China calls itself a
democratic dictatorship, so it looks like the title’s question is a
very odd one to ask. You can find various indices that measure
countries on a line with dictatorship at one end and democracy at the
other. So how can a country actually be (rather than call itself) a
democratic dictatorship?
Consider Hungary.
Its Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has pledged
to create an illiberal state like Russia or China. Perhaps as a
result, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at a 2015
EU summit dispensed with diplomatic protocol to greet
Orbán with a "Hello, dictator." To further this aim he has
gone about controlling the media and courts either directly or
through placement of allies, with complete
success. Yet he and his party remain popular in part because of the
lethal combination of extreme nationalism, scaremongering about
migrants and antagonism against Muslims and Jews. In addition NGOs
have been attacked, which has led to legal proceedings by the
European Commission. A host of public bodies like its fiscal
council, the central
bank, and the national elections commission, have been
abolished or their independence limited.
Yet Hungary is still
a democracy in the sense of having reasonably genuine elections. As
the opposition is fragmented there is little need to resort to the
kind of tactics used in other democracies, such
as Turkey. When occasionally the opposition does win a local
election, Orbán unleashes
the full might of his nationalist, enemies at the door, enemies
within narrative at them. With almost total control of the media and
civil institutions, he can make life very difficult for the
opposition. He won
his last election with ease. It is an effective model that could
survive for many years.
So would it be
reasonable to call Hungary a democratic dictatorship [1], or is that
just a contradiction in terms? Hungary is no longer a pluralist
democracy, by which I mean there are no independent centres of power.
But there are still elections, which are not a complete fiction. But
you cannot call elections where one side completely controls the
media fair. The acid test would be if a unified opposition under a
credible leader ever did appear whether he would ever be allowed to
win.
---------------
“American media should study Hungary’s record,” Newt Gingrich
declared
after a visit to Hungary. He was talking about the 13ft-high
razor-wire border fence that Orban erected against the influx of
“foreigners”, but few can doubt that Trump would like to emulate
Orbán in other ways. He already has what is effectively a state TV
station, the widely watched Fox News. His attacks on the independent
press are relentless. He does not yet control the media in the same
way as Orbán does, but he gets his apologists on CNN and other
stations as these stations try and keep ‘balanced’.
Having Fox on his side is crucial in his ability to control the
Republicans in Congress. Speak out and you risk losing your seat in a
primary election against a Trump loyalist. The few who do speak out
tend to be retiring from politics. The democratic norms of politics
that have stood for decades in the US have gone out of the window. He
breaks the norms because he knows
no one will stop him. Other countries that are able to have long
recognised that the way to get foreign policy favours is to grant
some business perk to him or his family. (We see similar corruption
in Hungary.)
He may not control the courts to the extent that Orban does, but he
is not miles away. Soon he, or at least his party, will get a
majority on the supreme court. He has pardoned whoever he likes at
his whim. The Republican party have retained a majority in the House
in part because of gerrymandering, and the supreme court allows
this to continue. Orbán fights a long but successful battle to close
down a university in Budapest, while Trump’s climate change denying
appointees try to close down scientific research in the US. (On the
latter, see this excellent essay
from Carl Zimmer HT Tim Harford.)
Trump makes no
secret of his admiration for dictators. In a way it does not really
matter if Putin has ‘something on him’ in the form of a tape of
whatever, as Trump admires Putin anyway as a strong man leading his
nation. His natural enemy is Europe: hence his attack on Merkel and
his constant and incorrect references to rising crime as a cost of
immigration in Europe.
---------------
Another way of
looking at this is to consider human rights and their suppression.
Hungary has just passed
a law making it illegal to provide legal help to undocumented
immigrants seeking asylum, as part of a set of bills incredibly
called ‘Stop Soros’. George Soros has become Orbán’s bogeyman.
Trump separates the children of illegal immigrants from their
families. As Fintan O’Toole says,
this has not been a ‘mistake’ by Trump, but a trial run
“to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of
acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They
have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by
building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group”
Or to deal with an infestation of immigrants, as Trump said recently.
And O’Toole thinks the experiment was a success: the base were
happy, and Fox news talked about child actors pretending to cry.
Italy’s new interior minister calls for a “mass cleansing” of
migrants from “entire parts” of the country,
street by street.
