How to Lose a Country
Ece Temelkuran
An urgent call to action from one of Europe’s most well-regarded political thinkers. How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship is a field guide to spotting the insidious patterns and mechanisms of the populist wave sweeping the globe – before it’s too late.‘It couldn’t happen here’Ece Temelkuran heard reasonable people in America say it the night Trump’s election was soundtracked by chants of ‘Build that wall.’She heard reasonable people in Britain say it the night of the Brexit vote.She heard reasonable people in Turkey say it as Erdoğan rigged elections, rebuilt the economy around cronyism, and labelled his opposition as terrorists.How to Lose a Country is an impassioned plea, a warning to the world that populism and nationalism don’t march fully-formed into government; they creep. Award winning author and journalist Ece Temelkuran, identifies the early-warning signs of this phenomenon, sprouting up across the world from Eastern Europe to South America, in order to define a global pattern, and arm the reader with the tools to root it out.Proposing alternative, global answers to the pressing – and too often paralysing – poltical questions of our time, Temelkuran explores the insidious idea of ‘real people’, the infantilisation of language and debate, the way laughter can prove a false friend, and the dangers of underestimating one’s opponent. She weaves memoir, history and clear-sighted argument into an urgent and eloquent defence of democracy.No longer can the reasonable comfort themselves with ‘it couldn’t happen here.’ It is happening. And soon it may be too late.
(#ue0381083-c266-5345-af59-4cd581c88d64)
Copyright (#ue0381083-c266-5345-af59-4cd581c88d64)
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate 2019
Copyright © Ece Temelkuran 2019
Ece Temelkuran asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008294014
Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008341770
Version: 2019-01-09
Dedication (#ue0381083-c266-5345-af59-4cd581c88d64)
For Umut.
His name means ‘hope’ in my mother tongue.
Contents
Cover (#u36d959b3-eeed-5bf6-b205-a269b0b8d421)
Title Page (#u36d959b3-eeed-5bf6-b205-a269b0b8d421)
Copyright (#u5cfff9a0-a8ac-5878-8206-07926b3df3ca)
Dedication (#u61a5bebb-076a-519e-8ac6-224ed3da14cb)
Introduction: What Can I Do for You? (#u424f4b15-e390-59db-a8f7-3806876d1790)
1 Create a Movement (#u16af0738-fc48-56c9-9020-a3eebd2b4fac)
2 Disrupt Rationale/Terrorise Language (#u8bfa746b-cc8d-53ce-aabb-831258532276)
3 Remove the Shame: Immorality is ‘Hot’ in the Post-Truth World (#litres_trial_promo)
4 Dismantle Judicial and Political Mechanisms (#litres_trial_promo)
5 Design Your Own Citizen (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Let Them Laugh at the Horror (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Build Your Own Country (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION
What Can I Do for You? (#ue0381083-c266-5345-af59-4cd581c88d64)
The fighter jets are breaking the dark sky into giant geometric pieces as if the air were a solid object. It’s 15 July 2016; the night of the attempted coup in Turkey. I am piling pillows up against the trembling windows. I guess they’ve just dropped a bomb on the bridge, but I can’t see any fire. People are talking on social media about the bombardment of the Parliament Building. ‘Is this it?’ I ask myself. ‘Is tonight the Reichstag fire for what remains of Turkish democracy and my country?’
On TV, a few dozen soldiers are barricading the Bosporus bridge, shouting at the startled civilians: ‘Go home! This is a military takeover!’
Despite their huge guns, some of the soldiers are clearly terrified, and all of them look lost. The TV says it’s a military takeover, but this is not a coup as we know it. Coups usually wear a poker face – there’s no hustling or negotiating, and certainly no hesitation when it comes to using the heavy weaponry. The absurdity of the situation sees sarcasm kick in on social media. This kind of humour is not necessarily aiming for laughter; it’s more of a contest in bitter irony, which seems normal only to those engaged in it. The jokes mostly concern the idea that this is a staged act to legitimise the presidential system – rather than the parliamentary one – that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has long been asking for, a change that would hand him even more power than he already has as the de facto sole ruler of the country.
The dark humour disappears as the skies over Istanbul and Ankara become busy hives of fighter jets. We are learning the language of war in real time. What I’d thought was a bomb was actually a sonic boom – the blast-like sound fighter jets make when they break the sound barrier. This is the proper terminology for the air breaking into giant pieces and raining down on us as fear: fear of realising that before the sun rises we might lose our country.
People in the capital city of Ankara are now trying to differentiate between sonic booms and the sound of real bombs hitting Parliament and the intelligence service headquarters. The catastrophe unfolding in front of our eyes is constantly blurred by the absurdity of the news reports on our screens. Live on air, MPs are running around Parliament trying to find the long-forgotten air-raid shelter, and when they finally do locate it, nobody can find the keys, while outside in the streets people dressed in their pyjamas are kicking tanks, cigarettes in their mouths, and shouting at the jets.
A communications explosion is occurring on our TV screens, and many of us know that this is very much not normal. Turkey’s recent history has taught us that a coup starts with the army taking politicians into custody and shutting down news sources. Also, coups tend to happen in the early hours of the morning, not during television prime time. In this meticulously televised coup, government representatives appear across TV channels all night long, calling on the people to take to the streets and oppose the army’s attempted takeover. The internet does not slow down in the way it usually does whenever something occurs to challenge the government; on the contrary, it’s faster than ever. Even so, the speed and intensity of the night’s events do not allow the sceptics to properly process these strange details.
Erdoğan communicates using FaceTime, with his messages broadcast on CNN Turk. He calls everyone out into the city centres. Like most people, I do not anticipate the government’s supporters taking to the streets to confront the military. Since the founding of the modern Turkish republic in 1923, under Kemal Atatürk, the army has traditionally been the most respected institution in the country, if not the most feared. But apparently much has changed since the last military coup in 1980, when it was the leftists who resisted and were imprisoned and tortured; the president’s call resonates with thousands.
In no time the TV screens are showing the young, terrified soldiers being beaten and strangled to death by this mob. And that is when the never-ending sela from all the minarets in the country begins. Sela is a special prayer recited after death. It has such a shivering tone that even those who are not familiar with Muslim customs can tell that it is about the irreversible, the end. Tonight, sela is followed by loud announcements from minarets calling people to the streets in the name of God, to save the president, the democracy, the nation … The tune of death now shares the sky with jets, the delirious ‘Allahu akbar’s of Erdoğan supporters and the soldiers’ cries for help. And I remember the poem that started everything: ‘The minarets are our bayonets/The domes our helmets/The mosques our barracks/And the faithful our soldiers.’ It was Erdoğan who recited the poem at a public event in 1999, leading to him being imprisoned for four months for ‘inciting religious hatred’, and transforming him first into a martyr for democracy, then a ruthless leader. And after seventeen years, on the night of the coup the poem sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy, a promise that has been kept at the cost of a country.
We have learned over time that coups in Turkey end the same way regardless of who initiated them. It’s like the rueful quote from the former England footballer turned TV pundit Gary Lineker, that football is a simple game played for 120 minutes, and at the end the Germans win on penalties. In Turkey, coups are played out over forty-eight-hour curfews, and the leftists are locked up at the end. Then afterwards, of course, another generation of progressives is rooted out, leaving the country’s soul even more barren than it was before.
As I watch the pro-government news channels throughout the night it becomes clearer by the minute that it is business as usual. Pictures and videos come through of arrested soldiers lying naked in the streets under the boots of civilians – as leftists lay under army boots after the coup in 1980 – and the news channels and the government trolls on social media, not at all paralysed like the rest of us, present us with the perspective they deem most appropriate: ‘Thanks to Erdoğan’s call, the people saved our democracy.’
