The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism
Left and Right, it poses deadly threat to the liberal democratic order
In an opinion piece for MSNBC Daily, Zeeshan Aleem decries the convergence of the populist Left and the populist Right. (Whether populist Left is the right term for the far Left is doubtful, but for the sake of convenience I’ll use it here.) His evidence for this is the apostasy of certain figures—Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, lesser-known people—who once were thought to be reliable comrades but now make common cause with MAGA on a range of issues.
Aleem’s detailed analysis of this phenomenon is mostly garbage. Noting the left-right populist consensus on Ukraine, he tortures the English language in an attempt to show that the populist right isn’t truly antiwar:
While it’s true that the MAGA wing’s increasing hesitation to involve itself in Ukraine has the effect of calling for a less hawkish position than many Democrats, the actual ideology underlying the position isn’t fundamentally antiwar. Trump and MAGA Republicans are nationalists interested in militarizing domestic American life. They’re in favor of aggressively securing the borders, supporting armed vigilante formations and emboldening militarized police. And while Trump isn’t interested in the kind of nation-building that both parties supported during the war on terrorism, he exhibited no lack of appetite for war when he torpedoed the Iran nuclear deal, played chicken with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, requested colossal defense budgets, continued drone warfare but with less transparency, called for military parades in the streets and employed strategists such as Steve Bannon who enjoy saber-rattling about the prospect of war with China.
It would have been interesting to read Aleem’s explanation of how securing the country’s borders represents “militarization,” or how exactly Trump and his supporters “emboldened militarized police.” I particularly appreciated the crack about “military parades”—it took me about thirty seconds to find a photo depicting a full battalion of M47 Patton tanks clanking down Pennsylvania Avenue on the occasion of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first inauguration (1953). But leaving aside his standard-issue left-progressive obsessions, the phenomenon Aleem describes is a real thing. There is a certain pattern of convergence between the populist Left and the populist Right. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that it’s been there all along.
Though the populist Left and the populist Right differ on many points of policy, their respective ideologies are rooted in the same negative, hyper-critical, hateful view of America as it is. Trump promises to Make America Great Again; the progressive wing of the Democratic Party promises to put America through the wringer of “fundamental transformation.” Both promises are predicated on a belief that the real, existing America is a bad, bad place.
Thus the two sides’ real kinship is not programmatic but spiritual. Here and there they do hold similar views, e.g in their desire to throw Ukraine to the Russian wolves. But even where the ideas differ, the thought process is the same: America can do nothing right, because America itself is corrupt and unworthy. This is politics as a morality play: good versus evil, with no possibility of compromise.
No wonder, then, that the two sides’ common enemy is liberal democracy, a political system fundamentally opposed to the radical anti-intellectualism and nihilism that characterize the populist Left no less than they do the populist Right. Bipartisanship, pragmatism, practicality, splitting the difference—all the horse trading and deal making that lubricate the gears of representative government are anathema to those who practice politics-as-morality. Liberal democracy is conservative in the former sense of the term: a political system based on the recognition that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs; that the perfect is the eternal enemy of the good; that the moral order of the universe is no business of government. Try explaining that to Tucker Carlson or Cori Bush.
For much the same reason, the populist Left and the populist Right take a dim view of civil liberties as traditionally defined. The idea that people should be free to speak their minds and live as they choose is not only violated in practice but rejected in principle. Freedom is seen as a zero-sum game that can only be secured for one group by taking it away from some other group. Both sides embrace the ideology of the group and hold that individual interests are determined by group identity. And it’s taken for granted that groups should be pitted against one another: “ordinary Americans” v. “elites,” BIPOC v. Whiteness, and so on. The first commandment of contemporary populism, Left and Right, is: Know Thy Enemy.
Finally, the populist Left and the populist Right are both comfortable with violence. One has only to recall the siege of the Federal Building in Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 2020 to realize that despite all their gassing about the evils of January 6, 2021, the populist Left has no objection in principle to politically motivated violence. And naturally the converse is the case: the populist Right stridently condemned the violence in Portland, but it makes excuses for the invasion and spoilation of the US Capitol.
Since there’s nothing new under the sun, an historical example of the convergence of two supposedly opposed ideologies is easily cited. In the 1930s it was widely believed that the rise of fascism could be countered by nothing less than a broad coalition of the Left: an international Popular Front. “Only socialist countries can fight effectively,” George Orwell argued in The Lion and the Unicorn. But he wrote that sentence at a time when National Socialist Germany and the Stalinist Union were digesting the meal they’d made of Poland at the beginning of World War II. Despite all the propaganda poured forth by the two countries in earlier years—the bestial face of Bolshevism, the bloody monstrousness of Nazism—when the times demanded cooperation, they were glad to cooperate. Their later conflict was in the nature of a civil war, the clash of variant totalitarianisms. And gradually it became clear that whatever their formal ideological differences, the two regimes had always been in spiritual accord.
Zeeshan Aleem admits that he doesn’t understand the phenomenon he describes—not surprising given his own leftist convictions. These prevent him from stepping back and taking a good long look at the state of American politics today. If he did, Aleem might realize that the problem has nothing to do with Left versus Right but with new and toxic variants of populist authoritarianism versus the liberal political order.