‘Extreme polarization can kill democracies’
Maciej Czajkowski, a veteran Polish news producer who is a friend, recently called from Warsaw. Agitated, he pressed me for information about the U.S. presidential election.
“The American presidential election has great consequences for the world,” he said, fearful that President Donald Trump could be re-elected.
Trump’s bigoted rhetoric is admired by the far-right in Poland and other European countries, he said. We discussed his concern that a Trump victory will likely further embolden right-wing extremists, lead to increased nationalist xenophobia, and add fuel to the rising nationalist movements in Europe.
Others in Europe share Czajkowski’s fears about the possibility of Trump’s re-election. A recent poll taken in Germany found that Germans believe Trump poses a greater threat to world peace than the leaders of North Korea, Russia, China, and Iran.
Czajkowski, who is gay, is also worried that a Trump victory will result in an escalation of Poland’s campaign against gays. Poland is a homophobic nation, and its right-wing government is aligned with an anti-gay base, he says.
Trump’s bigotry also has resonance in a homogenous Poland that has a history of anti-Semitism.
Another Polish friend, Michal Bilewicz, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Warsaw, has been approved for a full professorship by his fellow academics, but this promotion requires authorization from the president of Poland who ignores all requests for this authorization. Speculation is that the president is not authorizing the promotion because Bilewicz has been in charge of several studies that show the current extent of Polish anti-Semitism.
In Hungary, academic bodies such as the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have been put under government control to prevent criticism of the nation’s leadership.
During my discussion with Czajkowski, I, too, felt concern about the rise of right-wing nationalism, anti-Semitism, and the erosion of democratic institutions. This concern is very personal. Although most of my family came to the United States from Riga in Latvia at the beginning of the last century, those who did not come here were murdered with 25,000 other Jews in the Rumbula Forest outside Riga, after being forced to dig their own graves.
Like Czajkowski, I am concerned about the danger of a Trump re-election. I am most concerned about the danger it poses for our country. Three books, among others that deal with the forces that threaten and undermine democratic institutions, are must-reads: “On Tyranny” by Timothy Snyder; “Twilight of Democracy” by Anne Applebaum; and “How Democracies Die,” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
One of the arguments advanced by Snyder, a Yale professor, is that the abandonment of facts is the abandonment of freedom. Trump, of course, is notorious for his lies. The Washington Post fact-checker, as of July, counted more than 20,000 Trump lies. Snyder notes that it’s hard to track down all the Trump’s lies because there are so many of them.
Applebaum, a historian who writes a column for The Atlantic and has written three histories of the Soviet Union, observes that many Americans choose questionable sources for their news, noting the difficulty of finding the truth in a storm of lies. More and more people click on the news they want to hear, she says, and these outlets such as Facebook, YouTube, and Google, fortify thinking that’s often not based on truth.
“False, partisan and often deliberately misleading narratives now spread in digital wildfires, cascades of falsehoods that move too fast for fact-checkers to keep up,” Appelbaum writes. People have always had different opinions, she says, but now they have different facts.
As is the case with his lies, Trump is also notorious for a xenophobic nationalism and a divisiveness that sets Americans against one another. Snyder warns that government-fomented xenophobia unites authoritarian nations against imaginary foes. And far-right nationalist leaders foster a polarized world that’s divided into friends and enemies, in which there is no room for a middle position, or common ground.
A key component of democracy is that competing political parties accept one another as legitimate rivals. Trump appears to reject the idea that some of us may be Democrats, some Republicans, and that while we have differing points of view, we’re ultimately all Americans.
Harvard professors Levitsky and Ziblatt see this kind of polarization as having serious consequences for our democratic institutions.
“One thing that is clear from studying the breakdowns of democracies throughout history is that extreme polarization can kill democracies,” they write.
By electing Trump in 2016, it appears we opened the door to the death of our democracy. Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has been consistently undermining our democratic institutions and moving us closer and closer toward autocratic rule.
I am as agitated as my Polish friend Maciej about the possibility of Trump’s re-election. That it would encourage right-wing nationalist movements in Europe is very troubling. But it’s even more disturbing to me, as an American, to think that this nationalist trend that Trump champions would likely make his re-election the end of America as we’ve known it, as we love it.
A recent poll taken in Germany found that Germans believe Trump poses a greater threat to world peace than the leaders of North Korea, Russia, China, and Iran.