| Review of: | Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred by John Lukacs |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | R. W. Hildreth |
| Reviewed in: | Peace & Change |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 32, Issue 04, Pages 590-612 |
Book Reviews
John Lukacs's latest work,
The danger, for Lukacs, is clear-the greatest threat to "our civilization" is the degeneration of democracy into nationalist populism. While critical of liberal and progressive roots of contemporary populism, Lukacs's main target is the "Republican Right." He argues that Republicans have abandoned their conservative ideals of stability, order, and tradition, and instead have tried to construct their "permanent majority" based on invoking hatred against foreign and domestic "enemies." While certainly not the first writer to examine the populist tendencies of the contemporary Republican movement (see, for example, Michael Kazin,
Drawing inspiration from Tocqueville's account of the transition from the aristocratic to the democratic era, Lukacs hopes to diagnose the next great shift in politics. While Tocqueville saw both dangers and opportunities in the emerging democratic movement, Lukacs sees the latest transition from democracy to populism in wholly negative terms. Populism, for Lukacs, is a form of politics in which unscrupulous leaders manipulate the masses through appealing to the "myth of the people" against political elites, internal subversives, and external enemies.
The book is divided into thirty-three short chapters distributed among four sections. The sections are roughly chronological. The first section examines the historical origins of key concepts such as "right and left," liberalism, conservatism, populism, progressivism, nationalism, socialism, and the like. The second section examines the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on the role of Wilson's idealism and the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. The third section surveys twentieth-century American history as the background for the fourth section's analysis of the contemporary political situation.
The first two sections are quite helpful in clarifying the historic origins of terms that make up the conceptual field of populism. Lukacs is at his best here, deftly correcting misreadings of key concepts, including fascism, national socialism, and totalitarianism. Against the tendency of those on the Left (and I would add the current administration) who wantonly use the terms fascist or totalitarian, Lukacs calls for greater historical and conceptual specificity. He advances the intriguing thesis that Hitler and Mussolini were both populists, but of different stripes. The most important distinction, for Lukacs, was that Mussolini's fascism centered on bringing the masses into the totality of the state while Hitler appealed to the
Lukacs turns his attention to recent American politics in the final two sections. While there are a few important observations and many pithy criticisms of the Republican Right, this section's sweeping condemnation of populism is less convincing. First, the important observations: Lukacs is right to highlight the ways in which Republicans have resorted to populist appeals, although his analysis covers familiar territory. He does highlight the considerable convergence of the Left and the Right. Those who call themselves "conservatives" today are, for Lukacs, scarcely different in manners, mores, and morals than those who call themselves "liberals." The result is a paradoxical Republican doctrine, which links "permissiveness together with the crude administration of power; a superficial propagation of privacy together ...weakening of private moral standards and convictions, the celebration of ...private property at the same time when in reality people were not owners but renters; the disappearances of most of the ...known differences of class together with an unceasing appetite for publicly demonstrable labels of class" (p. 152).
I have to admit a certain guilty pleasure in Lukacs's attack on the Right. Lukacs's most biting but also most unsubstantiated claim is that "President Bush and his advisers chose to provoke a war in Iraq well before the election of 2004 for the main purpose of being popular. This was something new in American history" (p. 211). While this may indeed be true, it requires evidence and argument, both of which are lacking. In fact, there are few if any references and no bibliography in the book. It appears that we have to take Lukacs at his word.
And even though Lukacs chastises others for their imprecise use of words and language, his use of populism is very amorphous. He never offers a clear working definition nor does he provide any way to distinguish between different forms of populism. Instead, Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, George Wallace, Juan Peron, Daniel Shays, and Ignatius Donnelly are indiscriminately lumped together as populists. Surely, there are important differences between these figures. More egregiously, Lukacs ignores or dismisses important populist achievements (direct primaries, women's suffrage, agricultural cooperatives, civil rights), values (cooperation, equality, community, self-help), and strategies (nonviolent direct action, community organizing, citizen leadership, cooperatives). He even suggests that it may be a good idea to restrict voting to the "more responsible" citizenry and leave the selection of candidates to party bosses.