A number of intellectuals have pointed to an internal contradiction within liberalism. Does tolerance for others include tolerating illiberal people? I wonder if there is an analogous contradiction within illiberalism, an ideology that (in the West) is often driven by a dislike of illiberal cultures.
The first time I recall reading about xenophobic populism in Europe was when the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn criticized Muslim immigrants for not sharing the liberal values of Dutch citizens. Fortuyn (who was gay) could be seen as a liberal who was intolerant of illiberal people. He was later assassinated by a left-wing Dutch animal rights activist.
Over time, right wing populist parties gained increasing strength in Europe, and indeed it’s quite possible that their support is still increasing. Not surprisingly, these parties eventually attracted a lot of people who did not share Fortuyn’s liberal values. Their voters are often older people who are culturally conservative and live in rural areas or smaller cities. Some of these parties became less libertarian and more populist over time, as they gained new supporters.
In America, President Trump has more support among Hispanic voters than one might expect (even if the linked poll overstates his support by 10% or 15%), given his occasional disparaging remarks about Mexican illegal immigrants and “****hole countries” in Central America. Why is that?
At a stylistic level, Trump has a lot in common with the traditional Latin American “strongman”. Here’s a comment on Peronism that I recently ran across in a diary of Emilio Renzi, written in the 1960s:
Writers like Beatriz Guido, Sabato, and Viñas himself view Peronism as a continuous and daily apocalypse; it would seem the nation has reached a point at which there is nothing but theatrics and falsehood. They cannot understand the reasons for which Peronism was widely supported, and they regard corruption and calumny as the explanation for its backing. The Peronist masses are viewed as naïve and wickedly gullible, deceived by power.
That’s how many American intellectuals currently view the Trump phenomenon.
Trump’s appeal is partly based on the idea that he’ll protect the US from becoming more like Latin America, even as his political style and economic nationalism has clear affinities to Latin American politics. Is that a stable equilibrium?
Politico reports that several far-right politicians in the Netherlands have recently converted to Islam:
A former member of Geert Wilders’ far-right Dutch party announced Monday that he has converted to Islam.
Van Klaveren was a harsh critic of Islam during his time as PVV politician, saying “Islam is a lie” and “The Quran is poison,” newspaper NRC reported.
Asked in the newspaper interview if he feels guilty about these statements, Van Klaveren said he had been “simply wrong,” adding that it was “PVV policy: everything that was wrong had to be linked to Islam in one way or another.”
Arnoud van Doorn, a former PVV official, was an earlier convert to Islam. Van Doorn congratulated Van Klaveren on his decision via Twitter, writing: “[I] never thought that the PVV would become a breeding ground for converts.”
I don’t know what lies in the future for liberalism and illiberalism, but I sense that the current equilibrium is not stable. We should expect the unexpected.
PS. It’s useful to set aside the unanswerable question of what “true Islam” is all about, and focus instead on the more tractable question of, “What sort of cultures dominate in majority Islamic countries in the year 2019”.
READER COMMENTS
Thaomas
Feb 5 2019 at 4:34pm
I think the more relevant question is what sort of culture dominates among Muslims of [our country]. Amon a small and not necessarily representative sample of Muslims I know, the are more liberal that many of my FB friends.
Benjamin Cole
Feb 5 2019 at 7:12pm
The Emilio Renzi quote is great writing.
Brian Donohue
Feb 6 2019 at 9:35am
If you are curious about Trump’s appeal among Latinos, you can do better than “well, these people dig strong men”, which strikes me as containing a whiff of… well, condescension might be a charitable way of putting it.
I disagree with Victor Davis Hanson a lot, but he is someone who regularly interacts with Latino Americans and is utterly unsurprised by this phenomenon.
Meets
Feb 6 2019 at 11:21am
I think the strongman argument for Hispanic support is questionable. After all, they left those countries with struggled.
