-center public from the necessity of reforming existing norms and institutions, these outlets have channeled popular alarm at Trumps contempt for democracy into concern with our Constitutions subtler version of the same.

None of this is to suggest the American left is in good shape. It is not, and for reasons that have long concerned left-contrarians, including the steady rightward march of non-college-educated voters that has left the Democratic Party with a massive structural disadvantage at every level of government, and an economically polarized coalition rife with internal tensions.

But to the extent that contrarians attribute this state of affairs to liberal hyperbole about Trumps authoritarianism, they lapse into their own form of wishful alarmism. The decline of left institutions, from trade unions to liberal churches; the extraordinary power and influence of the right-wing media; the resilient appeal of white-grievance politics; the cultural chasm between secular, college-educated urbanites and religious, non-college-educated rural-dwellers; the American publics earned distrust in the capacities of their own government; the representational biases of our Constitution; neo-feudal levels of economic inequality; the burgeoning hegemony of anti-Chinese nationalism; and the wicked problem of climate politics none of these forces were brought into being by the tendentious use of the word coup, and all have collectively placed the U.S. left in a predicament for which #Resistance liberals have no histrionic historical analogy, and left-contrarians, no clear answer.

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Liberal Hyperbole About Trumps Authoritarianism Was Never the Problem - New York Magazine

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On 9th November 2016, when liberal opinion was appalled by Donald Trumps election victory, Barack Obama delivered a message of reassurance from the White House Rose Garden. He restated his faith that America had a progressive destiny, albeit sometimes circuitously reached: The path that this country has taken has never been a straight line. We zig and zag.

Obamas patience is partly vindicated by Joe Bidens victory in 2020. A majority of US electors insisted on a course correction. But over 73m Americans voted to continue along the Trump trajectorymore than the number who backed him last time. They trusted the mendacious demagogue more than the institutions of American democracy. A hard core prefers conspiracy theories about electoral fraud to facts. The zigzag pattern played out not over decades but days, minute-by-minute as the results were disputed. The defeated Presidents prolonged refusal to concede seemed to confirm that the US constitution was imperilled every day that he was in office. But the impotence of his ragethe fact that Biden is on course for inaugurationalso underlines the resilience of democracy.

Mainstream liberal commentary often casts Trump as dictator, a modern-day Hitler or Mussolini. The corrosion of US constitutional norms has been compared to the collapse of the Weimar Republic. After clashes between Trump supporters and protesters in Portland earlier this year, the letters page in the Los Angeles Times reflected the mood of his staunchest opponents: Hitlers purpose was to create chaos and discrimination, to flex the muscles of the right-wing fascists who made up his base, and to stay in power. Now the White House is doing something similar, wrote one correspondent. We are now descending into fascism, said another.

The comparison has been made by experts in authoritarianism such as the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of bestselling books on the slide into tyranny. Conservative critics depict Snyder as an hysteric, primed to hear approaching jackboots round every corner, but the parallels that he suggests with 20th-century tyrants are somewhat qualified: If Trump is not a fascist, this is only in the precise sense that he is not even a fascist, Snyder wrote in 2018. He strikes a fascist pose, and then issues generic palliative remarks and denies responsibility for his words and actions.

The caveat is important. There was plainly a fascistic streak in Trumps style. But it comes with an absence of discipline and wilful shallowness taken from the showbiz milieu that brought him to prominence. He is more involved with personal gratification than any doctrine to mould the destiny of a nation.

None of that excuses the most sinister aspects of his regime: the abuses of power and the racism, the inhumane treatment of migrantsthe caging of childrenand cultivation of support among white supremacists and neo-Nazi militias. The rallies and the chanting mobs, the culture of intimidation, all carried chilling associations with the past. But it is also important to recognise how the contemporary threat is differentultra-modern, a knowing performance of transgression, a product developed to shift units of outrage in the digital marketplace. We need to learn from history, but not lean too hard on it.

The totalitarian experience of the 1930s still, with good reason, defines the worst-case scenario. But given all of the subsequent developments, and the embedding of new norms during the long reign of post-1945 consumer capitalism, any downfall of 21st-century liberal democracy is unlikely to follow a 90-year-old template.

