RISE OF THE STRONGMAN
Rights, liberty under growing threat
For a fleeting moment in the spring of 2011, democrats rejoiced as citizens in the Arab world rose up against oppressive regimes.
“Strategies of repression and strategies of diversion will not work anymore,” U.S. President Barack Obama declared that May, hailing the “shouts of human dignity” in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen. If democracy could gain a foothold in a region that had resisted it for so long, the possibilities appeared endless.
Before the year was out, there were already signs of a slide back into a metaphorical winter. Today, with the exception of Tunisia, the nations looked to with optimism have returned to their authoritarian ways. Far from the hoped-for democratic wave, authoritarian regimes are becoming more oppressive, and the world is seeing a rise of strongmen leaders in such countries as Turkey, Philippines, Venezuela and Hungary, where it was thought democracy was taking hold.
And there are fears the trend will only worsen.
Freedom House, a U.S.-based non-government organization that researches democracy and human rights, reported that in 2016, for the 11th straight year, more countries suffered declines in political rights and civil liberties than experienced gains. The organization’s annual Freedom in the World report detailed gains by populist and nationalist forces in democratic states and brazen aggression by authoritarian powers in 2016.
“All of these developments point to a growing danger that the international order of the past quarter-century — rooted in the principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law — will give way to a world in which individual leaders and nations pursue their own narrow interests without meaningful constraints, and without regard for the shared benefits of global peace, freedom, and prosperity,” the authors wrote.
Turkey, Venezuela and Hungary were among the countries experiencing the sharpest declines in the Freedom House rankings, and recent events suggest their slide is continuing.
In Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, a mass trial began earlier this month of nearly 500 defendants accused of plotting to overthrow the government in a failed coup last year.
A week earlier, journalists from one of the few media outlets critical of the government stood trial on charges of “aiding and abetting terrorist organizations.”
In Venezuela, the security forces of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro have been locking up opposition leaders as part of a crackdown on dissent.
And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban is silencing dissent by penalizing NGOs that receive foreign money and demonizing one of his fiercest critics, the Hungarian-born investor George Soros.
Of course, the actions of these leaders pale when compared to Kim Jong Un of North Korea, a country ranked third worst in the world by Freedom House, ahead of just Syria and Tibet.
“North Korea is a single-party state led by a dynastic totalitarian dictatorship,” the Freedom House report says.
WHILE THE WEST WORKS OUT ITS OWN PROBLEMS, DESPOTS AND DICTATORS HAVE A LOT MORE LEVERAGE ... IT’S A PERFECT STORM AGAINST DEMOCRACY RIGHT NOW.
“Surveillance is pervasive, arbitrary arrests and detention are common, and punishments for political offences are severe. The state maintains a system of camps for political prisoners where torture, forced labour, starvation, and other atrocities take place.”
But, unlike such countries as Turkey, Venezuela, Hungary and the Philippines, North Korea was long ago written off as a democratic hope.
The world has never been immune from strongmen, but there are signs that defence mechanisms are eroding. Yascha Mounk, a lecturer on political theory at Harvard University, has studied decades of data from the World Values Surveys, an initiative begun in 1981 to measure beliefs and values. In a paper published last year in the Journal of Democracy, he and Roberto Stefan Foa wrote that people in North America and Europe have become “more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives.”
For example, the proportion of Americans who think it would be a good thing or very good thing for the “army to rule” has risen from one in 16 in 1995, to one in six today. A similar increase has been seen in those who favour “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament and elections.” The trend is most pronounced among people born after 1980.
“Earlier generations have a real sense of what it means not to live in a democracy,” Mounk said in an interview. “They have fought against fascism or have experienced fascism or they have been alive at a time when communism was a real force in the world. When they assess liberal democracy, they assess it in relation to these other systems, and they recognize these other systems are bad.”
He said younger people do not have the same negative experience of alternatives to democracy: “They look at the present reality and they find things in it which they have reason to be pissed off about, like the stagnation of living standards and other things. And so they say, ‘Why not try something new? How bad can things get?’
“That doesn’t mean they will like whatever system will emerge if we do lose liberal democracy, but I think it makes them much more willing to go down a path that might result in democracy’s ultimate demise.”
In a book to be published next spring, The People Versus Democracy, Mounk identifies three factors that are undermining people’s faith in democracy. Living standards for ordinary citizens in the West have stood still since 1985. At the same time, Europe, and to a lesser degree North America, is undergoing a gradual transition “from mono-ethnic and mono-cultural countries to multi-ethnic ones, which part of the population is embracing, but another part is rebelling against.” Finally, the rise of social media has reduced the technological advantage that political, financial and academic elites have over the rest of the population. That levelling can be a godsend to people resisting dictatorship, Mounk said, but in a democracy it “erodes a kind of consensus that made racist speech inappropriate, that insisted on politicians telling the truth to some degree.”
Brian Klaas teaches politics at the London School of Economics and is the author of The Despot’s Accomplice: How the West is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy. He said in an interview that “the sheen has been taken off” Western liberal democracy by its failure to deliver economic results to an increasingly alienated population. And under President Donald Trump, he said, the United States has abdicated its traditional role of pressuring other countries on human rights, press freedom and fair elections.
