Opinion | Angry voters are enabling autocrats around the world -

There is a serious chance that American voters will deliver the presidency to a man who tried to overturn the results of the last election, who directed his supporters to storm the Capitol to keep him in power and who repeatedly calls for vengeance against his political opponents. He still won’t say whether he will accept the outcome of the November election.

Incongruous though the current moment might seem to the stunned old-school political class clinging to a belief in the resilience of long-standing political institutions, the erosion of America’s democratic norms fits into a broader trend that has been gathering steam around the world since at least the turn of the century, when the burst of democratization following the collapse of the Soviet Union started to flag.

The V-Dem Institute, which is run out of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, reports that 7 in 10 people today live in countries ruled by some form of autocratic government; 10 years ago, fewer than half did. Since 2009, more people have lived in countries that are becoming increasingly autocratic than in countries becoming increasingly democratic. Some 60 countries will hold or have held national elections in 2024. The institute identifies an erosion of democracy in 31 of them.

The current autocratic turn is more subtle than during the Cold War, when military leaders, mostly across the Global South, toppled elected governments at the behest of the Soviet Union or the United States. Authoritarianism today is ushered in by elected incumbents, who erode democracy by undercutting institutions that can check their power, muzzling the media, limiting the scope of civil society and undermining the rule of law.

Follow this authorEduardo Porter's opinions

Think of Hungary’s new constitution, passed after Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party won supermajorities in parliament, or the attempts by Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador to abolish the national election watchdog and replace the justices of the Supreme Court. Or in the United States, think of Project 2025, which would have a Trump administration reorganize the federal government to reward political allies and purge civil servants deemed disloyal.

Unlike the military dictatorships of yore, stained by their illegitimate use of force, the new authoritarians ride waves of popular support. They represent themselves as the righteous sword of some unitary, aggrieved “popular will” in an existential battle against not a standard political opponent but an illegitimate and corrupt enemy, whose defeat requires wielding power unfettered by irksome checks and balances.

This new authoritarianism threatens long-standing liberal democracies beyond the Global South. American voters’ embrace of Donald Trump is comparable to French voters’ turn toward anti-immigrant right winger Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, who claims to represent the “real France.” It recalls neo-Nazis joining the government in Sweden and the surge in the polls of Germany’s ethnic nationalist Alternative for Germany.

This political tide is so broad as to defy a unified narrative. Does the “people’s” grievance arise because of immigration and demographic change, facing the volk with ethnic, cultural and religious “others” challenging their hold on political power? Is this about globalization, vilified by Trump’s newly-minted running mate J.D. Vance as a destroyer of real American communities?

Pippa Norris from Harvard Kennedy School blames liberal gains on the culture front encroaching on the belief-set of aging, conservative voters, who are on the losing side of demographic change but still wield political clout. “Divisive issues might take on different colorations,” Norris told me. But “the cleavage is there in every country.”

The acknowledgment of gender inequities and the acceptance of formerly proscribed gender identities; the critique of colonialism, racism and xenophobia; the rise of environmentalism — all challenge a cohort that once determined the status quo. The old mainstream culture feels under siege; political entrepreneurs promise to return to old norms, if only they are given the power.

Other disturbances have certainly played a role: climate change and persistent income inequality; migrant waves arriving in Europe and the United States; the economic implosion of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic, which sent people into hiding and badly damaged economies around the world. And of course there’s social media, which has allowed grievances and insecurities to travel, unchecked, further than they ever could have before.

The reason we feel that the same thing is happening everywhere, said Melis Laebens, a political scientist at Central European University, is in part due to the “diffusion of strategies and political arguments,” which spread themes such as, say, transphobia, into countries where they had little political salience. “It is very visible between Europe, the U.S. and the Southern Cone of South America.” As political analyst Matthew MacWilliams put it to me, “Pat Buchanan’s bile could only go so far; Trump’s and Orban’s can go everywhere on social media.”

It’s unclear how to rebuild liberal democracy in a world fractured by such mutual distrust, where debates over, for example, immigration, are construed as moral battles . How do countries such as the United States, India, Hungary and Turkey overcome a mindset in which elections become existential fights between “the people” and some corrupt cabal of “others?”

They will have to find a way. Protecting the liberal democratic order is an indispensable task. “Democracy,” Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali told the U.N. General Assembly in 1996, during the last episode of mass democratization following the unraveling of the Soviet bloc at the end of the Cold War, “contributes to preserving peace and security, securing justice and human rights, and promoting economic and social development.” Its current erosion portends a troubled world.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLyxtc2ipqerX2d9c4COaW5oamNkrrbAzpypmpupYsOwwMSrqmaclaK8pL7AnLBmrKKqwLV5w56amrFf