There are different modes of authoritarianism, as varying responses to the pandemic around the world have revealed. The conventional dictatorial reflex, still alive and well in many places away from the west, was to use the new threat of the disease as a pretext to silence critics and consolidate a grip on civil society. Here, after all, was a situation that positively demanded an extension of state power, reaching deep into the private realm. Lockdown measures applied across Europe were quasi-totalitarian in scope. For aspiring dictators, it is second nature to pivot from such expedients to repression. Vladimir Putin passed a misinformation law, ostensibly to stop the spread of fake Covid-19 news, but convenient also to a man who likes to suffocate dissent. Recep Tayyip Erdoan used the same technique in Turkey. Sharing provocative Corona virus [sic] posts has been added to the list of offences that can lead to detention by the Interior Ministrys Cyber Crimes Unit. In Hungary, Viktor Orbn, a keen student of Putinism, used a compliant parliament to award himself powers to rule by decree during the emergency.

A more orthodox fascist than Trump would have likewise seen the new disease as a licence for repression. But he chose instead to deny the severity of the threat. His supporters rejected anti-Covid measures as an affront to personal freedom. That makes them tricky recruits to any traditional fascist project, which demands subordination of individual will into the collective project for national supremacy. The libertarian strain in Trumpism should be at odds with the authoritarian styling. But the lack of coherence doesnt bother its adherents, who are not looking for specific doctrines. What matters is the sugar-rush taste combinationfreedom from social convention laced with self-righteous anger.

Most radical ultras in westerndemocracies have grown up saturated in the lifestyle and expectations of consumer capitalism

The appetite for that product will not be diminished by Trumps eventual expulsion from the White House. Nor will it be confined to the US. Something similar fuelled the UKs exit from the European Union. Now Nigel Farage is executing the pivot from Euroscepticism to lockdown-scepticism. The Brexit Party will be renamed and refocused, mining the seam of opinion where Farages nostalgic, nationalist base shades into xenophobia and paranoid anti-vaccine conspiracy theory. The common thread is the need to be opposing establishment power. Since Brexit has become a legal fact, Brussels can no longer be the great bogeyman of oppression. A new oppressor has to be found and resisted. That is a project for perpetual opposition, not for the creation of a fascist state. Farage has enabled the spread of far-right ideas into the British mainstream, but he is uninterested in wielding executive power. His comfort zone is shirking responsibility and stoking grievances under (supposedly) liberal governments.

Boris Johnson rode the nationalist Brexit tiger to Downing Street, and he has a proven disregard for the protocols that uphold Britains unwritten constitution. But even his fiercest liberal critics struggle to cast him as a scheming tyrant. Johnsons ambition, like Trumps, is too centred on himself to resemble a project of authoritarian statecraft. There was a kind of Bolshevik radicalism about Brexita belief that all means were justified in pursuit of a utopian goalbut Johnson could not tear himself away from the mirror for long enough to complete the revolution.

The overthrow of a well-entrenched liberal democratic order is hard work. It requires sustained self-sacrifice. Those are not prominent features of 21st-century radicalism in western societies. There is plenty of angry energy, but much of it is expended online, which is a low-effort model of insurrection. Sitting at a computer and firing off enraged tweets or sharing propaganda memes can deliver the gratifying sense of participation in something daring or subversive without any cost in money, time or personal safety.

True, some clicktivist radicals advance to more active kinds of extremism: a wider pool of digital fundamentalists could, in theory, constitute a real-life threat. But not everyone will make the journey, and not just because they cant be bothered. Most radical ultras in western democracies have grown up saturated in the lifestyle and expectations of consumer capitalism, with at least some values to match. (Their experience is very different, in that respect, to the pattern of authoritarian revival in former communist eastern Europe.) The late 1960s counterculture made a fetish of personal self-actualisation. That was followed by the 1980s cult of personal enterprise. Both promoted the pursuit of individual fulfilment over notions of duty and self-sacrifice. The accompanying social and economic shifts are not going to be undone any time soon. There may still exist some appetite to be part of a collective political project, but I suspect the bar has been raised, relative to the 1930s, in terms of how much individuality people are ready to surrender. Todays young battalions of internet vigilantes are not drilled in taking orderslet alone handling real weaponslike the generation that emerged from the trenches in 1918, traumatised and alienated.

There is no doubting the potency of the current reaction against liberalism, on left and right (but with the right achieving more spectacular electoral returns). Nor should anyone belittle the grievances that have fuelled that polarisation. The economic consensus that underpinned late 20th-century globalisation has been discredited. The promise of widening prosperity and upward mobility failed with the financial crisis, and few answers have since been found with the old liberal tool kit. Voters have felt betrayed by self-serving elites and expressed their frustration in support for maverick populists.

