The Authoritarian Wave Has Several Causes, and the Largest Is That Democracy Is Not Working

There is a genre of conversation, on podcasts and panels and in long essays, that asks why right-wing authoritarians are rising across so many countries at once. The conversations tend to settle on a single explanation, and the explanation tends to be whichever one the speaker already had. I want to lay out several, because I think they are all operating, and then say which one I think matters most.

First: There Is No One Reason

A wave that appears in a dozen countries with different histories, religions, economies and electoral systems is not the product of a single cause. Anyone who tells you it is one thing is telling you what they wanted to say before the wave arrived. What follows is a list, and the items compound.

Education

Populations are badly educated, and I mean this in a specific sense. Not that people lack facts, though they do, but that almost nobody has been taught how to tell a claim that is supported from one that is merely repeated, how a statistic can lie, or what a con looks like from the inside. I have written about what schooling leaves out. The omission is worldwide, and an electorate without those defences is available to anyone who wants it.

The Split of the Press

About fifteen years ago the press in most free countries stopped pretending to a common standard and divided into channels that serve a side. In every country where an authoritarian has risen you can find the channel that made him: a broadcaster or a network that told one part of the population, daily, that the other part was its enemy. Why the split happened is a subject of its own. That it happened, and that it was a precondition, seems to me beyond dispute.

The Failure of Representation

Here is the cause I think is largest, and the one the conversations least like to name.

Representative democracy does not work, and people are finding this out. Not from the mainstream press, which is part of the system and describes it as healthy, but from one another, over the network, where the gap between what the system promises and what it delivers is discussed openly.

Once a population concludes that its votes change little, that the important questions are never on the ballot, and that the people it elects answer to someone else, it looks for a way out. I count four exits people have been taking:

• Back to the strongman. If the machinery of representation is a fraud, some conclude, then at least a single man who says what he will do is honest about where power lies. This is the authoritarian wave itself.
• Tear it down without a plan. Some want the system dismantled and have given no thought to what replaces it. This is the wave's destructive edge.
• Pull power downward. Some demand more local democracy, hoping a representative they can reach will conform better to what they want than one they cannot.
• Decide directly. Some demand direct democracy, or sortition, or other arrangements in which the public settles questions itself.

Notice that these four are responses to the same diagnosis. The strongman's supporters and the direct democrat agree about the disease. They disagree only about the cure, and the strongman's cure is the one that requires no institution-building, which is why it is winning in the short run.

Global Problems and the Flight to the Familiar

The fourth cause is fear of the future. Climate, artificial intelligence, nuclear proliferation, pandemics: the problems now arriving are global, and nobody has a convincing account of how our institutions will handle them. One human response to a threat you do not understand is to retreat to what you do. The strongman offers the past: the nation, the border, the faith, the old order. It is useless against any of the actual problems, but it is familiar, and familiar is what fear wants.

The Economic Explanation

Michael Sandel and others argue that people without higher education, who are the majority everywhere, have been hurt by globalisation and by an economy that increasingly rewards credentials they do not have, and that their support for authoritarians is an expression of that injury.

Maybe. I do not dismiss it. But I would put it under the third heading rather than beside it. It is not that the economy failed them and democracy was fine. It is that democracy was supposed to be the mechanism by which they could do something about the economy failing them, and it turned out not to be. The injury is real; the anger is at the instrument that was supposed to answer it and did not.

Why the Order Matters

Put the causes together and the sequence is this. A badly educated public, fed by a press that has chosen sides, watches a representative system fail to address the things it is afraid of, and concludes, correctly, that the system is not working. It then chooses, from the exits available, the one that requires the least of it.

Every proposed remedy that leaves the third cause untouched will fail. Better civics classes will not save a system that does not work. A less partisan press will report the failure more accurately. Economic relief, if it comes through the same unresponsive machinery, will confirm rather than dispel the diagnosis.

The wave is a symptom. The disease is that the public has no way to decide anything, and has noticed. The strongman is the wrong answer to a correct question, and he will keep being chosen until a better answer to the same question is on offer.