When the Eastern Bloc came apart in the late 1980s, many observers speculated that it would not be long before communism in East Asia fell, too. Longtime scholars of the communist world were surprised when Soviet socialism imploded but the Chinese version endured. After all, the Chinese had more experience with republican governance than did the Russians. Moreover, Confucian tradition, with its reverence toward the family, seemed incompatible with Marxism’s hostility to church and clan, which were perceived to be obstacles on the road toward total societal integration with the state. It was, however, in Tiananmen where the last, great democratic wave died. Yes, the Soviet Union dissolved, its satellites and vassal states across the globe abandoned Marxism, and civil society found its footings in the Second World in the decade that followed the 1989 revolutions. But it was in China where the promise of liberal democracy was dashed against an unyielding totalitarian collective. In retrospect, democracy never fully recovered.
The tide of democracy that crested in the late 1980s has been slowly but perceptibly rolling back ever since. Moscow’s experiment with privatization and liberalism, tainted by the corruption of the Yeltsin era, was long ago abandoned in favor of an authoritarian petrol-state – one that average Russians seem to prefer. China’s nomenklatura learned how to pacify their citizenry – at least, those of influence on the country’s coast — with the trappings of capitalism without all the messiness of self-rule. The democratization some was believed would sweep the Middle East after the Iraq War and the Arab Spring never materialized. Sectarian conflict and a brand of Sunni Islamic fascism seem instead to be more appealing. The autocrat in Turkey is less and less a Western ally and more a subversive and destabilizing element. His tenuous bonds to Europe appear today more vestigial than aspirational. From Sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America to Southeast Asia; democratization has been tempered by statism and, in many cases, tyranny.
There were periods when it seemed as though the democratic tide would wax again. The color revolutions of the early 2000s in the former Soviet republics; Lebanon’s Cedar, Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip, and Iran’s Green Revolutions; all were crushed or corrupted. The lattermost undermined by the very beacons of freedom its revolutionaries aspired to emulate. By the winter of 2014, the Venezuelans who protested a debased and backward socialism, bequeathed to the incompetent apparatchiks who were once loyal to the late Hugo Chavez, served as unfortunate canaries in a suffocating coal mine. As they were being slaughtered in streets, the scope of the crisis facing Western democracies had become clear. This popular rebellion against the unnecessary privation of the Bolivarian Revolution was all but ignored by the West. Europe and North America’s self-styled champions of democratic institutions and the consent of the governed had lost the confidence in their own moral authority. They stayed silent, and Venezuela’s revolution died. On Saturday, German Mavare, the leader of Venezuela’s beleaguered opposition party, was shot in the head. Americans were too busy to notice; Donald Trump had tweeted something offensive about taco bowls.
It is not just the United States where a crisis of confidence in the capacity of the governed to consent to that condition is brewing. In the American context, the brand of populist nostalgia promoted by Donald Trump entails pining for a return to the racially homogenous steel-and-coal economies of the mid-20th Century; unattainable and melancholy, but hardly militaristic. That is not the case in the nations where a nastier brand of populism is on the rise.
“Trump’s ability to connect with angry American voters also parallels that of European leadership today’s crop of right-wing parties,” Soviet and Russian History Professor at Britain’s University of Birmingham, Arfon Rees, told Newsweek. Reporter Emily Cadei sees in Trump and in those who would emulate his success in Europe’s nationalist right more similarities than differences. Their speeches employ a “lowbrow speaking style.” Their policies are intentionally vague, designed to be subject to individual interpretation. They appeal to the marginalized, the fearful, and those who perceive themselves displaced by forces beyond their control, like the globalization that has accompanied the information age. It is this approach that has led to the success of parties like France’s National Front, Austria’s Freedom Party, and the personality cult developing around Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
As was the case in 1989, it isn’t in Europe but in Asia where nationalistic populism represents the gravest threat to the liberal post-Cold War order. In the American press, much has been made of the election of “the Donald Trump of the Philippines,” Rodrigo Duterte, to that country’s presidency this week. The brash and profane political figure from the violence-plagued island Mindanao titillated his country’s media with talk of his ability to “love four women at the same time” and his utterly vacuous platform. But Duterte scares many a Filipino. According to The Guardian’s Tom Smith, loose talk of “martial law” during the campaign reminded many of the misrule of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. The fear that “Duterte will wield a similarly arbitrary iron fist when it comes to the rule of law, breaking it when he chooses,” persists in the minds of millions of the new president’s constituents. But Duterte isn’t a Filipino problem alone. Americans will have to negotiate over military facilities in the Philippines with this new populist representative who promised his countrymen a better deal.
Perhaps the most frightening image of resurgent populist nationalism was conjured up by the Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Browne. In his dispatch from Shanghai, he chronicled the rise of a movement of “neo-Maoists,” who pine for the brutal and bloody days of the Cultural Revolution and against whom the Chinese Communist Party’s leaders are struggling for control. They have fed these absolutists a steady diet of old patriotic songs, Marxist lectures, and augmented social welfare programs, but it hasn’t diluted the growing influence of this group. The power of the revisionist movement is derived from their belief that Chinese society is growing less equal, which is an accurate assessment. For these fundamentalists, just as Mao had once urged the radical students of the Red Guard, “it’s right to rebel.” It isn’t merely economic populism that these Chinese nationalists demand, but militarism; “Television images of warships patrolling the South China Sea, and warplanes circling the East China Sea, keep spirits high,” Browne wrote. For now, that is enough to keep passions from boiling over. But the Chinese economy is cooling, inequality is rising, and tempers are short.
These developments portend something disconcerting. The cultural and governmental norms that once typified free societies aren’t in high demand. For some, particularly the West’s “race realists,” who in America have rallied behind Trump, these are the failed relics of an earlier age – one that they believe did them and their kin no favors. It isn’t just that the tide of democratic rebellions has waned; it is that they were replaced by something much more primal and lamentably familiar. Is the present wave of nationalistic and populist movements sweeping the globe a mere spasm or a trend of things to come? Time will tell. If, however, we’re witnessing the dawn of a new age, it’ll be among the darkest in living memory.
