Democracy and Its Discontents, Ep. 4: The Allure of the Strongman

Introduction

One of the hallmarks of a healthy democracy is a network of institutions that provide checks and balances.

But as distrust, disillusionment, and discord grow, there are some leaders who promise to change the system…

[Steph Haggard: “If you believe that the political system is corrupt and fundamentally not operating in the interests of the people, then delegating a lot of power to a strongman is one way to solve that problem and get things done.”]

I’m Lindsay Shingler. This is a special miniseries from Talking Policy we’re calling: “Democracy and Its Discontents.”

Over the course of five conversations, we’re exploring some of the underlying dynamics that seem to be driving polarization and opening the door for aspiring autocrats.

In this episode, we’ll talk with UC San Diego professor Steph Haggard about how populist strongman leaders seek to gain a foothold in divided democracies.

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Lindsay: You don’t have to look very hard at the news these days to get the sense that people seem to be disaffected, unsatisfied with the state of American democracy.

We’ll get into some of the details shortly, but in a sentence or two or three, can you tell us what’s going on with American democracy?

Steph: I think if you asked 10 political scientists what was wrong with American democracy at the moment, all of them would pretty much say the same thing as the first out-of-the-gate answer, which is: it really boils down to polarization.

But when we think about polarization, it’s a sort of strange reason for democracy to be at bay, because democracy is really about having different views. You have a view of abortion, I have a view of abortion. You want confederate statues, I want them taken down. Those are pretty divisive issues, but that’s what democracy does. It’s supposed to manage that.

But now we have a different type of polarization, and I think one way in which we’re polarized is around different conceptions of democracy itself.

Lindsay: Say more about that—what do you mean by “polarized around different conceptions of democracy?”

Steph: So you hear this term, “institutionalists.” Well, what is an institutionalist? Well, an institutionalist is someone who says, “look, we have a set of institutions, we have the rule of law, we have checks and balances on the executives. Individuals have rights. We’ve got procedures through which things get done.”

And the majoritarian conception of democracy, which is this competing conception of democracy, argues that majorities should really be able to do what they want. They should be able to advance their chosen worldview and interests.

And if that’s your view of democracy, then many of these other features that some of us see as profoundly central to democracy—like the rule of law, and checks and balances, and rights, and so forth—those become hindrances to the people getting what is really deservedly theirs.

And if you believe that the political system is corrupt and fundamentally not operating in the interests of the people, then delegating a lot of power to a strong man is one way to solve that problem and get things done. And that’s a unifying feature of a lot of the democratic backsliding and authoritarian regress we’re seeing in the world.

Lindsay: You have studied the phenomenon of democratic backsliding and the rise of illiberal regimes for a long time. You’ve been a guest on the Talking Policy podcast before, you’ve written books on this topic. Can you put this into global and historic context for our listeners? You know, what have we seen in terms of democratic regress around the world, and how bad are things now?

Steph: If I had to tell the story in a couple of sentences, it would go something like this:

There was an initial wave of democratization in the world, which we might trace all the way back to the American and French revolutions, but really gained steam—I would say—in the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then we had this huge interruption during the Great Depression where regimes that were democratic were falling by the wayside in rapid succession, obviously, in the fascist and Nazi countries of Central Europe, and France, and Italy, and Germany, and Spain.

And then we had the post-war period, which you’d think would be a period of democratization—and certainly it was for Europe. But actually, there was a pretty strong authoritarian streak among newly independent countries.

And then, around the mid-70s you have this huge wave of democratization, which begins to crest. And it starts in Southern Europe—in Portugal, actually, and Spain, and Greece. Then it spreads to the Southern Cone of Latin America—Brazil, Argentina, Chile—then to East Asia. Some listeners might remember the dramatic scenes of Marcos being pushed out by these popular mobilizations in Manila—and Korea, and then, to Africa as well.

And of course, the crowning act in that drama is the collapse of the Soviet Union, and what some people would call the liberation of Eastern Europe, where those countries that had been under Soviet sway had the opportunity to become democratic. So, all of that gave rise to this tremendous optimism about the future of democracy.

And then sometime in the early 2000s, probably from 2005 forward, you see that progress stall. More democracies—the number of new democracies, slows to a crawl. And some of those democracies start to unravel in various ways.