‘Allahu akbar’s multiply on my street, accompanied by machine-gun shots from the circulating cars. After so many years spent under AKP rule, devotion to the army has apparently been replaced by religious commitment to Erdoğan. We are watching his face and name become the emblems of the new Turkey we’ll wake up to. Beneath the madness and the noise a carefully crafted propaganda machine is fully operational, already preparing the new political realm that will come into being in the morning. And having long been a critic of Erdoğan’s regime, as dawn breaks it becomes Kristall-clear that there won’t be a place for people like me in this new democracy.
Watching a disaster occur has a sedating effect; like millions of people around the country, I am numb. As our sense of helplessness grows along with the calamity, the cacophony transforms into a single siren, a constant refrain: ‘There’s no longer anything you can do; this is the end.’ The global news channels jump in. For the rest of the world, the night’s events are like the opening scene of a political thriller, but in fact this is the climax, the dénouement. It has been a very long and exhausting film, unbearably painful viewing for those of us who were forced to watch or take part. And I remember how it began: with a populist coming to town. Which is why, as the British and American TV anchors put hasty questions to the studio analysts, I feel like saying, ‘As our story ends, yours is only just beginning.’ A bleak dawn breaks.
I remember the exact day I experienced dawn for the first time. I woke up early one morning to the sound of the radio playing loudly in the living room, and found my mother and father chain smoking as they listened to a coup being declared. Their faces darkened as the day broke. It was 12 September 1980, and I looked up at the clear blue sky and said to myself, ‘Oh, this must be what they call dawn.’ I was eight, and one of the most vicious military coups in modern history was just getting started. My mother was silently crying, as she was to do frequently for several years after that dawn.
From that day forth, like millions of other children with parents who wanted a fair, equal and free Turkey, I grew up on the defeated side; among those who always had to be careful and who were, as my mother told me whenever I did less than perfectly at school, ‘obliged to be smarter than those in power because we are up against them’. On the night of 15 July 2016 ‘we’, as ever, were smarter than ‘them’, as we combined penetrating analysis with brilliant sarcasm. But in every square of every city in the country, raging crowds were playing the endgame, perhaps not as smartly, yet with devastating effect.
On 15 July 2016, my nephew Max Ali was the same age I was on 12 September 1980. He is one and a half years older than his brother, Can Luka. They are half-Turkish, half-American, and they live in the US. They were supposed to have gone home to America on 16 July, after a vacation spent with their babaanne – ‘grandmother’ in Turkish – my mother. Max Ali is a religious devotee of babaanne breakfasts. He is one of the lucky few on the planet who know of epic Turkish breakfasts, and he believes only babaanne knows how to make them. As a family, we’re always proud that he chooses tomatoes and Turkish cheese over Cheerios, which my father calls ‘animal food’. Had they not experienced the dawn during the coup their memories of babaanne would have been limited to indulgent breakfasts. But instead of heading to the airport that morning, as day broke they watched their babaanne crying and chain smoking in front of the TV. My mother told me Max Ali asked the same question I’d asked thirty-six years before: ‘Did something bad happen to Turkey?’ Babaanne was too tired to tell him that every generation in this country has its own dark memory of a dawn. She gave the same answer she had given me thirty-six years previously: ‘It is complicated, my dear.’
How and why Turkish democracy was finally done away with by a ruthless populist and his growing band of supporters on the night of 15 July 2016 is a long and complicated story. The aim of this book is not to tell how we lost our democracy, but to attempt to draw lessons from the process, for the benefit of the rest of the world. Of course, every country has its own set of specific conditions, and some of them choose to believe that their mature democracy and strong state institutions will protect them from such ‘complications’. However, the striking similarities between what Turkey went through and what the Western world began to experience a short while later are too many to dismiss. There is something resembling a pattern to the political insanity that we choose to name ‘rising populism’, and that we are all experiencing to some extent. And although many of them cannot yet articulate it, a growing number of people in the West sense that they too may end up experiencing similar dark dawns.
‘Turks must be watching us and laughing their asses off tonight,’ read an American tweet on the night of Donald Trump’s election victory less than five months after the failed coup attempt. We weren’t. Well, maybe one or two smirks might have appeared. Behind those smirks, though, lay exasperation at having to watch the same soul-destroying movie all over again, and this time on the giant screen of US politics. We wore the same pained expression after Britain’s Brexit referendum, during the Dutch and German elections, and whenever a right-wing populist leader popped up somewhere in Europe sporting the movement’s signature sardonic, bumptious grin.
On the night of the US presidential election, on the day of the Brexit referendum result, or when some local populist fired up a surprisingly large crowd with a speech that sounded like total nonsense, many asked the same question in their different languages: ‘Is this my country? Are these my people?’ People in Turkey, after asking these questions for almost two decades and witnessing the gradual political and moral collapse of their homeland, regressed to another dangerous doubt: ‘Are human beings evil by nature?’ That question represents the final defeat of the human mind, and it takes a long and excruciating time to understand that it’s actually the wrong question. The aim of this book is to convince its readers to spare themselves the time and the torture by fast-forwarding the horror movie they have recently found themselves in, and showing them how to spot the recurring patterns of populism, so that maybe they can be better prepared for it than we were in Turkey.
It doesn’t matter if Trump or Erdoğan is brought down tomorrow, or if Nigel Farage had never become a leader of public opinion. The millions of people fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure. And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves. It is better to acknowledge – and sooner rather than later – that this is not merely something imposed on societies by their often absurd leaders, or limited to digital covert operations by the Kremlin; it also arises from the grassroots. The malady of our times won’t be restricted to the corridors of power in Washington or Westminster. The horrifying ethics that have risen to the upper echelons of politics will trickle down and multiply, come to your town and even penetrate your gated community. It’s a new zeitgeist in the making. This is a historic trend, and it is turning the banality of evil into the evil of banality. For though it appears in a different guise in every country, it is time to recognise that what is occurring affects us all.
‘So, what can we do for you?’
The woman in the audience brings her hands together compassionately as she asks me the question; her raised eyebrows are fixed in a delicate balance between pity and genuine concern. It is September 2016, only two months after the failed coup attempt, and I am at a London event for my book Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy. Under the spotlight on the stage I pause for a second to unpack the invisible baggage of the question: the fact that she is seeing me as a needy victim; her confidence in her own country’s immunity from the political malaise that ruined mine; but most of all, even after the Brexit vote, her unshaken assumption that Britain is still in a position to help anyone. Her inability to acknowledge that we are all drowning in the same political insanity provokes me. I finally manage to calibrate this combination of thoughts into a not-so-intimidating response: ‘Well, now I feel like a baby panda waiting to be adopted via a website.’
This is a moment in time when many still believe that Donald Trump cannot be elected, some genuinely hope that the Brexit referendum won’t actually mean Britain leaving the European Union, and the majority of Europeans assume that the new leaders of hate are only a passing infatuation. So my bitter joke provokes not even a smile in the audience.
I have already crossed the Rubicon, so why not dig deeper? ‘Believe it or not, whatever happened to Turkey is coming towards you. This political insanity is a global phenomenon. So actually, what can I do for you?’
What I decided I could do was to draw together the political and social similarities in different countries to trace a common pattern of rising right-wing populism. In order to do this I have used stories, which I believe are not only the most powerful transmitters of human experience, but also natural penicillin for diseases of the human soul. I identified seven steps the populist leader takes to transform himself from a ridiculous figure to a seriously terrifying autocrat, while corrupting his country’s entire society to its bones. These steps are easy to follow for would-be dictators, and therefore equally easy to miss for those who would oppose them, unless we learn to read the warning signs. We cannot afford to lose time focusing on conditions unique to each of our countries; we need to recognise these steps when they are taken, define a common pattern, and find a way to break it – together. In order to do this, we’ll need to combine the experience of those countries that have already been subjected to this insanity with that of Western countries whose stamina has not yet been exhausted. Collaboration is urgently required, and this necessitates a global conversation. This book humbly aims to initiate one.
