Towards a Dumber (But More Accurate) Theory of Political Change

How Orbán altered my thinking

Orbán is out in Hungary. I’m happy, because I dislike Orbán’s brand of ethno-nationalist illiberalism, and because I’m tired of typing that goddamned “a”-with-a-li’l-hat-on-it in Orbán’s name (if you’re on Windows, it’s “NUM LOCK + ALT + 0225 + SHIFT + WINDOWS + CONTROL”, hold down for 70 seconds). Orbán’s ouster also seems like a good time to reflect how badly the big theory of political change from ten years ago has fared.

Circa 2016, people thought that we might be witnessing the beginning of a populist authoritarian wave. Trump won in the US, Brexit passed in Britain, the Law and Justice Party was in power in Poland, and Orbán was making his illiberal intentions known. The rule that I learned in college — that when a country becomes an established liberal democracy, they don’t go backwards, sort of like how once you start getting your groceries delivered, you’ll never set foot in a grocery store again — seemed wrong. Liberal democracy was maybe not the end of history. And I was an acolyte of this thinking — if this piece is a dunk on anyone, it’s a dunk on my eternal bête noire: me from the past.

One thing that made the “rising authoritarianism” theory compelling was the presence of a plausible instigating event: The advent of social media. The story went like this: Social media bypassed gatekeepers and democratised information, which empowered fringe elements that had been shunned by establishment types in politics and media. It also gave politicians who speak the people’s language a direct line to their audience. It empowered the common man and reminded us why most framers of Western constitutions greatly feared the common man, whom they considered smelly, ignorant, and more than ready to burn witches or murder Jews if they thought it would increase crop yields by even a miniscule amount.

The theory had logic, but a global shift towards populist authoritarianism hasn’t happened. Brexit is unpopular, the regimes in Poland and Hungary have been voted out, and Trump would be out if Kamala Harris hadn’t responded to a question about using taxpayer dollars to fund gender reassignment surgery for anyone anywhere in the world (or whatever the question was) with: “Sure”. No new Western governments have hopped on the authoritarian bandwagon in the past decade. Social media is still with us — and it has not morphed into a Lincoln-Douglas-style long-form tête-à-tête, to say the least — but what looked like the beginning of a wave now looks like more of a self-contained ripple.

So, what about the theory was wrong? To my mind, definitely the notion that people were becoming ideologically right-wing. We really need to drop the idea that most people are ideologically anything — they’re just not. John and Jane Average Dipshit are not crusaders, they don’t want to be foot soldiers in your silly little Socialist Revolution or corpses in your re-conquest of Christian civilization; they want a better, simpler life, and also for their enemies to be killed by hornets, if possible. Political types ascribe to grand, high-falutin theories, but regular people who have a shot at experiencing joy or sex at some point in their lives do not. So, we political types need to stop imagining that every tremor in the political landscape is a harbinger of a seismic shift that will lead to permanent victory for one ideological faction or another.

But the political shift that probably did occur involves immigration. Though social media did not suddenly turn people into acolytes of Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt, it did make nativist politics far more potent. Old Media would deem, say, video of a random immigrant being an asshole on a bus not newsworthy, but social media personalities will circulate that video all the way to the bank. And a politician whom establishment types would have laughed off as a xenophobic loon can now take their case straight to the masses. These changes combined with the fact that…ya know…there’s a there there — you won’t find me arguing that Western governments deserve five-star reviews for their handling of immigration — are why basically every liberal democracy has a noisy anti-immigration party. Centrist parties need to get with the times and neuter the potency of anti-immigration politics. That was the policy of incoming Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar, a man whose nationalist credentials are surely helped by the fact that his name — if he was British — would basically translate to “Johnny Anglo-Saxon”.

I should probably get “VOTERS DO NOT UNDERGO BIG IDEOLOGICAL SHIFTS” tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. Most voters are practical, not ideological — their concerns are typically material and first-order. They also seem to periodically get bored with their leaders — rarely does any party anywhere in the world enjoy more than a decade in power before voters say “Nah, fuck that” and elect anyone else. Permanent ideological shifts basically never happen. And the good news is that the ideological conquest of the Western world by illiberalism that many of us feared a decade ago has not happened. The weird news is that any of us ever thought that it might.

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