There are more important factors, I think:
1. The economy is good.
2. The immigration issue is overrated for them. After all, its not like Latin America has open borders. Mexico doesn’t want Central America asylum seekers either.
3. Hispanics are not pc/woke so aren’t attracted to the progressive wing over centrist democrats.
Meets
Feb 6 2019 at 11:21am
*”with strongmen” I meant to say above
RPLong
Feb 6 2019 at 11:56am
Count mine among the chorus of voices who object to your apparent insinuation that Latinos prefer strongmen.
Latinos are well-represented in red states and have traditionally been socially conservative, working class, and religious, with comparatively high levels of entrepreneurship. It’s not hard to imagine why support for a Republican president would be high among a demographic like that. No need for a strongman hypothesis here.
Hazel Meade
Feb 8 2019 at 3:32pm
I completely agree, which is why conservatives should be welcoming Hispanic immigration with open arms.
And yet, as we see, the current Republican president is not big on Hispanic immigration, and neither is the Republican base. Because, fundamentally the Republican base is not composed of liberals trying to keep out Hispanics due to their illiberal political views (despite propaganda from some quarters to the contrary). The real driver here isn’t even cultural difference but labor competition. Trump’s base is working class laborers who are threatened by foreign competition. And that’s basically an illiberal position.
Jon Murphy
Feb 6 2019 at 12:33pm
Regarding Latin support, it seems to me there is a bit of a Transitional Gains Trap thing going on. From conversations I’ve had with folks, despite the insults, they support Trump cracking down on illegal immigration. These people went through the process, spent the money, and are essentially earning some rents, and they feel that the Democrats are taking that away from them. Like how taxi companies are complaining about Uber: “we went through this, and so should they!”
Now, this does come from just a handful of conversations with a few people I know, so take it for what it’s worth.
Scott Sumner
Feb 6 2019 at 8:05pm
Everyone, Check out the recent presidential election in Brazil, and 100 other elections in various Latin American countries.
RPLong
Feb 7 2019 at 10:27am
You can’t really be claiming that there have been 100 fair and non-disputed elections of “strongmen” in “various Latin American countries,” that the main thing these elections have in common is that “Hispanic voters” voted in them, and that this demonstrates why “Hispanic voters” like Trump, can you?
Say it ain’t so!
Scott Sumner
Feb 7 2019 at 12:47pm
RPLong, Yes, 100 is hyperbole. But you can’t deny that the cultures of Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Italy (i.e. almost 90% of the world) are less politically liberal that northwestern Europe, North America and Australia, can you?
I certainly am not singling out just Latin America.
Also, keep in mind that not everyone who employs a populist, authoritarian style is a dictator. Berlusconi and Trump certainly are not dictators, but share some stylistic similarities. Think about the recently elected president of Brazil, who praises the military dictators of the 1970s. Could someone like that be elected in, say, Canada?
RPLong
Feb 7 2019 at 2:57pm
Scott, it’s true that I “cannot deny” that the governments of countries in North America, northwestern Europe, and Australia are all more liberal than 90% of the world‘s governments. But that is not the point of our disagreement.
What I disagree with is your insinuation, in paragraphs 4 and 5 of your original blog post, that the reason Donald Trump polls well among Hispanic voters in the United States of America (in one recent poll) is that Hispanic voters in general like “strongmen.” The election of strongmen in 20th Century Argentina or 21st Century Brazil is not evidence that Hispanic voters in the United States of America prefer Donald Trump because they prefer strongmen.
This claim strikes me as being not just tendentious, but obviously so. In my first comment to you, I mentioned many plausible reasons why American Latinos might rate a current Republican president highly. Don’t you think we have an obligation to rule out simple explanations like that before we generalize about ethnic preferences for fascism?
