Liberalism Offers a Language of Resistance Against Authoritarianism Everywhere
The West may have become complacent about defending liberalism but non-Western countries are naturally turning to it
On July 11-12 in Washington D.C., the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism—The UnPopulist’s parent organization—convened the largest gathering of liberals from around the world in recent memory for the inaugural Liberalism for the 21st Century conference. Those who couldn’t make it missed out on a truly special occasion.
But we’ve got you covered.
We’ve been publishing select portions of the conference right here on our page—from ISMA President Shikha Dalmia’s brief opening address to the closing keynote conversation between Francis Fukuyama and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Part 1 and Part 2)—and we are incrementally releasing the full conference on our YouTube channel (which you should subscribe to).
Additionally, those who couldn’t attend can read the excellent conference recaps written by Damon Linker, Luis Parrales for The Dispatch, and Cathy Young for The Bulwark.
Today, we want to share with you the conference’s first panel discussion: “Liberalism Beyond the West.” The moderator is Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, whose brilliant new book is The Reactionary Spirit (look out for the excerpt that we will be publishing from it later this week). The panel featured Anne Applebaum, prize-winning historian, staff writer for The Atlantic, and author of the new book, Autocracy, Inc.; Azar Nafisi, Iranian dissident and author of many books, including a memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which is an international bestseller and has been translated into over 30 different languages; and Henri Barkey, Middle East expert, professor of international relations at Lehigh University, and an adjunct fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, who has the distinct honor of being accused by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of masterminding the 2016 failed coup against him.
We encourage you to watch the video of this panel discussion in its entirety, which includes a lively Q&A section, as substantive as the panel itself, that is not included below.
The following transcript of the panel discussion has been adjusted for flow and clarity.
Zack Beauchamp: I want to start by telling everybody a story—one that challenges us liberals to think about ourselves the way that we think about other ideologies. It goes like this. A Marxist will tell you, “How dare you judge communism? We have these wonderful principles.” And we're like, “Well, look how communism worked out in reality. You can't just say that communism is freedom for everybody—being a fisherman in the morning and then a critic at night,” as Marx once suggested. The communist then says to the liberal, “What about your track record? You guys talk about freedom, about democracy, about everybody being in a fair system of cooperation together and living a lovely liberal life. But what have actual liberal states done? Slavery in the United States and colonialism in Europe. Japanese internment, also in the United States, at a time when it was allegedly fighting for democracy during the Cold War. I can't count the number of people who are dead as a consequence of American foreign policy.” If you’re this hypothetical Marxist critic, you could say that the actual track record of liberalism is every bit as bloody as that of any totalitarian regime. Liberalism is Western imperialism. It is oppression. That's the story.
Now, I don't buy the story. I don't think anyone in this room buys the story. I think it's wrong for a number of reasons—the obvious one being that liberalism is capable of changing. Sure, liberalism has been entangled with imperialism and racism and slavery and colonialism in the past. But liberal states have a capacity to reform themselves. However, I want to focus on a less obvious reason for taking the story to be wrong, which is that liberalism is not just the history of the West; it's not just the history of Western Europe and North America. In fact, liberalism is much more than that; it’s a much more capacious doctrine—one that has origins and roots in different places around the world. The conventional history of liberalism as something that started with a bunch of European intellectuals in the 17th century and got exported to the rest of the world doesn’t capture the full story. So, tell me: From your points of view and your experiences in places outside of that traditional narrative, what does this conventional history miss? What does our hypothetical Marxist get wrong?
Anne Applebaum: The place where liberalism starts is in the experience of injustice and the experience of autocracy. Everywhere you look in the world where there is a successful or unsuccessful democracy movement—whether it's in Hong Kong, Iran, Russia—it begins with people who intuitively understand that a state in which a small group of people makes all the decisions, in which the economy is untransparent, in which the legal system and the judges are bought and paid for by people in power, where there isn't rule of law, there's rule by law (in other words, the law is whatever whoever is in charge says it is) … anybody who lives in a system like that understands it to be unfair. That's the starting point for thinking about alternatives. And that was true at the time of the English Civil War, which was the beginning of, “Our system is unfair. Why should the monarch be in charge?”, it was the beginning of that process.