But even the economics do not map neatly onto the conditions that cultivated totalitarianism in the 1920sthe issue then was not mere disappointment but hyper-inflation, mass unemployment and penury. Conditions in rustbelt Pennsylvania or Sunderland in 2020 are not very analogous to Berlin in 1933, or for that matter Petrograd in 1917.

The movements that channel todays stresses have been marinading in stability and prosperity unprecedented in history. Yes, they borrow propaganda styles, tropes and rhetoric from totalitarianism and attract a maniac fringe with swastika tattoos or hammer-and-sickle stickers. But to the extent that there is doctrinal continuity from 20th-century fascism or Stalinism, it is hybridblended with concepts and privileges cultivated in the long period of liberal consensus.

On the left, there is still talk of overthrowing capitalism, but little plotting to do it by revolution. The study of Marxism-Leninism is confined to academia. The aspiration to proletarian control of the means of production has not vanished, but it has been eclipsed by cultural concerns. The activist left today is notably more animated by historical revision than economics. Pulling down statues fires their imagination more than requisitioning factories. There might be Bolshevik zeal in the way they police online discourse, but to a true Stalinist, the obsession with symbols is a distraction from the task of building new structures.

The new nationalist right is glad to meet the left on that terrain. It makes no great defence of free-market capitalism and corporate power, neither of which have served its target audience well in recent years. Plus, fighting the culture war from a socially conservative position is a way to connect with those broken-down industrial areas that used to vote for left-wing candidates.

While that culture war looks like a battle of left and right extremes, it is fought on classically liberal terrain. It is a contest of rights and freedoms. Right-wing culture warriors demand liberty to say offensive things (and accuse the left of censorship); their left-wing counterparts claim freedom from harm caused by the hate speech with which they charge the right. The left wants redress for historical injustice for groups that have been discriminated against; the right asserts that such a campaign amounts to prejudice against straight white men. The shrillest iterations of those views can be ferociously illiberal in tone, but they resonate with their audiences precisely because of a shared liberal assumption that individual rights are sacred. They do not add up to a new blueprint for government. They are not agendas to build 1,000-year Reichs or a new Soviet Socialist Republic.

The feature of that debate that really challenges the stability of democracy is not in the arguments themselves but the digital infrastructure on which they are propagated. It is the machinery of Facebook, YouTube, Google, WhatsApp and Twitter that facilitates polarisation, sorting people into irreconcilable tribes and spinning them off towards the most extreme iteration of any opinion. That process happens in an entirely new kind of civic space that is quasi-public but privately owned, and sprawls across jurisdictions.

The significance of this technical revolution in the flow and control of information dwarfs any post-liberal political doctrine. Yet it is little understood. Trump benefited from it, but has no discernible comprehension of how it works.

The intrusive capabilities of Google, Amazon and Facebook obliterate conventional notions of privacy in ways the Gestapo and Stasi barely dreamt was possible. The shift elicits hardly a murmur of dissent. As Tim Wu, a professor of law at Columbia University, has said: Consumers on the whole seem content to bear a little totalitarianism for convenience. We never read the terms and conditions before ticking the box that gives consent for our personal data to be used, including for exploitation by political campaigns. That whole area is the proper focus for concern about the sustainability of a liberal democratic order, which still relies on conventions and protocols carried over from an analogue age.

The real threat, then, comes less from fascistic doctrines that explicitly repudiate liberalism than from the loss of a common public frame of reference in which ideas of any kind can be civilly debated. It is a crisis that worries even the habitually optimistic Obama: If we do not have the capacity to distinguish whats true from whats false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesnt work, he said recentlyand by definition our democracy doesnt work. Trump did not plot to abolish political opposition. It was the digital engine of radicalisation and the corrosion of a shared vocabulary of truth that weakened the constitutional order and made it vulnerable to Trumpism.

None of this is to diminish the threat of nationalist populism, or any far-left equivalent. But it is also important not to mistake shallow clickbait totalitarianism for the real thing. The fear of repeating old horrors can be perversely comforting because it implies we will know the enemy when we see it. We make a fancy-dress monster of 20th-century atrocities to frighten ourselves into vigilance, but also to reassure ourselves that vigilance works. The danger is that we scour the wrong horizon, looking in the rearview mirror for an old threat to return without exercising enough imagination about how a new form of dictatorship could evolve. It would work with the libertarian current of the digital culture. It would not seize democratic institutions by military force, but wash away their foundations with the acid of cynicism. It would not advertise itself with crass demagogy like Trump; his cartoonish fascism made the danger explicit to liberals. It made him easier to resist. A slicker, more insidious iteration could be more successful.