Out of curiosity and a sense of due diligence, I briefly perused Pew Research’s website prior to writing this comment. That website has a well-known section dedicated to analyzing Hispanic perspectives in America, with data going back decades. My reading of that data is that this NPR/PBS poll is an outlier. (Start with this redux of the 2018 midterms, for example, which shows that 69% of Hispanics voted Democrat. Odd, for a group that supposedly approves of Donald Trump at a rate of 50%, don’t you think? Was this because Democrats ran a lot of strongmen during the 2018 election?)
If you’re seeing something in the data that I’m missing I think we’d all benefit from seeing that data. I think it would make a stronger case than the one you made above, which I must admit I am struggling to interpret charitably.
Scott Sumner
Feb 10 2019 at 3:35pm
RPLong, You have no answer for my views on the voting behavior of people in Latin American countries (and many other places). So my response is that you can’t beat something with nothing. If you have an alternative hypothesis, I’d love to hear it.
Tim Van Allen
Feb 7 2019 at 3:14pm
The functional contradiction exists within liberalism, not within illiberalism. You are equating one side of the liberal dilemma with illiberalism. As you pointed out, Pim Fortuyn was a liberal. He chose one side of the dilemma: rejecting the immigration of illiberal people. Most modern liberals take the other side: promoting the immigration of illiberal people who undermine liberalism. Conservatives do not want to preserve liberalism. They want to preserve a culture, race, ethnic identity, way of life, etc. Some degree of liberalism might be part of that, but it’s not the core value.
Also, opposition to immigration is not necessary based on moral principles, such as tolerance. It could simply be pragmatic. Open borders pretty much guarantees the collapse of modern societies within a few decades. I’m not sure why open borders would be considered liberal anyway. Classical liberals believe in private property for individuals, and historically they believed in borders. Tolerance doesn’t mean anyone gets to live in my house.
Scott Sumner
Feb 10 2019 at 3:40pm
Tim, What if the “way of life” is conservative values, and the people who want to preserve that way of life are immigrants from the developing world? And what if the people who reject that way of life are native born millennials?
mbka
Feb 8 2019 at 2:38am
Scott,
I think that liberal – illiberal axis isn’t quite the right tool to cut through the various paradoxes we see arising. For once, the truly liberal argument against immigration from “illiberal” cultures only has appeal for a tiny minority of intellectuals. Most people simply aren’t liberal. They just don’t want any change from the world they used to see when they were young – when they formed the idea of the world as “it is supposed to be”. So typically, immigrants are disliked because they have different cultural habits, not because these habits are necessarily illiberal. I believe Pim Fortuyn is more of an outlier here. Besides, actual liberalism would simply state that people should be able to believe whatever they believe as long as they observe the law and should even be able to change the law as long as they do so in accordance with constitutional procedure.
So I see this rather as a question of increasing tribalism, of a desire to be surrounded by people “like ‘us’ “, culturally similar ones, the desire to belong to an identifiable group that practices specific food, clothing, and other cultural habits as signs of group belonging. This doesn’t just apply to nationalism of course. It applies to veganism just as well, or any kind of left wing identity groups.
The anthropologist Mary Douglas built a nice cultural model around this, called grid-group analysis. The model has two axes, one is about “group”, with extremes of individualistim vs group (collectivist) orientation, and the other is about “grid”, with extremes of either low or high social barriers (hierarchy). This gives you 4 quadrants of political world views:
individualistic and low on hierarchy: classical liberalism, capitalism
group oriented and low on hierarchy: collectivism or sectarianism
individualistic and high on social barriers: isolated homesteader society, anarchy
group oriented and high on social barriers: paternalistic conservatism, fascism
Now we have a situation where the whole world moves more towards group orientation. On the egalitarian end, that would be your religious extremists or left wing zealots. On the hierarchy and structure end, that would be your right wing populists. The question is, why more tribalism now? Why this revival of group feelings? Did the world cross some threshold of “too many people not of my culture” or “to much globalism” that triggered that backlash? But if this is so, then how do you explain that New York City, London and Paris, epicenters of cosmopolitanism, are precisely not the ones turning fascist? That is where I am scratching my head.
mbka
Feb 8 2019 at 3:02am
… and the obsession with groups easily explains why right wing populists would convert to Islam, because they have a strong desire to belong to a tight knit group, why Jean Marie Le Pen was quite OK with authoritarian rule in Arab countries as long as the Arabs stay there, because he understood it as the Arab’s version of his own vision for France, why generally nationalists are OK with someone else’s nationalism, because they want a world of strong identities and believe that people are born into their identities, etc.