Around the world, wherever people are fighting for freedom or democracy or justice, most of them aren't looking to the United States or Europeans to lead them. Sometimes they're inspired by the writings of the past. But most of them have their own story in their own context. The Russians, the first to understand the link between kleptocracy and authoritarianism, came to see how Western financial institutions and systems were co-responsible for creating autocracy in Russia and elsewhere. They were the ones who first explained to us the connection between untransparent money and arbitrary power, and they were the first to learn how to expose it. The great gift that Alexei Navalny had was his ability to investigate and expose how the system worked, but in a way that was funny and amusing and watchable and entertaining and so absorbing that hundreds of millions of people watched his videos. He was a liberal who came to his liberalism not from admiration of the West or aping of America but from understanding how his system worked, how it was interlocked with the West and taking advantage of Western institutions. So, to answer the question, if you look around the world, each of these movements has a local source and a local specificity and comes to liberal ideas in its own way.
Azar Nafisi: I'll start with a story too. About two decades ago, I had just migrated to the U.S., and after giving a talk at the Women's Foreign Policy Group, a lady came up to me, and before I could say anything, she said, “You're wrong. Women actually like to wear the veil in Iran. It’s their culture.” I really regret not telling her: “If Iranian women love to wear the compulsory hijab, why is it that they welcome flogging and being jailed, tortured, and even killed for refusing to wear it?” And how many times since then have I heard this from politicians, the people in the media, universities, and think tanks: “but it's their culture, you see.”
But if my culture then means stoning people to death, polygamy, female marriage at the age of nine … if that’s what my culture is, then your culture is Inquisition, the burning of witches in Salem, slavery. It is not St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine and Moby Dick and James Baldwin and Tony Morrison and W.H. Auden and on and on. If mine is associated with whoever benefits from the Islamic Republic, then yours is fascism and communism. People say, “It’s our culture. You should not interfere with our culture.” But this kind of thinking, in the garb of exposing colonialism, in fact creates a new form of colonialism. It too does not allow Iranian women to speak for themselves. It does not give them voice. When the so-called feminist scholar, Germaine Greer, defended the practice of female genital mutilation, which is performed on girls before they reach puberty so that they don’t go on to enjoy sex, by saying that “attempts to outlaw the practice amounted to an attack on cultural identity. One man’s beautification is another man’s mutilation. Mutilation is a form of self decoration”—she says that you have to give women the right to self-decorate, namely, mutilate themselves—what kind of reasoning, what kind of scholarship is this?
“The people have discovered their power, and the regime has discovered its own weakness. There is defection from within the regime, and many of these defections come from people reading, people discussing, people thinking about liberal texts. Like the rock stars of Iran are Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper and Václav Havel—for me, personally, Czesław Miłosz, Joseph Brodsky, Szymborska, Gombrowicz, my God.” — Azar Nafisi
Iran's Constitutional Revolution [in 1905] was one of the first in Asia, and the constitutionalists fought against both the West's expansionism and hegemony (especially between Russia and England). But they also wanted to become part of a new world. You don't merely export or import values and principles—they need to be needed. That’s how liberalism survives—by other people picking it up. If women in Afghanistan or Iran want to be free to dress the way they want, to appear the way they want, who are you to tell them they cannot? There is a deep condescension in this approach. It tells them, “You are not really made for freedom.” In the revolution, there was an American, Howard Baskerville, who at the age of 24 was shot dead in the city of Tabriz because he was supporting the constitutionalists. The American consul told him that they didn’t want him to be involved, that Americans should not be involved in other peoples’ affairs. His response was, “I cannot ignore the suffering of these people who are fighting for their rights. I am an American citizen, and I am proud of that, but I am a human being, and cannot stop having sympathy for the people of this city. The only difference between me and these people is my birthplace, and that is not a big difference.”
This is what we need more of today and much as a hundred years ago.
Henri Barkey: I’m a political economist, so I'm going to look at it from a different perspective. I don't believe that you can export liberalism.
When you look at the origins of liberalism in the West, it is essentially the result of two very important developments: industrialization and urbanization. When you look at liberalism in the rest of the world, the liberalism that we see is not really genuine—whether in the Middle East or in Latin America, the liberalism there is really an imitative, mimicking type of liberalism. What these countries saw was that as the West developed and industrialized, industry equaled power. So if you wanted to be powerful, you had to industrialize. So these countries, first and foremost, tried to industrialize first—they didn't try to bring in the values of liberalism. For them, the instrument was industrialization.
