Choosing Fortune Over Freedom

“If the 19th [century] was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the ‘collective’ century, and, therefore, the century of the state.”

Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932), translated by Barbara Moroncini.

Where goes the 21st century? Until recently, it could be said that, with the defeat of fascism, in 1945, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union about a half century later, that we had seen the demise of what the Italian dictator Mussolini envisioned as “a century of authority.” But, now, liberalism’s global triumphal march, as was so brazenly predicted in some corners just two decades ago, seems to have slowed, and may even be going into reverse.

Increasingly, authoritarian regimes are rising around the world, led by a pesky, resource-rich Russia and a new full-blown superpower, China. Today, few regimes are becoming more democratic, and many, such as Turkey, are evolving toward one-party, voter-blessed, autocracies. These regimes, like their fascist and communist antecedents, often show a kind of contempt for the messy work of pluralistic decision-making and constitutional restraint.

Elections, long iconic for Americans, are increasingly beside the point. The regimes in Russia and Iran, like that of Turkey, can claim voter mandates, even if their electoral process is twisted by government control of the media and occasional outright repression. Adolf Hitler liked to boast that he, too, took power in Germany in 1933 through legal means.

But, China, the most important authoritarian country, has little pretense of free elections, so it has become inconceivable that anyone other than the Communist Party will be in control for the foreseeable future. For Chinese whose concerns extend beyond material benefit to such concepts as secure property rights, artistic, political or religious freedom, the obvious option is not to agitate but migrate to one of a diminishing number of spots where such rights are guaranteed.

But most people in China, like their counterparts elsewhere, are more concerned with their well-being than the freedom of a handful of writers, artists or even businesspeople. Having witnessed a remarkable shift from poverty to growing prosperity and power, the Chinese model, rather than seen as anachronistic, has evolved into the gold standard for many countries, particularly in the developing world.

This is not surprising, given the rapid progress that country has made in recent years. China has expanded its share of global gross domestic product from 2 percent in 1995 to 12 percent in 2012. Its economic model – communist control of thought and politics but welcoming to most enterprise – has vastly outperformed that of the strongest democracies, the United States, the European Union and Japan, particularly in light of the Great Recession. This recalls the 1930s, where Germany’s state-directed economy and that of the Soviet Union seemed to cope far better with the Depression than their Western democratic counterparts.

As in the 1930s, we are even seeing the emergence of a new authoritarian Axis. We can see this with Turkey’s decision to increase food exports to Russia to make up for sanction-tightened imports from the U.S. and the EU. Argentina, an increasingly authoritarian democracy, is also set to increase food exports to Moscow.

Right now, the new Axis is changing global politics. Vladimir Putin’s break with the West reflects, in part, his confidence that his nation’s future lies more with the Middle Kingdom than with the whining democracies of the EU. For less-developed countries, it is more compelling to see in the Chinese model the quickest way to achieve a strong economy.

Even in democratic and pluralistic India, the new government has sought stronger ties to China, under new Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has a strongly authoritarian bent, which previously worked well in his management of Gujarat state.

Chinese success has made it painfully clear that globalization of capitalism does not require pluralism or Western standards of legality. Nor has it done much to promote global understanding, in the China Sea or elsewhere in the world. Religious and ethnic divisions are, if anything, ever more pronounced. The failure of the much-heralded Arab Spring to create anything remotely pluralistic epitomizes this trend, leaving the West with the dilemma of selecting which repressive regimes to ally with to defeat even more heinous entities, like Hamas or the Islamic State.

This rise of authoritarianism is not limited to the developing world. In the West, these tendencies are also getting stronger, and from both right and left. One powerful spur has been the growing sense among a once-comfortable middle class – beset by 15 years of flat or shrinking incomes – that they are being “proletarianized.”

Such fear leads normally conservative or moderate people to look at more extreme solutions. Historian Eric Weitz notes that such fears abetted the rise of the National Socialist movement in Germany. Today, across Europe, nativist parties, albeit still far less terrifying than the Nazis, are on the upswing, from traditionally liberal and prosperous Scandinavia to increasingly impoverished Greece.

Ukraine, facing dismemberment by Putin’s Russia, also has seen the rise internally of the neofascist and anti-Semitic Svoboda movement. The most notable example can be found in France, where the National Front’s Marine Le Pen is leading in the polls to become the Fifth Republic’s next president.

Perhaps the first neoauthoritarian to gain power in Europe, Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban, has suggested that the recession of the past decade marked the end of what he called “the era of liberal democracies.” For Hungary, he claims, inspiration in the future won’t come from America or the rest of the EU, but from such authoritarian countries as China, Russia, Turkey and Singapore.

Far less discussed has been the rising authoritarianism on the Left. President Obama’s excessive use of federal regulations to circumvent troublesome Republicans in Congress demonstrates a new surge of executive and bureaucratic power. After the November election, there is good reason to suspect that, particularly if his party loses the Senate, the president’s approach in his final two years in office will increasingly resemble Louis XIV’s L’etat c’est moi.

If the Right’s authoritarian priorities, including those of some elements aligned with the Tea Party, seek to protect traditional culture, values and the middle classes, the Left favors centralized control to redress wrongs done to selected groups – women, gays, undocumented immigrants – through regulation and taxation. Environmental activists, notably those mobilized around climate change, increasingly despair of addressing their concerns through legislative action, where support is often limited, relying mostly on executive action.

When liberals abandon liberal principles, we lose one of the most important brakes on expanding central power. As we can see already in California and other places, decisions on virtually everything about how we live – from transportation, to housing and, most particularly, how we generate energy – are increasingly being made not by our elected representatives but through the administrative bureaucracy. The notion of “checks and balances,” of getting buy-in from the opposition and dissenters in your own party, means little to those who have found the “truth” and are determined to impose it on everyone else.

In some ways, Mussolini, executed by his fellow Italians in 1945, may have been more prescient than his enduring image as a posturing buffoon might suggest. In 1934, Mussolini noted that “as civilization becomes more and more complex, individual freedom is more and more restricted.”This was clearly true in the industrial era, but may also characterize our current transition to a post-industrial, information economy.

This view diverges from the popular wisdom that information technology is inherently liberating. The visionary MIT analyst Nicholas Negroponte maintained that “digital technology” could turn into “a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony.”

It turns out that technology is not liberating by itself and can be corralled just as easily for authoritarian purposes. The media’s emphasis on young people posting on Facebook in places like Egypt, Iran and Russia gave us a false impression of how those societies operate. Governmental suppression and organized violence subsequently proved more powerful than digital technology. Smartphones, the Internet and the increasing reach of information technology are not sufficient to spawn conditions for pluralistic democracy. As anyone who spends time in China can attest, great things can be achieved without fundamental individual freedom.

The sad truth is that we may be entering an era where classical liberalism – market capitalism, freedom of speech and safety from government intrusion – may be somewhat in retreat. As during most of world history, pluralistic democracy remains a fragile achievement that thrives only in a relative handful of places. For that reason, we need – more than ever – to cherish it.