In Evelyn Waugh’s sidesplitting novel Scoop, the fictional Daily Beast reports on a war between the patriots and the traitors. Waugh was aiming at the London tabloids, but his caricature of media caricatures has today’s mainstream media nailed.
Yesterday, I posted a critical analysis of the word “democratic” in elite discourse, pointing out that its meaning has been effectively reversed, so that elite-preferred policies are “democratic,” but dissent “anti-democracy.” As though to make my point, The Globe and Mail carries this weekend a long piece by Doug Saunders on looming dangers to democracy. You can see it coming: a Trump victory in 2024 would “have the ominous potential of cementing a worldwide far-right authoritarian bloc.”
This is hysterical, and dangerous too, almost calling for rioting, terrorism, civil unrest and bureaucratic sabotage in the event of a Trump victory.
Saunders’ article is long, and I won’t rehearse it in detail, but its tactics are worth naming.
Smearing: Democratic leaders like Georgia Meloni, Victor Orban, Mateusz Milowieki, Geert Wilders and of course Donald Trump are lumped into the same “anti-democratic”, “far-right”, “authoritarian” category as (inevitably) the dictator Putin. The tactic smears by association.
Jargon: Considerable use is made of a polysyllabic vocabulary of “democratic backsliding” and “de-democratization,” certified by academics and think tanks. Most of the big words serve to hide their premises, but the appearance of learning can be a tactical advantage.
Emotive Abstraction: Concrete policy choices are hidden under hyperbolic but emotive abstractions remote from any direct meaning.
The rest of this brief post looks at this last tactic. It conceals real policy alternatives behind vague but loaded language, thereby smearing the policy alternative while obscuring, even denying, the possibility of democratic choice. Rather than saying “Party X opposes mass immigration,” which would name mass immigration as a choice and imply that other choices were possible, we are instead told merely that, “Party X is anti-democratic and intolerant.” Specificity disappears, and with it democratic choice.
Here are five examples of The Globe’s rhetoric of loaded abstraction, from its accounts of the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, Hungary’s Victor Orban, Italy’s Georgia Meloni, Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) under Mateusz Morawiecki, and Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD):
Geert Wilders of the Netherlands is said to campaign, “almost exclusively on policies of racial intolerance and withdrawal from democratic institutions including the EU.” In other words Wilders wants to limit Islamic immigration, and to end the policy of closing farms to meet EU emissions standards. Thus described concretely, neither policy is inherently undemocratic.
Victor Orban’s signature policy is immigration control and the preservation of Hungary’s Christian culture, and he has clashed with the EU on this. The Hungarian people have chosen those policies, repeatedly.
Georgia Meloni is said to have a, “platform of opposition to racial and sexual minorities,” and her party “is often considered neo-fascist.” In fact, she opposes mass immigration and also the transexual agenda. Obviously Saunders wanted to get in the ‘F’ word, “fascist,” and it is true that left uses it often, but that merely demonstrates the circular character of established leftwing discourse: it reports on itself.
Mateusz Morawiecki’s Law and Justice Party in Poland is said to have “severely curtailed the rights of women, minorities and homosexuals,” when a more specific description would say the PiS opposes mass immigration, abortion and gay marriage. This involved conflict with the courts and as usual the EU.
The Alternative for Germany is said to be “devoted almost entirely to intolerance and opposition to democratic institutions,” when in fact the AfD wants to limit immigration and reduce EU control of German policy, and also to end security state persecution of themselves. Once again, the concrete realities are mundane, and far less shocking than hyperbolic abstractions about “democratic institutions.”
A line runs through these examples: mass immigration and multiculturalism on the one hand, and social liberalism on the other, are obligatory to the elite mind. Dissent on these issues attracts the rote pejoratives — far-right, authoritarian, anti-democratic, extremist, a danger to democracy, don’t you know — but the issues themselves are named only obliquely, through opaque generalities. It is almost as if the aim was to limit democratic choice.
Four of the above cases involve opposition to the notoriously undemocratic behemoth known as the European Union. The view that farm or social policy or anything else should be controlled by elected national governments, and not by the the opaque processes of a supra-national bureaucracy, is the opposite of undemocratic. Words have lost all concrete and direct meaning.
Beneath the abstract rhetoric of democracy and democratic institutions lies its opposite: an elite multiculturalist left-liberalism that wants to restrict the range of democratic debate. Policy choices outside a very narrow spectrum are denounced as a threat to democracy.
Finally, let’s come back to a country mentioned only in passing by The Globe: if it’s authoritarianism you seek, how did Canada do during the Freedom Convoy, by far the largest popular protest in our history? The Globe itself, while it caviled about the Emergencies Act (effectively martial law) and bank account seizures, participated enthusiastically in the state’s propaganda attack on the supposedly “far-right” Freedom Convoy, giving us months of phony swastikas and confederate flags. But it has nothing to say about the discriminatory and ongoing use of the criminal law against Freedom protesters. How many of Orban’s political enemies are on trial, or held for years in remand?
In our society, the real authoritarianism comes from above, and preaches in the establishment press about democracy in danger, while steadily reducing the range of democratic choice.