When you look at Latin America and the Middle East and East Asia in the ’60s and ’70s, what did they do? They invented something called import substitution, which tried to replicate industrial policies but without the other parts of what that required. In the West, when industrialization came, you also saw three very important attributes to it: (1) the rule of law, (2) a modern state apparatus, and (3) a civil society. Those things never really materialized in the rest. When they adopted industrialization policies, it did not come with the rule of law, with the development of civil society. In fact, it was very restricted, and limited to very small groups. So this liberalism that we see in Latin America, Middle East, etc., was essentially imitative. It was not genuine. It was not believed in. When you look today in the 21st century at issues of rule of law in many of these countries, there is no rule of law. You have leaders who do whatever they want. They can imprison people for no reason whatsoever. You can go to jail in Turkey because you've insulted the president or you insulted a former Ottoman Sultan. So, yes, all of these societies had crises at the end of the ’70s. We saw it in Latin America with the bureaucratic, authoritarian coups. We saw it also in Turkey. But they never really emerged from the crisis of ideology, a crisis of liberal identity.
The only time in Turkey where there was an opening was between 1983 and 1993 when it had a president, Turgut Özal, who was an economist, who was a maverick, who understood that if he wanted to develop Turkey, he had to liberalize politically as well as economically; that you can't just do economic liberalization without the political liberalization. Unfortunately, he died. But the military really disliked him and pushed back against him.
When I was preparing for this presentation, because I just got Chat GPT Plus, I decided to see what it thinks of liberalism in the non-Western world. One of the examples it spewed out was the Atatürk regime in Turkey. It was secular—but it was anything but liberal. It was repressive against religious folks. And it was repressive toward the Kurds who to this day have no essential say in Turkish politics.
So when people talk about liberalism … people have incorrect notions that liberalism really existed in a number of places. In Argentina under Sarmiento, or Benito Juárez in Mexico … those presidents very clearly said, “We are emulating the West. Because we want to be like the West.” It wasn’t really an effort on the part of the West to export liberalism; it was a mimicking, and in most instances it failed.
Beauchamp: So, I think what is interesting about our current moment is that even some of those countries that were success stories are in crisis, as are the countries that they wanted to imitate. The United States is the obvious example—but it’s not the only one. Hungary was widely considered, after communism, to be the signature success story of post-communist transition. Israel and India were two of the very few countries that transitioned to democracy right after World War II and had—almost, in India’s case—continuous histories of democratic rule, right up until recently where there came to be serious crises inside of those countries. Those four examples are at the top of my mind. But there are lots of other ones: from the Philippines, to Brazil, to the countries we are going to be discussing—where people on this panel lived. What this picture puts together is a sense that liberalism is in crisis in its frontiers, in places where it was trying to take root, and even in the places where it’s been established for a long time. This is a genuine moment of global crisis for liberalism. No matter how strong you think liberalism is in its ideas … clearly, there’s something going on here. Henri, how do you see this crisis? What are its origins? What is the nature of this crisis?
Barkey: I think this crisis is different than previous crises in the sense that, yes, economics plays a role—when it comes to the causes of this crisis you can point to the 2007-2009 economic crisis in the West, especially in the United States, and the end of the Cold War, because the Cold War had created a certain amount of discipline and people lived within that discipline, and the rise of China, and, we should also add the end of Cold War effect, the fact that there’s much greater agency on the part of leaders. That is to say, you now see leaders around the world—Modi, Orbán, Erdoğan, Putin, you name it—who do not want to leave power. They are manipulating the system to stay in power. The problem for them is that liberalism is a threat to their rule.
