From Slate: Never one to allow harrowing events to upstage him or to let propriety stand in the way of his sales pitch, Donald J. Trump cheered every twist and turn in London, Nice, and Ankara from the sidelines. When Brits voted to Brexit, Trump congratulated them on taking “their country back,” promising “to do the exact same thing on Election Day 2016 here in the United States.” When he heard of the terror attack in Nice, he saw, first and foremost, an opportunity to drive home his opposition to Muslim immigration. “When will we learn?” he tweeted that Thursday night. “It’s only getting worse.” Even the coup in Turkey became “further demonstration of the failures of Obama-Clinton. You just have to look,” he said at a Saturday press conference announcing Mike Pence as his running mate, “every single thing they’ve touched has turned to horrible, horrible death-defying problems.”
Trump’s case is straightforward: The challenges facing America are momentous. But they were brought about by incompetence, corruption, or false loyalties. And so they can easily be solved once a strong, incorruptible, patriotic leader—a leader just like Trump—takes power. He, and only he, is the solution to the “death-defying problems” that shaped this terrible week.
It is this providential fusion of the people and their leader—the belief that collective deliverance from a dark world can only come from a pure, unadulterated conduit for the people’s voice—that defines the core of his appeal. And it is his closely related inability to contemplate that he may at times be mistaken, or that there may be legitimate conflicts of interest in a democracy, or that the power of the presidency needs to be checked by other institutions, that makes him so dangerous…
Across the affluent, established democracies of North America and Western Europe, the last years have witnessed a meteoric rise of figures who may not be quite so brash or garish as Trump and yet bear a striking resemblance to him: Marine Le Pen in France, Frauke Petry in Germany, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and many of the leading Brexiteers in the United Kingdom. They too harness a new level of anger that is quite unlike anything liberal democracies have witnessed in a half-century. They too promise to stand up for ordinary people, to do away with a corrupt political elite, and to put the ethnic and religious minorities who are now (supposedly) being favored in their rightful (subordinate) place. They, too, are willing to do away with liberal political institutions like an independent judiciary or a free, robust press so long as those stand in the way of the people’s will. Together, they are building a new type of political regime that is slowly coming into its own: illiberal democracy.
Critics often attack Trump, Le Pen, and their cohort for being undemocratic. But that is to misunderstand both their priorities and the reasons for their appeal. For the most part, their belief in the will of the people is real. Their primary objection to the status quo is, quite simply, that institutional roadblocks like independent courts or norms like a “politically correct” concern for the rights of minorities stop the system from channeling the people’s righteous anger into public policy. What they promise, then, is not to move away from popular rule but rather to strip it of its artificial, liberal guise—all the while embodying the only true version of the people’s will.
Places like Hungary and Poland show what this might mean in practice. Once celebrated as examples of successful democratic transition, these countries are now at the forefront of the movement toward illiberal democracy. After Viktor Orbán took power in Budapest six years ago, his Fidesz party undermined the country’s constitutional court, stacked government institutions like the electoral commission with party loyalists, and turned the most important media outlets into uncritical propaganda machines. Over the course of the past year, Poland’s Law and Justice party has accomplished much the same feat in a fraction of the time. In both places, key liberal rights are honored more in the breach than the observance.
Political elites are understandably terrified by the speed with which illiberal democracy is coming into its own. But if the populists are pushing for a political system that does away with one half of liberal democracy, the truth is that a large number of establishment politicians are increasingly tempted to embrace a system that does away with the other half. Where Trump and Le Pen seek to establish an illiberal democracy, a lot of sensible centrists are quietly seeking their salvation in what I call “undemocratic liberalism.” If the people want to violate the rights of unloved minorities, setting up the prospect of democracy without rights, the political establishment is increasingly insulating itself from the people’s demands, opting for a form of rights without democracy.