ONE
Create a Movement (#ue0381083-c266-5345-af59-4cd581c88d64)
‘We have to take the deer! We have to!’
So says four-year-old Leylosh, shouting to emphasise the fact that we simply must put the imaginary deer on the infinitely large back seat of our imaginary car, which is already filled by several other animals, including a dinosaur we luckily managed to rescue from freezing. We are driving from Lewisburg, a once-thriving small farming town, sixty miles north of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to her granny’s house in Istanbul, to deliver the Lego duck that we built and then cooked on a miniature stove. Leylosh is squinting in the imaginary wind and providing a scary winter soundtrack for our arduous journey: ‘Oouuuuvvoouuuv!’ Now and then she checks with a quick side glance to make sure I’m fully engaged. Satisfied with my powers of imagination, she turns back to reassure our passengers: ‘Don’t be afraid. We’ll be at Granny’s soon. We don’t have to go to school today.’
In a less exciting parallel universe, she will have to go to kindergarten in fifteen minutes, and in an hour’s time I’ll have to give a lecture at Bucknell University, a liberal arts college, on ‘rising populism’ and my novel The Time of Mute Swans, which partly deals with how Turkey became the perfect case study for the topic. Leylosh’s mother Sezi, a long-time friend who teaches at Bucknell, talked me into this, because she believes that American academia needs to hear about the Turkish experience and to be warned about the later stages of the Trump administration. It is therefore now time to stop teaching Leylosh how to ‘kiss like a fish’ and return to my real-life role: floating like the angel with a bugle in Bruegel’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels to alarm the wool-gathering masses. Sezi keeps checking her watch. But neither Leylosh nor I are keen to get out of the imaginary car, and in a way, her reasons are no less political than mine.
Sezi is a fortepianist and an expert on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical instruments. Leylosh probably thinks all mothers play Chopin on antique pianos to persuade their daughters to eat their breakfast. It’s doubtless no more unusual to her that her father is an anthropologist who periodically visits indigenous tribes in the Amazon rainforest. Her school, a kindergarten for children whose parents work at the university, a safe haven for children of cosmopolitan academics in a small American town, is full of kids like her; they speak at least two languages, travel regularly between continents, and are blissfully unaware that what’s normal to them is far from ordinary.
‘She used to love going to school,’ says Sezi. But lately the mornings have begun resounding with cries of ‘No, Mom! No!’ As Leylosh holds on to the door of our imaginary car, refusing to leave for school, her mother explains that this new attitude, like many other inconveniences in the US, began after Trump came to power. Herein lie the political troubles of the four-year-old Leylosh.
The morning after the election, Leylosh arrived at school with her mother. The three teachers were waiting at the door, hands on their hips and brandishing new sardonic smiles. ‘It was as if they were telling us to “suck it up”!’ says Sezi. ‘They’re all Trump supporters who are taking care of the children of Bernie or Hillary voters. The tension has been gradually mounting ever since, and it now affects the children.’ Sezi stops to find the right words: ‘These people, they changed all of a sudden, it’s as if they are now a different species.’
As the Argentinian proverb goes, ‘A small town is a vast hell.’ This is especially the case in today’s world, because the phenomenon of rising populism has a lot to do with the provinces. Small towns are often where people first encounter this social and political current. However, they wouldn’t describe it as diligently as the political analysts – and even if they did, their concerns would go largely unheard. The mobilising narrative of the new political direction feeds on provincial perceptions of life and the world, perceptions that are seen as too archaic to be understood by cosmopolitans. The small, unsettling changes in the provinces can seem inconsequential in big cities, where monitoring one’s neighbours is a lost habit. It is therefore only long after right-wing populism has been felt by those in the provinces that it is diagnosed by the political analysts and big media.
Sezi gives me more examples of how people’s general attitudes towards one another in her small town changed after Trump’s victory, examples that might sound insignificant to big-city folk: ostentatiously smirking when the liberal academics enter local restaurants, or not removing ‘Make America Great Again’ signs from front gardens months after the election, and so on. As the examples multiply, it’s as if she’s trying to describe a strange smell: ‘It’s like it was already there, boiling away silently, and Trump’s victory activated something, some dark motion was unleashed.’
Something has indeed been unleashed around the Western world. In several countries an invisible, odourless gas is travelling from the provinces to the big cities: a gas formed of grudges. A scent of an ending is drifting through the air. The word is spreading. Real people are moving from small towns towards the big cities to finally have the chance to be the captains of their souls. Nothing will stay unchanged, they say. A new we is emerging. A we that probably does not include you, the worried reader of this book. And I remember how that sudden exclusion once felt.
‘No, we are different. We are not a party, we’re a movement.’
It is autumn 2002, and a brand-new party called the Justice and Development Party, AKP, with a ridiculous lightbulb for an emblem, is participating in a Turkish general election for the first time. Being a political columnist, I travel around the country, stopping off in remote cities and small towns, to take the nation’s pulse before polling day. As I sit with representatives of other, conventional parties in a coffee shop in a small town in central Anatolia, three men stand outside the circle, their eyebrows raised with an air of lofty impatience, waiting for me to finish my interview. I invite them to join us at the table, but they politely refuse, as if I am sitting in the middle of an invisible swamp they don’t want to dirty themselves in. When the others eventually prepare to leave, they approach me as elegantly as macho Anatolians can. ‘You may call us a movement, the movement of the virtuous,’ the man says. ‘We are more than a party. We will change everything in this corrupt system.’ He is ostentatiously proud, and rarely grants me eye contact.
The other two men nod approvingly as their extremely composed spokesman fires off phrases like ‘dysfunctional system’, ‘new representatives of the people, not tainted by politics’, ‘a new Turkey with dignity’. Their unshakeable confidence, stemming from vague yet strongly held convictions, reminds me of the young revolutionary leftists I’ve written about for a number of years in several countries. They give off powerful, mystic vibes, stirring the atmosphere in the coffee shop of this desperate small town. They are like visiting disciples from a higher moral plane, their chins raised like young Red Guards in Maoist propaganda posters. When the other small-town politicians mock their insistence on the distinction between their ‘movement’ and other parties, the three men appear to gain in stature from the condescending remarks, like members of a religious cult who embrace humiliation to tighten the bonds of their inner circle.
Their spokesman taps his fist gently, but sternly, on the table to finish his speech: ‘We are the people of Turkey. And when I say people, I mean real people.’
This is the first time I hear the term ‘real people’ used in this sense. The other politicians, from both left and right, are annoyed by the phrase, and protest mockingly: ‘What’s that supposed to mean? We’re the real people of Turkey too.’ But it’s too late; the three men delight in being the original owners of the claim. It is theirs now.
After seeing the same scene repeat itself with little variation in several other towns, I write in my column: ‘They will win.’ I am teased by my colleagues, but in November 2002 the silly lightbulb party of the three men in the coffee shop becomes the new government of Turkey. The movement that gathered power in small towns all over the country has now ruled Turkey uninterrupted for seventeen years, changing everything, just as they promised.
‘We have the same thing here. Exactly the same thing! But who are these real people?’
It’s now May 2017, and I am first in London, then Warsaw, talking about Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy, telling different audiences the story of how real people took over my country politically and socially, strangling all the others who they deemed unreal. People nod with concern, and every question-and-answer session starts with the same question: ‘Where the hell did these real people come from?’
