Donald Trump Makes Autocracy Look Bad
For which we should be thankful
The best cure–maybe the only cure–for voters’ impatience with liberal democracy is to let them have illiberal democracy. People all over the world, and especially in the United States, have grown so frustrated with the failure of democratic politics to produce the outcomes they want that they have increasingly clamored for strongman rule. Last year scholars at Allegheny College conducted a survey that found that a majority of Americans agreed that “The only way our country can solve its current problems is by supporting tough leaders who will crack down on those who undermine American values.” Many other surveys in recent years (like this one) have reached similar conclusions.
Americans elected that tough leader; and now, after only a few months, they seem to be having second thoughts. According to a Times/Siena poll released over the weekend, a solid majority of Americans think that a president should not be able to ignore the Supreme Court and Congress, deport immigrants who criticize Israel and so on. Although it’s no surprise that Democrats do not regard Donald Trump as the kind of strongman they might have hypothetically endorsed, independents found his tactics equally intolerable. The fact that 40 percent of Republicans still say that a president should be able to do whatever he thinks right at least gives one hope for the other sixty percent.
Even An Autocrat Has To Deliver
The appeal of the populist strongman, from Mussolini and Peron to Huey Long and down to our own day is always the same: “I am here for you. I am you. And I will do what needs to be done for you.” The strongman promises to sweep away the obstacles to the attainment of the popular will. The Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, a great admirer of Mussolini, contrasted what he called “the endless conversation” of liberal parliamentarianism with the decisiveness of the charismatic leader. The strong leader does not debate; he acts. The decision, not the process, establishes his legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
There used to be a highly respectable version of this doctrine, though it wasn’t supposed to apply to countries like the United States. The “modernization theory” that dominated academic thinking in the U.S. in the Fifties and Sixties argued that developing countries benefited from autocratic leaders who could marshall a nation’s resources in order to invest them in economically rational ways rather than cater to interest groups. This was why, according to theorists like Seymour Martin Lipset and Samuel Huntington, Pakistan under military rule would outpace India with its commitment to pluralism and liberal rule.
They were wrong, of course. For all the failures of its socialist model, India was able to muster the political will to take on its feudal system of land tenure while in Pakistan the generals, themselves members of the feudal order, never did so, and the country remains to this day dominated by zamindari, or landlord rule. The advantages of allowing democratic politics into economic life turn out to be at least as great as the drawbacks. Most scholars accept that the economic evidence tips only slightly towards democracies, but argue that the evidence for broad measures of social well-being and regime stability overwhelmingly favor democracies. (See, for example, The Democracy Advantage by Morton Halperin, Joseph Siegle and Michael Weinstein.)
But that, of course, hasn’t stopped voters in actual democracies from yearning for the strongman shortcut. India itself has embraced the free-market soft autocracy of Narenda Modi; so, too, in diverse forms, Turkey, Hungary, Italy and, previously, Poland and Brazil. And above all, the United States. We dream, with Carl Schmitt, of decisive action. Schmitt thought that the outcome hardly mattered; it was the catalyzing effect of the act that earned the acclamation of the crowd.
Donald Trump, You’re No Xi Jinping
But of course the outcome does matter: autocratic rule doesn’t look very appealing if it can’t deliver. You get chaos and gratuitous cruelty but the trains don’t run on time. You need the right kind of autocrat. Indeed, the confrontation that Trump has provoked with China seems to demonstrate the virtues of a very different kind of strongman rule. Trump changes his mind on tariffs any time the stock market tanks or a plutocrat works his way into the Oval Office. That is, of course, the opposite of decisive action. Xi Jinping, who can afford to ignore public opinion as well as rich businessmen, has adopted a clear position–we will always negotiate but never submit–and stuck to it. Xi must look at his rival and see, not a fellow strongman, but the haplessness and indiscipline of democracy.
Like a few other countries, most of them very small, including Singapore and the UAE, China is the modernizing autocracy par excellence–a technocratic system guided by a clear and unwavering vision of national interest. Chinese leaders can make risky but ultimately rational bets on the future, whether in the form of electric cars or robots. They can build bridges, dams and high-speed trains without worrying about the homes or lives that will be destroyed in the process. They are, as Graham Allsion writes in Destined For War?, his paean to Xi and the Chinese model, patient and steady.
That sounds more like Joe Biden–more like almost anyone–than Donald Trump. Our current president decides, undecided, and decides again. Maybe what people have in mind when they call for a strongman is Xi Jinping–someone who really will make the trains run on time. But of course they don’t actually want an austere and colorless apparatchik who insists on being worshiped from a distance. They want to be tickled; they want to hoot down those idiots on the other side. It’s quite possible that our carnivalesque political culture will only produce the kind of feckless clown who makes both democracy and autocracy look bad.
Benevolent dictators, or even rational technocratic dictators, are rare. Most rulers who seek absolute power are not thinking about the nation’s well-being or cannot distinguish between national and personal self-interest. The leaders who come to power in liberal democracies are not necessarily wiser or nobler, though I think on average they are; but the institutions that surround them, and the norms that guide them, minimize the harm they can do and even encourage them to do more good than they otherwise might. Think of how political activism ultimately forced a very reluctant President Kennedy to introduce serious civil rights legislation in 1963.
The autocratic shortcut is a pernicious fantasy; but it blossoms in the darkness of public frustration and despair. The work of the moment is to minimize Donald Trump’s wreckage. But the yearning for the strongman will not dissipate until we make our politics more responsive to peoples’ needs.