Authoritarianism is Coming, But Whose?

If it does eventually come down to a contest between us and them, I prefer us. Or rather, the authority of God rather than the authority of them.

The End of the Liberal Tradition? : A New Paper Suggests Young Americans are Giving Up on Democracy

In a deeper sense, though, liberalism generally, and American liberalism specifically, is a tradition, the organic working-out of precedent, over time, in a particular political culture. The American Framers were figures of the Enlightenment, true, but they also thought they were restoring the traditional rights of Englishmen, rights that could be traced back to Magna Carta and beyond. The American conception of religious liberty, for example, is deeply influenced by the historical experience of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, and also by the particular understanding of religion that took hold in a colonial, frontier society. This explains why it differs so much from its cousin on the European continent, the French doctrine of laïcité.

But American culture is changing. Our traditions are not so popular nowadays, including our political traditions; and when we discard our traditions, we can fall for many things, including, apparently, authoritarianism. That, it seems to me, is the upshot of this important paper. The authors identify authoritarianism in our politics with Donald Trump, and it’s easy to recognize Trump’s authoritarian appeal (“I alone can fix it”). But there is authoritarianism on the left, as well, which the authors ignore. American college students increasingly oppose free speech, at least with respect to certain viewpoints, and insist on shutting down speakers with whom they disagree, often with the approval of administrators and faculty who should know better. Not to mention the left’s continuing assaults on religious liberty, including attempts to get nuns to cover contraceptives for their employees and threats to remove the tax-exempt status of religious schools that disapprove of same-sex marriage.

Foa and Mounk’s paper is bracing. If the trends they identify continue, the West, including the United States, faces a political transformation unlike anything we have seen for generations. Liberal democracy doesn’t look like it’s about to collapse, they concede. But, then, neither did world communism, even right before the fall of the Berlin Wall.  (Bolded emphasis mine, EP.)