They recognise the lexicon, because the politicised and mobilised provincial grudge has announced its grand entrance onto the global stage with essentially the same statement in several countries: ‘This is a movement, a new movement of real people beyond and above all political factions.’ And now many want to know who these real people are, and why this movement has invaded the high table of politics. They speak of it as of a natural disaster, predictable only after it unexpectedly takes place. I am reminded of those who, each summer, are surprised by the heatwave in Scandinavia, and only then recall the climate-change news they read the previous winter. I tell them this ‘new’ phenomenon has been with us, boiling away, for quite some time.
In July 2017, a massive iceberg broke off from Antarctica. For several days the news channels showed the snow-white monster floating idly along. It was the majestic flagship of our age, whispering from screens around the world in creaking ice language: ‘This is the final phase of the age of disintegration. Everything that stands firm will break off, everything will fall to pieces.’ It wasn’t a spectre but a solid monster telling the story of our times: that from the largest to the smallest entity on planet earth, nothing will remain as we knew it. The United Nations, that huge, impotent body created to foster global peace, is crumbling, while the smallest unit, the soul, is decomposing as it has never been before. A single second can be divided up into centuries during which the wealthy few prepare uncontaminated living spaces in which to live longer while tens of thousands of children in Yemen die of cholera, a pre-twentieth-century disease. The iceberg was silently screaming, The centre cannot hold.
The progressive movements that sprang up all around the world, from the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999 to the 2011 uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, were in many respects a response to these fractured times. In a world where more people are talking, but fewer are being heard, they wanted to tell the rest of humanity, through their bodies, that regardless of our differences we can, and indeed must, come together to find collective answers to our age of disintegration, otherwise everything will fall apart. They demanded justice and dignity. They demanded that the world realise that a counter-movement is necessary to reverse the global course of events. They showed us that retreat is not the only response to the global loss of hope. They were the ones who resisted the temptation to ‘yield to the process of mere disintegration’, and rejected the notion that it is ‘a historical necessity’.* (#ulink_cd578b9b-4e48-55eb-be0d-119859e636bd) Their answer to disintegration was to create new, invigorating, temporary and miniature models of loose collectives in squares around the world. In several different languages they responded to the famous words of W.B. Yeats with the message that, if people unite, the centre can hold.
As time passed, however, many of these progressive movements ended up suppressed, marginalised or swallowed back into the conventional political system. For several understandable reasons they couldn’t accomplish what they started – not yet. However, their voice was clearly heard when they announced globally that representative democracy (abused by financial institutions and stripped of social justice) was undergoing its biggest crisis since the Second World War.
Today we are witnessing the response to similar fears of an entirely different mass of people, one with a more limited vocabulary, smaller dreams for the world, and less faith in the collective survival of humanity. They too say that they want to change the status quo, but they want to do it to build a world in which they are among the lucky few who survive under the leadership of a strong man. It is no coincidence that ‘wall’, whether literal or virtual, has become the watchword among rising right-wing political movements. ‘Yes, the world is disintegrating,’ they say, ‘and we, the real people, want to make sure we’re on the sunny side of the dividing wall.’ It is not that they want to stand by and watch babies die in the Mediterranean, it is just that they don’t want to die as well. What we are hearing, as it carries from the provinces to the big cities, is the survival cry of those whose fear of drowning in the rising sea of disintegration trumps their interest in the survival of others. And so, ruthlessly, they move.
Political movements are promises of transition from actuality to potentiality – unlike political parties, which must operate as part of actuality, playing the game but standing still. This is why, from Turkey to the United States, including the most developed countries with their seemingly strong democratic institutions, such as France, the UK and Germany, we have seen people assemble behind relentless, audacious populist leaders, in order to move together and attack the actuality they call the establishment; to attack the game itself, deeming it dysfunctional and corrupt. A movement of real people is the new zeitgeist, a promise to bring back human dignity by draining the swamp of the stagnant water that politics has become. In other words, les invisibles, the masses, long considered to be indifferent to politics and world affairs, are globally withdrawing their assumed consent from the current representative system, and the sound of it is like a chunk of ice breaking off from Antarctica.
The job of changing the global course of events is, of course, too big a task for the fragile I, and so we is making a comeback in the world of politics and ethics. And this comeback is at the heart of the global phenomenon that we are witnessing. We wants to depart from the mainland of political language, dismantle it and build a new language for the real people. If one wants to know who the real people are, one must ask the question, what is we? Or why is it that I don’t want to be I any more, but we?
It is one of those crowded Sundays on the European side of the Bosporus in the summer of 2015. Sunday is the day that the upper-middle classes of Istanbul move en masse to the cafés on the seaside for the famous Turkish breakfast, which lasts more or less the entire day. The cafés are located alongside the Ottoman fortress walls, where bloody wars were fought to enable us to one day have these glorious feasts and to be irritated when our order is late. There is a family over there, on the pavement, in their best outfits. Not wealthy enough to sit at the cafés, but able to make ends meet so that they can stroll through the richest neighbourhood on the Bosporus and watch the arduous weekend breakfast campaign. The two small kids are being led by their young mother, who is trying hard not to make it too obvious that this is their first time in this part of the city. The father seems to be searching for something on the ground as he walks. Then he stops, and points to a spot on the pavement. ‘Here! Here!’ he shouts happily. ‘This is the one. This one. I put that there.’ His gaze then proudly travels the full length of the paving. ‘This is the longest road in Istanbul,’ he says, ‘and we made it.’
I have always wondered whether the families of the fallen workers of the great bridges, great tunnels, great roads, ever visit the little memorial plaques attached to those constructions. Do they take pictures in front of them, pointing at a name? And is it essential that they describe the road as ‘the longest’, the tunnel ‘the deepest’, their country ‘the greatest’? Otherwise, will their relative’s life and death be meaningless? Some of us cannot and never will understand why a man who can hardly make a living is proud of the fact that Erdoğan’s is ‘the greatest palace’, or why he rejoices when he hears that the daily cost of running that palace is ten times more than he earns in a year. For many of those who are privileged enough to be in a position to try to analyse the important matters of big politics, the ordinary man’s feeling of smallness and the rage it engenders are inaccessible, and so it is equally hard for them to comprehend how that smallness might desperately crave to be part of a we that promises greatness.
‘I play to people’s fantasies. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It is an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion.’
In his debut work of literature, The Art of the Deal,† (#ulink_f3bc8207-fac1-51cf-b8d1-308a76f14f3e) Donald Trump was already describing the ‘truthful hyperbole’ that would later put him in the White House. He must be proud to have demonstrated that in order to become the American president he had no need to read any books other than his own. Trump knew one simple fact about people that many of us choose to ignore: that even though individualism as a concept has been elevated for many decades, the ordinary man still needs a shepherd to lead him to greatness. He knew how diminishing and disappointing it can feel to realise that you are only mediocre, in a world where you have constantly been told that you can be anything you want to be.
He also knew that the call to break the imaginary chains of slavery preventing the real people from reaching greatness would resonate with his supporters, regardless of the fact that it sounded absurd to those who had had the chance to become what they wanted to be. ‘It’s not you,’ he told them. ‘It’s them who prevent us from being great.’ He gave them something solid to hate, and they gave him their votes. And once he started speaking in the name of we – as has happened many times over the course of history – they were ready to sacrifice themselves. As Americans know very well from their own constitution, the words ‘We, the people’ can build a new country and bring empires to their knees. And believe it or not, even the British, a people who take pride in not being easily moved, are also not immune to the allure of we.
‘We have fought against the multinationals, we have fought against the big merchant banks, we have fought against big politics, we have fought against lies, corruption and deceit … [This is] a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people.’
Although this may sound like Salvador Allende, Chile’s Marxist leader, speaking after his election victory in 1970, it was in fact Nigel Farage, the erstwhile leader of UKIP – and incidentally a former banker himself. He uttered these words on the morning of 24 June 2016, the day after Britain’s Brexit referendum. He too was using the age-old magic of speaking in the name of ‘the people’. On the same day, however, many cosmopolitan Londoners, who were automatically excluded from this inflaming narrative, found themselves wondering who these real people were, and why they bore such a grudge against the big cities and the educated. And those who were old enough were beginning to hear echoes sounding from across the decades.
