Authoritarianism and How to Counter It

Bill Jordan

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030172107
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030172114
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was assumed that liberal democracies would flourish worldwide. Instead, today authoritarian leaders are gaining power – from Trump's US and Bolsonaro's Brazil to Orban's Hungary – while Russia and China have turned back towards their old, autocratic traditions. This book examines the origins and implications of this shift, and focusses especially on the longstanding coercion of poor people. As industrial employment, and now also many service jobs, are being replaced through technological innovations, state-subsidised, low-paid, insecure work is being enforced through regimes of benefits cuts and sanctions. Authoritarians are exploiting the divisions in the working class that this creates to stoke resentment against immigrants and poor people. The author identifies new social movements and policies (notably the Universal Basic Income) which could counter these dangers.

© The Author(s) 2020

Bill JordanAuthoritarianism and How to Counter Ithttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17211-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Bill Jordan¹

(1)

Honorary Professor of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK

Bill Jordan

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

Political philosophers since Machiavelli and Hobbes have tried to refute their suggestion that authoritarianism is the default setting for modern polities. In their very different ways, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Adam Smith, Bentham, J.S. Mill, Karl Marx, J.M. Keynes and Beveridge, along with a succession of Continental political philosophers, all sought to show how freedom and democracy could establish themselves through enduring institutions. Yet today it seems that new authoritarian leaders are gaining power all over the world, while both Russia and China have turned back towards their autocratic traditions. This book examines the origins of this tendency.

Keywords

AuthoritarianismDemocracyInstitutions

End Abstract

Capitalism’s supporters have always claimed that it promotes freedom. When Milton Friedman launched the movement for globalisation and the privatisation of the public infrastructure with his There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch in 1975, his proposals were made in the name of liberty. Although it soon became apparent that there was a heavy price, in terms of environmental degradation, increased inequality and the neglect of the commons, to be paid for these developments, it was still argued that, when set against the universal gains in freedom that this revolution produced, these were costs worth paying.

Gradually, other negative outcomes—the financial crash, and in its wake the stagnation of industrial productivity and earnings—showed that (for the ‘developed’ economies) these down-sides were even more extensive. But few would have predicted the latest phase in these processes, the widespread emergence of authoritarian political regimes.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the process of political reconstruction in Western Europe was focussed on avoiding a recurrence of authoritarianism. The oppressive and often mass-murdering rule by small groups of right- and left-wing radicals had scarred the continent’s interwar history, and led to that conflict. Under the leadership of the United States and United Kingdom, the victorious allies resisted communist movements in countries such as Greece and Italy, and supported what were claimed to be new regimes for democratic freedom and equality.

Elsewhere in the world, of course, authoritarian rule continued to flourish—notably in Latin America, and in the colonial regimes of these same European powers. As a result, the leadership of the Soviet Union, held up by the West as the epitome of authoritarianism, was regularly supporting resistance movements by those very colonial peoples against their imperialist overlords. From Algeria to Indo-China, the Cold War found expression in the struggle against Western rulers and their armies.

What followed was a shifting scene, as post-colonial liberation movements often slid into dictatorships, especially on the African continent. But a turning point seemed to have been reached with the collapse of the Soviet satellite regimes in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989, and eventually of the USSR itself. Yet market economies did not—as hoped by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—always lead to liberal democracies, and the Arab Spring did not end authoritarianism in North Africa and the Middle East. Instead, from Egypt to Poland and Hungary, varieties of authoritarianism have again risen to power.

Now suddenly authoritarian politics has become prevalent all over the world. Although there have been many variants, from overt fascism to belligerent Trumpism, and from Putin’s post-Stalinism to the Chinese one-party state, in every continent regimes have evolved towards illiberal policies, with the support of large segments of their working-class constituencies.

On a single day, 28th October, 2018, in two very distant parts of the world, this was clearly evident. In Brazil, a right-wing presidential candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, convincingly defeated his rival from the Workers’ Party, which had ruled the country for over 20 years. He vowed to imprison or exile his opponent, repeal much of the legislation that had raised the living standards of poor citizens, cut taxes and crack down on crime. In his campaign, while denouncing corruption he had also used racist, sexist and homophobic comments, for which he refused to apologise. He played down the excesses of Brazil’s post-war dictatorships, but defined himself in opposition to the regime in Cuba.

On the same day, state elections in Hesse, Germany—in many ways the large European nation that had proved most resistant to the rise of authoritarianism—revealed an 8 per cent rise in support for the Greens, but an almost equal increase for the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), the far-right party. The corresponding declines in votes for the Chancellor’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and especially the Socialist PSD, threatened the survival of Angela Merkel’s coalition government. It also signalled the possible long-term polarisation of European politics, following a decline in established conservative and social democratic parties all over the continent.

Finally, in the USA a far-right gunman killed eleven of the congregation in a synagogue, and injured another 16, in Pittsburgh on the same day. This followed on from the receipt of parcels containing pipe-bombs by staff of former president Barack Obama, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and several other leading Democrat political figures, the previous week. A man who had posted violent right-wing on-line threats was arrested two days before the gun attack. President Trump belatedly pleaded for reason and compromise in US politics, in marked contrast with his tone in the presidential election, and his authoritarian style of leadership.

Elsewhere, political developments were more ambiguous and confusing. In France, the collapse of the traditional conservative and socialist parties, and the rise of Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche, was followed by mass demonstrations by the Gilets Jaunes, apparently a movement of workers whose employment security and living standards were threatened by increased fuel duties. And in the UK, the referendum vote to leave the European Union triggered a series of chaotic parliamentary schisms which some commentators have described as the most bitter since the seventeenth-century English Civil War.

In other words, even where authoritarian regimes have not taken power, democratic politics has been disrupted and beset by conflicts, with traditional parties weakened and divided. Far from sustaining liberty and the rule of law, the economics of global markets seems to have led to their subversion, in every part of the world. Capitalism has not only been seen to be compatible with authoritarianism; it appears to have promoted it.

The Authority of the State

One possible conclusion from this would be that, outside of hunter-gatherer societies living in simple equality, the system of authority created in states inevitably involves laws, enforcement and punishment—it is simply a matter of degree. Both ownership of property and the competition that is an essential feature of markets imply the threat of sanctions against those who use force or fraud in pursuit of their economic interests. The whole of European political philosophy since Machiavelli, and British political philosophy since Hobbes, is simply a response to the brilliant and ruthless expositions of the authoritarian implications of modernity set out by those two authors.

Machiavelli was, after all, attempting to show how a ruler might steer a state back from a situation where an authoritarian tyrant had seized power to one in which the people valued and upheld freedom. He thought there was an inevitable alternation between good and bad authority, because of competition between individuals and groups. A relatively public-spirited regime would inevitably give rise to a new generation which, ‘refusing to content themselves with equality among citizens, but turning to avarice, to ambition, to violence against women, caused a government of the best men to become a government by the few, without having any regard to civil rights’ (1519, Ch. 2, p. 198).

For Hobbes, living in a century of religious and civil wars, people’s desire for security and the satisfaction of their wants led them to pursue ‘a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death’ (1651, XI, p. 64). In an environment of commerce and industry, such as England, the sovereign must overawe subjects, or there would be ‘continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, nasty, brutish and short’ (XIII, p. 8). Although they preserved their na...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The New Authoritarianism
• 3. A Coercive State
• 4. Mobility and Migration
• 5. Authoritarianism and Militarism
• 6. Inclusion and Democracy
• 7. Credit and Debt
• 8. Towards Greater Sustainability
• 9. Freedom and Justice for All
• 10. Conclusions
• Back Matter