Hazel Meade
Feb 8 2019 at 3:25pm
Is low hierarchy supposed to be the opposite of high social barriers? Confused by these quadrants.
An isolated homesteader society would seem to be low on hierarchy AND high on social barriers simultaneously, so that axis doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Scott Sumner
Feb 10 2019 at 3:40pm
Interesting comment.
Hazel Meade
Feb 8 2019 at 1:54pm
The contradictions are everywhere.
Often illiberal people who vote for Trump will claim that Hispanic immigration should not be tolerated because Hispanics are given to authoritarian populist politics. It’s the Trumpists themselves saying that Hispanics love authoritarian populists, and giving it as a reason to keep them out, while themselves voting for an authoritarian populist. Thus the irony.
At the same time, many of Trumps supporters object when “liberals” frown on their intolerance of immigrants, and demand that liberals extend their tolerance towards themselves. In other words, they demand liberals extend universal tolerance to the intolerant, but they do not practice universal tolerance themselves.
The problem with tolerating the intolerant is that it interferes with tolerance towards people who are not intolerant – who are merely the innocent victims of intolerant people. Tolerating intolerant people would essentially mean, for instance, that if you see a racist shopkeeper throwing a black person out of a restaurant just for his skin color, that you would be socially obligated to tolerate that – you would be bound by custom to refrain from saying anything about it or expressing contempt for the shopkeeper.
Essentially what you are really faced with is a choice: Who should be socially ostracized? The people who desire to ostracize others, or the people they desire to ostracize. In no universe it is possible to have a society in which nobody gets ostracized – until the day when everyone universally stops trying to ostracize others. In other words, you can’t get universal tolerance until the intolerant cease to exist, and the only way to get there is to not tolerate the intolerant.
Mark Z
Feb 8 2019 at 8:39pm
I see a couple problems with your analysis, Scott. First, it seems like you’re making the exact same argument opponents of immigration make: that Latin American immigrants import their political dispositions and thereby threaten American liberal democracy as voters. It’s hard to justify dismissing this position as an argument against immigration while using almost the exact same argument to explain why immigrants didn’t vote for one’s preferred candidate by a sufficiently wide margin (you don’t really even define what the phenomenon requiring explanation is; how much support should we expect Hispanics to give Trump? Is the supposed oddity that a higher fraction voted for Trump than, say, black voters? What’s the benchmark here?).
The second problem: foreign born Latin Americans opposed Trump more than their American-born children and grandchildren (at the bottom I left a link). So, does the supposed Latin American inclination toward strongmen skip a generation? That seems doubtful. It seems like almost the opposite of what you’re suggesting is the case: actual immigrants are more likely to be bothered by Trump, because they are more likely to identify with their country of origin and their more precarious position as immigrants. Those born here – rather than recapitulating Latin American political stereotypes – identify more as Americans, are more assimilated into ‘white’ culture, share the economic and cultural interests of ‘white’ America more than their parents and grandparents do, and don’t have to worry as much about their citizenship status as their parents; in short, they’re less anti-Trump because they’re more assimilated; they’re ‘more American,’ not less.
http://fortune.com/2016/10/29/hispanic-voters-generation-divide/
Scott Sumner
Feb 10 2019 at 3:28pm
Mark, I think you misread the post. It’s not about the pros and cons of immigration, it’s about the internal contradictions of illiberalism.