After the horrific experiences of the Second World War, not many people in Western Europe expected the masses ever again to lust after becoming a single totality. Most happily believed that if humans were free to choose what they could buy, love and believe, they would be content. For more than half a century, the word I was promoted in the public sphere by the ever-grinning market economy and its supporting characters, the dominant political discourse and mainstream culture. But now we has returned as the very essence of the movement, burnishing it with a revolutionary glow, and many have found themselves unprepared for this sudden resurrection.
Their voice has been so loud and so unexpected that worried critics have struggled to come up with an up-to-date political lexicon with which to describe it, or counter it. The critical mainstream intelligentsia scrambled to gather ammunition from history, but unfortunately most of it dated back to the Nazi era. The word ‘fascism’ sounded passé, childish even, and ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘totalitarianism’ were too ‘khaki’ for this Technicolor beast in a neoliberal world. Yet during the last couple of years numerous political self-help books filled with quotes from George Orwell have been hastily written, and all of a sudden Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is back on the bestseller lists after a sixty-eight-year hiatus. The hip-sounding term that the mainstream intelligentsia chose to use for this retro lust for totality was ‘rising populism’.
‘Rising populism’ is quite a convenient term for our times. It both conceals the right-wing ideological content of the movements in question, and ignores the troubling question of the shady desire of I to melt into we. It masterfully portrays the twisted charismatic leaders who are mobilising the masses as mad men, and diligently dismisses the masses as deceived, ignorant people. It also washes away the backstory that might reveal how we ended up in this mess. In addition to this, there is the problem that the populists do not define themselves as ‘populists’. In a supposedly post-ideology world, they are free to claim to be beyond politics, and above political institutions.
Political thought has not been ready to fight this new fight either. One of the main stumbling blocks is that the critics of the phenomenon have realised that ‘rising populism’ is the strange fruit of the current practice of democracy. As they looked deeper into the question they soon discovered that it wasn’t a wound that, all of a sudden, appeared on the body politic, but was in fact a mutant child of crippled representative democracy.
Moreover, a new ontological problem was at play thanks to the right-wing spin doctors. Academics, journalists and the well-educated found themselves included in the enemy of the people camp, part of the corrupt establishment, and their criticism of, or even their carefully constructed comments on, this political phenomenon were considered to be oppressive by the real people and the movement’s spin doctors. It was difficult for them to adapt to the new environment in which they had become the ‘oppressive elite’ – if not ‘fascists’ – despite the fact that some of them had dedicated their lives to the emancipation of the very masses who now held them in such contempt. One of them was my grandmother.
‘Are they now calling me a fascist, Ece?’
My grandmother, one of the first generation of teachers in the young Turkish republic, a committed secular woman who had spent many years bringing literacy to rural children, turned to me one evening in 2005 while we were watching a TV debate featuring AKP spin doctors and asked, ‘They did say “fascist”, right?’ She dismissed my attempt to explain the peculiarities of the new political narratives and exclaimed, ‘What does that even mean, anyway? Oppressive elite! I am not an elite. I starved and suffered when I was teaching village kids in the 1950s.’
Her arms, having been folded defensively, were now in the air, her finger pointing as she announced, as if addressing a classroom, ‘No! Tomorrow I am going to go down to their local party centre and tell them that I am as real as them.’ And she did, only to return home speechless, dragging her exhausted eighty-year-old legs off to bed at midday for an unprecedented nap of defeat. The only words I could get out of her were: ‘They are different, Ece. They are …’ Despite her excellent linguistic skills, she couldn’t find an appropriate adjective.
I was reminded of my grandmother’s endeavour when a seventy-something American woman approached me with some hesitation after a talk I gave at Harvard University in 2017. Evidently one of those people who are hesitant about bothering others with personal matters, she gave me a fast-forward version of her own story: she had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s, teaching English to kids in a remote Turkish town, then a dedicated high school teacher in the USA, and since her retirement she had become a serious devotee of Harvard seminars. She was no less stunned than my grandmother at the fact that Trump voters were calling her a member of the ‘oppressive elite’. She said, ‘I try to explain myself to them when we talk about politics, but …’ A ruthless political narrative that labelled her lifelong labours as both unimportant and oppressive was gaining traction. In this new political scenario, she found herself trying to crawl out of the deep hole that had been dug for elites, a hole that was proving too deep for her frail legs. The more serious problem was that the real people never asked her to join them, or offered to help her climb out of the hole. All they demanded from her was ‘respect’.
‘Respect is something I hear a lot about from Trump voters. The spirit of the sentiment is often: “Maybe Trump’s a jerk, maybe he won’t do what he says he will, but he acts as if people like me are important, and the people who disrespect me aren’t.”’
In September 2016 the Chicago Tribune published a Bloomberg opinion piece by Megan McArdle.‡ (#ulink_186a2848-ca2f-565c-b96f-188243e11f14) As she had expressed before in other columns, McArdle was stunned by the fact that any conversation with Trump supporters was usually brought to a halt by the word ‘respect’. When Trump entered the scene, bucketloads of ‘respect’ flushed through American politics, and Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ comment about Trump supporters gave them yet another angle to exploit. Suddenly the media was questioning its own ability to respect ordinary people. Self-criticism among journalists, together with the massive attacks on the media from Trump supporters for being disrespectful towards real people, became impossible to ignore. So much so that after the election the New York Times opened a ‘Trump voters only’ section in which they could express themselves free from the condescending filter of the elitist media. Even if the new platform might have functioned as a rich source of raw research material for academics, it was definitely a triumph for Trump voters in their quest for gaining respect, a victorious battle in the long war of recognition.
We always holds its challengers to ethical standards (such as objectivity) that it does not itself feel obliged to meet, because the original owners of we have a monopoly on morality and the privilege of being the real voice of the masses. End of story. Critical voices become so paralysed that they don’t notice that the ‘respect’ we demand of them is actually an unquestioning silence.
The magic word ‘respect’ is also frequently used by the right-wing Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán. ‘Respect to the Hungarians!’ was his party’s 2014 European Parliament electoral slogan. Between then and the end of 2017, Orbán relentlessly reiterated the central importance of respect. He demanded respect from Germany, the United States and the EU, and when attacked for his xenophobic policies he replied: ‘According to my thinking, this is a sign of respect.’ He announced his solidarity with Poland because Poland wasn’t respected enough, and offered his respect to Trump, Vladimir Putin and Erdoğan. He also complained that ‘respect is a scarce commodity in Europe’, and asserted that only respect could save the continent.
Erdoğan likewise introduced excessive amounts of ‘respect’ into Turkish politics after he came to power in 2002. He repeatedly demonstrated to the Turkish people that respect no longer had to be earned, it could simply be unconditionally demanded. Whenever there were serious poll-rigging claims, he demanded respect for ‘my people and their choices’, just as he demanded respect for court decisions only when they resulted in his opponents being imprisoned. However, when the Constitutional Court decided to release journalists arrested for criticising him, he said, ‘I don’t respect the court decision and I won’t abide by it.’ As with Orbán, Trump and others, respect is a one-way street for Erdoğan: he only accepts being on the receiving end.
‘[Respect] is what Putin really wants,’ wrote Fiona Hill in a piece for the Brookings Institution’s website in February 2015.§ (#ulink_40da44d9-a28a-5759-9d6b-75288f9e91f5) She continued, ‘He wants respect in the old-fashioned, hard-power sense of the word.’
