The year was 1848. The French had just toppled their monarchy – not for the first time – and had reestablished a constitutional republic; also not for the first time, hence it was known as the Second Republic.
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A presidential election followed. In a stunning landslide, it was won by one Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the famous conqueror Napoleon. This, despite the fact that it was an open secret that he would eventually make himself sole ruler, like his uncle. He did; he first made himself dictator, and then Emperor, a position he would hold until 1870.
And you are no doubt wondering: Who cares?
Glad you asked. Here is why this event matters; indeed, why it is a warning. The French opted to follow a single Leader. Today, we are seeing political movements across the globe in which people put their hopes and trust in a single leader. Russia, America, the Philippines, Hungary, India, Israel, France, Italy – and that is only the beginning of the list. This phenomenon crosses national, cultural, and geographic lines. In other words, we have a global trend toward authoritarian rule.
Why is this happening? What does history teach us about such trends?
Basically, it’s quite simple. People turn toward such a leader when they are strongly dissatisfied with the present situation. This dissatisfaction may be merely uncertainty or unhappiness, or outright rage and frustration. But there has to be something else, namely a loss of faith. That loss of faith can be in a country’s institutions or traditional ideologies and political beliefs. There has to be an attitude that the old beliefs are no longer relevant and the existing institutions are incapable, whether because of incompetence or corruption, of saving the country.
In modern history, such movements and leaders tend to emerge from the Right. There have been plenty of Left-wing dictators, but they are more likely to come to power through different routes. Joseph Stalin did not become dictator of the Soviet Union by leading a mass movement but rather through bureaucratic politics and infiltrating his allies into all corners of the already-authoritarian ruling system, the Bolshevik (Communist) party.
So, why do these movements come from the Right? Because in response to dissatisfaction with the present, one of the most powerful appeals to make is the call of the past; whether this “past” is real or mythical does not matter. The power of the call is the appeal of former glory. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte did not need a slogan like Make France Great Again, because his name was really all that was necessary; he awakened popular memories of when French armies were running all over Europe, from Moscow to Madrid. (Somehow the phenomenal cost in lives and fortune, not to mention ultimate defeat, were not remembered as much.)
Occasionally the memory of the past by a leader got a little weird, such as when Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy, openly dreamed of recreating the Roman Empire.
Once again, who cares?
Movements focused on a single leader inevitably become anti-democratic and anti-constitutional. They have to. If you place your faith in a single leader, then democracy becomes increasingly unnecessary; you may wish to use it to get your leader into power, but you certainly don’t want to give the other side the chance to remove the leader. Also, legal restrictions such as constitutions can become annoying speed bumps that stand in the way of the vision of the leader. Democracy and constitutional government require compromise, and never has a leader of such a movement even pretended to be interested in compromise. In extreme cases, the leader becomes a kind of secular savior. And not always just secular; the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire was closely connected to uncertainty and loss of faith in Rome in the second century A.D.
Can the United States avoid this fate? Our most powerful barrier is the faith that this country has had in its Constitution. This is what saved America during the economic crisis known as the Great Depression. To understand what happened, let’s compare America and Germany. The Great Depression affected the two countries about equally. Industrial production in both fell 47% and unemployment soared to over 25%. Yet the political results were astoundingly different. In America, power simply shifted from the Republicans to the Democrats. A Democratic president was sworn in. The only change in the Constitution was the abolition of Prohibition.
In Germany, by 1932, HALF of the voters were choosing parties sworn to overthrow the established order; namely, the Nazis and the Communists. The Nazis and Adolf Hitler took power in Germany at the same time that Franklin D. Roosevelt became president here. Why the difference? Even in the throes of economic disaster, Americans were not tempted by extreme movements of either stripe. On the other hand, Germans were not fond of their constitutional republic, which existed mainly because of the country’s defeat in World War I, and therefore the German electorate was far more vulnerable to the appeals of radical movements, the larger of which was headed by the ultimate Leader.
The Communists in Germany came to regret having effectively helped the Nazis cripple the German republic. (The Communists were the first to be shipped to concentration camps.) There is a strange parallel to this happening in America. The most dangerous attacks on the Constitution do not come from the Right, 1/6 notwithstanding.
It is from the Left that the Constitution is being undermined by attacks on its authors, either by focusing on the fact that many were slave owners, or that they are just a bunch of dead white men from many years ago, etc. Couple this with the lack of civics education at both the high school and the college level, and you have an undermining of public appreciation of the Constitution that increases the vulnerability of the rights contained in that document. Storming the Capitol can be dealt with by the ordinary legal processes, and so far it has been; eating away at the foundation is far more insidious. What is more dangerous to your house – a coyote howling at the front door, or a termite colony moving in underneath?
