Die Populistdämmerung
3/2/21 11:39![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kiaa posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
talkpoliticsHistory tends to serve us "significant coincidences" much more frequently than we might suspect. Coincidences of the type that Karl Jung once described, like two geographically separate events seemingly sharing no causal relation between themselves, but in essence carrying the same meaning. Synchronicity is a term that Jung coined in the 50s of the 20th century, and it's becoming more relevant now than ever. Does this mean humankind is slowly getting wiser, and seeing what lies beneath the surface, I don't know.
Why am I talking about Jung, you may wonder. I was reminded of these concepts while witnessing two events separated by thousands of miles. One was Donald Trump's turbulent fall-down at the US elections. The other, Alexei Navalny's predictable ordeal upon returning to Russia. I'd argue these two visible events are consequences of a third one, happening a bit beneath the surface. The twilight of wannabe authoritarian populists in the early 21st century.
It wasn't so long ago that right-wing populists and their pseudointellectual useful idiots used to look down upon us progressive rabble, and explain with some disdain that liberal civilization, and we along with it, were doomed to oblivion. They were essentially forecasting that the future does not belong to human dignity, respect, peace and accord, but to humiliation, hatred, conflict, and war. And that we should prepare ourselves accordingly.
But that was yesterday. Today, we don't tend to hear of such things. We're again hearing of stuff that wannabe authoritarian populists insisted were dead at this point: the Green Deal in Europe, an end to the Uncivil War in America, and a chorus of calls for the restoration of human rights and freedoms in Russia.
It is this subtle and yet profound change in the Zeitgeist that is the third event concealed under the surface that I'm talking about, and it's what makes the synchronicity link between Trump's downfall and Navalny's self-imposed martyrdom. These two evens mark not the beginning but the end of the period where authoritarian populism used to look like the new unshakable world order of Western civilization. If we are to rephrase Churchill, this is not the end of the beginning, it's the beginning of the end.
Mind you, that's really not how things were looking like before the EU elections in 2019. Victor Orban, who declared Hungary "a non-liberal country" back in 2014, was promising a huge breakthrough by the far right, which was then supposed to submit the rest of the EU to its ideology. An aesthetic and cultural shock was being promised to the Western civilization, where arrogant reactionaries would take over, "drain the swamp" of stagnant liberal bureaucracy, and replace it with a society where "traditional values" would rule supreme, and the world would become the utopia that it once was. Or was supposed to be? You never know how exactly the minds of those folk operate. Politics was about to become a Darwinian proving ground, a jungle for predators and prey, not a shiny elitist golf course with Mojitos.
And where are we now? The promises to shuffle us all into a jungle full of beasts has not come to fruition. The far-right failed to make a breakthrough in 2019. Instead, the real breakthrough came from Democrats and Liberals who got 40 EMPs more than four years prior, and from the Greens who added another 17 seats, reaching 69 in the EU parliament. The left, even the outdated Social-Democrats, also consolidated their positions. It was time for the authoritarian populists to sound a retreat. More and more real power in the EU is shifting toward the liberal-green side of the EU parliament, which in turn has increased its pressure on the authoritarianists who've seen their pipe dream of a European political jungle slip away by the day.
But this didn't just happen overnight. The end of the short-lived era of the far-right authoritarians, now marked by the Trump/Navalny synchronism, had long been in the making. It was as early as the days when the new "conservatives" were scaring decent folk with the law of the jungle that the forces of civilization were already lining up to push back against them. Right after the infamous Brexit referendum and Trump's election victory, both interpreted as the final triumph for the "jungle" advocates, the pushback began almost immediately. As one might expect, France was the first place where this happened noticeably. Just a few months later, Macron won by a landslide there. Himself a Third-Way type of technocrat, and unlike other European leaders like Cameron, he refused to build his campaign around the topic of reconciliation with the jungle camp and collaboration with the proponents for national self-isolation. Instead, he bet on a message of European unity, liberal values, and a green future. And he utterly crushed the local jungle representative, Marine Le Pen.
Unlike America, France failed to surrender. What followed was resistance at the very heart of neo-authoritarianism. In 2018, about a year after Macron's victory, reactionary Poland was having local elections. The ruling conservatives only managed to get four major cities, while the democratic opposition took 19, including the capital. In Orban's supposedly "non-liberal" Hungary, local elections were held in late 2019, just weeks after the EU election. The local authoritarianists lost the capital, as well as 10 of the 23 largest cities. Outside Europe proper, the same year in Turkey, Erdogan lost all major cities, including the two major megapolises, Istanbul and Ankara. In 2020, even Putin, the longest-reigning beast in the jungle lost Novosibirsk, Tomsk and Tambov, only being able to retain Moscow by a thread.