‘You come to me and say, “Give me justice.” But you don’t ask with respect.’ This quote comes not from another respect-obsessed political leader, but from Don Corleone, in the opening scene of The Godfather. One might easily mix them up, because the global circuit of exchanged respect (Geert Wilders respecting Farage, Farage respecting Trump, Trump respecting Putin, Putin asking for more respect for Trump, and all the way back round again, much as Hitler and Stalin once voiced their respect for one another) has started to sound like some supranational mafia conversation. The web of respect among authoritarian leaders has expanded so much that one might forget that this whole masquerade started on a smaller scale, with a seemingly harmless question. It started when the ordinary people began transforming themselves into real people by demanding a little bit of political politeness: ‘Don’t we deserve some simple respect?’
But here’s how the chain of events goes further down the line when respect becomes a political commodity. When the real people become a political movement, their initial, rhetorical question is this: ‘Do our beliefs, our way of life, our choices not matter at all?’ Of course, nobody can possibly say that they do not, and so the leaders of the movement begin to appear in public, and take to the stage as respected, equal contributors to the political discussion.
The next password is tolerance, tolerance for differences. Then some opinion leaders, who’ve noticed social tensions arising from polarisation in the public sphere, throw in the term social peace. It sounds wise and soothing, so nobody wants to dismiss it. However, as the movement gains momentum, tolerance and respect become the possessions of its members, which only they can grant to others, and the leader starts pushing the ‘social peace’ truce to the limits, demanding tolerance and respect every time he or she picks a new fight.
But at a particular point in time, respect becomes a scarce commodity. For Turkey, this invisible shift happened in 2007, on the election night that brought the AKP a second term in power. Erdoğan said, ‘Those who did not vote for us are also different colours of Turkey.’ At the time, for many political journalists the phrase sounded like the embracing voice of a compassionate father seeking social peace. However, not long afterwards, Erdoğan started speaking Godfather. He stopped asking for respect and raised the bar, warning almost everyone, from European politicians to small-town public figures, that they were required to ‘know their place’. And when that warning was not enough, he followed it up with threats. On 11 March 2017, Turkey was mired in a diplomatic row with Germany and the Netherlands after they banned Turkish officials from campaigning in their countries in support of a referendum on boosting the Turkish president’s powers. Erdoğan said, ‘If Europe continues this way, no European in any part of the world can walk safely on the streets.’ In threatening an entire continent, he’d become the cruel Michael Corleone of The Godfather Part II.
Even for those countries that have only recently begun to experience a similar social and political process, this chain of events is already beginning to seem like a cliché. Nevertheless, the way in which the logic of contemporary identity politics serves this process is still relatively novel, and is rarely discussed. In the twenty-first century it’s much easier for right-wing populist movements to demand respect by wrapping themselves in the bulletproof political membrane of a cultural and political identity and exploiting a political correctness that has disarmed critical commentators. Moreover, the use of a sacrosanct identity narrative turns the tables, shining the interrogator’s lamp on the critics of the movement instead of on the movement itself, making them ask, ‘Are we not respectful enough, and is that why they’re so enraged?’ As the opposition becomes mired in compromise, the movement begins to ask the probing questions: ‘Are you sure you’re not intimidating us out of arrogance? Can you be certain this is not discrimination?’
And we all know what happens when self-doubting intellect encounters ruthless, self-evident ignorance; to believers in the self-evident, the basic need to question sounds like not having an answer, and embarrassed silence in the face of brazen shamelessness comes across as speechless awe. Politicised ignorance then proudly pulls up a chair alongside members of the entire political spectrum and dedicates itself to dominating the table, elbowing everyone continually while demanding, ‘Are you sure your arm was in the right place?’ And the opposition finds itself having to bend out of shape to follow the new rules of the table in order to be able to keep sitting there.
‘We become increasingly uncomfortable when people take advantage of our freedom and ruin things here.’
These words came from a Dutch politician, but not the notorious xenophobe Geert Wilders. They are from his opponent, the Dutch prime minister and leader of the centre-right Liberal Party, Mark Rutte, in a letter to ‘all Dutch people’ published on 23 January 2017. Although the words seemingly referred to anyone who ‘took advantage’, they were in fact aimed at immigrants. Rutte’s opposition to right-wing populism was being distorted by the fact that he felt obliged to demonstrate that he shared the concerns of the real people: ordinary, decent people. He must have felt that in order to keep sitting at the top table of politics, he had to compromise. And this is the man who two months later would bring joy to Dutch liberals by beating Wilders. Many Dutch voters accepted, albeit unwillingly, the new reality in which the least worst option is the only choice. The manufactured we is now strong enough not only to mobilise and energise supporters of the movement by giving them a long-forgotten taste of being part of a larger entity, but to affect the rest of the political sphere by pushing and pulling the opposition until it transforms itself irreversibly. It creates a new normality, which takes us all closer towards insanity.
‘We are Muslims too.’
This was the most frequent introduction offered by social democrat participants in TV debates in the first years that the AKP held power in Turkey. Just as what constituted being part of the we, ‘the real, ordinary, decent people’, meant supporting Brexit in Britain or accepting a bit of racism in the Netherlands, so did being conservative, provincial Sunni Muslim in Turkey. Once the parameters had been set by the original owners of we, everyone else started trying to prove that they too prayed – just in private. Soon, Arabic words most people had never heard in their lives before became part of the public debate, and social democrats tried to compete with the ‘real Muslims’ despite their limited knowledge of religion. The AKP spin doctors were quick to put new religious concepts into circulation, and critics were forever on the back foot, constantly having to prepare for pop quizzes on ancient scriptures.
One might wonder what would happen if you passed all the tests for being as real as them, as I did once. In 2013, after studying the Quran for over a year while writing my novel Women Who Blow on Knots, I was ready for the quiz. When the book was published I was invited to take part in a TV debate with a veiled AKP spin doctor – a classic screen charade that craves a political catfight between a secular and a religious woman. As I recited the verse in Arabic that gave the title to my novel and answered her questions on the Quran she smiled patronisingly and said, ‘Well done!’ I was politely reminded of the fact that I was at best an apprentice of the craft she had mastered, and somehow owned. She made it very clear that people like me could only ever inhabit the outer circle of the real people. No matter how hard we toiled, we could only ever be members of the despised elite. Any attempt to hang out at one of Nigel Farage’s ‘real people’s pubs’ or a Trump supporters’ barbecue would doubtless end with a similar patronising smile, and maybe a condescending pat on the shoulder: ‘Way to go, kiddo!’
One of the interesting and rarely mentioned aspects of this process is that at times the cynical and disappointed citizens, even though they are critical of the movement, secretly enjoy the fact that the table has been messed up. The shocked face of the establishment amuses them. They know that the massive discontent of the neglected masses will eventually produce an equally massive political reaction, and they tend to believe that the movement might have the potential to be this long-expected corrective response to injustice. Until they find out it is not. ‘The insinuation that the exterminator is not wholly in the wrong,’ says J.P. Stern, ‘is the secret belief of the age of Kafka and Hitler.’¶ (#ulink_31ff2eea-4e0b-507f-9a1a-a1ba652cc1b1) The limitless confidence of the movement is not, therefore, entirely based on its own merit; the undecided, as well as many an adversary, can furnish the movement with confidence through their own hesitations. After all, there’s nothing wrong with saying the establishment is corrupt, right? By keeping its ideological goals vague and its words sweet, the movement seduces many by allowing them to attribute their own varying ideals or disappointments to it. What is wrong with being decent and real anyway? The vagueness of the narrative and the all-embracing we allow the movement’s leader to create contradictory, previously impossible alliances to both the right and the left of the political spectrum. The leader, thanks to the ideological shapelessness of the movement, can also attract finance from opposite ends of the social strata, drawing from the poorest to the richest. Most importantly, as the leader speaks of exploitation, inequality, injustice and consciousness, borrowing terminology and references from both right- and left-wing politics, growing numbers of desperate, self-doubting people, and a fair few prominent opinion-makers besides, find themselves saying: ‘He actually speaks a lot of sense. Nobody can say that a large part of society wasn’t neglected and dismissed, right?’
‘I don’t understand how they won. I’m telling you, lady, not a single passenger said they were voting for them. So who did vote for these guys?’
This was the standard chat of taxi drivers in Turkey after the AKP’s second election victory. As a consequence, ‘So who did vote for these guys?’ became a popular intro to many a newspaper column. Clearly neither taxi drivers nor the majority of opinion-piece writers could make sense of the unceasing success of the movement, despite rising concerns about it. After hearing the same question several times, I eventually answered one of the taxi drivers with a line that became the intro to one of my own columns: ‘Evidently they all catch the bus.’
After the Brexit referendum, many people in London doubtless asked themselves a similar question. If I’d been a British columnist, the title for my column might have been ‘The Angry Cod Beats European Ideals’. Among the groups who voted Leave in the referendum were Scottish fishermen, who have obsessed for many years over the fact that European fishermen were allowed to fish in Scottish waters, as well as pissed off about an array of other European things that are of next to no consequence to Scotland. Similarly, in countries such as Hungary and Poland where right-wing populism is in control of the political discourse there has always been a ‘condescending Brussels elite’, or ‘the damn Germans’, who stand in the way of better lives for ordinary men, as well as the nation’s ‘greatness’.
I am aware that what I have written above might seem like the condescending remarks of a cosmopolitan, unreal person, and that there is, of course, a real and solid sense of victimhood behind all of these new movements: many of their members are indeed the people who catch the bus, and who have seen the price of their fish and chips rise. It would therefore, as Greek economist and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis says, be inconsequential mental gymnastics for intellectuals to analyse these movements only ‘psychoanalytically, culturally, anthropologically, aesthetically, and of course in terms of identity politics’.** (#ulink_ab07a30c-7500-5120-9e85-f38e5552e3fb) And I agree with him on the fact that ‘the unceasing class war that has been waged against the poor since the late 1970s’ has been intentionally omitted from the narrative, and carefully kept outside the mainstream global discussion. Moreover, these right-wing populist movements can, in fact, also be seen as newly-built, fast-moving vehicles for the rich, a means for the ruling class to get rid of the regulations that restrain the free-market economy by throwing the entire field of politics into disarray. After all, there is certainly real suffering, genuine victimhood behind these movements.
However, they do not only emerge from real suffering, but also from manufactured victimhood. In fact, it is the latter that provides the movement with most of its energy and creates its unique characteristics.
In Turkey, the manufactured victimhood was that religious people were oppressed and humiliated by the secular elite of the establishment. For Brexiteers it is that they have been deprived of Britain’s greatness. For Trump voters it is that Mexicans are stealing their jobs. For Polish right-wing populists it is Nazis committing crimes against humanity on their soil without their participation and the global dismissal of the nation’s fierce resistance to the German invasion in 1939. For Germany’s AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) it is the ‘lazy Greeks’ who benefit from hard-working real Europeans, etc. The content really doesn’t matter, because in the later stages it changes constantly, transforms and is replaced in relation to emerging needs and the aims of the movement.
And every time the masses adapt to the new narrative, regardless of the fact that it often contradicts how the movement began in the first place. In Turkey, the Gülen movement, a supranational religious network led by an imam who currently lives in Pennsylvania, was an integral part of Erdoğan’s movement, until it was labelled terrorist overnight. The same AKP ministers and party members who had knelt to kiss the imam Fethullah Gülen’s hand were, less than twenty-four hours later, falling over themselves to curse him, and none of Erdoğan’s supporters questioned this shift. Doubtless Trump voters did not find it odd when the FBI, Trump’s very best friend during the probing of Hillary Clinton’s emails scandal, all of a sudden became ‘disgraceful’ after it started questioning whether Trump’s election campaign had colluded with the Russian government. Instead, Fox News called the FBI a ‘criminal cabal’ and started talking about a possible coup, confident that Trump’s supporters would follow the new lead, feeling, as their leader did, victimised by the disrespectful establishment. Once the identification of the masses and the movement with the leader begins, the ever-changing nature of the content of the manufactured victimhood becomes insignificant. And when the leader is a master of ‘truthful hyperbole’, the content even becomes irrelevant.
But how, one might ask, did the masses, dismissing the entirety of world history, start moving against their own interests, and against what are so obviously the wrong targets? Not the cheap-labour-chasing giant corporations, but poor Mexicans; not the cruelty of free-market economics, but French fishermen; not the causes of poverty, but the media. How did they become so vindictive towards such irrelevant groups? Why do they demand respect from the educated elite, but not from the owners of multinational companies? And why did they do this by believing in a man just because he was seemingly ‘one of them’? ‘This is almost childish,’ one might think. ‘It seems infantile.’ And it is. That’s why, first and foremost, such leaders need to infantilise the people.
Infantilisation of the masses through infantilisation of the political language is crucial, as we shall see in the next chapter. Otherwise you cannot make them believe that they can all climb into an imaginary car and travel across continents together. Besides, once you infantilise the common political narrative, it becomes easier to mobilise the masses, and from then on you can promise them anything.
Sezi promises Leylosh an ‘evening surprise’ to persuade her to go to school. I ask what the surprise is. ‘There is no surprise, but she won’t remember probably,’ Sezi says, before laughing devilishly. ‘And if she does, I’ll just make something up.’
* (#ulink_95398e1f-c366-5819-b019-fcbf5acfbcd6) Karl Jaspers, Preface to Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Schocken, 1951).
† (#ulink_437aa384-2f96-5ddd-b6f7-48bff1b8ee95) Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal (Random House, 1987).
‡ (#ulink_6b5e2125-0129-50b2-825a-7d00050ddb8e) Megan McArdle, ‘“Deplorables” and the Myth of the Single-Issue Voter’, Bloomberg, 19 September 2016.
§ (#ulink_4df9595b-ddd2-5889-9128-626d920594d7) Fiona Hill, ‘This is What Putin Really Wants’, Brookings, 24 February 2015.
¶ (#ulink_703479ea-aac3-5f27-b626-71d279f161dc) Quoted in Michael Wood, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
** (#ulink_cbf0cc93-7813-54fd-846b-4ec06adfbfb5) Yanis Varoufakis, ‘The High Cost of Denying Class War’, Project Syndicate, 8 December 2017.
TWO
Disrupt Rationale/Terrorise Language (#ue0381083-c266-5345-af59-4cd581c88d64)
‘… and that was when Chávez gathered his loyal friends under a fig tree on top of a hill. They all swore on the Bible. That’s how and why the revolution started.’
The Venezuelan ambassador to Turkey accompanied his closing words with a rehearsed hand gesture, indicating Heaven above, from whence the irrefutable truth had come. His finger lingered there for a dramatic moment, pointing at the ceiling of the Ankara Faculty of Law. His presentation was over, and as his fellow panellist it was my turn to address the question of how the Venezuelans managed to make a revolution.
This was 2007, a year after I’d published We are Making a Revolution Here, Señorita!, a series of interviews I’d conducted in the barrios of Caracas about how the grassroots movement had started to organise itself in communes long before Hugo Chávez became president. I was therefore quite certain that the real story did not involve mythical components like fig trees on hilltops and messages direct from Heaven. I had maintained a bewildered smile in silence for as long as I could, expecting His Excellency sitting next to me to apply a little common sense, but I found my mouth slowly becoming a miserable prune, as my face adopted the expression of a rational human being confronted by a true believer. It was already too late to dismiss his fairy tale as nonsense, so I simply said, ‘Well, it didn’t really happen like that.’ There were a few long seconds of tense silence as our eyes locked, mine wide open, his glassy, and my tone changed from sarcasm to genuine curiosity: ‘You know that, right?’ His face remained blank, and I realised, with a feeling somewhere between compassion and fear, that this well-educated diplomat was obliged to tell this fairy tale.