History is a vital guide to what can go wrong, but it is not a forecasting tool. It is right to listen out for echoes of the old fascism in modern America, not because the old fascism is on the way back but because the nature of the beast shows itself in the difference between then and now. History is not repeating, but it can warn us that something we havent understood is going on. We never fall into the same abyss twice, writes the French novelist Eric Vuillard in Order of the Day, an account of Europes descent into darkness in the 1930s. But we fall in the same way, in a mixture of ridicule and dread.

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You have misunderstood the threat to liberal democracy - Prospect

Romanians voted in parliamentary elections on Sunday, with the governing pro-European liberals expected to win despite criticism for their handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

More than 18 million Romanians are eligible to take part in the vote, which has been organised to take in the now familiar virus safety measures of social distancing, mask-wearing and hand disinfectant.

Polling stations abroad have been open since Saturday, with more than 120,000 expatriate Romanians having cast a ballot by midday on Sunday, according to the electoral authority.

Romania is one of the poorest countries in the EU and four million of its citizens have left in recent years to seek better lives elsewhere, in particular in Western EU member states.

In a region where populists and nationalists have recently gained ground, liberal Prime Minister Ludovic Orban has won support by pledging to modernise Romania and keep it on a "pro-European" path.

Orban has been running a minority government for the past year.

A recent opinion poll published by the IMAS institute showed his National Liberal Party (PNL) garnering 28 percent of the vote, ahead of the main opposition Social Democratic Party (PSD) at 23 percent.

The recently-formed centre-right alliance USR-Plus are forecast to win 18 percent, which would bolster their growing influence in Romanian politics.

- Trust and hope -

Both the virus and widespread disillusionment with politics are expected to weigh on turnout, which stood at 11 percent at midday, as opposed to 12.5 percent at the same time during the last such election in 2016.

Polling stations opened at 7:00 am (0500 GMT) and are scheduled to close at 9:00 pm (1900 GMT), when an exit poll will be published by the local media.

The first official results are expected later in the evening.

After having voted in a Bucharest school, 63-year-old retired electrician Gheorghe Preda said he had "no hope" of change and criticised both big parties "who have been taking turns in power for 30 years and make lots of promises during the campaign, but forget them afterwards".

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But 104-year-old philosopher Mihai Sora, who won the admiration of many Romanians for doggedly turning out for hours during anti-corruption protests in recent years, said staying away from the polls was not an option.

"I voted with trust and hope, in thinking of my country and the future of its people," he wrote in a Facebook post.

Adina Ionescu, 42, was watching her two daughters enjoy themselves on an open-air ice rink before heading to cast her vote later.

She had received some chocolate for her traditional St. Nicholas' Day present and was hoping for another gift at the close of the polls: "A government of young people, which cares about the environment and about Romanians' welfare".

- Naughty or nice? -

The PNL have the advantage of being supported by President Klaus Iohannis, who has brushed aside criticism that he is disrespecting his constitutional role by campaigning for the liberals.

Orban said after casting his vote that "it's up to Romanians today to determine the path that the country will take".

"As for me, I voted for a dynamic, modern Romania, confident in its abilities and respected on the international stage," he added.

The left-wing PSD is the heir to the former Communist Party and has dominated Romanian politics over the past 30 years.

It won by a landslide in the previous election in 2016, but its years in power were marked by massive anti-corruption protests and spats with Brussels over controversial judicial reforms.

The new head of the PSD, Marcel Ciolacu, called on Romanians "to vote in the spirit of the St Nicholas' Day holiday, where those who've been good get treats whereas the others get a smack".

Ciolacu said he hoped that the outcome of the elections would lead to "a plan to get out of the pandemic and the economic crisis".

The PSD has expressed opposition to some of the current anti-virus measures, although it has itself been criticised for lack of clarity in its own plan to combat the virus.

Orban's government has said it will not reinstitute a full lockdown like the one imposed in the spring, but epidemiologists fear there may be an explosion of cases in the weeks to come.

mr-ii/jsk/spm

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Romanians head to polls in shadow of pandemic - Yahoo News