What are the causes and consequences of democratic decline worldwide over the course of the last two decades? Has democracy in the United States recently drifted more towards democratic backsliding or did the results of the 2022 midterm elections inspire hope in the reversibility of democratic degeneration in the US? What effect does this trend have on the stability of the international order, on the future of liberal democracy more largely, and not least, on the promotion of democracy abroad? How do we classify different types of democratic backsliding and are there institutional and organizational responses to these? Why have cultural issues become the symbolic battleground today for so many opponents of liberal democracy?
Guests featured in this episode:
Thomas Carothers, is the Harvey V Feinberg Chair for Democracy Studies and Co-director of the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trained as a lawyer, he served in the office of the legal advisor of the U.S. State Department before joining The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He is an expert on democracy and international support for democracy promotion abroad for human rights, governance, the rule of law, and civil society. Tom has published several critically acclaimed books, including Funding Virtue: Civil Society and Democracy Promotion, Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad, and most recently Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization.
He's also been a visiting member at the CEU, and is a member of the advisory board of our Democracy Institute in Budapest.
GLOSSARY:
What are the United States midterm elections?
(02:27 or p.1 in the transcript)
United States midterm elections are general elections that occur every four years in the middle of the U.S. presidential term. The election process mandated by Article I of the United States Constitution, by which all members of the United States House of Representatives and roughly a third of the members of the U.S. Senate are on the ballot, occurs every two years. (Currently, the House of Representatives has 435 members, and the Senate has 100.) Midterm elections get their name because they occur halfway through a president’s four-year term. In addition to elections for members of Congress, 36 states hold their gubernatorial elections during the midterm cycle. Many local races and citizen-generated initiatives also can appear on midterm ballots. In general, fewer Americans vote in midterm elections than in presidential elections. Whereas about 60 percent of eligible voters typically cast ballots in presidential election years, that percentage falls to about 40 percent for midterms. (Voter turnout in the 2018 midterm elections was 50 percent, the highest since 1914. Turnout for the 2022 midterms was estimated at 47 percent.) source
What is the OECD?
(07:26 or p.3 in the transcript)
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, international organization founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. Member countries produce two-thirds of the world’s goods and services. The convention establishing the OECD was signed on Dec. 14, 1960, by 18 European countries, the United States, and Canada and went into effect on Sept. 30, 1961. It represented an extension of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), set up in 1948 to coordinate efforts in restoring Europe’s economy under the Marshall Plan. One of the fundamental purposes of the OECD is to achieve the highest possible economic growth and employment and a rising standard of living in member countries; at the same time, it emphasizes maintaining financial stability. The organization has attempted to reach this goal by liberalizing international trade and the movement of capital between countries. A further major goal is the coordination of economic aid to developing countries. Current OECD members are Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. source.
What was the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol?
(15:32 or p.5 in the transcript)
January 6 insurrection or January 6 U.S. Capitol attack was the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, by a mob of supporters of Republican Pres. Donald J. Trump. The attack disrupted a joint session of Congress convened to certify the results of the presidential election of 2020, which Trump had lost to his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden. Because its object was to prevent a legitimate president-elect from assuming office, the attack was widely regarded as an insurrection or attempted coup d’état. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law-enforcement agencies also considered it an act of domestic terrorism. For having given a speech before the attack in which he encouraged a large crowd of his supporters near the White House to march to the Capitol and violently resist Congress’s certification of Biden’s victory—which many in the crowd then did—Trump was impeached by the Democratic-led House of Representatives for “incitement of insurrection” (he was subsequently acquitted by the Senate). source
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SR: Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna, and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. This is the first episode of season six of "Democracy in Question" and it's a great pleasure to welcome today Thomas Carothers, who is Harvey V Feinberg Chair for Democracy Studies and Co-director of the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trained as a lawyer, he served in the office of the legal advisor of the U.S. State Department before joining Carnegie. He's an expert on democracy and international support for democracy promotion abroad for human rights, governance, the rule of law, and civil society.
Tom has published several critically acclaimed books, including "Funding Virtue" 1 with the subtitle, "Civil Society and Democracy Promotion," "Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad," and most recently "Democracies Divided" 3 with the subtitle, "The Global Challenge of Political Polarization."
