From Can It Happen Here? (Cass Sunstein, Ed, 2018) pp215-7
[from ‘Authoritarianism is not a momentary madness, but an eternal dynamic within liberal democracies’, by Karen Stenner & Jonathan Haidt]
Although we have paid great attention here to the role played by normative threat in the populist phenomenon, one critical thing to note about authoritarians is that they are not especially inclined to perceive normative (or indeed, any other kind of) threat – they are just especially reactive when they do. If anything, authoritarians, by their very nature, want to believe in authorities and institutions; they want to feel they are part of a cohesive community. Accordingly, they seem (if anything) to be modestly inclined toward giving authorities and institutions the benefit of the doubt, and lending them their support until the moment these seem incapable of maintaining “normative order.” As our observation of the mechanics of the authoritarian dynamic made clear, authoritarians are highly reactive and highly malleable. Depending on their assessment of shifting environmental conditions, they can be moved from indifference, even positions of modest tolerance, to aggressive demands to “crack down” on immigrants, minorities, “deviants,” and dissidents, employing the full force of state authority. This is to say, the current state we find ourselves in can easily be made much worse, or much better, by how we come together and respond to this now in terms of attending to people’s needs for oneness and sameness; for identity, cohesion, and belonging; for pride and honor; and for institutions and leaders they can respect. This should take the place of demeaning and ridiculing authoritarians, ignoring their needs and preferences (which is an undemocratic way for a democracy to treat a third of its citizens), and simply waiting for them to “come back to their senses.” It is condescending to say that no sane, reasonable person could want the things they want, therefore they must be unhinged or else are being manipulated.
But this is no momentary madness. It is a perpetual feature of human societies: a latent pool of need that lurks just beneath the surface and seems to be activated most certainly by things that constitute the very essence of liberal democracy — things such as
. . . the experience or perception of disobedience to
group authorities or authorities unworthy of respect,
nonconformity to group norms or norms proving
questionable, lack of consensus in group values and
beliefs, and, in general, diversity and freedom “run
amok”. . . (Stenner 2005: 17).
Liberal democracy has now exceeded many people’s capacity to tolerate it. And absent proper understanding of the origins and dynamics of this populist moment, well-meaning citizens, political parties, and governments are likely to respond to these movements in ways that serve only to exacerbate their negative features and entirely miss their possibilities. The same warning goes out to all of Western Europe and the English-speaking world post-Brexit. Worst of all, we might miss the real opportunities for a thoughtful, other-regarding reconciliation of two critical parts of our human nature: the desire to liberate and enable the individual, and the impetus to protect and serve the collective.
We have shown that the far-right populist wave that seemed to “come out of nowhere” did not in fact come out of nowhere. It is not a sudden madness, or virus, or tide, or even just a copycat phenomenon — the emboldening of bigots and despots by others’ electoral successes. Rather, it is something that sits just beneath the surface of any human society — including in the advanced liberal democracies at the heart of the Western world — and can be activated by core elements of liberal democracy itself.
Liberal democracy can become its own undoing because its core elements activate forces that undermine it and its best features constrain it from vigorously protecting itself. So it seems we are not at the “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992). The “last man” is not a perfected liberal democrat. Liberal democracy may not be the “final form of human government.” And intolerance is not a thing of the past; it is very much a thing of the present, and of the future.
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