“He's part of the Western alliance. But his diatribe is constantly anti-United States. ‘The United States did the coup in 2016’; ‘The United States is the cause of Turkey's economic problems,’ and so on. He never criticizes Xi, he never criticizes Putin. Why? Because those leaders are not challenging his authoritarian system. They are authoritarians.” — Henri Barkey
When we look at the United States, the economy is doing very well, thank you: unemployment has never been this low in our memory. The crisis that we see is not one of economics, even though economics has played a role in the creation of it. It’s more of a values proposition; people are reacting to liberal values in the sense that they want more tradition, more religion, less emphasis on chosen gender roles—so it’s really a different type of crisis that we have and it’s not one that we will necessarily solve by pouring more money into the economy, as the Biden administration has done. So we need to start looking at this crisis from a different perspective.
One thing I would like to say, which is actually optimistic. It has obviously become a problem in the West. But we ought to look at immigration from another perspective. People want to come to United States, want to come to Europe. Do you see immigrants trying to get into China or Russia or anywhere else? The liberal system, with all its problems, is still very successful, because it is the place where people want to end up and live in. Not in China. Not in Russia.
Applebaum: I absolutely agree that we're at a moment which isn't an economic crisis but something deeper. And even calling it a cultural crisis doesn't go far enough either. If you look around the world, at moments when democracies collapse and dictatorships arise, it’s almost always at a moment of enormous strife and civil war—as with the rise of Napoleon after the French Revolution—when people feel not just economically insecure but physically insecure. And it's almost always a time when there's a cacophony of voices wanting different things, leading to people eventually saying, “Right, we want to end this conflict, and we want a single leader.” There's always a part of the population that prefers that. In almost every country on the planet, except those who have managed to control their internet, like China, you now have people living in that kind of world. All of us have access to a constant stream of information, often contradictory—there’s one view of the world available with one click on your phone, and then there's a completely different view available on another. The reality that people have before them is extremely complicated. There are no guideposts. We're rapidly losing faith in the institutions that used to help us sort out what's true and what's not true—whether it's universities, newspapers, authority figures. And how do people react in that kind of situation? They demand silence, they demand order, they demand safety. There's a reason this is happening in so many countries at the same time: it’s because people are faced with the same breakdown of narratives. Whether it’s the United States, the Philippines, Hungary, Brazil, you see this very similar phenomenon.
Revitalizing Liberalism Requires Understanding That It Is a Natural Response to Diversity Everywhere
We're also in a moment when the autocracies have begun to work together in a way that didn't seem possible even a decade ago. They are not working together because they share an ideology. I'm very much against this idea that we're in some kind of new Cold War. Instead, what we have are autocrats who have nothing in common ideologically, whether it's theocrats in Iran or nationalists in Russia or communists in China, who work together on the basis of their common desire to stay in power, their common desire to use the financial system for their own purposes, to enrich themselves or to enrich their families, and they help one another do that. They use the same tactics and techniques. They trade and exchange surveillance tactics, repressive tactics. And they also now share and borrow from one another’s counter-narratives. All of them have perceived the sense of cacophony and division that has arisen from the change in the way we get and receive political information, and they copy and imitate one another. Whether it's arguing for traditional families, as some do, whether it’s—I think, very cynically—arguing for a return to religion. Very often they use religion, not because they're truly religious or have some spiritual connection to a deity, but as an identity marker. It’s a symbol of a return to some kind of traditional way of life that will protect you from this very rapidly changing world. And the autocrats learn from one another how to use these narratives, and they learn to use them in cooperation with their allies inside the democratic world. So there are American autocrats who borrow ideas and metaphors and narratives from Russia. There are Iranians who work inside the United States in the same way. There's the same learning process that goes on in Europe.
This is why the Cold War idea doesn't explain the world anymore: the autocracies have allies inside the democracies. They allied with one another in ways that don't have anything to do with traditional alliances. They work together and exchange ideas in a way that's not coordinated. They don't sit in a room like in a James Bond movie where all the bad guys are sitting around one table. There’s a network, and they communicate across the network, and they use this experience that most people have now, of disorientation, of being overwhelmed by information, and they offer an alternative. And I think they've been successful in many countries for that reason.
