Ivan Krastev is writing – in principle – about the rightward turn in Poland,but he could be talking about the Trumpish movement in the US, or the rise of the National Front in France:
The rise of these parties is symptomatic of the explosion of threatened majorities as a force in European politics. They blame the loss of control over their lives, real or imagined, on a conspiracy between cosmopolitan-minded elites and tribal-minded immigrants. They blame liberal ideas and institutions for weakening the national will and eroding national unity. They tend to see compromise as corruption and zealousness as conviction.
What makes anxious majorities most indignant is that while they believe that they are entitled to govern (they are the many after all), they never can have the final say. And so they are ready to blame the separation of powers and other inconvenient principles of liberal democracy for their frustration — and readily endorse parties like Law and Justice that run against those principles.
In a recent paper entitled “The Political Economy of Liberal Democracy,” the economists Sharun Mukand and Dani Rodrik argue that the question is not why so few democracies are liberal, but why liberal democracies exist at all. In the best of times, it’s an idle question. And maybe Poland will do the right thing, again, and throw the bums out after two years. Or perhaps the enigma of liberal democracy will cease to be an idle question, and become, for Europe, an existential one.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/135043897832