As for you comments on Hispanic voting behavior, I don’t worry at all about how immigrants vote once they get here–that’s their decision. I don’t judge whether an immigrant is good or bad by the criterion of whether they happen to agree with my political views.
Mark Z
Feb 10 2019 at 4:56pm
But their voting behavior seems to undermine your explanation for one aspect of their voting behavior (that they voted for Trump ‘more than one might expect’ because of a greater Latin American preference for strongmen). The fact that Hispanics tend to be more Republican and more supportive of Trump the more generations removed from immigration, specifically, is at odds with that explanation.
Hazel Meade
Feb 11 2019 at 10:34am
Only if you think that voting behavior is genetic, rather than cultural or institutional. If one doesn’t believe that Latin Americans bring the characteristics of Latin American politics with them and pass them on to their offspring then there is no contradiction.
Mark Z
Feb 11 2019 at 4:11pm
Your response is confusing me. I’m saying pretty much the exact opposite of voting behavior being genetic: I’m arguing that, with each generation, Hispanics vote and think more like Americans in general and less like their parents and grandparents who migrated here. That’s not consistent with genetic inheritance of voting patterns.
I don’t see how institutional or cultural inheritance rescues Scott’s hypothesis either. Are you suggesting that 2nd or third generation Latin Americans may be more ‘culturally Latin American’ than actual Latin American immigrants? You’d still have to convince me that the supposed Latin American proclivity for strongmen skips the first generation, and I don’t think a cultural explanation does any better than a genetic explanation at explaining how that’s possible. The simplest explanation to me seems: Hispanics become less culturally Hispanic the longer they’re here (in generational terms) and the longer they’ve been here (again, in generations, or the more culturally assimilated they are) the more Republican or pro-Trump they tend to be, which is sort of the opposite of Scott’s hypothesis.
One might argue that it’s a phenomenon in need of explanation that Hispanics seem to assimilate into ‘white’ culture and identity after several generations rather than persisting as a distinct, non-white identity and culture like African Americans. But given that most Hispanics are in pretty much every respect every bit as white as Italians or Greeks, I think this pattern of assimilation is fairly unremarkable.
Hazel Meade
Feb 12 2019 at 10:06am
Sorry, you’re right that was confusingly phrased. I meant to say it’s a contradiction if you think Scott thinks it’s genetic. But I don’t believe Scott believes it’s genetic at all. The argument has been made that liberal countries should not admit immigrants from illiberal countries like Latin America because they will bring illiberal values with them. Scott is not the one making that argument. He’s simply pointing out the contradiction between opposing immigration from Latin American countries on the grounds of their illiberalism and supporting a very Latin-American style politician like Trump. That political style is common in Latin America in the present and might be popular with current Hispanic immigrants. He’s not saying that third generation Hispanics are voting for Trump because of an inherited predisposition for strongmen.
Mark Z
Feb 13 2019 at 12:48am
“That political style is common in Latin America in the present and might be popular with current Hispanic immigrants. ”
And my argument is that evidence suggests precisely the opposite: Trump is not popular with Hispanic immigrants. He’s decidedly unpopular with them. It is the descendants of hispanic immigrants – not the immigrants themselves – that drive up overall hispanic support for Trump to more than Scott would expect. This is obscured when one deals with Hispanics in bulk, ignoring that only some of them are immigrants, but when you separate them into immigrants and descendants of immigrants, support among actual immigrants is much lower. And I think this pattern makes perfect sense and requires no explanation beyond simple assimilation. Of course immigrants tend to oppose an anti-immigration politician, and of course their non-immigrant descendants are markedly less put off by said politicians anti-immigration sentiment.
LK Beland
Feb 13 2019 at 1:03pm
I think that partitioning Hispanics between “Cuban” and “Continental” Hispanics would help a lot in terms of understanding voting trends.
Cuban-Americans tend to support the GOP. They typically do not view themselves as part of the same cultural group as other Hispanic-Americans.
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