---------------
Arguments that
democracy is still safe in the US seem rather naive. A Washington
Post piece
from just a year ago says there are four barriers to the US becoming
a ‘populist’ state. The four are the independence of congress and
the judiciary, being restrained by the Republican party, limited
patronage powers, and the absence of any crisis. The first two have
not done too well and the last two do not seem to matter. Tyler Cowan
thinks
the US government is just too large and complex for one man or group
to take control. He is correct insofar as Mueller has been allowed to
continue. But there is little chance
of Trump being impeached by this Republican party. Whether Mueller is
allowed to continue depends a lot on whether he goes after Trump
family members, and Mueller probably understands that. The important
point is that Trump does not need to control every part of government
to control what happens.
Trump certainly acts
like a dictator would act. The barriers to Trump becoming an Orbán
type figure are that his supporters do not control most of the media,
and he faces a single and organised opposition party. These are the
two threads by which this pluralist democracy hangs. You might think
it an exaggeration to call these two only threads, and I hope we will
see that it is in the midterms, but there are worrying signs in the
US and elsewhere that popular support for democracy is falling, as
documented by Yascha Mounk in a book reviewed here.
The fact that Trump could be elected and then supported in the first
place by one of the two main political parties in the US is a clear
sign that all is not well with US democracy. Those, like Paul
Krugman, who have for a long time appeared ‘shrill’ about what
was happening to the Republican party have been fully justified in
their fears.
The rise of the far
right and democratic dictatorships in the West have happen before, of
course. It is no coincidence that in the 1930s and now economies were
scarred by deep recessions followed by bad policy. That may be
important in part because it fosters intolerance of ‘outsiders’,
particularly immigrants, which parties of both the far right and
unfortunately the centre right have exploited. (In the UK, and also
in Hungary and Poland, the EU has also become an outsider.) Since
perhaps Nixon, the Republicans have exploited race: more explicitly
and vigorously as time has gone on. Parties of the right do this in
part because their backers want to avoid redistribution being used as
a way of mitigating the impact of bad economic times, and focusing on
social conservatism can capture
voters who would otherwise vote left on economic issues. I have
described both the bad policies (austerity and fears about
immigration) as forms of deceit (using debt as a cover for reducing
the state and setting targets for immigration without intending to
meet them), and collectively as neoliberal overreach.
---------------
If the demonisation
of immigrants is the common thread in these moves towards democratic
dictatorships, then it becomes important to resist the early stages
of this process. One lesson of the experience across countries is
that popular concern is not primarily about numbers. It is not the
reaction of citizens worried about being overwhelmed by immigrants.
Less than 5% of the population in Hungary are immigrants: 3% if you
count only immigrants from outside the EU. Nor is it true that
attitudes to immigration are always going to be hostile. This year
for the first time in a decade more people in the US think
legal immigration should be increased rather than decreased.
But this idea is
difficult to get across. In the UK for example it is true that rising
concern about immigration follows rising numbers, but it follows
increased newspaper coverage even more closely, and which newspapers
people read is the best explainer of immigration concern. [2] With a
few important exceptions the concern is generally about immigration
‘in the country’ rather than locally. In the UK stoking fear
about immigration may not as yet have created the conditions for a
democratic dictatorship, but it has spawned a ‘hostile environment’
policy that led people to be locked
up and deported illegally, and of course it was
critical in forcing the country make one of its biggest policy errors
for a generation.
I have heard people
say that we have to have Brexit because otherwise half the country
will feel betrayed (as opposed to the other half already feeling
that). But in reality the opposite is true. Xenophobia becomes strong
when economic conditions are bad, and Brexit will make them worse.
Brexiters are going to feel betrayed anyway when they realised they
have been sold snake oil. If we are to avoid a self reinforcing cycle
of economic and political decline, we must give priority to the
economy and stop scapegoating immigrants for each policy failure.
[1] Whether the term
dictatorship is more accurate than one party state or the term
plutocracy that I have used before
is interesting, but not I think critical for the discussion here.
[2] Let me try and
be clear what I mean by immigration concern not being about numbers.
Of course large numbers of immigrants make it easier for newspapers
to talk about ‘floods’ and ‘being overwhelmed’. The mistake
is to think that if only the numbers could be reduced somewhat, the
concern would disappear. It will not because it is not in the
interests of those whipping up concern for that to happen. Any
attempt to appease the concern by, for example, vetting patients in
A&E only gives credibility to the idea that immigrants are
responsible for reduced access to the NHS: in reality the opposite is
true.