He's also been a visiting member at my own university, the CEU, and is a member of the advisory board of our Democracy Institute in Budapest. With Tom, I'd like to discuss the causes and consequences of democratic decline over the course of the last two decades. As he has compellingly argued in several recent articles, many explanations for democratic backsliding have proved misleading for it's been much less of a global trend than we tend to assume, and it has mainly affected only a limited set of polities. However, it's also important to understand why, in his view, of all mature western democracies, it's the United States alone that has recently drifted in the direction of democratic backsliding, and therefore it would be an error to view the rest of the world through the optic of American exceptionalism in reverse as it were.
In this context, of course, it would be interesting to hear his analysis of the 2022 midterm elections as well and to think about whether these results inspire hope in the reversibility of what Charles Taylor, who was my guest recently, has termed democratic degeneration in the United States. What effect does this trend have on the stability of the international order, on the future of liberal democracy more largely, and not least on the promotion of democracy abroad?
In the second half of our conversation, I'll ask Tom to outline his conceptual framework for classifying different types of democratic backsliding and to suggest some institutional and organizational responses to each of these. Why have cultural issues become the symbolic battleground today for so many opponents of liberal democracy? For gender, reproductive rights, ethnicity, race, immigration, or religion have all turned into right-wing populist battle cries. And despite regional specificities, these are part and parcel of a rather adaptable transferrable toolkit which circulates internationally within the networks of emergent illiberalisms on almost every continent. Tom, welcome to the podcast, and thanks for joining me today in Vienna.
TC: It's wonderful to be with you.
SR: In a recent Carnegie working paper , you present a stark picture of democratic backsliding in a global comparative perspective. As you and your co-author, Benjamin Press, observe, and I quote you, "Once favored notions about democracy's inevitable spread, its intuitive appeal, and its inherent value have been overshadowed by the harsh reality of a world where each year brings less rather than more democracy globally." But global surveys can also be misleading if the criteria by which we define backsliding remain fuzzy. And definitional problems are compounded by inadequate causal explanations of this backsliding. So, let me ask you to start by defining democratic backsliding and then talk about some common misunderstandings about its drivers.
TC: Democratic backsliding should be thought of as significant decay or deterioration of core democratic institutions and processes. So, democratic backsliding is not just political churn where, for example, you might have the situation that Great Britain has been in recently, many leaders in a short time, and you think, "Wow, democracy's really falling apart." That's not backsliding. Backsliding is when you begin to see, as I said, core institutions and processes like checks and balances on executive power, respect for the rule of law, electoral integrity, respect for the basic rights of citizens in participation. When those things come under attack, then you're in a process of democratic backsliding.
SR: The trend that you describe here is far from global, as you argue in the piece, for it primarily seems to plague countries in the global south, former socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as former Soviet republics. Whereas democracies in Western, Northern, and Southern Europe, East Asia, or North America have experienced, at worst, what you call democratic tremors, such as the rise of far-right parties in Germany or Sweden or even Austria. The United States looms large in this respect as an outlier since the Trump era and its immediate aftermath does pose a systemic threat to electoral democracy and the rule of law. So, in an article in “Foreign Policy” 5 recently you argued that many of these pessimistic analyses of democratic backsliding as a global trend are distorted because they are overly fixated on the peculiarities of the United States. And you caution, therefore, against projecting the problems of American democracy onto the rest of the world. What makes the United States so unique and what are the specificities of backsliding in the U.S. which we would only generalize at our peril?
TC: My co-author and I strongly tried to highlight the fact that although living in Washington, one is immersed in democratic gloom and it's hard not to think the whole world is sinking in democratic quicksand and soon its heads will be under the surface, but when you look around the world carefully, as you were mentioning, what you see is actually quite a sharp division between those countries that really are experiencing significant backsliding like India, for example, like Turkey, Egypt, Thailand, quite a few others versus countries in Western Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, East Asia, Canada, etc., that certainly have unsatisfactory elements to their democracy, have parties that are challenging power in various ways. Among, in a sense, what we call OECD democracies, among wealthy established democracies, the United States is the only one where you see a president who loses an election and refuses to recognize the validity of his loss. That's stunning. Nowhere else in Western Europe, Southern Europe, Northern Europe, East Asia, Australia, Canada, have we seen that. And convince a large number of his followers that the election was illegitimate and make systematic attempts to try to gain influence over the electoral machinery that brings people to power. Those are signs of systematic trouble that we don't see anywhere else. And I think it's important. When I say this, European friends of mine are quick to say, "No, no, we have lots of gloom. Don't tell us things are fine here in Germany or in Sweden. Look at our far-right party. Look at that." And I say, true, you do have tremors. We don't just have tremors, the whole corpus has been shaking in fear over where this is headed in the United States.