Nafisi: Liberalism is threatened in both of the countries I’ve called home: the United States and Iran. But it is in Iran that liberal values and principles are being actively brought into resistance against the regime. From the very beginning of this revolution, when tens of thousands of Iranian women went to the streets against the compulsory hijab, one of their main slogans was, “Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western. Freedom is global.” After 2022 and the murder of the girl around the hijab by the government, you have more and more people talking about the autonomy of individual, the need for independence in all walks of life. I’m not saying this movement will be successful. Anne was right, the Cold War doesn't exist anymore. But in many ways, Iran is like the Soviet Union of the Muslim world. It was the first theocracy in the modern world. It had ambitions which were imperial, to “export” the revolution, and the failure of that ideology has given the Iranian people a great deal of power and some hope. I celebrate the fact that Iran is thinking about liberal values, and it's not been exported to it. It comes from very specific needs.
Beauchamp: Azar, I want to stay on that thought, because I think it's really important: not just the recognition that liberalism isn't just a set of abstract doctrines but is embedded in people's needs, their fundamental sense of self respect, and that that's where it originates, but also this idea that you’re raising of liberalism as a form of resistance.
“Liberalism is not just the history of the West; it's not just the history of Western Europe and North America. In fact, liberalism is much more than that; it’s a much more capacious doctrine—one that has origins and roots in different places around the world. The conventional history of liberalism as something that started with a bunch of European intellectuals in the 17th century and got exported to the rest of the world doesn’t capture the full story.” — Zack Beauchamp
I think for a lot of people living in the West, liberalism is so embedded in our daily practices, in the way that we think, in the vocabulary that we use to talk about the world. (If none of you have read Alexandre Lefebvre’s new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, you should. It's excellent on this particular point.) We have an essential set of concepts that when liberalism is challenged and threatened from the inside, the response that you get from a lot of Westerners is a repetition, a kind of stuttering that I'm doing now: “How dare you? How dare you challenge this? You're challenging something sacred or holy, and profaning it.” But it also means we don’t have great answers. When somebody says, “Why do things have to be this way? Why do we have to respect all people equally? How come people should get to choose their own way of life?”… it's just so taken for granted. But in Iran, people have been forced, because they're confronted with the alternative all the time, to develop practices of resistance. They develop languages that one uses to articulate a challenge and a defense of liberalism. So talk a little more about how that evolved, and what those practices look like, and what the lessons for the rest of the world can be from this Iranian uprising.
Nafisi: The interesting thing about Iran is that liberalism is on the rise. But in a totalitarian society, crisis exists every day. When you wake up in the morning and go outside, the way you look can bring about a crisis. Apart from that, the regime is in crisis. The people have discovered their power, and the regime has discovered its own weakness. There is defection from within the regime, and many of these defections come from people reading, people discussing, people thinking about liberal texts. Like the rock stars of Iran are Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper and Václav Havel—for me, personally, Czesław Miłosz, Joseph Brodsky, Szymborska, Gombrowicz, my God. I mean, we would read this like children reading comics—maybe this is not a good analogy. That was the excitement of living under that rule, that we were subverting the regime by just being ourselves and by reading these texts.
But unfortunately, when I came here, one thing that I realized was how much people wanted to be comfortable. Our universities, the students talking about their courses. But as our beloved James Baldwin reminds us, artists are here to disturb the peace. That's why you go to university, to be disturbed and to disturb. It really gets on my nerves when someone whines about how Mark Twain disturbs him. They don't understand that democracy is something that needs to be nurtured every single day, and that is why … Iran is giving you a message, and if you are not going to take that message, liberalism belongs to us and not to you.
Beauchamp: Henri, I want to talk about resistance in Turkey because it seemed for a long time like Erdoğan had done an excellent job consolidating a version of competitive authoritarianism. But it looks like, especially parsing some election results recently, that there's been, if not cracks in the system, then certainly more room for electoral challenge to the regime than some had previously thought. What can we learn from pushback against Erdoğan?
Barkey: Yes, Erdoğan lost the municipal elections, but they were municipal elections. They were not national elections. The municipal elections are different in the sense that people respond to local conditions more than national conditions. And Erdoğan also made huge mistakes because he made the elections about himself. He dissed his mayoral candidates and went and campaigned himself. But also the ruling party had done a very bad job in running the municipalities, and there was a reaction to that. But, look, he’s been in power now for 20-odd years and people are getting sick of him. But the system he has created, which has three components to it, is very durable. (There is one crack—which is important. I'll come to it at the end.) One is that he is a populist authoritarian leader who now controls every single institution in the state: the central bank, the Supreme Court. Look, the Supreme Court made a rare decision against him and … he just ignored it. That’s what JD Vance wants to do here too. So he essentially tries to control the civil society. He doesn't want the civil society to get stronger, because he knows that's a threat, and that's why he has people in jail. The second is that he has created an image of himself as the man of the people, like the typical populist who says, “I'm fighting for you against the corrupt elites and everybody who wants to undo you.” He’s actually a pious person. He actually believes that Islam should rule. He said that Islam and God essentially gave a role to women, and that's what should be followed. But he also controls everything; he’s a micromanager. Just the other day, he chastised a woman journalist because he didn’t like her nail polish.