Lindsay: So, what are the ways that this might happen? Like, what has that looked like in the past where democracies have disintegrated?

Steph: Historically, the main way they collapsed was the coup. A bunch of military leaders step up to the microphone and—and the news outlets and say, “look,” you know, “Congress is closed. Rights are suspended. Martial law is declared.”

And this happened as recently as 2014 in Thailand, which had, you know, been a democratizing country. You had these people on the streets that represented competing camps, they were called the yellow shirts and the red shirts, and some were pro-monarchist and some were pro the people.

And you had these fights, and the military stepped in and said, “enough of this,” you know, “we’re done.”

But what was new was this phenomenon that is called backsliding, which is that you elect democratic leaders, and those democratic leaders incrementally—usually, in stepwise fashion—begin to dismantle some of the key institutions of democracy.

And the rogues gallery here, I think, is pretty well known. You know, it’s Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. It’s the governments in Poland, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Erdoğan in Turkey, and Putin for that matter! There was hope when he came to office that he might further democratize Russia.

And that backsliding phenomenon is the one that seems to be different than what we’ve seen before in the way that democracies unravel.

Lindsay: Is there some kind of a coherent common ideology among all these different kind of rogue leaders that you’ve talked about, these outsiders who come in and promise to bring the government back for the people?

What strings them together? Or is it really quite dependent on the context of the countries?

Steph: Well, this is not the type of answer a political scientist typically likes to give, but I think what strings them together is practically nothing, believe it or not.

But what we see that, I think, is a global trend, is the rise of what’s been called populism, which is another term that gets used a lot, but maybe not analyzed as closely as it should.

Populism is a thin ideology. It’s not—it’s not economic populism alone. It’s more about how the political space is defined. And the main characteristic of populism is that the world is divided into two camps, “us” and “them.” And “they” are the corrupt elite, they’re immigrants, they’re outsiders, they’re minorities, and the “we” is the true people of the nation. And that true people is under assault. They’re facing threat.

And if politics is defined in that way, obviously, it’s really difficult to compromise, leaders can get away with a lot of mischief because their supporters will back them. And populism, as this sort of thin, you know, Manichaean ideology, can attach itself to a variety of different other ideologies.

So let me give you two examples. Hugo Chávez came to power in Venezuela in part because of gross inequalities, and poverty, and elites that seemed to be squabbling over things that weren’t important to the people. And what he promised was a rectification of that. He was a leftist. He’s not a rightist. And other populist leaders in Latin America in—in both Ecuador and Bolivia—Evo Morales did this on the part of the Indigenous communities in that country, came to office with populist ideas that were in favor of a people that was the downtrodden people, the poor, you know, the left behind.

In other settings though, populism has been attached to right-wing ideologies that are anti-immigrant or to other types of ideas, anti-globalization, anti-this, anti-that. But I think the unifying thread is not these other ideologies to which they attach, it’s the way in which the central political problem is defined in terms of an “us” and “them.”

And so, polarization matters. But the form it takes is tied to such distinctive local conditions.

Lindsay: So, nothing necessarily strings these leaders together the way that we might think of communist leaders, kind of, hanging together under the banner of communism. And yet they are rising at the same time. Since 2012, the number of democracies has declined. The quality of democracies have declined. The share of the global population who live in a democracy has declined. So, we know that these numbers are true. We can talk about the way we measure democracy, but there’s this thing happening.

So, in the previous three episodes in the series, we’ve talked through some of the big issues and trends that seem to be contributing to a larger trend—which is the topic of this series—which is the rising appeal of leaders who seem to want to undermine democracy in different ways.

And so, we have looked at misinformation that damages our ability to trust, and participate in civic life, and trust each other. We’ve looked at the sort of weakening bond between government and its citizens by making the role of money in politics—which is driving governments to be hyperattentive to the needs of the wealthy and less attentive to the needs of everyone else, and the kind of disaffection that comes from that. And you’ve talked a little bit about the role that economic anxiety plays in some countries. And we’ve talked about this—this anxiety that people seem to be feeling, whether it’s religious, it’s cultural, it’s economic.

And these things together are—are pulling us apart.

Is there a fundamental global story here, that—that is part of how we could possibly—so many of us at the same time—find ourselves in the same place? It’s really perplexing.

