Global Authoritarianism Rising
+ Inspiration from Amazon workers and Chile + Meet incredible leaders: Lt. Gov Garlin Gilchrist and Sophia Bracy Harris
In this issue, we explore the dramatic global rise of authoritarianism, highlighting new data and some of the best analyses of recent developments in Russia, China, France, Hungary, and the Philippines — with cautionary lessons for the U.S.
But first, a couple of announcements:
New York friends will not want to miss the chance this Friday, 4/22, to hear from Michigan Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist. A longtime friend, community organizer and Detroit native, Garlin is on the frontlines of the fight to save democracy and advance racial justice. He and Governor Gretchen Whitmer are up for reelection this fall in a pivotal swing state. You’ll get to hear his insights and hang out with some great progressive leaders in a hip Union Square location. The event is Friday, April 22 at 6 pm. You must RSVP here to save a spot. If you can’t come, you can still contribute.
We also encourage you to join a virtual event with legendary civil rights activist Sophia Bracy Harris. She’ll be talking about her book Finding My Own Way: A Journey to Wholeness Against the Odds with Bryan Stevenson and Surina Khan. The event will take place on April 27th from 8-9:30 ET. You can register and find out more here.
In our Delights and Provocations section, we lift up a must-listen interview with Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer, two workers who helped lead the first successful unionization drive at Amazon. It’s a master class on organizing, courage, perseverance, and imagination.
We close with Article 1 of the new Chilean constitution, which is being written at a constitutional convention dominated by representatives of popular movements. It’s moving and inspiring.
Global Authoritarianism Rising
The devastating war in Ukraine has had contradictory consequences for right-wing politics around the world. It has clarified the stakes and global nature of the fight for democracy and energized democratic forces. But right-wing Viktor Orbán was re-elected in Hungary, even after having allied himself for many years with Putin. (Orbán is a hero to Tucker Carlson and much of the American right, and the U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, is planning to gather in Budapest in May). France holds a momentous election on April 24th, in which Marine Le Pen, a pro-Putin, racist candidate who has built her career on nativism and Islamophobia is a serious contender for the presidency. The approach of the right and the failures of the left in those two counties offer cautionary lessons for us. The threat to democracy worldwide is dire.
In March, the Swedish think tank Varieties of Democracy, or V-Dem, published its “Democracy Report 2022: Autocratization Changing Nature?” It represents the collaboration of 3,700 scholars and is based on “the largest global dataset on democracy with over 30 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2021.” Here are some key takeaways, quoting from the report:
Dictatorships are on the rise and harbor 70% of the world population – 5.4 billion people
Liberal democracies peaked in 2012 with 42 countries and are now down to the lowest levels in over 25 years – 34 nations home to only 13% of the world population. • The democratic decline is especially evident in AsiaPacific, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as in parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
The increasing number of closed autocracies – up from 25 to 30 countries with 26% of the world population – contributes to the changing nature of autocratization.
Electoral autocracy remains the most common regime type and harbors 44% of the world’s population, or 3.4 billion people.
A record of 35 countries suffered significant deteriorations in freedom of expression at the hands of governments – an increase from only 5 countries 10 years ago.
A signal of toxic polarization, respect for counterarguments and associated aspects of the deliberative component of democracy got worse in more than 32 countries – another increase from only 5 nations in 2011.
In a special issue of The New Republic on “Democracy in Peril,” David Rieff offers a sobering response to the question “Can the Global ‘Autocratic Tsunami’ Be Stopped?”
. . . The promise of [Francis] Fukuyama’s end of history [thesis] was that democracy and capitalism came as a package, one never able to reach its full potential without the other. But it is this that the economic successes of authoritarian countries like China and Vietnam call into question. And for many of the nations of the global south, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine simply does not have the same existential urgency it does for people in Europe, North America, and Turkey, and understandably so. It is not that many of these countries support Russia, but rather that the war is simply of little immediate concern. How this will affect democracy’s prospects, though, is not something anyone knows at this point. It is quite possible that in the future the term democracy itself will become unstable. After all, the Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India considers itself to be democratic because it is, or least takes itself to be, majoritarian. And the People’s Republic of China does not concede that it is undemocratic. And now, the Chinese state uses the language of anti-imperialism to deny its own autocratic character. For example, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, recently said tartly, “Democracy is not Coca-Cola, which, with the syrup produced in the United States, tastes the same across the world.” He might as well have been channeling his inner Ariel Dorfman or Eduardo Galeano! And it was wrong to describe China as “authoritarian,” he said. China was a democracy, he insisted, it was just that China’s democracy takes a different form from that of the United States. . . .
In a recent interview, [Andy] Tian [a Chinese tech entrepreneur] offered his own version of Wang Yi’s argument about democracy taking a different form in China than it had in the United States. The first stage of tech innovation had been in the United States, Tian insisted. But Chinese entrepreneurs such as himself were going to change all that. “What’s the next stage of [tech] evolution?” he asked rhetorically. And answered his own question. “[Those of us] based in emerging markets,” Tian boasted. “We are taking over.” And then he concluded with a flourish. “We’re decolonizing,” he said. That may seem like nonsense to most people in the global north. But Tian isn’t speaking to them. And the fate of democracy is much more likely to be decided by those people in the global south to which his words are addressed than by what happens in Ukraine.
In his Nation article “Russia and China, Together at Last,” historian Alfred McCoy contends that the geostrategic designs of Xi Jinping’s China and its newly bolstered alliance with Russia are the big story that has been overshadowed by Putin’s brutality in Ukraine.
[In Februrary,] when Vladimir Putin met Xi Jinping in Beijing at the start of the Winter Olympics, it proved a stunning reversal of the Stalin-Mao moment 70 years earlier. While Russia’s post-Soviet economy remains smaller than Canada’s and overly dependent on petroleum exports, China has become the planet’s industrial powerhouse with the world’s largest economy (as measured in purchasing power) and 10 times the population of Russia. Moscow’s heavy-metal military still relies on Soviet-style tanks and its nuclear arsenal. China, on the other hand, has built the world’s largest navy, its most secure global satellite system, and its most agile missile armada, capped by cutting-edge hypersonic missiles whose 4,000 miles-per-hour speed can defeat any defense. . . .
In a landmark 5,300-word statement, Xi and Putin proclaimed that the “world is going through momentous changes,” creating a “redistribution of power” and “a growing demand for…leadership” (which Beijing and Moscow clearly intended to provide). After denouncing Washington’s ill-concealed “attempts at hegemony,” the two sides agreed to “oppose the…interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights.”
As McCoy argues in his new book To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change (and in this interview with the podcast Global Governance Futures), China may achieve dominance in a new world order by 2030. But climate change may also doom this new era of hegemony to be a brief one because the north China plain, home to some 400 million people, will, McCoy claims, become “one of the least habitable places on the planet” by 2060 or 2070. However accurate these predictions, McCoy’s analysis suggests that the climate crisis and the crisis of democracy will intersect in world-historic ways that call for those who work principally on one crisis to be ever mindful of the other.
Another urgent front in the struggle against authoritarianism in France, where the upcoming runoff election on April 24th pits a centrist incumbent who has embraced neoliberalism and nativism, Emmanuel Macron, against a racist right-winger with an even more reactionary program, Marine Le Pen. Le Pen’s signature policy is a so-called “National Preference,” which would legalize discrimination against foreigners living in France. (This is unconstitutional, but it says everything about what Le Pen is about). Obviously, Le Pen must be defeated, but the closeness of the race and the absence of a left alternative in the run-off is a catastrophe. How did we get here? And what might we learn? Phillippe Marlière offers some answers in his Open Democracy article “This time around, the threat of a LePen presidency is real.”
The next two weeks will be crucial for the future of France, and perhaps Europe. For the first time since the Vichy regime of the 1940s, the far Right is in a position to gain power. Opinion polls show that the two remaining presidential candidates are neck and neck – and Macron is largely to blame for the situation.
After his election in 2017, Macron did not govern as a centrist. Rather, he moved sharply to the Right throughout his term on law and order, immigration and Islam. His economic agenda, meanwhile, is seen by many as having catered to affluent voters. Macron is commonly viewed as aloof and arrogant. People outside France tend to underestimate the depth of his unpopularity, including the extent to which he is detested by the young, the racialised and public sector workers. Yet the support of these voters, who lean to the Left, will be crucial for his re-election. . .
Many left-leaning voters, who have been disciplined enough in the past to vote for a conservative candidate to ‘stop fascism’, appear to have now had enough. Opinion polls show that up to a third of Mélenchon’s first-round voters would currently opt for Le Pen in the second, while up to another third would abstain. These figures do not look good for Macron, who will have to listen to and win over this electorate. He cannot afford to be complacent.
The threat is all the more real given that some left-wing candidates, including Mélenchon [the left candidate in the first round of voting who was edged out by Le Pen], do not want to explicitly call on their supporters to vote for Macron. “We know for whom we will never vote! You must not give your vote to Marine Le Pen!” Mélenchon told his supporters on Sunday evening. The message was widely interpreted as implicitly condoning abstention, which would facilitate Le Pen’s victory.
The old anti-fascist reflex is fading away on the Left, the conservative electorate has radicalised, Zemmour [a candidate even further to the right of Le Pen who got 7% of the vote in the first round] has further mainstreamed racism in French society and Le Pen has softened her image. Macron, meanwhile, is the sole target of a volatile and angry electorate. The conditions have been set for France to sleepwalk into a far-Right presidency. This was not a possibility before. It is now.
In a searing piece, “A Failure of Imagination,” in The New York Review of Books, James MacAuley argues that the left’s failures paved the way for the rightward march of French politics. The failure to embrace anti-racist politics — and, in fact, willingness to flirt with nativism and adopt some restrictionist frames — has empowered the right.
The great lie of the Great Replacement would not be so resonant were it merely an anxiety that animated one side of the political spectrum. In the realm of ideas, the left, unwilling to promote and defend the successes of the welfare state, has occasionally become a meeker proponent of the same toxicity its opponents sell in a more aggressive and emotional package. As a result, it inevitably seems weak and impotent by comparison.
L’affaire des foulards [the controversial 1989 suspension of three Muslim high school students for wearing headscarves] was only the beginning of a long string of left-wing failures to express and defend a positive, inclusive vision of the multicultural society that France has become. This lack is most acute when it comes to the public visibility of Islam in French society, but the left has also fallen into the trap of accepting, regardless of the evidence to the contrary, that “waves” of immigrants threaten social cohesion. The reality is that over the last ten years, immigration in France has increased at a slower pace than in other European countries, even after the 2015 migrant crisis. But the illusion of mass immigration remains largely undisputed. . .
France’s crackdown on Islam in public life has been as much a project of the establishment French left as it was of the French right . . . What for decades, and even centuries, were true left-wing causes—secularism, education, gender equality, the fight against anti-Semitism—have now become instruments in a larger cultural battle against a minority community a true left would defend, champion, and, at the very least, include. Muslims account for roughly 10 percent of the French population, and France is a multicultural society regardless of its universalist pretensions. . .
France in 2022 is a diverse, multicultural society with so much promise and so much to be proud of. It deserves a strong political left unafraid to ignore right-wing identitarian shibboleths, brave enough to speak for an increasingly polyphonic national community, and free of reactionary nostalgia for a country that never quite existed.
In “Orban Victorious,” in New Left Review’s Sidecar, Kyle Shybunko takes stock of the failure of United for Hungary (EM), the country’s broad united-front coalition, to defeat the ruling party. Orbán’s rewriting of election laws and leashing of the media were both crucial factors, but so was the failure to articulate a bold and clear progressive economic vision.
EM’s failure was expected, even if its scale was not. During the final weeks of the campaign the government was leading in polls, 50% to 40%. Yet, as in 2018, the Fidesz-KDNP machine pulled out all the stops to prevent a last-minute opposition breakthrough. A new law allowed voters to register outside their residential jurisdiction, legalizing the practice of voter tourism. The postal ballot system meanwhile benefitted Fidesz-KDNP by prohibiting postal voters from registering a Hungarian residence, which confined the practice primarily to Magyar residents of Transylvania, Vojvodina and other neighbouring enclaves. Some 100,000 émigré voters in the UK, many of whom have a registered address in Hungary, were forced to travel to London or Manchester to cast their votes in person. Reports of pro-EM ballots being destroyed in Transylvania are yet to be substantiated, but there was undoubtedly a degree of voter coercion in Hungary’s smaller villages, where Fidesz mayors often exchange public-sector jobs for vote guarantees.
Whatever the extent of these manoeuvres, Hungary’s highly concentrated media landscape, combined with Fidesz’s use of public funds in its election campaign, made unseating Orbán unlikely. Yet, this year, circumstances for the opposition were uniquely favourable, as EM managed to present a single electoral ticket with a common political platform. In 2010, Orbán swept to power on a wave of discontent with the incumbent Liberal-MSZP coalition and its prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, who had presided over mass privatizations in the preceding decade. Orbán’s first legislative supermajority allowed him to denude the High Court, change the electoral system to benefit Fidesz-KDNP, introduce a liberalized labour code, and begin to abolish faculty governance in the university system.
The opposition had managed to unite around a plan for rescuing Hungary’s democratic-constitutional order from the corrosive effects of Orbán’s rule; on this question, its rhetoric was clear. But absent a similarly unified social-economic vision, it was incapable of mobilizing sufficient popular support under conditions of degraded electoral democracy. . . .
On paper, the EM parties agreed to oppose some of the most extreme economic reforms of the Fidesz-KDNP government, such as the so-called ‘Slave Law’, which removed overtime restrictions and allowed firms to delay payment to workers for up to 36 months. Yet such positions were part of a broader EM programme that emphasized restoring the ‘rules-based’ market economy over which Gyurcsány presided. Marki-Zay’s timid appeals to the labour movement fell flat, as the leader drew a distinction between the ‘interest representation’ of unionized workers and the ‘wellbeing’ of the economy as a whole – suggesting that the former would ultimately be subordinate to the latter. For many voters, such restorationism, harking back to the dark days of the post-Soviet transition, did not amount to a compelling vision of the future.
