The left is accused of authoritarianism – but it's the right that gets away with it
For a wearyingly long time now, one of the right’s favourite tactics against the left has been to accuse it of planning a police state. From Winston Churchill’s 1945 claim that a Labour government would need “some form of Gestapo” to last year’s warnings in the Tory press that Jeremy Corbyn would turn Britain into a version of Venezuela, rightwing journalists and politicians have used the spectre of authoritarianism to make the left seem sinister and foreign.
The tactic is sometimes still effective. In this month’s US election, Donald Trump won the key state of Florida in part by persuading Hispanic immigrants that Joe Biden, a famously pragmatic Democrat, would instead form an intolerant leftwing government. “I voted for Trump to prevent the United States from resembling countries like Cuba,” Jose Edgardo Gomez told the Miami Herald. “We want the United States to continue being free and to continue having a true democracy … Many Americans don’t understand the threats that socialism poses.”
The fact that no western democracy has ever been turned into a police state by the left hasn’t completely neutralised this argument. Because there have been so few elected socialist governments in the west, and even fewer that have enacted much of their programmes, the left hasn’t had many opportunities to prove that it’s not interested in ruling by authoritarian methods. Instead, the allegation has lingered.
On rightwing websites such as Spiked and Guido Fawkes, which often provide anti-Labour attack lines to the Tory press and politicians, Keir Starmer is already being described as an authoritarian, despite his history as a human rights lawyer. No doubt tabloid picture researchers are scouring the archives for any photos of him wearing a Russian hat. Corbyn had to waste some of his leadership denying that his favourite cap was a tribute to Lenin’s; the Times told readers he rode a “Chairman
Mao-style bicycle”. Besides smearing the left and putting it on the defensive, these red scares have another important but less noticed effect. They serve as a political distraction.
Over the past 40 years, while the right has continued to warn about hypothetical leftwing dictatorships in the west, actual authoritarianism has become a growing feature of rightwing government in Britain and the US. The change has been incomplete and gradual. Authoritarianism is often a tendency, an official inclination, rather than an absolute political state. And this autocratic turn has gone largely undeclared: countries that won the second world war and the cold war like to think they have no time for despots. But the outcome has been a great strengthening of government against the governed.
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher politicised the police as strike-breakers, and demonised her opponents as “the enemy within”. In the 2000s, the George W Bush administration argued that the president’s powers should be almost unlimited, and established the brutal detention camp at Guantánamo. Both premiers were criticised for their draconian tendencies, but both were comfortably re-elected, unrepentant.
Yet even Bush has been shocked by the Trump presidency. Donald Trump’s intolerance of press criticism and peaceful protest, threats to jail political opponents, and contempt for the electoral process have arguably made the United States more of an autocracy than a democracy. Meanwhile, similar impulses have been at work in Boris Johnson’s premiership, with its illegal suspension of parliament, illegal Brexit legislation and fury at the few remaining checks on its authority, such as “activist lawyers”.
As with Bush and Thatcher, the breaking of democratic norms by Trump and Johnson has been accepted and sometimes welcomed by many voters. Over 10m more people chose Trump this month than at the 2016 election. Last year, Johnson won the first big Tory majority since 1987.
In increasingly impatient, divided societies, frustration with the compromises and deadlocks produced by previous, more consensual governments has left voters open to more aggressive alternatives. Shortly before the 2019 election, a prophetic survey by the Hansard Society found that 54% of Britons felt the country “needs a strong ruler willing to break the rules”, and 42% believed that Britain’s problems could be dealt with better “if the government didn’t have to worry so much about votes in parliament”.
Even people appalled by the transgressions of Trump and Johnson can be reluctant to consider their implications. For the first few days after this month’s US election, Trump’s refusal to concede defeat was widely seen as just a tantrum – rather than a rejection of democracy and, in effect, a demand to head a one-party state. If you’ve grown up with the idea that the US is a strong democracy, or that British prime ministers respect the law, it’s frightening to face up to the possibility that neither may be the case.
It may also be frightening to realise that the Anglo-American right has a double standard on authoritarian governments. That double standard used to be applied mainly to other countries. During the 1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick, an influential adviser to the Republican president Ronald Reagan, argued that rightwing police states were “less repressive” than leftwing, “totalitarian” ones, and should be supported by the US when there were, from a conservative perspective, no better alternatives. At the time, the consequences of her thinking were felt by people living under rightwing foreign dictatorships, from the Philippines to Argentina, that the US helped sustain in power. But with the Trump presidency you could say that a version of her doctrine has been applied at home.
The US and Britain’s authoritarian experiments may now be coming to an end. The sacked Dominic Cummings was the source of much of the Johnson government’s autocratic thinking. Trump, for all his manoeuvring, will almost certainly have to step down when Joe Biden is inaugurated in January. The democratic and constitutional pressures against him staying on are probably too great.
Yet the conditions remain that made the experiments possible. In the US, after Trump’s attacks on the election, many voters are disillusioned with democracy. And the ground has been prepared for his party to refuse to accept future electoral outcomes it doesn’t like – possibly starting with January’s crucial Senate races in Georgia.In Britain, the government still contains deeply illiberal figures, such as the home secretary, Priti Patel. And Johnson himself, like Trump, has a dislike of being held accountable that’s so strong, he’s arguably not a democratic politician in any sense beyond the winning of elections. As with Trump, the fact that he lacks the focus and diligence to be a dictator is not that reassuring. A more functional rightwing strongman could come along.
And the scale of what has already happened during Trump and Johnson’s premierships shouldn’t be played down, as just another stage in conservatism’s evolution. In two of the world’s supposedly most stable political systems, the right have bent democracy out of shape. In future, it would be good to have a bit less self-righteous talk from them about dictatorships of the left.
• Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist