Authoritarian liberalism

Tolga Theo Yalur*

Living in an Orwellian hell is not an unusual feeling for anyone. In both cultural and individual narratives, it owes to the themes crucial to the issue of authoritarianism. The authoritarian question today is usually traced in the nationalist expressions, which ignores the historicity of fascism. What determines similar debates is always the capitalist world economy, functioning in the form of a "nation-state" (sharing world markets at the beginning of the century, especially bringing "nation-states" with borders drawn with rulers to allocate oil wells). The world economy carries out its operations by nation-states, where the citizens and the state are tied through belief, faith, tribalism, patriotism, etc.

In her influential book, Towards a Green Democratic Revolution (2022), Chantal Mouffe exhausts the leftist conceptualization of third-degree liberalism in the post-covid world. Advocating for a democracy aimed at exclusively defending the interests of ‘true nationals’ to “recover” democracy, for Mouffe, is in fact a call for restricting it with “an exclusive ethno-nationalist discourse that excludes migrants, considered as a threat to national identity and prosperity.” 

Susan Neiman confirms Mouffe's line of thought in Left is Not Woke (2023), stressing that the left diverged from the universalist idea of ethics and justice for progress toward relativistic progress where justice for one could incoherently turn the other’s life into hell. Both voice the fear today that combines a statist absolutism and a digital control of the public conscience. The myth that authoritarian regimes created this fear continue to exist on the level of theses that evoke certain claims with the trouble with "fascism". On this level, human pluralities are tried to be absorbed into an isolation and "fear of the stranger".

The word “post-truth”, in this sense, is incompatible with both democratic debate and anticipation, reaction and adaptation to a physically changing reality, both conditioning and conditioned by the hegemonically prescribed information in the mainstream. Neiman rests the case in her example of the New York Times. A news media outlet that “sets the standards in more than one country” that incorporated the woke demonstrations lately, the discourse still underlines that “ethnic backgrounds” may determine political perspectives. Her comparison is a news title: “Despite Vice President Kamala D. Harris's Indian roots, the Biden administration may prove less forgiving over Modi's Hindu nationalist agenda”. The caption demands the debate, the fact that it is about India doesn’t show the fact that the harshest Indian critics of the country call it “fascism.” The contrast Neiman drew is the difference of tribalism that flourishes from biological reductionism and the intrusion of tribal politics into the authoritarian discourse of liberal politics in the very similar logics that the woke ideologies function.

Passions that find a chance to exist and find expression in the nationalist forms are neither good nor bad in themselves. Some are motivated by authoritarian interests like fascism, and some by liberating passions like liberalism, socialism. Unsurprisingly to Neiman’s view of “calling out” the woke excesses, the silence of the liberal left has driven these “passions” into the right accounts. 

Donald Trump’s discourses conflict passions with rationality for a space of reconciliation within the nationalist perspective. Instead of a refurbished framework of woke politics on the right, this discourse could find a very deep expression within a fascist tradition of the 19th century by German thinkers who acted with the dream of uniting Kulturnation (cultural nation) and Staatnation (state-nation) that aren’t necessarily dependent on each other.

Neiman’s detailed accounts of the unhappy mergers of the Kulturnation/Staatnation perspectives into the right, the intertwining of the cultural and the tribal dead-ends necessitates the intervention of a territorial sovereignty (national borders) constituted by nation-states. Not a synthesis, but rather the proportioning and subordination of Kulturnation to the state’s fundamental needs. This situation is the inherent fascism of a rationality that defines the nation with the population, far from the naive and symbolic "race struggle" conception of the pre-18th century appropriated into the Woke discourses. 

The discontent expressed by Neiman in her latest book is not a new expression of the liberal eclipse in the post-covid world. The French philosopher Barbara Stiegler describes "the ideology of cognitive biases" in Adapt! (2019) for the constitution of authoritarian liberalism qua biological liberal politics that misappropriate the scientific darwinism into an idea of adapting less with or to the advanced technologies than adapting these into the growing liberal values that themselves have become more authoritarian in their unwritten rules of entrepreneurship, self-sufficient individuation, privatization, speed, deregulation. The idea of adapting Buddhist ethics to liberal ideologies, for example, is seen as an ethical mode and a rejuvenating spirit for the endless distraction of the capitalist economy demands unlimited attention.

Stiegler makes the case for the evolutionary idea of adapting the cognitive sciences and how science and technology could be assimilated into the ideology even when that’s liberalism, an “ideology without an ideology”. She finds Walter Lippmann’s work in the USA as revelatory to refute the adaptation hypotheses in new liberal darwinism to biologist politics that inevitably misappropriate the sciences. The ideas emerged historically at the fin de siecle that paved the way to wars and depressions, and structured in the post-war international laws, treaties and institutions, and incorporated the information available into their prescribed discourses.

For Stiegler, these were the phases of liberal globalization envisioned by Lippmann who later incorporated the “rhythm” of human life to contrast with the pace of the capital mobilization where humans need to be less mobile than the capital. Lippmann’s version of darwinism concerned a comprehensive and realistic study of human nature avoiding any rationalist bias and the exhaustive adaptive activity in the pace of industrialization compared to human life. The ideology of participatory democracies is unproductive due to the alienation and stereotyping involved in the process, which is far from the industrial realities.

Conceptions of delusional constructs, illusions, and the explanation of beliefs in reality debates lead to understanding the discursive regimes relating to the collective productions of the unconscious capable of shaping the cores of psychic truth which are not undisclosed. These reality fictions solicit the unconscious dynamics for those who adhere to them would represent a distorted and displaced way of expressing what does not find a representation in the mainstream discourse.

*Born in İzmir, Turkey, Tolga Theo Yalur studied economics at METU (Ankara) and cultural studies at GMU (Fairfax, VA), and has taught media and culture in Turkey and the United States, at GMU, Bosphorus University (Istanbul), and The New School (NYC). In his published books and articles, he explores advances in cognitive science, media, film, and culture.