“While the West works out its own problems, despots and dictators have a lot more leverage and a lot longer leash to behave in totally undemocratic ways without any consequences,” Klaas said. “I think it’s a perfect storm against democracy right now.”
In Turkey, Erdogan’s government has jailed judges in addition to journalists and opposition politicians, and assumed sweeping new powers following a disputed referendum in April. Once seen as a beachhead of secular democracy, Turkey is sliding toward autocracy. But Trump congratulated Erdogan on the referendum that solidified his grip on power, and the Turkish leader visited the White House a month later.
Since his election last year in the Philippines, populist President Rodrigo Duterte has suppressed free speech and declared a war on drugs that has resulted in the extrajudicial killings of thousands of alleged drug dealers. Duterte, a former mayor, boasts of personally killing criminals and last year said he would be happy to “slaughter” millions of drug addicts.
Yet in an April phone call, Trump praised Duterte, telling him he was doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem,” according to a transcript.
Canada’s criticism of countries where democratic rights are being eroded has been more forceful. On Aug. 1, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland denounced the arrest of Venezuelan opposition leaders Antonio Ledezma and Leopoldo Lopez, calling the detention a sign of the Maduro government’s “campaign of repression” and “dictatorial intentions.”
Last month, Freeland spoke out against Turkey’s jailing of politicians, academics, journalists and human rights defenders. “We call on Turkish authorities to respond to current challenges without violating international legal obligations and human rights,” she said.
In May, Canada’s ambassador to Hungary, Isabelle Poupart, expressed Canada’s serious concern about the Orban government’s targeting of Central European University, which was founded by Soros in 1991 and whose rector is former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.
Klaas said Trump’s tolerance, even praise of strongmen, sends a strong signal. “I’ve seen this already in countries where I have worked. They used to try to impress the U.S. and now it’s blatant — they just don’t care. They know they’re not going to get pushback.”
He gave the examples of Madagascar, where the government has tried to appear democratic in the past, but is now clamping down on the opposition, and Thailand, where the ruling junta is squelching dissent and this week charged a prominent journalist with sedition. Trump has invited the leader of the military junta, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha to visit the White House, the first such visit since Thailand’s elected government was overthrown in 2014.
One strongman who has faced criticism from the United States is Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, whom Trump has labelled a “bad man” and an aspiring dictator. “There is a far right and a far left end of populism,” Mounk said. “Venezuela reminds us that the far left variant of populism can also have terrible effects.” The Trump administration recently imposed sanctions on Maduro, freezing any assets he has in the United States and prohibiting Americans from doing business with him. Klaas said Maduro was singled out because he embodies left-wing populism, “which Trump will innately have disdain for.”
In 2009, Marc Hetherington co-wrote the book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, which drew little attention outside political science circles. It argued that the United States had seen a shift among voters with an authoritarian inclination — marked by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. Once more or less split between support of the Republican and Democratic parties, the authoritarians had migrated to the Republicans and were in a position to become an influential force within the party. Then Trump happened, and Hetherington and co-author Jonathan Weiler were seen as clairvoyant.
In an interview, Hetherington, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, said his research does not show any general thirst for authoritarian rule. But it does show that people who value tradition, hierarchy and the status quo are less likely to be bothered when liberal democracy is challenged.
“This is true in the U.S. and it’s also true in Europe,” he said. “There’s a store of people who would go along with certain things. They’re not actively asking to do away with democratic norms. But if the people who are challenging those democratic norms are promising a return to a simpler, more traditional time, then these folks are willing to go along with it.”
A leader hoping to channel those emotions will identify an outside group as a threat, stoking fears. Hetherington finds the current situation troubling, but sees no “outpouring of desire” to shed democratic norms. He pointed to election results this spring in France and Netherlands, where far-right leaders who seemed to be on the rise were defeated.
Harvard’s Mounk said the move away from liberal democracy can be reversed. Elected populists who have subverted their country’s constitutional system — Erdogan, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Hungary’s Orban — have done so only after they were elected to a second term. So, it is important to oppose their re-election before they solidify their powers. In Poland, President Andrzej Duda last month responded to massive street protests by relenting on legislation to bring the judiciary under government control.
But strengthening democracy will ultimately require more fundamental reforms to educate citizens and address a sense of economic disparity and a fraying national fabric. “We have to think about how to create a sense of a nation that is proud and unified in its diversity, standing up against those who want to exclude based on race or religion, but also standing up to those on the left who basically want to say, ‘let’s give up on the nation and just think about identity groups,’ ” Mounk said.
Klaas, who is American, hopes Trump’s bumbling rule will act as a vaccine against authoritarianism. “He might actually protect us from a much savvier authoritarian person who could come later, because all of the tests are strengthening our defences,” he said. “His incompetence is effectively the saving grace of American democracy right now.”
EARLIER GENERATIONS (KNOW) WHAT IT MEANS NOT TO LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY.