Critics of Donald Trump and his followers commonly make one big mistake: the idea that the trends we are seeing in America are uniquely ours and the rest of the world is somehow immune (and vice versa).
We Americans stress our uniqueness, which is mostly fair but reminds me of that famous saying: “You’re Unique, Just Like Everybody Else.” The reality is that from our very founding there have been many parallels between us and “them.”
As a proud member of the Sons of the American Revolution, I can tell you that we consciously borrowed many ideas from France and England, not to mention money from Holland, to establish this country. We remixed all that to create a unique country, but then and now worldwide trends come hereand we send ours abroad as well. At present, right-leaning authoritarian leaders have reached power in India, America, Italy, Hungary, and Russia, among others, while others’ parties are in first place in France and the Netherlands. Britain may yet follow. China has become more authoritarian, although not via democratic means.
Throughout history, there have been times when people have yearned for a strong leader to solve problems. Whether this is good or bad is not my point here; rather, it happens. It is worth exploring why. I’m going to suggest that four things come together.
The first and maybe the most important factor is that people lose confidence in their existing institutions such as schools, universities, legislatures, businesses, and many others. This can lead to people feeling ignored or disconnected from the decision-making processes. People then become frustrated and angry.
So, in this mood, people may become more amenable to the siren call of a powerful leader who promises to rectify the problems – often combining this with an assurance that there are certain elites who need to be punished for leading the country in the wrong direction.
This tendency can be harmless or harmful; it depends on the extent to which people are willing to follow a leader, or whether that leader is able to create a dictatorship. On the one hand, you might have someone like Franklin Roosevelt, elected president four times and immensely powerful. He undoubtedly had quite a following – but there were limits. Roosevelt wanted to “pack” the Supreme Court with new appointees. (The size of the court is not fixed by our Constitution.) Even in the throes of the Great Depression, a majority of Americans were opposed to Constitutional tinkering. Roosevelt left the Constitution pretty much intact. In fact, during his whole 12 years of being president, there was only one change to the Constitution, and that was the repeal of Prohibition.
But there is another outcome. To many people, the leader becomes the solution. At this point the leader’s movement becomes a personality cult, with all criticisms of the leader rejected (or made illegal) even if his actions contradict his previous statements.
Personality cults are extremely difficult to penetrate. The most extreme case of this involves Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Hitler’s actions cost the lives of millions of Germans, the loss of half of his country’s territory, and his country’s reputation. Yet even today, in Germany, in his native Austria, and even in America, Hitler still has a following.
Such a leader may well reach his position by democratic means. Hitler’s party did so. It never got an outright majority, but this does not matter. History is made by determined minorities, and if Nazism was not a majority, it was infinitely larger than its more determined opponents. And it benefited hugely from the unpopularity and instability of the German Republic which Hitler stifled once in office.
The same was true of a much earlier charismatic leader, the French Emperor Napoleon III, who was elected president of France by a landslide in 1848 even though many realized that he make himself emperor soon (which he did). On the whole, he was not a bad ruler, governing France for 18 years, longer than his much more famous uncle. He was toppled only when he lost a war with Germany in 1870.
Napoleon III’s rule was much more benign than Hitler’s, but their accession to power, along with that of other famous dictators like Mussolini and Franco does bring up one commonality; the trends I have described here seem to benefit the Right more than the Left.
The explanation is simple, fortunately. In times of crisis, many people yearn for the “better” or “simpler” days of the past, and this naturally benefits conservatives more than progressives. There have, of course, been a number of Left dictatorships. The most relevant right now was that of Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union with an iron hand from 1928 to 1953. He had a personality cult as well, but it was one developed from above, not from the grass roots. He is important to us for a number of reasons, but mostly because the current Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, is a great admirer of Stalin.
The truly interesting question is whether this represents a permanent retreat from freedom and democracy, or whether this is a temporary step sideways in world history.
In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published a famous book called The End of History and the Last Man, arguing that the world was inevitably evolving toward liberal democracy as the ideal form of government. Fukuyama’s work is like the Bible; it is more often quoted than it is actually read. He did not deny that there might be sidesteps and reversals,but saw his conclusion as an inevitable end. He noted that whenever nations had stepped away from democracy, sooner or later they returned to it. Fukuyama was of course not the first scholar to postulate about long term historical trends.
The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw history a series of conflicts, where each successful trend would generate its own opposition, resulting in a new historical trend. To Hegel, this process had no obvious end. Fukuyama, believing that liberal democracy would be an “end” of sorts, is a bit more like Karl Marx, who also saw human conflict eventually reaching the ideal society (communism) where people would no longer need a government to force them behave. I have to admit that I lean more toward the views of the historian H. A. L. Fisher, who wrote:
“One intellectual excitement has, however, been denied me. Men wiser and more learned than me have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen. This is not a doctrine of cynicism and despair. The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of history; but progress is not a law of nature. The ground gained by one generation may be lost by the next. The thoughts of men may flow into the channels which lead to disaster and barbarism.”
I have often wondered if Fisher had ever read the first verse of William Butler Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
