Should we be afraid? Liberal democracy, democratic backsliding, and contemporary populism
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Should we be afraid? Liberal democracy, democratic backsliding, and contemporary populism From Fascism to Populism in History Federico Finchelstein Oakland, University of California Press, 2017, 328 pp., ISBN: 978-0-520-29519 How Democracies Die: What History Reveals about our Future Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt New York, Penguin Random House, 2018, 312 pp., ISBN: 978-0241-31798-3 The People vs. Democracy: Why our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save it Yascha Mounk Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2018, 393 pp., ISBN: 978-0-674-97682-5 Contemporary Political Theory (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-018-00298-5
With Donald Trump’s presidential victory, the doubtful respect that populist leaders in Poland, Hungary, and Turkey have for democratic institutions, and the growing support for populist parties across Europe, the question of whether to be anxious on behalf of liberal democracy is much discussed in political theory and beyond. Whether populism is a threat to liberal democracy, or a much-needed repoliticization of the elitist nature of contemporary democratic systems, is indeed a controversial issue about which political theorists differ. How much political disagreement can exist in a democracy before such disagreements become disagreements about democracy? Is the normative ideal of liberal democracy being threatened by ‘illiberal democracies,’ such as Viktor Orba´n’s Hungary, and/or by ‘undemocratic liberalism,’ such as the market-oriented politics of the European Union? Three new books written by Federico Finchelstein, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, and Yascha Mounk take issue with these questions on the threats to liberal democracy by present-day democratic backsliding and contemporary populism. 2019 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Review Essay
Their methodological approaches differ, as do their critical diagnoses, but taken together they provide enlightening, interesting, and alarming insights into the present political situation. Finchelstein’s book From Fascism to Populism in History (2017) takes a distinct historiographical approach, as he maps the conceptual, rhetorical, and political differences between the classical fascism of the 1930s, and what he calls ‘populism as postfascism’ (p. 18) emerging in the post-WW2 era. Finchelstein concludes that contemporary populism is a form of ‘postfascism for democratic times’ (p. 251), implying that contemporary populists continue some of the central ideological tenets of classical fascism – such as a logic of incarnation between ‘the people’ and their leader, a politics of enmity, a critique of independent institutions, and a call for a more unmediated popular will (p. 105) – while at the same time acknowledging the legitimacy of political representation (p. 183). In How Democracies Die: What History Reveals about our Future (2018), Levitsky and Ziblatt employ a comparative and historical approach as they evaluate Trump’s actions and rhetoric in light of prior examples of demo
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