Steph: Yeah, well, Lindsay, you’re talking like a social scientist, so it’s music to my ears, because what you’re saying is: “all of this is happening at the same time in very different locations. Shouldn’t there be an underlying thread underneath it?”

So, here’s where I have to do what social scientists do, which is to say, “look, you know, there are some competing theories out there about what’s driving this.”

So first, there’s an approach which really focuses in on race and ethnicity. And there is a reason to believe that that would be happening among certain countries in the world at the same time. Because if we think of the international economic geography, there are these—I would call them “seams”—in the global fabric where you have very rich countries sitting close to relatively poor ones. And those seams are along the U. S.–Mexico border. They’re in the Mediterranean.

So there’s a reason to believe that immigration, racial differences, might arise as a point of contention at the same time in the world. Now, that doesn’t completely get at what the racial-ethnic threat is, because in some cases it has to do with people who are transported to the place they are 250 years ago on a slave ship. I mean, they’re not coming in new.

But the idea that these immigrants and minorities are somehow privileged, or enjoy distinctive advantages, is something that you could see arising in a number of different places, as attention is paid to undoing some of the past injustices.

So that’s one cluster of challenges where, I think, you could say that that’s a common thing that is happening at the same time, for reasons which are in the world economy, like the growth of immigration.

And—I’ll just say one more thing on this—is that this threat and challenge of immigration is not going to go away going forward, because even deeper forces like climate change are going to push on this envelope, and drive people out of the neighborhoods, and the counties, and countries that they’re living in, in search of cooler temperatures, and water, and just really foundational things. So that’s not going to go away.

Lindsay: So, you talked about some of the cultural stuff. What about the role of globalization and economics in all of this?

Steph: It’s clear that something quite dramatic has happened, not in the advanced industrial states as a whole, but in the United States, which is that the United States has just become dramatically more unequal since—starting around the end of the 70s and into the early 80s.

And now, I think, economists are owning up to the fact that some of that inequality is driven by exposure to global forces. And the storylines that people tell about the industrial heartland in the United States, seeing factories close and jobs moving abroad, is correct.

But there’s also this question of technological change, which has been extraordinarily rapid. And the problem with the technological change we’re seeing right now, is it favors people who are highly educated and have high skills. And so, the result of that is the gap—in not just income, but quality of life—between people who are college educated and not college educated, is just becoming vast.

And I think it’s no coincidence that President Trump ran his campaign openly appealing to people who are less educated. And some of the most compelling work on this—and saddening work on this—has been done by two economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, on the “deaths of despair” and the way in which deaths by alcoholism, and drug use, and suicide in certain communities have just skyrocketed in connection with these types of—of worsening economic and class divisions.

And, not surprisingly, those are also areas that tend to be vulnerable to populist appeals because local life is collapsing in quite profound ways.

Lindsay: So what are these people—what are they being promised by these populist leaders?

Steph: You know, the answer to that question is—is not only in the material realm. And I think this is something that liberals are just really bad at understanding. It has to do with respect, fundamentally. And—and due deference, and treating people as equals, and so forth.

And, you know, certain comments are crystallizing in terms of how people think. And here I’m going after the Democrats, but the comment by Hillary Clinton about deplorables, I think, crystallized a sort of disdain for a share of the population, which just breeds anger and contempt.

And, part of a populist leader’s toolkit is saying, “I stand with you. I am going to respect you,” you know, “your time has come.” And in some ways that is more important than the material things. Because in some cases, populists are actually allied with oligarchs. It’s not like they’re for redistribution, and provision of health care, and sending checks out.

But I think that individuals matter, and that these charismatic politicians are able to exploit and use those advantages to push their own political careers forward. And I think ignoring the particularities of leaders and their charisma, frankly, is something that we ignore at our peril.

Populist leaders are often highly charismatic to their followers and really form direct connections that drive the processes of polarization that I was talking about.

Lindsay: What happens when an aspiring autocrat, a far-right demagogue, is elected to office?

We talk about, you know, the democratic backslide, democratic regress in a place like Hungary under Viktor Orbán. How does life change?

Steph: When an autocrat comes to power, the first thing you want to do is, weaken checks on your authority. Well, who are you going to go after? The courts.