In the meantime, the EU citizens, having witnessed the chaos of the British exit from the Union, only used the occasion to reinforce their trust in the EU, and re-confirm the long-term federalist prospects of the remaining member states. The national isolationism of the neo-authoritarian regimes in Europe began looking like an anachronistic remnant of the past again, not a herald of the times to come.
From Toulouse to Tomsk, and from the Bosporus to the Baltic, societies were signaling that no, they don't want to be shuffled into an authoritarian jungle. And those who were already there to one extent or another, showed that they didn't like it. They demonstrated their affinity to peaceful societies living in accord, where you're not supposed to have your Mojito forcefully yanked out of your hands, then hit over the head with a golfing stick by a random beast passing by. America also woke up from her nightmare eventually, and told Trump enough is enough. No more jungle, no more hatred and no more division. That was also the message of that ever increasing number of Russians who dared to defy the absolutist authorities in their country, and come out in protest to Navalny's arrest: no more beasts, no more torment on behalf of the hungry predator lurking in his lair in Kremlin.
The authoritarian beasts are retreating everywhere. Poland and Hungary have failed to transform the EU parliament into a jungle, they've failed to torpedo the progressive EU budget, and they've failed to prevent it from punishing authoritarian jungles like them. Slovakia and Slovenia in turn have stopped flirting with their Polish and Hungarian mentors. The EU parliament has not stopped pressuring the likes of Putin and Erdogan. The latter has suddenly started sending amicable messages to Brussels, after having called the European leaders Nazis for years. In Moscow, Putin is busy explaining how he possesses no notary acts for no huge palaces and villas. Are you noticing the change?
But sure, though injured and weakened, the beasts will be kicking and screaming and biting. The question now is not if the forces of civilization would take back what they had surrendered to the beasts of the jungle. That won't be easy at all, granted, which is evident by the way Trump went out kicking and screaming. Once mortally wounded, more seasoned dictators like Orban and Putin will be capable of doing much more damage than Trump was allowed with his cartoonish joke of a coup. No, they won't be giving up their power without a fight, far from it.
But the tide has always turned. From here on, we can expect an exponential increase in the cases of Synchronicity that will be confirming this turnover.
Why am I talking about Jung, you may wonder. I was reminded of these concepts while witnessing two events separated by thousands of miles. One was Donald Trump's turbulent fall-down at the US elections. The other, Alexei Navalny's predictable ordeal upon returning to Russia. I'd argue these two visible events are consequences of a third one, happening a bit beneath the surface. The twilight of wannabe authoritarian populists in the early 21st century.
It wasn't so long ago that right-wing populists and their pseudointellectual useful idiots used to look down upon us progressive rabble, and explain with some disdain that liberal civilization, and we along with it, were doomed to oblivion. They were essentially forecasting that the future does not belong to human dignity, respect, peace and accord, but to humiliation, hatred, conflict, and war. And that we should prepare ourselves accordingly.
But that was yesterday. Today, we don't tend to hear of such things. We're again hearing of stuff that wannabe authoritarian populists insisted were dead at this point: the Green Deal in Europe, an end to the Uncivil War in America, and a chorus of calls for the restoration of human rights and freedoms in Russia.
It is this subtle and yet profound change in the Zeitgeist that is the third event concealed under the surface that I'm talking about, and it's what makes the synchronicity link between Trump's downfall and Navalny's self-imposed martyrdom. These two evens mark not the beginning but the end of the period where authoritarian populism used to look like the new unshakable world order of Western civilization. If we are to rephrase Churchill, this is not the end of the beginning, it's the beginning of the end.
Mind you, that's really not how things were looking like before the EU elections in 2019. Victor Orban, who declared Hungary "a non-liberal country" back in 2014, was promising a huge breakthrough by the far right, which was then supposed to submit the rest of the EU to its ideology. An aesthetic and cultural shock was being promised to the Western civilization, where arrogant reactionaries would take over, "drain the swamp" of stagnant liberal bureaucracy, and replace it with a society where "traditional values" would rule supreme, and the world would become the utopia that it once was. Or was supposed to be? You never know how exactly the minds of those folk operate. Politics was about to become a Darwinian proving ground, a jungle for predators and prey, not a shiny elitist golf course with Mojitos.
