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January 8 - January 15, 2021
Resentment, envy, and above all the belief that the “system” is unfair—not just to the country, but to you—these are important sentiments among the nativist ideologues of the Polish right, so much so that it is not easy to pick apart their personal and political motives.
By contrast, the polarizing political movements of twenty-first-century Europe demand much less of their followers. They do not espouse a full-blown ideology, and thus they don’t require violence or terror police. They want their clercs to defend them, but they do not force them to proclaim that black is white, that war is peace, and that state farms have achieved 1,000 percent of their planned production. Most of them don’t deploy propaganda that conflicts with everyday reality. And yet all of them depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once told me should be
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The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth. For those who become the one-party state’s gatekeepers, the repetition of these conspiracy theories also brings another reward: power.
Unity is an anomaly. Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.
Nobody, in the 1990s, wished to have India back, and nobody does now. But there was a nostalgia for something else: a world in which England made the rules.
Svetlana Boym wrote in her elegant book The Future of Nostalgia, come in two forms.
Once upon a time life might have been sweeter or simpler, but it was also more dangerous, or more boring, or perhaps more unjust.
people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. They dislike divisiveness. They prefer unity.
The result is a hyper-partisanship that adds to the distrust of “normal” politics, “establishment” politicians, derided “experts,” and “mainstream” institutions—including courts, police, civil servants—and no wonder.
Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus. The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.
More recently that has begun to change. Long divided by borders and history, some of the intellectuals and ideologues behind these new movements have now found a set of issues they can unite around—issues that work across borders and are easy to sell online. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, both real and imagined, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative, religious worldview is another. Sometimes, opposition to the EU, or to international institutions more generally, is a third.
Dislike of same-sex marriage, African taxi drivers, or “Eurocrats” is something that even Spaniards and Italians who disagree about their respective separatist movements can share. Avoiding history and old border disputes, they can conduct joint campaigns against the secular, ethnically mixed societies they inhabit, and at the same time appeal to the people who want the raucous debate about these things to come to a halt.
“I was shouting from a tribune at some university meeting in Wrocław, and simultaneously felt panicked at the thought of myself shouting….I told myself I was trying to convince [the crowd] by shouting, but in reality I was trying to convince myself.”
You have to shout if you want to convince yourself as well as others. You have to exaggerate your feelings if you are to make them believable.