And so, you see in both Hungary and Poland a whole series of extraordinarily complicated judicial reforms that are basically designed to weaken the independence of the judiciary.

Similarly with the media—you don’t want an independent media, because an independent media is going to be a check on whatever it is you choose to do. So you go after those institutions.

So quite apart from what’s going on with respect to the government itself and expanding executive powers, you’re also—autocrats are also trying to weaken these other institutions which check their ability to act. And that, to me, is extremely dangerous.

That really has adverse consequences for the way we live, not democracy in some abstract sense, but—can I get good information? Can I trust in the science that universities produce? You know, those types of basic things that we count on.

Lindsay: How quickly can democracy be undone? And when the damage has been done, can it—can it be fixed? Can things bounce back?

Steph: Well, the answer to this question is unfortunately a sad one.

The stronger the democratic institutions you have going into these episodes, the more likely it is that you’re going to get out of them. And, you know, the European democracies—do I think they’re going to become dictatorships? Do I think the United States is going to become a dictatorship? No. I just don’t think that’s going to happen for a whole series of reasons that have to do with the long history and integrity of the institutions that have evolved over several hundred years.

But imagine that you’re in a poor African democracy where you’re seeing rapidly rising food prices, and global climate change, and a democratic government which is not working, and—and livelihoods are at stake, and so on. You can imagine how those weak democracies at early stages of development can much more quickly unravel. And the real transitions to authoritarian rule happen precisely in democracies that are relatively new compared to those in Japan, and the United States, and Western Europe.

Lindsay: You have spoken to this question already, but I’m going to ask you again to sort of reflect on—why do we not want a strongman populist leader? Why do we not want an authoritarian leader?

Steph: Let me just highlight three things quickly because I think they’ll make sense in the current context.

The first is that it’s just extremely difficult to actually govern in an environment which is highly polarized and where you have populism. Because one of the dirty secrets of populist leaders is they often don’t enjoy majorities. You know, if you look at the vote shares that bring populists to office, it often is not an outright majority, and they don’t even necessarily hold all the seats and have to figure out other ways to get around legislatures. That’s one thing.

The second is that trust in institutions falls as a result, and this is a much longer trend in the United States. But it’s happening across many of the advanced industrial states, which is that if those institutions don’t work, are not seen to work, then obviously you’re going to trust them less. You’re not going to trust the Congress. You’re not going to trust the courts. You’re not going to trust the bureaucracy to do what’s in the interest of the public.

And that’s a longer-term development in American politics, where if you go to Pew data, it just shows you this collapse in support and trust of basic institutions. So that’s another disability of this type of rule.

But the third one is one that gets more specifically to the nature of populist rule, which is that if you believe that the world is divided in this Manichaean way between “us” and “them,” then you’re going to give your guy a lot of latitude to do what’s necessary to solve the problem and to address what, you know, is seen as a challenge.

And let me give you a very concrete example of this. The president of El Salvador is a populist leader who ran on a platform of halting gang violence in that country. And how did he do it? Well, he shut down the courts, effectively, and declared martial law in parts of the country and sent police off to kill people. Mano duro, right? You know, “hard hand.”

And giving executives the latitude to do things, to solve problems which people want solved, is a reminder of how, you know, this kind of populist rhetoric and the circumstances that countries are in, can end up granting leeway to autocrats that you don’t want to be on the receiving end.

You know, think Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, a similar kind of, penal populism, someone called it, I think that’s a really interesting term. You know, “lock up our enemies, lock up our enemies.” And you see that—shadows of that—in the U.S. campaign.

But what if my brother was just, a mentally ill guy who had gotten addicted to drugs as a result of an injury that he suffered on a job, and now, all of a sudden, he’s been killed? You don’t want to live in that world. And I think this is one of the more dangerous things that populist leaders exploit, is the willingness of their supporters to grant them incredible power to rule in the name of the people.

Lindsay: Given all that you have studied over the years in this—in this area, and given that we’re going to an important election season in the U.S., what would you want American voters to know?

If you could talk to them, what would you want them to keep in mind as they go into this election season?

Steph:  You know, unfortunately, the type of things I would want from them are not entirely where we are. And they reveal my liberal, pragmatic roots very deeply.