The third important aspect to his rule is the fact that, every day, the diatribe coming out of Turkey and the Turkish government is an anti-Western dialogue. Everything that’s wrong in Turkey is a fault of the United States or the West. The truth is he was here yesterday—he was here at a NATO meeting. He's part of the Western alliance. But his diatribe is constantly anti-United States. “The United States did the coup in 2016”; “The United States is the cause of Turkey's economic problems,” and so on. He never criticizes Xi, he never criticizes Putin. Why? Because those leaders are not challenging his authoritarian system. They are authoritarians. The major fault line today in Turkey is this: as a result of his diatribes, 70% of the population says the greatest threat to Turkey is the United States. He uses that anti-Western diatribe to maintain his control. This is a way he can say, “If you are not for me, you're with them, the foreigners.”
When you look at the last municipal election results, the one place where other than Istanbul where he really lost very badly was the Kurdish areas. The Kurds have essentially broken completely with him. They used to be quite sympathetic to him at the beginning of his rule. But now they realize he’s not going to do anything about their plight—and, on the contrary, in the previous municipal elections when they won a whole series of municipalities in the east and southeast, a few days after the election results he had 150 mayors dismissed and replaced by government officials just like that. So the Kurds are now at a place where you're seeing signs of liberal dialogue, of looking at the West, because they’ve decided that’s the only place that can help them. Although we won’t help them. That’s where you have new ideas emerging, where you have real resistance to the system. But, they are Kurds—they are the other. So it’s easy, from Erdoğan’s perspective, to dismiss them, to repress them—as he does on a daily basis.
Beauchamp: Anne, in some ways, you've lived through the most hopeful—sorry to the rest of you—recent series of developments in any of these countries that we've been talking about, which is the recent Polish elections. It seems to a lot of observers that the Law and Justice Party that had been in power in Poland had been putting it straight on the Hungarian trajectory towards a full-on authoritarian state. But something magical happened. They lost in an election, and now there's a new government that's attempting to put the pieces back together, to reconstruct the liberal state that had emerged in Poland after the fall of the Communist government. So I have a two-part version of this question for you: One, what can we learn from the way that election was won? And second, what can we learn about reconstructing a government that had been polluted by authoritarian forces who won power and were attempting to reshape it in their images?
Applebaum: First, there are some things that are specific about Poland—there’s the relationship with the European Union and so on—that don't have outside application. And it's also important to remember that Poland had moved down the path towards autocracy in very much in the Hungarian … I mean, it was actually an imitation of Hungary—with things borrowed from Erdoğan as well. The ruling party very much thought that it was creating a system in which it would never lose again. And they were so confident that they would never lose that they actually became very corrupt very fast. So they stole a lot of money, which was one of their mistakes. They assumed that they would never be held to account. They also became overconfident, and their overconfidence meant that they were sure they were going to win the election. So they didn't plan to steal it. When they lost, they were very surprised. “How could this have happened?” So it's a little bit unfair to compare it to Iran or Russia, or even Venezuela, or a country much further down the road towards dictatorship, where there isn't a free election. It was a free election. There were some unfair aspects to it: they tried to cheat, and they had four times as much money. They used state money to fund their campaign. They had control of state television and state media, which is very important in Poland. So there were ways in which they cheated, but they didn't actually control the way the votes were counted. So those are the specificities.
