Turning Back the Clock

Dear Leader may be more of a wannabe King than a Fascist, but Conor Lynch says it's clear Republicans have an agenda that takes full advantage of the decline of democratic institutions.

Reactionaries explicitly or implicitly reject what liberals, leftists and even modern conservatives call progress. They see progress as more of a terminal decline, and many believe in the reversibility of history.

In today’s GOP, ... the beginning of our decline is the 1960s ... the decade of civil rights, rock 'n’ roll and counterculture. According to this thesis, the '60s [were a time] of moral decline and decadence, and this degeneration has continued unabated since then. Abortion and gay rights are just two issues that, for Republican reactionaries, symbolize the decline of American — and, more specifically, Western — civilization.

They've been waiting for a solid Supreme Court majority.

Now, of course, the GOP is coming for other rights and freedoms that have been gained over the years, whether it’s women’s reproductive rights or marriage equality. Finally it is becoming clear to liberals and centrists, as it has been to those on the left for a long time, that progress can quickly be reversed. The struggle it took past generations to achieve what we now take for granted is easily forgotten, and without similar struggles today, it is not a question of if, but when the far-right will succeed in imposing their illiberal, anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian agenda.

Update (July 22):  Lynch argues further that the neoliberal "project" of the past few decades is being attacked from the left and right with different goals in mind.

The left criticized modernity not because it rejected the modern world, but because it saw the Enlightenment project as incomplete. Karl Marx praised the bourgeoisie and called capitalism a “great civilizing influence,” considering it to be a positive development in history. He also wrote the most influential critique of capitalism to date, and while he acknowledged that capitalism was progress over feudalism, he also believed that it must eventually be replaced with socialism to realize the goals of the Enlightenment. Put simply, Marx and other leftists believed in the idea of progress, long associated with the Enlightenment.

On the right, criticisms of modernity came from a very different perspective. Reactionaries did not see the modern world as progress over the pre-modern world; rather, they saw it as a decline. Driven by nostalgia and resentment, reactionaries romanticized the past and believed that the ills of modernity could be cured by simply turning back the clock and restoring the status quo ante.

Populism is emerging worldwide in response to new anxieties.

Numerous articles have been written in recent years about how the policies of neoliberalism have worsened stress and loneliness, exacerbated mental health problems, driven rising rates of suicide and the opioid crisis, and left people feeling desperate and hopeless in general. Globalization, deindustrialization, consumerism and "financialization"; all these economic trends are contributing to the breakdown of our democratic society, leading some to embrace authoritarian alternatives.

Lynch maintains the left can't simply offer more of the same old policies as the recent past.

It will ultimately come down to which side can offer the more appealing alternative, and the left should recognize that the more realistic and “pragmatic” approach isn’t always the most politically persuasive. One of the most common criticisms of populists has been that they are selling a pipe dream, which to an extent is true -- especially for right-wing populists who base their entire worldview on falsehoods. If the left wants to stop reactionary populism, however, it will have to adopt an unapologetically populist approach of its own, and reject the dogma of neoliberalism once and for all.

Update (December 17):  Andrew O'Hehir sees a common thread running through upheavals in Western democracies--what he calls a "crisis of democratic legitimacy".

Throughout the Western world, we have tied the entire concept of democracy, and all its norms, institutions and machineries, to a specific version of globalized capitalism that keeps on promising universal prosperity and never delivers it.

What we see now, in America, France, Britain and around the world, is the long-delayed and often incoherent blowback for that historic error. If "democracy" now depends on ordinary people constantly making sacrifices to the gods of the market, who after a long process of fattening will one day lead us to paradise, then it needs a new name. Because nobody, anywhere, ever voted for that.