I’ve written many words on the authoritarian tendencies of Germany in particular and the modern Western state in general. It is the main focus of my blog. Whenever I describe some new repressive development, as I did on Wednesday, I receive always the same kinds of comments. Readers tell me that fascism must be returning to Germany and that our inherent National Socialist tendencies are manifesting themselves yet again. Others write that this is all happening because in Europe we do not have the American Bill of Rights, which means that we cannot fend off rapacious state bureaucrats with our guns. Many say that we did not draw sufficient lessons from our earlier experiences with totalitarianism.
Now, I fully agree with the spirit of these remarks. I too want to live in a world where the state does not arbitrarily house-arrest me and inject me with experimental medical substances whenever some virus is making the rounds. Precisely for these reasons, I think it’s important to understand why our states act the way that they do, and to develop an accurate perspective on state behaviour in general. This means clearing away some old myths. “Totalitarianism,” for example, is a caricature that liberal thinkers adopted in the postwar period to describe rival illiberal nationalist and communist ideologies. There are no self-identified totalitarians anywhere and no body of explicitly totalitarian political theory exists. What is more, modern-day German authoritarianism is basically the opposite of Nazism and is rooted in profound antifascist sensibilities. And while I have nothing against the right to bear arms (and would happily see this right reintroduced to the Continent), it is not the political panacea many seem to think it is. To beat back the state, you need something else entirely – something that is just as eagerly suppressed in the United States as it is here in the Federal Republic.
All of these theses owe something to the classical liberal perspective – the Western ideological tradition that emphasises freedom, individual rights and equality before the law. Many of my readers are classical liberals, and that’s totally fine. If I do not entirely share your views, that’s not because I want to take away all of your rights and freedoms. It’s rather because I think liberalism makes a variety of empirically incorrect claims about human nature, and also that it seriously misunderstands state power. Thus liberal mechanisms for binding the state have failed, and long association with the ruling elite has changed the nature of liberalism itself. Classical, negative-rights liberalism – where the state mainly locks up violent criminals and defends private property rights – has become defunct everywhere, precisely because it is inconvenient for people in charge. Elites have replaced it with positive-rights liberalism instead, where the state spends vast sums on social welfare programmes, sends your kids to Drag Queen Story Hour and blames white people for disproportionate black criminality. This successor ideology uses many of the same words and claims to be interested in many of the same things, but is in fact an entirely different animal.
In what follows, I will try to describe state authoritarianism objectively – not from within the world of liberal assumptions, but from outside and sub specie aeternitatis. The truth is that modern liberalism, although it has retained much of its anti-authoritarian rhetoric, has presided over massive expansions to state power. To the extent Westerners have enjoyed more freedom from state harassment than East Europeans under communism or Germans under National Socialism, that has less to do with liberalism itself than with other supervening factors that have made the elevation of liberalism to a civic religion possible in the first place. If you’re truly interested in freedom and personal autonomy, it’s worth thinking about what is necessary to make states actually back off and leave you alone in reality, whatever ideology their leaders espouse.
I think many elements of liberalism make it hard to conceptualise authoritarianism, so I will begin with the former and proceed to the latter:
1) Liberalism in its negative classical form and its positive modern form is a universalising ideology. By this I mean that it makes claims on behalf of all peoples and all political systems everywhere. While it can be hard for adherents of universalising ideologies to understand that their ideologies are not, in fact, universal, the effort is very much worth it, because it brings many things into focus. Liberalism is both a relative newcomer to the long history of human politics and also highly unusual. Even today, at the height of its influence, liberalism is native only to a small minority of the world’s population. Europeans spent much of the 20th century imposing liberalism throughout Asia and Africa, in all the same lands where they had spent the 19th century preaching Christianity. Throughout all of this territory liberalism remains a set of political beliefs imposed from the outside. Even in core European countries like Germany, liberalism is relatively young and has a fraught and uncertain record. This perspective guards against the easy assumption that something which is not liberal must therefore automatically be communist or fascist. Most people do not identify with liberalism and there is a wide range of non-liberal and illiberal political thought out there.
2) Because liberalism claims to oppose the authoritarianism of the state, liberals automatically equate the absence of liberalism with authoritarianism. If it were not for liberal principles, they believe, we would be suffering at this moment under some unimaginably totalitarian dystopian illiberal regime. Conversely, they equate all manifestations of state authoritarianism immediately with a relapse to some rival, more primitive illiberal political system. When the state cracks down, they assume that it must be because of Nazism or whatever. I unreservedly accept that comparisons like these serve an important polemical purpose. They highlight the hypocrisy of our rulers and that really hurts, or they wouldn’t expend so much effort to discourage people from arguing in this way. Nevertheless, I think these arguments are incorrect analytically. As we learned during Covid, even liberal systems are capable of overt authoritarian interventions in the most personal and intimate areas of our lives.
3) The objective perspective becomes very important here. Subjectively and from within liberal ideology, it is tempting to argue that self-described liberal polities must not be liberal whenever they produce illiberal results. Society, however, is very complex, and we must be open to the possibility that even liberal systems can lead to authoritarian or illiberal places, despite or even because of the best liberal intentions of everyone involved. If we shrug off these unwelcome outcomes with “real communism has never been tried”-style dismissals, we risk blinding ourselves to how liberalism functions in reality. Liberalism, for example, is a fundamentally oppositional ideology. It is always arrayed against real or imagined ideological enemies. A lot of present German political authoritarianism is baked into our 1949 Basic Law, which establishes this Orwellian monstrosity we call “defensive democracy” full of mechanisms that our founders hoped would prevent illiberal communist and illiberal fascist subversion. This is why we have the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, and it is why a great part of the political debate in the my country is consumed with weird histrionics about which political positions should be legally and socially acceptable in the first place. Positive-rights liberalism is even more authoritarian, as it commits itself to guaranteeing specific social outcomes. Recognising ever more arcane political rights, like the right to survive a viral infection, causes very unsettling illiberal outcomes, which however derive directly from (positive) liberal premises.
4) We should not, however, overestimate the influence of ideology. Human civilisations, always and everywhere, exhibit clear hierarchical features, and in all of them political power invariably accrues to a confined oligarchy, whatever ideological beliefs anybody espouses. This is as true of dictatorships as it is of liberal democracies. In the former, power is not in fact exercised by a single strong man, but is actually wielded by an entire elite class, whom the dictator merely represents in public and to outsiders. In the latter, the people are not in fact sovereign, as oligarchic rule quickly adapts to overcome the minor obstacles posed by such things as elections and the rule of law. Liberal ideology does exercise an influence on politics, but this influence is far subtler and also much stranger than its proponents allow. I hope, someday soon, to write a book about this.