The United States is, I think, alone in these OECD democracies of having calcified around two very different conceptions of what the country should be over the last 50 or 60 years that are becoming irreconcilable with each other, in which you have two identity communities and politics now being defined by two large identity communities that most voters feel themselves being pulled in one direction or the other. And they represent contrasting visions of what the country should be that, as I said, are irreconcilable, whether it's over gun ownership, over abortion, attitudes towards immigration, that, when you add them up, represent a fundamentally different conception of what you'd like the country to be, and they become non-cooperative with each other, unwilling to work together politically, talk about each other in extreme terms, view each other as fundamental threats to democracy, and so forth. And so this toxic polarization has reached a level of intensity and breadth throughout the society that you really have a serious problem on your hand trying to run a modern democracy with a country that's so divided.
SR: So, it's almost as if one sees the other as a political opponent, the other as an enemy. In the U.S. what we are seeing is it's not just political polarization, it's also very, very deeply about cultural issues. And the question in my mind is, do you see the midterm elections as a critical tipping point? For example, I was reading Paul Krugman's op-ed where he claimed a sweep for Trumpist Republican candidates to be even worse than Viktor Orban's soft authoritarian ethno-nationalist pseudo-democracy in Hungary. I was thinking to myself if these hyperbolic doomsday scenarios were slightly exaggerated in retrospect or do these results really signal that democratic backsliding can be reversed and has, to an extent, been reversed.
TC: It's too early to say that it's been reversed. You still have a president who denies the legitimacy of the election. He still has many followers. They are still trying to gain influence over the electoral processes in different ways. But the election was very good news in one focused sense, that the candidates who were running to have positions of responsibility over elections in the different states where this has become a very challenging issue, all of those people lost their attempt to gain those positions of influence. That's a major victory for democracy in the United States. So yes, some strikingly good news there. Democracy was on the ballot and democracy won in that way.
But we have to be cautious. It's not really cause for complete celebration because we still have a country in which politics is calcified around these two different poles and in which we still have the problem of overrepresentation of one side versus the other. In that, because of the way the Senate is structured in the United States with the representation of certain states having an equal number of votes with much more populous states, because of the electoral college system, because of gerrymandering in a number of states and so forth, when you add to that picture the level of hostility in politics, the level of non-functionality between the two sides, the determination of one side when it gains some power to try to do in the other side, not just to beat it but to really make its life miserable politically and to really cast it in public terms as the utter enemy of the nation, we still have all of that on our hands. We still have the toxic polarization, we have the dysfunctionality of the system in many ways. And so this election didn't really change that. The underlying problem in the United States is of a country that's ended up with two competing visions of the country, a political system that has built some patterns of minority representation into it that are very dysfunctional and very damaging to democracy, those are still there.
SR: So, I take your point of the U.S. as an outlier in this respect, but can we really ignore the historical legacy of what Henry Louis famously called the American century? So that democracy in America is a guarantee, in a sense, or has been thought of as guaranteeing the stability of the international order that is premised on the hegemony of the U.S. as a self-professed champion of liberal democracy after the end of the Second World War. So, here the whole question of exporting this model of democracy abroad comes to the fore. I look at the world partly from South Asia, being Indian, but, you know, so I'm thinking that, yes, the export of democracy by the U.S. was resented often in many parts of the world, so it's not always that it was, you know, treated with jubilation as we saw it failed miserably in Afghanistan or in Iraq. The question would be, has the erosion of democracy in the U.S. further undermined the credibility and legitimacy of promotion of democratic norms both in the international arena but also elsewhere in the world? And I'm thinking, for example, of the kinds of responses one could have and should have to the really, really strong protests in Iran today. Should, and how could, democratic forces and transformation in Iran, for example, be supported from the outside?
TC: Well, Shalini, it's always been the case that democracy grows from within countries. It's not brought to them or exported to them like a product in a way. But I would also add, many established democracies in the last 40 or 50 years have tried to assist other countries in processes of democratization. In some ways, it's been a bit of a conceit of the United States too often repeated by people in other parts of the world that the United States is kind of singularly engaged in this "export of democracy." Whereas when you look at the foreign policies and the foreign assistance programs of every major democracy, whether it's Great Britain, or Canada, or Australia, or Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, if you could go down the list, all of them have programs to support democracy abroad.
The United States is not alone in trying to do this. It's really the case that every modern wealthy democracy tries to offer something to other countries to say the system is good and you should give it a try. It's also in their interest to have more democratic partners, both economically and diplomatically. But it is a genuine effort on the part of all major democracies to have a more democratic world. So it hasn't been a unique American preoccupation. It's been a source of some frustration to me in Washington that American policymakers talk about democracy promotion as though the United States is this lone eagle circling above this parched earth, you know, looking where to land and help democracy spread. Whereas you go and meet with people from all of these other Western democracies, and they say, "Look, you know, we're actually doing this too. We're here in Malawi trying to do this. We're here in Cambodia trying to do that."
I hesitate to think that the fate of democracy in the world hinges just on the credibility of the United States as a pro-democratic actor. Yes, of course, it damages America's efforts to support other countries in being democratic when the United States struggles. When there was the January 6th 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, that was shocking to people around the world who said, how is this possible that in the United States, which both holds itself out to the world as an exemplar of democracy and has such a long tradition of democracy, could have such a thing occur? At the very moment when the Senate is counting the votes, to have an insurrection at that very moment shook the very framework of American democracy in some ways and shook the standing of the United States as a supporter of democracy. That doesn't mean the United States is disabled or discredited. When President Biden has put forward his line about, you know, the world is engaged in a struggle in democracy versus autocracy, people know he's talking about his own country and not just the world. And you could almost argue that makes it more real because it's like, this is hard, we're struggling with it, you're struggling with it. Let's put our arms together and see if we can stand up for this together.
SR: So, let me turn to another aspect of the argument you've been making. You've been trying to refine our understanding of backsliding by providing, on the one hand, arguments for looking at context-specific domestic political actors, significant local variations and, on the other hand, by advancing a really compelling theoretical taxonomy of democratic backsliding along three main categories of elite actor motivations behind it. And you call them grievance-fueled illiberalism, opportunistic authoritarianism, and entrenched-interest revanchism. So could you explain each of these categories, perhaps illustrate each one, and then talk about what strategies could those who support democracy in each of these contexts adopt, in response to these very different variations of backsliding?
TC: We felt that there are some significant subtypes and it's worth breaking apart this concept, at least partially. Grievance-fueled illiberalism. There are a number of countries where grievances accumulate. A shrewd political entrepreneur feels, sees, understands these grievances, and begins to embody them and to say, "I am the embodiment of your hopes and aspirations that are being quashed by these people or this issue and I'm going to win this for you. And I'm going to bring out these forces and use them as my political base and move forward." We look at Erdogan in Turkey, first Prime Minister and then President Erdogan spoke for many Turks, not a majority probably but many Turks who felt in some ways that the role of Islam in Turkish society had not been given the due that some people felt that it should have, that historically Turkey had suppressed Islam in various ways. And he began to speak for that idea and turned it into a political base and a movement. And so he's not just a backslider who's operating with no agenda, there is a clear agenda of feeding this grievance and then trying to provide something for those who feel the grievance. And to do so, grievance-fueled illiberals say, "I have to break the system in certain ways because maybe this supreme court over here is stopping us from giving people the rights that they need to exercise their, you know, religious freedom in this way or that way. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to curtail certain institutions, maybe this religious minority or majority has not been favored in certain ways, and so institutions have to bend to allow new realities." And down that road lies serious democratic trouble.