And where are we now? The promises to shuffle us all into a jungle full of beasts has not come to fruition. The far-right failed to make a breakthrough in 2019. Instead, the real breakthrough came from Democrats and Liberals who got 40 EMPs more than four years prior, and from the Greens who added another 17 seats, reaching 69 in the EU parliament. The left, even the outdated Social-Democrats, also consolidated their positions. It was time for the authoritarian populists to sound a retreat. More and more real power in the EU is shifting toward the liberal-green side of the EU parliament, which in turn has increased its pressure on the authoritarianists who've seen their pipe dream of a European political jungle slip away by the day.
But this didn't just happen overnight. The end of the short-lived era of the far-right authoritarians, now marked by the Trump/Navalny synchronism, had long been in the making. It was as early as the days when the new "conservatives" were scaring decent folk with the law of the jungle that the forces of civilization were already lining up to push back against them. Right after the infamous Brexit referendum and Trump's election victory, both interpreted as the final triumph for the "jungle" advocates, the pushback began almost immediately. As one might expect, France was the first place where this happened noticeably. Just a few months later, Macron won by a landslide there. Himself a Third-Way type of technocrat, and unlike other European leaders like Cameron, he refused to build his campaign around the topic of reconciliation with the jungle camp and collaboration with the proponents for national self-isolation. Instead, he bet on a message of European unity, liberal values, and a green future. And he utterly crushed the local jungle representative, Marine Le Pen.
Unlike America, France failed to surrender. What followed was resistance at the very heart of neo-authoritarianism. In 2018, about a year after Macron's victory, reactionary Poland was having local elections. The ruling conservatives only managed to get four major cities, while the democratic opposition took 19, including the capital. In Orban's supposedly "non-liberal" Hungary, local elections were held in late 2019, just weeks after the EU election. The local authoritarianists lost the capital, as well as 10 of the 23 largest cities. Outside Europe proper, the same year in Turkey, Erdogan lost all major cities, including the two major megapolises, Istanbul and Ankara. In 2020, even Putin, the longest-reigning beast in the jungle lost Novosibirsk, Tomsk and Tambov, only being able to retain Moscow by a thread.
In the meantime, the EU citizens, having witnessed the chaos of the British exit from the Union, only used the occasion to reinforce their trust in the EU, and re-confirm the long-term federalist prospects of the remaining member states. The national isolationism of the neo-authoritarian regimes in Europe began looking like an anachronistic remnant of the past again, not a herald of the times to come.
From Toulouse to Tomsk, and from the Bosporus to the Baltic, societies were signaling that no, they don't want to be shuffled into an authoritarian jungle. And those who were already there to one extent or another, showed that they didn't like it. They demonstrated their affinity to peaceful societies living in accord, where you're not supposed to have your Mojito forcefully yanked out of your hands, then hit over the head with a golfing stick by a random beast passing by. America also woke up from her nightmare eventually, and told Trump enough is enough. No more jungle, no more hatred and no more division. That was also the message of that ever increasing number of Russians who dared to defy the absolutist authorities in their country, and come out in protest to Navalny's arrest: no more beasts, no more torment on behalf of the hungry predator lurking in his lair in Kremlin.
The authoritarian beasts are retreating everywhere. Poland and Hungary have failed to transform the EU parliament into a jungle, they've failed to torpedo the progressive EU budget, and they've failed to prevent it from punishing authoritarian jungles like them. Slovakia and Slovenia in turn have stopped flirting with their Polish and Hungarian mentors. The EU parliament has not stopped pressuring the likes of Putin and Erdogan. The latter has suddenly started sending amicable messages to Brussels, after having called the European leaders Nazis for years. In Moscow, Putin is busy explaining how he possesses no notary acts for no huge palaces and villas. Are you noticing the change?
But sure, though injured and weakened, the beasts will be kicking and screaming and biting. The question now is not if the forces of civilization would take back what they had surrendered to the beasts of the jungle. That won't be easy at all, granted, which is evident by the way Trump went out kicking and screaming. Once mortally wounded, more seasoned dictators like Orban and Putin will be capable of doing much more damage than Trump was allowed with his cartoonish joke of a coup. No, they won't be giving up their power without a fight, far from it.
But the tide has always turned. From here on, we can expect an exponential increase in the cases of Synchronicity that will be confirming this turnover.
(no subject)
Date: 3/2/21 10:24 (UTC)