“We are living in an authoritarian state”
Add George Packer to the prominent commentators like Mona Charon, David French, and Michael Tomasky who believe that we are as Tomasky put it, “no longer a democracy.” Or else we are damned close.
“We are living in an authoritarian state,” Packer writes with conviction. On the surface of things, nothing looks any different, as I noted in April. “Yet it’s true,” Packer concludes. What makes it less recognizable for those raised in the 20th century is the lack of authoritarian trappings familiar from movies, black-and-white photos, and history books. There are no jackboots or firing squads, no “giant portraits of the leader, secret opposition meetings in basements,” etc. Nevertheless.
“Opposition parties, the judiciary, the press, and civil-society groups aren’t destroyed, but over time they lose their life, staggering on like zombie institutions, giving the impression that democracy is still alive,” Packer continues. We strive to name authoritarianism in the 21st century. It’s the same beast by other names: illiberal democracy, competitive authoritarianism, right-wing populism. But its features are the same (The Atlantic, gift link):
The blurred line between democracy and autocracy is an important feature of modern authoritarianism. How do we know when we’ve crossed it? These sorts of regimes have constitutions, but the teeth are missing. Elections take place, but they’re no longer truly fair or free—the party in power controls the electoral machinery, and if the results aren’t desirable, they’ll be challenged and likely overturned. To keep their jobs, civil servants have to prove not their competence but their personal loyalty to the leader. Independent government officers—prosecutors, inspectors general, federal commissioners, central bankers—are fired and their positions handed to flunkies. The legislature, in the hands of the ruling party, becomes a rubber stamp for the executive. Courts still hear cases, but judges are appointed for their political views, not their expertise, and their opinions, cloaked in neutral-sounding legal terms, predictably give the leader what he wants, endorsing his most illiberal policies and immunizing him from accountability. The rule of law amounts to favors for friends and persecution for enemies. The separation of powers turns out to be a paper-thin gentleman’s agreement. There are no meaningful checks on the leader’s power.
Twenty-first century authoritarianism doesn’t require sacrifice for the Fatherland. It has no guiding philosophy beyond securing power and riches for the ruler and his court. Open repression is unneeded in the digital age. Modern authoritarianism’s “dominant emotions aren’t euphoria and rage, but indifference and cynicism…. The most effective tools of control are distraction, confusion, and division.” Do it effectivley enough, Packer argues, and “the public throws up its hands and checks out.”
The U.S. under Trumpism bears all the hallmarks of an authoritarian state. He and his cronies take bribes. He works to cow the media. “He sends masked police to pick people off the streets without probable cause for arrest, disappear them into secret prisons, and ship them off to random countries. He fires experienced, patriotic civil servants and replaces them with unqualified toadies.” This you know.
After some anecdotes, Packer adds;
Today, in public life, and especially in the hellscape of social media, our habits of the heart tend to be unrestrained, intolerant, contemptuous. With the help of Big Tech’s addictive algorithms, we’ve lost the art of self-government—the ability to think and judge; the skills of dialogue, argument, and compromise; the belief in basic liberal values. Five years ago, in the midst of the George Floyd protests, I helped write a rather anodyne statement in defense of open inquiry, signed by more than 150 writers, artists, and intellectuals. Without using the phrase, it criticized cancel culture. Almost immediately upon its publication in Harper’s, the statement became the “notorious” Harper’s Letter—the object of furious condemnation by journalists and academics as the pearl-clutching of elites and an excuse for bigotry. This torrent of abuse came from the left, which no longer believed in open inquiry. Those on the right raged against left-wing puritans and declared themselves militants for free speech, even—especially—hatred and lies.
Since Trump’s return, Packer believes, those roles have reversed. “Free-speech hypocrisy is a symptom of the democratic decay that makes authoritarianism possible.”
But Packer’s assessment that, as Shakespeare wrote, the fault lies “not in our stars, but in ourselves,” is too one-dimensional. He acknowledges the “help” of social media and “Big Tech’s addictive algorithms” without laying enough blame there. Or rather on our insistence that any check on technological development is a crime against capitalism and freedom as Milton Friedman would see it. Packer gives too little credit to the toxic impacts of technological developments like social media and artificial intelligence, and even TV which gave us Donald Trump, and the personal automobile which gave us bedroom communities that aren’t. We set them loose on society like DDT or “forever chemicals” to meet a perceived need without a fleeting thought for longer-term consequences for society and the body politic for which we blame eash other.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.
Our way of life and our sense of ourselves is upended as much by avarice and royalist backlash as by our inventions. We create labor-saving devices that simply make possible more labor. We create online “communities” that instead erode them and our national sense of self.
Podcaster Joe Rogan “floated the idea of an AI president” and thought, “That’s awesome.”
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.
Packer laments:
The philosopher John Dewey believed that democracy is not just a system of government but a way of life, one that allows for the fullest realization of every human being’s potential. I was granted more than half a century to benefit from it in the country that practically invented democracy. It makes me heartsick that my children might not have the same chance. What can we do to prevent authoritarianism from becoming our way of life? How can we change the habits of our heart and our society?
I don’t know. But I’m not done fighting for it.
“We are living in an authoritarian state.” Get busy fighting it or get used to being crushed by it.
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