A different type, what we called opportunistic authoritarians are those who don't really have a clear agenda around a certain group, around a certain issue, but come to power and basically love wielding power and simply are political strongmen who exercise power for power's sake, often to protect themselves and just rule ruthlessly and accumulate power, but they're not really advancing any particular political idea. I think of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua as such a leader. Once a man with a very strong ideological orientation, but in the last 15 years when he returned to power and then began to wield it, he stands for nothing more than himself, his cronies, and an agenda of just ruthless concentration, centralization of power, and a breaking of all opposition forces and driving them out of the country. But to what end? There is no end. It's simply opportunistic authoritarianism.
The third category, entrenched interest revanchism, are forces who are pushed aside in a democratic transition, that becomes disfavored in a democratic transition, but they don't really lose all of their power. They bide their time, they wait for their moment, and then they strike back. And so democratic backsliding is driven by, whether it's in Thailand, elements around the royal family and the military who strike back and take power, or in Sudan, we've seen the military strike back against a process of transition they felt was threatening to the military's power. So, if you parachute me into a country and say, "Backsliding is occurring," I would get out my little chart here and I'd first say, let me orient myself. Is there a grievance agenda that has been mobilized by a political entrepreneur? Is there just a political strongman who simply has no agenda other than that of himself and his immediate followers? Or are these people who came from the past system who are trying to gain power back? Then I would at least have the start of thinking about ways to approach this and then talk about how different sort of policy responses may be necessary in those settings.
SR: So, what kind of policy responses would be necessary, which would defer by each case?
TC: Well, the grievance-fueled illiberalism, one of the striking features, Shalini, is that often the internationals who are watching such a situation underestimate the power of the grievance agenda. They underestimate the seductiveness of the agenda. Like when Duterte was elected in the Philippines and said, "I hear your insecurity. I know that people in this country are worried about crime and drug trafficking or this and that. I'm a tough guy, I'm going to solve this issue," he was speaking to the concerns of a number of people. Now he kind of turned it into something the way some candidates take a crime issue and sort of magnify it and are demagogic about it, but he did speak to the concerns of people and then got some momentum from that.
So first, we often tend to belittle or diminish the importance of the grievance agenda. So, first, we have to tune into what is the psycho-political dynamic really going on with this leadership. Who do they represent and what is the seductive message they have? Because you then begin to need to offer a counter-narrative to address this challenge to the system and say, "We're not just globalists who don't care about this community or that community. We actually also think about the interests of specific groups, and we also understand that these people are dissatisfied," and engage at that level of addressing the concerns of people. There's also been a tendency to underestimate how far such leaders will go with their agenda. Erdogan, for example, in Turkey, was consistently underestimated by western actors as an autocrat. People kept thinking, well, actually he's a Muslim democrat, so good to see democracy in a Muslim majority country. And he got a benefit of the doubt from outsiders for quite some time whereas he was headed down a road that Turkish analysts, who were not sympathetic to him, were warning many people in western capitals saying, "You don't know where this guy's headed. It's nowhere good. Don't be so sympathetic." So it's getting much more quickly onto a framework of realizing where they're heading and therefore thinking, what are the independent institutions we should be supporting to help stop that. So, the international community's been behind the curve in grievance-fueled illiberalism in many places and slow to realize the dangers.
In the case of opportunistic authoritarianism power here, it's centralizing power, but it's a narrowing of power. They're not building a wide base usually. Instead, they're very concentrated brittle regimes that usually have a small circle, a very corrupted circle of followers, a crony capitalistic system, which is very narrow and rigid in some ways. Anti- corruption is often a very good approach because usually there's a high level of corruption in these narrow concentrated circles of power and corruption is often their source of greatest vulnerability because that's the thing that the public is going to be angriest about. You can't really battle them with ideas because they don't really represent any ideas. So you have to go in a more instrumental form of trying to counter their efforts towards wielding power.
With the entrenched-interest revanchists, you have to again, do more to anticipate where they're going to come from and help a transitional government deal with those elements more thoroughly and more effectively before they become a problem. So, when a transitional government comes in, anticipate and say, "Okay, the military here has been put on the sidelines, what is the right deal to strike with them? What are the right incentives they need to have not to come back?" There's no magic answer in any one of these categories, but it's being politically shrewd about what the essential issues are. What are the dynamics that are going to do in democracy and therefore what kind of policy measures can you take to support the right sort of actors, the right sort of narratives, and the right sort of counterbalancing institutions to stop such dynamics from really going down a negative road?
SR: So, Tom, one of your key insights is with respect to the strength of countervailing institutions in each of these polities to resist authoritarian efforts to dismantle democracy. So these are, of course, independent judiciaries, electoral commissions, constitutions, parliamentary checks, but we can think of non-state institutions like independent media, or civil societies, or institutions of higher education. Besides focusing on these institutions and their role in keeping in check these authoritarian tendencies, don't you think we need to map and look for very subtle changes in democratic practices that may not immediately erode democratic institutions but would corrode its spirit?
So, I'm thinking even in the United Kingdom, for example, of the new laws put into place, which are placing severe curbs on the right to assembly and protest. In France, for example, the attempt to curb academic freedom through trying to ensure that certain disciplines like gender studies, or critical race studies, or postcolonial studies are not taught at university because these are not supposed to be academic disciplines in the strict sense but just fields of activism. These are the kinds of little first steps towards anti-democratic practices, which we would miss if we were just focused on the institutions, don't you think?
TC: Backsliding is an iterative and accumulative process, and so you're right. But one of the hardest parts of analyzing backsliding is knowing when to really give full attention to something and say, "This really spells trouble," as opposed to, "This is simply an irritant." And what we have to see is like the measures in the UK that are constricting protest, or as you say in France, the debates over really free expression, those represent a hardening of ideological views in which one side begins to have a level of intolerance for challenges from the other side. That intolerance is, by its nature, anti-democratic. When I use the word calcification in the United States, the calcification is the precursor to intolerance, and intolerance is the precursor to anti-democratic practices that simply restrict the ability of some people to speak, to assemble, and associate in other ways to be pro-democratic. And so what we see in France and in the UK that you've highlighted are the initial signs of calcification, which one side begins to have a level of intolerance that you sort of say, this is troubling because this links to a broader trend.
SR: So, finally, let me ask you a question which has been troubling me for quite a while, and that is how this anti-democratic repertoire toolkit, how easily transposable it is transnationally. So, although it then needs to be adapted to the specific context, the fact that it's so easy to copy, imitate many of these strategies, tactics and how easily illiberal leaders are learning and borrowing from one another is I think really alarming. What it shows is also a certain commonality of agendas that they're borrowing. For example, in all of the examples that you've spoken about today, one shared agenda would be anti-feminist and anti-women's rights ideologies based also on a very narrow understanding of ethno-nationalist politics and, therefore, who belongs to the nation or who doesn't, who should reproduce the nation or who shouldn't, and a backward-looking nostalgic worldview for something which is lost with this sense of not only just grievance but almost of a mimicry of victimhood on the part of majorities. Those seem to somehow be shared common features around which a repertoire of illiberal strategies seems to be built in right-wing anti-democratic manner. And it seems to travel well across the Atlantic. So, could you say something about the kinds of commonalities and also maybe the difficulties of building these kinds of right-wing transnational alliances because they've, on the one hand, resonated well, on the other hand, have had limited real success?
TC: One of the big puzzles, Shalini, about politics in the 21st century is without us really seeing it happening, we've arrived very quickly. We're here in the third decade of this century from the complete shift in the 20th century when politics was really the battle of social classes and then economic ideologies, which were oriented around the distribution of power among classes and the arrival of capitalism and its discontents and so forth. Suddenly we've ended up in the 21st century with sociocultural politics as being the real battleground in many places. And conservative forces in the United States and in Europe have really embraced wholly the sociocultural agenda and have become quite incoherent in their economic policies. Instead, what they have are sociocultural policies that are often about inclusion and exclusion, nativism and nationalism against "cosmopolitanism," and so forth. That does give a certain commonality to many of the right-wing illiberal forces that are common in many places.
I think both gender equality and LGBTQ rights are two examples of issues where they find a lot of common ground among themselves. But I think part of the reason that transnational dimension of this kind of illiberal power sort of grabbing coming from the right, or power struggles coming from the right, the reason it has certain limitations in terms of being real movements is there are just very, very deep differences among them at the same time.
If you look at Modi's movement, it's conservative in certain ways, nevertheless, if you transpose Hindu majoritarianism to the Sweden Democrats in Sweden and say, "Are you guys really friends?" They'd say, "Well, I'm having trouble getting my mind around that in a way. It isn't really clear exactly what we have in common other than there are certain nativist roots of both of these movements in certain ways." And so there actually are limits.
We see it even in Europe when Viktor Orban, you know, left the European People's Party in 2019, he began to look around to try to create a sort of right-wing ‘international’ within Europe and actually struggled to do so because, actually, there were some significant differences between the right in Italy, in Spain, in France, in the Nordic countries, in Hungary, and Slovenia, etc. When they really began to sit down, they didn't, in many cases, like each other personally very much, they didn't trust each other very much. They did have somewhat different agendas and we see that coming to the fore now. And so the actual commonalities are as great as the actual similarities and that's what makes this especially complicated.
So, I don't think we can assume there's going to be a right ‘international’ that's going to really overpower democracy even though we will see linkages and above all, as you say, the copying of tactics. I've really been struck by the brazenness Donald Trump embodied, the willingness to say anything for your cause. The brazenness has been picked up by people in many parts of the world who realize you can just be extraordinarily brazen and get away with it. And that, unfortunately, is the kind of tactic that can be exported or can be copied almost anywhere.
There's the tendency of Americans to look at the world through American eyes and so forth all around the world, but the United States is missing a lot of the actual nuances of what's happening in the world. We should just be careful not to sink into a sort of generalized gloom. In both European circles and North American circles, there's plenty of room for concern and there are plenty of things to fear, but democracy isn't finished. The 21st century is still relatively young, and we have a long way to go down this road.
SR: Thank you so much, Tom, for this really wide-ranging analysis of democratic backsliding and why, despite signs which do worry us, we shouldn't give up the hope that democracy is work in progress and it basically needs all of us to practice it on a daily basis if we want to further it. So thanks very much for being with me here today.
TC: Thank you for having me on your wonderful show.
SR: Let me wrap up by highlighting some points of my discussion with Tom Carothers. Democratic backsliding that we are witnessing in the United States, Turkey, Egypt, India, is a significant decay of core democratic institutions and processes, like respect for rule of law, judicial independence, electoral integrity. In western Europe or East Asian countries, there are anti-democratic forces that are challenging power, but this is not a fundamental threat to democracy itself. The United States is alone among all OECD countries, where democracy is in deep serious trouble. The toxic polarization in the United States has reached a level, where the differences between the two competing visions of what the country should be are irreconcilable. Each side considers the other to be the threat to democracy and it makes for considerable dysfunctionality of the political system. Democracy itself was on the ballot in the US midterm elections, as President Obama reminded us in November and for now democracy has won the day, even if the system is less than ideal in terms of representational qualities. Democracy cannot be exported to any country in the world from the outside. The United States falsely believes that it is unique in bringing democracy to other countries, but this is a misperception of its own importance and its role. All Western European countries have been engaged in democracy promotion in the rest of the world. So the fate of democracy worldwide fortunately does not depend on either the United States’ efforts alone in this direction or on credibility of the United States as a democracy abroad. It is important to distinguish between three different types of democratic backsliding. Illiberalism fueled by grievances, like in Turkey, is illiberalism which has an agenda – an agenda which we should take seriously in order to be able to offer a counter-narrative. This is not the same as opportunistic authoritarianism which can offer political strongmen like Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, who is simply clinging to power in a non-democratic fashion but advances no political agenda anymore. Both of these are different from the revanchism of entrenched interests, when they fight a rearguard battle as when the military strikes back to regain power and concentrate it once again in its own hands as in Thailand or in Sudan. Each type of backsliding therefore not only needs to be identified carefully, but a policy response needs to be designed differently according to the kind of problem we are facing so that different sets of actors can be supported to further democracy in different contexts. It is also important to identify the first signs of what Tom Carothers calls calcification as a precursor to the intolerance that fuels anti-democratic practices in order for us to be able to intervene to stop democratic backsliding at an early stage. If the 20 th century was defined by a class struggle and a clash of economic ideologies, today we are in the midst of cultural battles, battles around nativism and nationalism, gender and sexuality, religion and race, which are all being used by right-wing anti-democratic forces to undermine liberal democracies.
This was the first episode of season six. Thank you very much for listening and join us again for the next episode in two weeks' time when I'll be talking with Shaharzad Akbar who served until last year as the chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed and, of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.