When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them. Philip Collins
The prospect of terrorism comes from no state, although states may turn a blind eye to its perpetrators or even sponsor them. It is a threat that can be activated by radicalised zealots, many of whom are reared in the comfort of free liberal democracies. Although one of the virtues of these democracies is that they tend not to rush towards a threat by negating the liberties that make them targets in the first place, there are always two temptations, to which some of their number may be yielding. The first is to blame a set of outsiders, usually these days the whole community of Muslims. The second is to repudiate some of the freedoms of the open society in the quest for a gilded cage of better security.
The crises of prosperity and fear make common cause to produce a crisis of confidence. After a century of progress, democracy appears to be in retreat. The fledgling democracies are struggling. Since the introduction of democracy in 1994, South Africa has been ruled by one party, the African National Congress, which has become progressively more self-serving. Turkey, which once seemed to combine moderate Islam with prosperity and democracy, is lapsing into corruption and autocracy under a leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has begun to tear up the secular liberalism on which his nation’s constitution was founded. In Bangladesh, Thailand and Cambodia, opposition parties have boycotted recent elections or refused to accept their results.
In some democracies disenchantment threatens to tip into authoritarian rule. In Hungary Viktor Orbán openly declares that national needs trump liberal values such as freedom. In France, Marine Le Pen and her nativist Front National denounce a political establishment that she blames for betraying the white people of France. Similar tunes are played by the Danish People’s Party, the Swedish Democrats, the People’s Party of Switzerland and the notoriously Islamophobic Geert Wilders in Holland. In Poland, the Law and Justice Party stands accused of trampling on the country’s constitution to establish an ‘illiberal democracy’ of its own. But the most conspicuous setback for democracy has taken place in Russia. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 there were high hopes for a democratic order in the old Soviet Union, but these hopes faded in 1999 when Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin. Putin, a former KGB operative, has since been both prime minister and president twice. He has muzzled the press, imprisoned opponents and presided over the murder of radical journalists, even as the display of democracy has been preserved.
The crisis of confidence is fuelled by impatience. Democracy has everywhere been a long time taking root, and it is unreasonable to expect that the transition will be either quick or smooth. The failure of Egypt to emerge as a functioning democracy when Hosni Mubarak’s government fell to popular protest in 2011 was a setback to the hope that democracy might spread across the Middle East. Despair set in when the ensuing elections were won by Muhammad Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi promptly granted himself almost unlimited powers and created an upper house with a permanent Islamic majority. In July 2013 the army stepped in, Egypt’s first democratically elected president was arrested and leading members of the Brotherhood imprisoned.
Syria and Libya too have seen incipient democratic revolutions run into the sand. Viewed in the right light, the Arab Spring that began in Tunisia in December 2010 was a series of popular uprisings of oppressed people desirous of the same liberties they witnessed in the developed world. That was certainly the hope and the initial interpretation. Yet it was naive to suppose that democracy was there ready to take wing, like the butterfly in the chrysalis. By the same token, to pretend that no impulse for popular sovereignty was part of the uprising in the first place is simply untrue. The demand for recognition was there; it has just not been met.
Quite remarkably, given their manifold advantage over other forms of government, the established democracies are losing confidence in their own goodness. Astonishingly, the 2011 World Values Survey found that 34 per cent of Americans approved of ‘having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections’. They might have been more careful what they wished for. A third of voters are at least prepared to say they would like to drop the inconvenient panoply of democracy. The young have been steeped in complacency. When Americans born before the Second World War were asked to say how essential it was to live in a democracy, on a decimal scale, 72 per cent rated it as maximally important. Only 30 per cent of the millennial generation did the same.
The same spectre stalks Britain. Sixty-four per cent of British people recently told YouGov they thought conventional politics was failing and 38 per cent had at least some sympathy with the statement that ‘Democracy isn’t always the best way to run a country’. Against this sentiment, we need to retort, without hesitation, that it most certainly is. The noble arguments of Cicero, Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama are not just random fancies. They are making the case for a system of government that is emphatically superior to other forms. If we are ever hapless enough to be cursed with any of the alternatives we will learn to regret our complacency.
The Populist Utopia
When people cease to believe in democratic politics they will not find it replaced with better politics. They will find it replaced by populism which, rather than representing the power of the people, arrogates power in their name. Populism is utopia’s dark shadow.
The term populist derives from the 1890s, when the Populist movement in America set the rural Democrats against the more urban Republicans. The already elastic term then stretched further, across political movements of the fascist Right and the communist Left in Europe, the hearings of Senator McCarthy’s House UnAmerican Activities Committee and the Peronistas in Argentina. Contemporary movements that include Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the less scrupulous advocates of departure from the European Union and those backing the election of President Trump in late 2016 have a range of natures. They are connected by their claim to be the envoys of the people in adopting the use of the term populist. This is the fraud that utopia can smuggle in along with its promise. It is crucial to comprehend the populist utopia the better to counteract it.
The populist utopia has no place for politics. In William Morris’s News from Nowhere the House of Commons has been transformed into a storehouse for manure. The literary utopia erases all conflicts, which means that politics, the arbitration system, is redundant. In utopia, all desires have been satisfied and all the virtues miraculously consort in infinite combination in a land of no scarcity and abundant happiness. Individual rights can be revoked as unnecessary. The utopian takes all the complex questions of politics and promises, as if by magic, that they can be solved.
The idea that all good things can be had at once is a fantasy. The pursuit of a society that can satisfy everyone is a fool’s errand. Robert Nozick put this point colourfully in Anarchy, State, and Utopia when he suggested that no single society can be imagined in which Hugh Hefner, the Buddha and Ludwig Wittgenstein would all be equally happy. The clever statesman is always trying to build a coalition across ideological lines. Cicero is seeking to win the approval of the Senate. Jefferson needs to heal the nation after a bruising election. Lincoln wants the country to unite after civil strife. Kennedy summons the citizen spirit of the American people. Obama makes a direct appeal to people who did not support him. All of them are speaking to the best in the circumstances, not to some absolute best.
The populist pretends that politics is easy. The only reason that the obvious solutions have not been arrived at is that the prevailing elite is venally self-regarding. This is why the defining trait of the populist is an anti-political division of the nation into rival tribes; the elite cast against the people. The only factor that unites populist movements of the nativist right and the socialist left is hostility to the governing elite. The 2016 campaign for Britain to leave the European Union was populated by advocates, some of them, bizarrely, government ministers, who agreed on nothing except hostility to views they caricatured as those of the establishment. The American historian Richard Hofstadter called populism ‘the paranoid style of politics’ because it is always based on a supposed betrayal. If only the elite weren’t in it for themselves, the people would have been served.
In a notable speech in October 2016 Donald Trump hit all the discordant populist notes. ‘This’, he said portentously, ‘is a crossroads in the history of our civilisation that will determine whether or not We The People reclaim control over our government.’ There has rarely been a clearer exposition of the paranoid style than this. All those warnings about the fragility