If such views were confined to a few intellectuals on the fringe of that broad and variegated phenomenon we call American conservatism, it would matter less. But such thinking can be found at the highest reaches of the Trump administration, and it is shaping U.S. foreign policy today. Last fall, President Trump declared to a rally of supporters, “You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, okay? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Use that word. Use that word.”
In Brussels in December, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also made a case for nationalism, insisting that “nothing can replace the nation-state as the guarantor of democratic freedoms and national interests.” The idea echoes Hazony’s book “The Virtue of Nationalism,” which argues that true democracy comes from nationalism, not liberalism. It was a nod to the nationalists of Europe waging their crusade against the “liberal imperialism” of the European Union. And, indeed, the Trump administration has been openly putting its thumb on the scale in this battle, seeking, as Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, put it, to “empower” the conservative forces in Europe and Britain while denigrating German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the mainstream liberal parties on both the center-right and center-left.
Putin has also been aiding the illiberal nationalist movements in Europe as a central part of his global political strategy. Many of the movements have received funding from Russian sources, while the mainstream parties — or even those liberals not associated with a mainstream party, such as French President Emmanuel Macron — have been the target of Russian disinformation campaigns on social media. During the Cold War, when the Soviet Union also engaged in large, if now quaintly archaic, disinformation efforts, the U.S. government poured significant resources into combating them. Today, though we have mounted the beginnings of a defense against foreign manipulation, we have made little effort to respond to anti-liberal propaganda with our own defense of liberalism.
That is not so surprising when liberalism itself is under attack at home, from both the left and the right. Today, progressives continue to regard liberal capitalism as deeply and perhaps irrevocably flawed and call for socialism, just as they did during the Cold War. They decry the “liberal world order,” the international trade and financial regime, and virtually all the liberal institutions established during World War II and at the dawn of the Cold War.
And, just as they opposed responding to the Soviet communist challenge — whether through arms buildups, the strategy of containment or by waging an ideological conflict on behalf of liberal democracy — modern progressives show little interest in taking on the challenge posed by the authoritarian great powers and the world’s other anti-liberal forces if doing so would entail the exercise of U.S. power and influence. The progressive left is more concerned about alleged U.S. “imperialism” than about resisting authoritarianism in places such as Venezuela.
During the Cold War, the American left was outnumbered by the broad coalition of conservatives and anti-communist liberals who, in their own ways and for their own reasons, joined together to support anti-communist containment and to make the case for the superiority of liberal democratic capitalism over Soviet communism.
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No such coalition has coalesced to oppose international authoritarianism or to make the case for liberalism today. A broad alliance of strange bedfellows stretching from the far right to self-described “realists” to the progressive left wants the United States to abandon resistance to rising authoritarian power. They would grant Russia and China the spheres of influence they demand in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. They would acquiesce in the world’s new ideological “diversity.” And they would consign the democracies living in the shadow of the authoritarian great powers to their hegemonic control.
As the Trump administration tilts toward anti-liberal forces in Europe and elsewhere, most Americans appear indifferent, at best. In contrast to their near-obsession with communism during the Cold War, they appear unconcerned by the challenge of authoritarianism. And so, as the threat mounts, America is disarmed.
Much of the problem is simply intellectual. We look at the world today and see a multisided struggle among various systems of governance, all of which have their pluses and minuses, with some more suited to certain political cultures than others. We have become lost in endless categorizations, viewing each type of non-liberal government as unique and unrelated to the others — the illiberal democracy, the “liberal” or “liberalizing” autocracy, the “competitive” and “hybrid” authoritarianism. These different categories certainly describe the myriad ways non-liberal societies may be governed. But in the most fundamental way, all of this is beside the point.
By far, the most significant distinction today is a binary one: Nations are either liberal, meaning that there are permanent institutions and unchanging norms that protect the “unalienable” rights of individuals against all who would infringe on those rights, whether the state or the majority; or they are not liberal, in which case there is nothing built into the system and respected by the government and the governed alike that prevents the state or the majority from violating or taking away individuals’ rights whenever they choose, in ways both minor and severe.
The distinction may not have been as straightforward during the 18th and 19th centuries, when Britain and France had liberal institutions that genuinely challenged and even curtailed the power of absolute monarchies. But in today’s world, there can be no liberalism without democracy and no democracy without liberalism. Hungary’s Orban may speak of “illiberal” democracy, but he has systematically weakened the institutions — a free press, an independent judiciary, an open and competitive political system — on which democracy depends.
The new tools of oppression in the ‘illiberal state’
LEFT: The portrait of candidate Abdel Fatah al-Sissi placed on a flag being sold by street vendors outside a polling station in a Cairo suburb in May 2014. (Jonathan Rashad/Getty Images) RIGHT: A woman’s painted finger signifies that she voted in Egypt’s presidential election in March 2018. Sissi could soon have the authority to rule until 2034. (Salah Malkawi/Getty Images)
We are too easily fooled by the half-measures of autocrats and would-be autocrats. A ruler or a dominant majority may leave individuals alone for periods of time, or they may limit their rights only in small ways, or only on particular issues. But if they are not bound to protect individuals in their rights to life, liberty and property — and in this vital respect, to treat all people as equals under the law — then the rights they permit are merely conditional. Rulers may find it prudent, convenient or lucrative to allow people the free exercise of some or most of their rights, but the moment circumstances change, the rulers can do whatever they want.
The distinction is important because circumstances are changing. For the past seven-plus decades since the end of World War II and the beginning of the U.S.-led liberal world order, authoritarian regimes faced many disincentives to deprive their people of individual rights. In a world dominated by liberal powers — and above all, by the United States — they had reason to fear political and military punishments that could prove their undoing, and in many cases did. Regimes that went too far often paid a price eventually, and particularly if they were aligned with and dependent on the dominant liberal powers.