But what I think voters need to do when they go into the ballot box is to reflect on their own interests and ask the question: “am I going to be better off under this candidate or that candidate?”

Which is exactly what democracy is supposed to do. It’s to be a contest of ideas between politicians who are offering different platforms to the public. And what I worry about is that voters are not reflecting on—on the circumstances which they’re in, and the questions that they really think need to be addressed, and asking themselves whether candidate A or candidate B is going to address those questions.

And I think if we went back to that much more pragmatic, interest-based, bread-and-butter politics, we would be closer to what democracy is, which is a system for resolving differences and making decisions, rather than it being a kind of dramatic runway in which personalities are aired and—and competing ideologies are playing a larger role than the underlying issues that the electorate should be thinking about.

Lindsay: You gave us a definition of democracy that is sort of narrow, that’s majoritarianism, where whatever the majority votes for wins. And then that democracy sort of stops there. There’s another broader conception of democracy that suggests it is also about protecting minority rights, human rights, checks and balances, you know, the ability to speak freely without fear.

And we could make the argument—Zoli did in the last episode—that these things deliver better outcomes. That it’s in our self-interest to want these things. But there’s also a deep kind of value system that underlies this political philosophy and style of governing ourselves, which is that each person has equal value in this—in the civic life.

One of the questions that we’re asking each of the guests in this miniseries is: is democracy worth saving? Well, we know it is. Why is that broader, wider, more colorful picture of what democracy is—why is that worth saving?

Steph: The idea of majoritarian democracy that I put forward—which is one in which rights are obviously not completely trampled, but are given less prominence, and checks on executive authority are weakened to give presidents and prime ministers more power—that’s not my conception of what a democracy is. That’s a particular conception which is advanced—tends to be advanced—by populists. So, I don’t want to associate myself with that view of democracy.

I think it includes these other things that you talk about. And so, I think if you want to ask whether democracy is worth saving, you have to ask about the goods that democracy provides.

And those are of two sorts. You have to be a risk taker to say that you want to live in an autocracy, because you might end up in a system which doesn’t deliver you the best outcomes, it delivers the worst outcomes. Think Ceaușescu, or Zimbabwe, or Venezuela for that matter!

But the other point is just extremely simple. It’s almost like a—you know—a slogan of American democracy. It’s a free country. It’s a free country. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a country where I’m not free to think about the things that I want, and try to pursue them as I see fit.

And so, if you’re giving up democracy, you’re ultimately giving up basic freedoms. And that to me is really what we should be focusing on, is the concrete things that would change under a more autocratic setting. Things like not having your vote count, not being able to rely on the courts to protect you if you’re singled out for persecution, not being able to count on the police being checked in some way by the communities in which they serve all of us.

Those are the type of things that can happen when democracy really runs aground. And to me those are personal things. They’re not abstractions, they’re about. Can your life be lived in the way that you want to live it? And I think that’s in the end, you know, that’s the strongest argument for a democratic system.

Lindsay: Steph Haggard, thanks for being with us on Talking Policy.

Steph: My pleasure.

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Outro

In our next—and final—episode of this miniseries, we’ll sit down with Emilie Hafner-Burton and Christina Schneider, two scholars of democracy at UC San Diego. And we’ll try to make sense of our political moment, and understand what needs to happen in order to keep our democracy resilient.

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Credits

Thanks for listening to “Democracy and Its Discontents,” a special miniseries from Talking Policy. I’m your host, Lindsay Shingler.

Our production partner for this miniseries is CitizenRacecar. This episode was produced by Anna Van Dine. Mixing and sound design by Alex Brouwer. Special thanks to Tyler Ellison.

Talking Policy is a production of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

 

The UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) is a research network comprised of scholars from across the University of California and the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories that conducts policy-relevant research to mitigate conflict and promote a more peaceful world order. Our focus is on challenges that have the potential to lead to wide-scale conflict, and that can benefit from global cooperation to solve. Our portfolio includes both traditional security issues—defense innovation, strategy and deterrence, nuclear weapons policy, and security cooperation—and emerging and non-traditional challenges such as climate change, geoeconomics and great power competition, and threats to democracy. In each of these areas, IGCC builds diverse, multidisciplinary research teams that analyze the causes and consequences of global conflict—and help develop practical solutions.