Freedom to the People?

The war in Ukraine has brought a great deal of confusion into the Slovenian sport of quarreling between Partisans and Home Guards. Suddenly many Partisans have reservations about national liberation struggle, while people who regularly flip out every time people gather for the commemoration at Dražgoše loudly support the fight against a foreign occupier. But we quarrel all the same. About populism, for example. There is confusion here too, above all because some can’t make up their minds whether populists are cool or not.

The latest episode of this verbal civil war began with a special issue (funny how ambiguous the Slovenian language can be: izdaja means both “issue” and “betrayal”) of the weekly Mladina devoted to populists. In it, the editors allowed themselves an impermissible move and included Josip Broz Tito among the populists. Fire rained down on the editors from the left and the left. How dare you call Tito a populist? How dare you put him in the same category as the other populist scoundrels? Many of the comments were, as befits squabbling on social media, crude and insulting. Things went so far that Mladina’s editor Grega Repovž, exceptionally in his own name, published an editorial in the next regular issue expressing his dismay at a new low in discourse on Slovenian social media.

Hardly had the affair died down a little, as the stormtroopers of Slovenian keyboards had sniffed out another bone, when posts began appearing on my feed of a text published in the magazine Disenz under the title “The Delusions of Anti-Populism” by the sociologist Grega Hrib, in which the author, in short, lectured bourgeois liberals that they don’t get populism, through which “hordes of angry voters who don’t care about political civility, the rule of law and established rules are showing liberal democracy the middle finger and slowly but steadily sending it to the dustbin of history.”

Let me say at the outset that I agree with this analysis in principle. What bothers me is the gloating with which the author, throughout the piece, announces what he considers the more than deserved end of “bourgeois” liberalism, with the fury of—forgive me for mixing metaphors for decency’s sake—an enraged man who saws off the branch he is sitting on with a blunt knife to take revenge on his unfaithful wife.

I believe one of the reasons for the quarrel about populism and liberal democracy is a mistaken understanding of the terms we are talking about. This is, of course, one of the characteristics of the period we live in, in which “hordes of angry voters” consistently take refuge in “facts” that suit them emotionally and ideologically. I do not count the author of the Disenz piece among the latter. He is someone who certainly knows a great deal and has read a great deal. In his analysis of populism and anti-populism, he cites the post-Marxist theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. As, incidentally, do all the left-leaning enthusiasts for populism I have come across in recent years. Laclau and Mouffe are to left-wing pro-populists what Friedrich Hayek is to enthusiasts of neoliberalism. A theoretical ace up the sleeve, after which there is no more debate.

So let me explain how I understand populism and liberalism. As for the first, populism is not people-pleasing, which is a pathological need to be liked. A good example of a people-pleaser is Borut Pahor, whom many, mistakenly in my view, consider a populist. That does not mean his conduct did not often, wittingly or unwittingly, support populism, of which there is no shortage in Slovenia. A populist, in principle, couldn’t care less whether people like him; what matters above all is that they hate his opponents. A populist claims the exclusive right to represent the people and, in the name of that exclusivity, places himself above all political competition, while delegitimizing or subordinating the other branches of power and democratic safeguards, from independent media to civil society. Donald Trump, for example. But not only him. If we apply the above definition to Josip Broz, then we must surely agree that, despite all his merits in the fight against fascism, he showed no particular understanding for political competition, an independent judiciary, the oversight function of a democratically elected parliament over the executive, independent media or a critical civil society. All in the name of the people and the working class. And so Mladina was entirely justified in including him on the list on its cover.

The muddle about liberalism is even worse. Here people confuse liberals as a centrist political platform, liberal democracy as a political system, neoliberalism as an economic dogma, and the libertarian, who is the gentleman scattering inanities across Slovenian social media from an armchair in London with a teddy bear in his hand.

Liberals as a centrist political formation exist, at least in theory. They are characterized by a commitment to free enterprise, combined with advocacy of individual rights and freedoms. The existence and credibility of liberals, in Slovenia too, are threatened by the fact that a whole bunch of chancers hitch a ride under this label, understanding the center geometrically rather than in terms of values and ideology, and selling personal interests under the guise of liberalism, which they try to disguise by loudly shouting “neither left nor right, but forward.”

Liberal democracy is a political system. Its shortest definition is regular elections plus the European Convention on Human Rights. Respecting the provisions of the Convention not only ensures that elections are free and fair, but also protects the rights and freedoms of individuals and minorities in society, with constitutional and legal safeguards, against abuse by the ruling majority. To this definition must be added social rights, which give citizens the material basis for trust in liberal democracy.

Problems arise because people confuse liberal democracy and neoliberalism. The latter is based on the denial of the public interest and solidarity, and builds a bright future on the lowest possible taxes, the absence of any regulation, and the invisible hand of the market, which regularly takes care of the prosperity of the few, and which, neoliberals assure us, is supposed to trickle down to everyone in time. That has never happened; instead there has been social pauperization and political marginalization of an ever larger share of the population, which has responded, how else, by showing the middle finger and supporting populists. They offer no solutions, but unlike many defenders of liberal democracy, they at least recognize the pain and anger of the pissed-off plebs. And exploit them mercilessly to pursue their own economic and political interests.

Economic neoliberalism is the main reason liberal democracy is doing so badly, as it destroys the material basis for voters’ trust in the political system. It causes fear of the future, which is grist to the populist mill. Populism exploits fear and stokes anger. The greatest threat to Western civilization is empathy, says Elon Musk. The ideological foundation of Trump’s revolution is the fight against diversity, equity and inclusion. Populism builds its authoritarian march to power on the manipulation of hatred and, when that is no longer enough, on repression. Yet equating liberal democracy and neoliberalism is not entirely without basis. The fact is that many politicians who had their mouths full of human rights and the protection of social minorities at the same time calmly ignored social rights, without which liberal democracy cannot function and which in the end prepares the ground for the rise of illiberal and authoritarian populism, which exploits people’s hardship to push them even further into the muck. So populism does not bring freedom to the “hordes of angry voters,” but quite the opposite. It puts into their hands an ever blunter knife with which they saw off you-know-what themselves. Out of (justified) rage at liberal democrats who serve them personal freedom without social rights, they cheer for populists who in return offer them political authoritarianism and economic misery camouflaged by the adrenaline of hatred. All that is left to them is to rage at gays, feminists and migrants, who are supposedly to blame for everything. Perhaps one day we will realize that there is no freedom without social security. And vice versa. Until then, good night and good luck.