Notes on illiberal democracy, 1

Networks

I’ve been invited to participate in a round table next week on “illiberal democracy,” and wanted, in a very preliminary way, to explore the topic. For the moment, I’m going to assume that we have a fairly clear understanding of what the term means: a combination of formal democratic rules – regular, multiparty, contested elections; the preservation of a constitutionally mandated separation of powers; some degree of freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly – and stringently illiberal practices – harassment of opposition movements by judicial means and social media-inspired threats; verbal and legislative attacks on intellectuals, the independent press, and universities; fear-mongering and persecution of immigrants, ethnic minorities, gays, and transgender persons. The current group of illiberal democracies includes Hungary (in effect, the founding member of the club), Turkey, El Salvador, possibly India, and the United States. To this group, one can add political leaders and parties who either already presided over a period of illiberal democracy or would like to do so if they further increase their power or win the next elections: Bolsonaro, Duterte, Netanyahu, Fico, the AFD, Reform, Vox, Chega, and the RN.

I write down this list because my topic today is the networks that connect these various parties and leaders. Trump, for example, clearly recognizes Orban, Erdogan, Bukele, Modi, and Meloni as kindred spirits, and he has punished Brazil for having dared to prosecute Bolsonaro. Trump’s vice president, his secretary of state, and his one-time billionaire buddy Musk have repeatedly lent rhetorical support to the AFD, Marine Le Pen, and Farage. MAGA memes are widely disseminated in other countries, to the point where the murder of Charlie Kirk in the U.S. immediately became a cause célèbre for the European far-right. Other MAGA memes, such as the supposed criminality of immigrants, are not only picked up by different networked illiberal democrats but bleed into general political discourse, thereby making it harder for groups and parties that certainly are not illiberal to maintain their earlier or long-time positions on immigration and other MAGA fetish topics.

It is important to understand that these different ties are affinitive in nature, not organizational. MAGA’s eminence grise, Steve Bannon, tried some years back to federate his counterparts into a 21^st-century version of the 2^nd or 3^rd International, but he was rebuffed by his would-be allies. This does not mean that leaders do not do each other favors – one sees this notably in Trump’s relations with Bukele and Milei – but it is rather a question of being inspired by, and attempting to imitate, actions by one party or movement. Thus, accusations that opponents are traitors or pedophiles are picked up and “localized” in each movement; so too are ideas about rounding up and deporting immigrants who, for good measure, are categorized as criminals; and so too is support for, or at the least, refusal to oppose, Putin’s Ukraine war.

In one sense, there is nothing new about such networking. For centuries, political actors in various countries have been inspired by each other, whether defenders of absolutism in the 17^th century, anti-republican reactionaries in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, or liberals in the 19^th, and then, differently, in the 20^th, centuries. But those networks were what we could call ideationally programmatic: participants advocated for monarchy, or free speech, or the welfare state. Even the decades-long struggle against republicanism by Metternich and others had a programmatic side: the maintenance and glorification of social hierarchy. By contrast, illiberal democrats do not have anything like a common program: once one gets past the headliners – namely, immigrants, Muslims, gays, and transgender persons – in the (long) list of hated and despised groups, one arrives at a farrago of views: support for or opposition to the welfare state, abortion, vaccines, and many other issues.

What the various leaders and parties cited above do have in common is precisely a sense of hatred; of the headliners listed above, as well as of the political forces accused of supporting those groups. This, arguably, is how social media creates, on a daily, if not hourly, basis, the affinity network that ties together illiberal democrats: the hatred is reinforced, not for two minutes once a day, as in 1984, but over and over, by being fed phrases and images about the headliners and the struggle against them. Indeed, as the extensive literature on “motivated reasoning” shows, this emotional affinity is what enables the rank-and-file to incorporate hitherto ignored groups into the inner circle of the most-hated, thereby providing ever-new objects against which to mobilize.

In a later post, I will discuss the implications of this argument; for now, suffice it to say that the chances of moderating illiberal democracy by either rational argument or triangulation are low: the networks that sustain it are quite robust.