Fidesz, by contrast, promised to modernize the country and empower its upwardly mobile Christian middle class. In his 2021 speech at the Fidesz party congress, Orbán set out his vision for elevating Hungary to the status of a ‘developed nation’. As well as defending extant social hierarchies (from the macroeconomic to the domestic sphere), he pledged to create a dynamic national bourgeoisie — one that has hitherto been elusive in a semi-peripheral state like Hungary. This project tapped into a problem in Hungarian politics that stretched back to before the 1990s: how to form a distinct national identity while simultaneously playing economic catch-up with western Europe? ‘Illiberal democracy’ and hyper-neoliberal authoritarianism provided an answer, however illusory or mendacious, to that question. The opposition, by confining itself to constitutional matters, did not. . . .
Indeed, the last few years have seen a surge in street-level opposition to the Fidesz project. In January 2019, protests against the Slave Law erupted in towns and cities across the country. Workers at Audi’s massive engine plant in Győr launched an unprecedented strike that resulted in an 18% minimum pay rise for all employees. The week-long action catalyzed a wave of strikes at other plants. Workers at the Hankook tyre factory in Dunaújvaros struck, causing production to drop from 45,000 to 100 tyres per day, and winning a minimum raise of 20%. At large corporations like Suzuki, Bosch and Continental, employees organized protests, threatened strikes and won similar improvements.
This uptick in labour militancy has continued into 2022. As people went to the polls last Sunday, 20,000 of Hungary’s public school teachers had launched a national strike. The action was called by two previously rival formations, the Democratic Union of Teachers and the Union of Teachers, to fight back against desperately low wages and the ongoing assault on labour rights. The unions have framed their walkout as a defence of the right to strike tout court, launching a public campaign that has attracted support from students, parents and other trade unions. These developments suggest that the factionalism and atomization which characterized Hungary’s post-1990 labour movement may now be giving way to a cooperative approach. Orbán remains electorally ascendant, yet such revolts contain the glimmers of a freer, fairer, more solidaristic Hungary. Let’s hope they find a viable party-political form sooner rather than later.
On May 9th, the Philippines will elect its new president, and the front-runner is Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., son of the brutal, kleptocratic co-dictators Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. As the Sui-Lee Wee and Camille Elemia write in the New York Times,
The race is being cast as a competition between those who remember the past and those who are accused of trying to distort it, the last chapter in a brazen attempt to absolve the Marcoses of wrongdoing and quash any effort to hold the family accountable. Five years of President Rodrigo Duterte — a strong Marcos ally known for his bloody war on drugs and for jailing his critics — may have presaged a Marcos family comeback.
“It will determine not just our future but our past,” said Maria Ressa, a journalist and Nobel Prize winner who is an outspoken critic of both Mr. Duterte and Mr. Marcos.
The Marcoses are accused of looting as much as $10 billion from the government before fleeing to Hawaii in 1986, when the peaceful “People Power” protests toppled the Marcos regime. The family returned to the country shortly after the death of the elder Mr. Marcos in 1989.
Despite the exile, the Marcos name never truly left the political establishment.
As Julie McCarthy of NPR reports,
The Marcoses appear to be benefiting from "an extensive network" of anonymously managed social media accounts and online influencers, says Gemma Mendoza, who oversees coverage of disinformation for the Philippine news platform Rappler. Maria Ressa, Rappler's CEO won last year's Nobel Peace Prize. The network of influencers is seeking to advance the "family's makeover" and "to alter public perception," Mendoza says.
Their conspiracy-laced content, followed by millions, vilifies Marcos rivals and the mainstream media, she says, trolling and intimidating journalists assigned to cover the campaign.
"That's very worrisome for democracy, for press freedom, because the press is bearing the brunt of this," Mendoza says.
None of the dozen online influencers NPR reached out to agreed to be interviewed.
Historian Manuel Quezon says the Philippines is part of a global trend whereby extreme views find favor with voters, while fueling anti-democratic impulses. He says the Marcoses do not publicly support such narratives, but he says the phenomenon has been a boon to the family's political fortunes.
"Think Q-Anon, but Philippine style," he says.
The ascent of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos and his family was foretold in Lauren Greenfield’s brilliant 2019 documentary The Kingmaker (trailer here), whose title character is none other than Bongbong’s mother, the now-92-year-old Imelda Marcos. The film may be the most revealing and intimate exposé of an autocrat ever made.
Delights and Provocations
We highly recommend The Daily podcast’s interview with Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer, two of the leaders who won the first effort to unionize an Amazon warehouse in America. They offer a masterclass on organizing, courage, perseverance, and imagination.
Finally, we were delighted to find on Twitter Carlos Fischer’s translation of Article 1 of the new Chilean constitution, which is being rewritten because of sustained and massive action by diverse social movements. It’s an inspiring bright spot in the global fight against authoritarianism.