The Atlantic: A WARNING FROM EUROPE: THE WORST IS YET TO COME

[CousinIT]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/poland-polarization/568324/

. . .

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

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The decision to put a conspiracy theory at the heart of government policy was the source of the authoritarian actions that followed.

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Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liberal democracy is normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.

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In truth, the argument about who gets to rule is never over, particularly in an era when people have rejected aristocracy, and no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth or that the ruling class is endorsed by God. Some of us, in Europe and North America, have settled on the idea that various forms of democratic and economic competition are the fairest alternative to inherited or ordained power.

But we should not have been surprised—I should not have been surprised—when the principles of meritocracy and competition were challenged. Democracy and free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, after all, especially when badly regulated, or when nobody trusts the regulators, or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. Sooner or later, the losers of the competition were always going to challenge the value of the competition itself.

More to the point, the principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don’t necessarily answer deeper questions about national identity, or satisfy the human desire to belong to a moral community. The authoritarian state, or even the semi-authoritarian state—the one-party state, the illiberal state—offers that promise: that the nation will be ruled by the best people, the deserving people, the members of the party, the believers in the Medium-Size Lie. It may be that democracy has to be bent or business corrupted or court systems wrecked in order to achieve that state. But if you believe that you are one of those deserving people, you will do it. . . .