“Around the world, wherever people are fighting for freedom or democracy or justice, most of them aren't looking to the United States or Europeans to lead them. Sometimes they're inspired by the writings of the past. But most of them have their own story in their own context.” — Anne Applebaum
I think, though, that there are some general lessons. One is the importance of coalitions. The current leader of Poland is the leader of the centrist Liberal Party. He runs the country together with a more center-right party and a more center-left party. There was an understanding among those three parties that the differences between them—which in a different era might have been very severe or profound, just like Republicans and Democrats used to fight over percentages of taxes and those kinds of differences—they agreed to put those differences aside because the priority was making sure that the Law and Justice Party didn't consolidate the authoritarian system. It's as if in the United States, you had a really broad coalition from the far left to whatever is the middle of the Republican Party now, and that's what you would need to to win. So that was the first piece of it.
The second piece was that Donald Tusk, who is the leader, the current prime minister, did an enormous amount of grassroots campaigning—very specifically in small towns, in villages, in the countryside. He pursued parts of the country where he is personally unpopular and where his party is unpopular. That was all in an effort to show that the center, the liberals, and the center right care about the whole country and not just about their own people. Because what Law and Justice, like all populist parties, had tried to do was divide the country. You know: “We are one tribe. You are another tribe.” He sought to overcome that tribal division. That was something Joe Biden did pretty well in 2020 as well.
The third lesson—and I would have a different way of putting this if it was a left-wing autocracy—was that it was very important not to let the right steal patriotism. It was very important for the liberal parties to also be patriotic. Sometimes it’s just a symbolic thing. But sometimes it's a way of speaking with pride about the nation—again, with the aim of showing that we speak for everybody, not just liberals, not just people who live in Warsaw, and not just people who live in big cities. This is a mistake that left-wing parties make very often: in their often justified criticism of history, of slavery, of racism, and so on, they often miss the fact that people want to be proud of their country, and they want to feel some connection to the country. If you don't have that, you'll lose a part of your audience. This was also an answer to the problem that I talked about in the previous answer, which is that people have this sense of fragmentation, this sense of loss. The kind of childhood that you had in Poland in the 1950s or 1960s in a small town doesn't exist anymore. So you have to offer people a vision of unity and of stability. I think those were the elements that helped win this election.
I had this exact conversation with people who ran the British Labour Party's political campaign a couple of months ago, and this was very much something that they also tried to do. Labour is a patriotic party—Keir Starmer went out of his way to meet veterans, and they made an effort to show that they have some connection to British history. That was an important part of trying to win over the whole country. This was made possible by the fact that there was a free election, which there is not in Turkey, there is not in Hungary, and there certainly isn't in Iran. It was probably Poland's last chance to win.
On the question of putting the pieces back together again, it's very difficult. Once the institution has been shattered and the norms around it have been broken, you can't magically recreate it just by changing the people, because the institution—whether the judiciary or media—has lost respect and authority and you can't rebuild it instantly.
I should say some of the reconstruction is a little bit ugly. So in the very first days after they won the election, they shut down state television. It literally went off the air. State television had been turned into a very extreme form of propaganda. It wasn’t even Fox news. And the way they were able to shut it down was that the engineers at the television station—literally, the guys who made the signal go up in the air and into everybody's TV sets—they were angry at the ruling party, and they agreed to cooperate with the new government. So they shut it down. They brought in new journalists and restarted it. They had a legal basis for it, because the legality of the state television had been tampered with, but it was ugly. The same problem confronts them with the judiciary. Something like a third of Polish judges have been effectively appointed illegally under this unconstitutional process. And how do you get rid of them? And how do you get rid of them now that there’s still a president from Law and Justice who can veto legislation? The answer is: it will happen very slowly. They will do it by restricting certain judges from making certain kinds of decisions. But the big problem is restoring respect and restoring authority, because once it's lost, it doesn't come back fast.
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Fantastic conversation and series. Looking forward to digging in. Thank you!
Fantastic. How the Internet has created the epistemologic crisis that drives people to authoritarianism, about Poland's successful attempt to dislodge the authoritarian party that had begun the country's authoritarian trajectory (and how UK Labor did similar things: campaign in areas traditionally not supportive, reclaim patriotism, find a place and community for all). I think Harris/Walz are doing the same thing- I hope so. The only problem is that unlike the right-wingers in Poland, the GOP knows it may very well lose and are probably planning to steal the election, which did not happen in Poland (as much). Applebaum: "It was Poland's last chance."