Hugo Chávez’s name was already in the hall of fame of ‘The Great Populists’. He was criminalising every critical voice as coming from an enemy of the real people while claiming to be not only the sole representative of the entire nation, but the nation itself. Evidently he was also concocting self-serving tales and making them into official history, infantilising a nation and rendering basic human intelligence a crime against the proceso, the overall transformation of the country to so-called socialism – or a version of it, tailored by Chávez himself. The ambassador looked like a tired child who just wanted to get to the end of the story and go to sleep. I didn’t know then that in a short while grappling with fairy tales would become our daily business in Turkey, and that we would be obliged to prove that what everybody had seen with their own eyes had really happened.
‘It is alleged that the American continent was discovered by Columbus in 1492. In fact, Muslim scholars reached the American continent 314 years before Columbus, in 1178. In his memoirs, Christopher Columbus mentions the existence of a mosque on top of a hill on the coast of Cuba.’
On 15 November 2014, President Erdoğan told this tale to a gathering of Latin American Muslim leaders. The next day journalists around the world reported on the Turkish president’s bombastic contribution to history, hiding their smirks behind polite sentences that confidently implied, ‘Of course it didn’t happen like that, but you know that anyway.’
Neither Brexit nor Trump had happened yet. The Western journalists therefore didn’t know that their smirks would become prunes when rationality proved helpless against not only the nonsense of a single man, but the mesmerised eyes of millions who believed his nonsense. Had they been asked, Venezuelans or Turks could have told those journalists all about the road of despair that leads from a mosque on a Cuban hilltop to a hilltop in Ankara where nonsense becomes official history, and an entire nation succumbs to exhaustion. They could also have explained how the populist engine, intent on infantilising political language and destroying reason, begins its work by saying, ‘We know very well who Socrates is! You can’t deceive us about that evil guy any more!’ And you say, ‘Hold on. Who said anything about Socrates?!’
‘With populism on the rise all over Europe, we every so often face the challenge of standing up to populist positions in public discourse. In this workshop, participants learn to successfully stand their ground against populist arguments. By means of hands-on exercises and tangible techniques, participants learn to better assess populist arguments, to quickly identify their strengths and weaknesses, to concisely formulate their own arguments, and to confidently and constructively confront people with populist standpoints.’
I am quoting from an advertisement for the Institut für Argumentationskompetenz, a German think-tank. The title of the course they offer clients is ‘How to Use Logic Against Populists’. Evidently the helplessness of rationality and language against the warped logic of populism has already created considerable demand in the politics market, and as a consequence martial-arts techniques for defensive reasoning are now being taught. The course involves two days of workshops, and attendees are invited to bring their own, no doubt maddening, personal experiences along. Were I to attend the course with my sixteen years’ worth of Turkish experiences, I would humbly propose, at the risk of having Aristotle turn in his grave, opening this beginner’s guide to populist argumentation by presenting Aristotle’s famous syllogism ‘All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human. Therefore Socrates is mortal’:
ARISTOTLE: All humans are mortal.
POPULIST: That is a totalitarian statement.
ARISTOTLE: Do you not think that all humans are mortal?
POPULIST: Are you interrogating me? Just because we are not citizens like you, but people, we are ignorant, is that it? Maybe we are, but we know about real life.
ARISTOTLE: That is irrelevant.
POPULIST: Of course it’s irrelevant to you. For years you and your kind have ruled this place, saying the people are irrelevant.
ARISTOTLE: Please, answer my question.
POPULIST: The real people of this country think otherwise. Our response is something that cannot be found on any elite papyrus.
ARISTOTLE: (Silence)
POPULIST: Prove it. Prove to me that all humans are mortal.
ARISTOTLE: (Nervous smile)
POPULIST: See? You can’t prove it. (Confident grin, a signature trait that will be exercised constantly to annoy Aristotle.) That’s all right. What we understand from democracy is that all ideas can be represented in the public space, and they are respected equally. The gods say …
ARISTOTLE: This is not an idea, it’s a fact. And we are talking about mortal humans.
POPULIST: If it were left up to you, you’d kill everybody to prove that all humans are mortal, just like your predecessors did.
ARISTOTLE: This is not going anywhere.
POPULIST: Please finish explaining your thinking, because I have important things to say.
ARISTOTLE: (Sigh) All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human …
POPULIST: I have to interrupt you there.
ARISTOTLE: Excuse me?
POPULIST: Well, I have to. These days, thanks to our leader, it is perfectly clear who Socrates is. We know very well who Socrates is! You cannot deceive us any more about that evil guy.
ARISTOTLE: Are you joking?
POPULIST: This is no joke to us, Mr Aristotle, as it may be to you. Socrates is a fascist. My people have finally realised the truth, the real truth. The worm has turned. You cannot deceive the people any more. You were going to say, ‘Therefore Socrates is mortal,’ right? We’re fed up with your lies.
ARISTOTLE: You are rejecting the basics of logic.
POPULIST: I respect your beliefs.
ARISTOTLE: This is not a belief; this is logic.
POPULIST: I respect your logic, but you don’t respect mine. That’s the main problem in Greece today.
This is a simple example of the basic populist logic that, with variations, is employed in many countries today. However, even in this fictitious conversation there are at least five fallacies according to the general rules of rational debate, the fundamental rules of logic that we have been using for centuries in everyday life, even if we don’t know any Latin:
1. Argumentum ad hominem (rebutting the argument by attacking the character of one’s adversary rather than refuting the substance of the argument) – You and your kind have ruled …
2. Argumentum ad ignorantiam (appealing to ignorance by asserting that a proposition is true because it has not yet been disproven) – See? You can’t prove that all humans are mortal.
3. Argumentum ad populum (assuming that a proposition is true simply because many people believe it) – The real people of this country think otherwise.
4. Reductio ad absurdum (attempting to prove or disprove an argument by trying to show that it leads to an absurd conclusion) – You’d kill everybody to prove that all humans are mortal.
5. Ad-hoc reasoning (explaining why a certain thing may be by substituting an argument for why it is) – Democracy is about respecting ideas, so respect my idea.
Although the fallacies committed in the above conversation seem egregious, they did not appear childish to half of Britain when Boris Johnson and his ilk in the Conservative Party and the Leave campaign exercised them liberally during the Brexit debate. As Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian on 16 October 2016: ‘You’d hope for consistency and coherence; in its place, the bizarre spectacle of a party claiming to have been against the single market all along, because Michael Gove once said so.’ In other words, argumentum ad ignorantiam. Michael Gove was the man who – bearing a striking resemblance to the populist driving Aristotle crazy above – declared that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’. It was comments like this that led the other half of Britain to believe that pro-Brexit arguments were too puerile to take seriously, and that only children could fall for them. Like millions of people in Europe, they also thought that if populist leaders were repeatedly portrayed as being childish, they would never be taken seriously enough to gain actual power.
‘I will tell you one description that everyone [in the White House] gave – that everyone has in common. They all say he is like a child.’
Almost a year after the Brexit referendum, Americans were exercising the same ‘adult strategy’ on the other side of the Atlantic. When Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published in January 2018, its author Michael Wolff repeated this punchline in several TV interviews. The concerned nods of the composed presenters, together with Wolff’s expression of someone bringing bad news, created the impression of a parent–teacher meeting being held to discuss a problem child. Each interview emphasised Trump’s infantile behaviour, providing a comfortable underestimation of the situation for worried adult Americans. He’s just a wayward child, you know, and we are grown-ups. We know better.
For any country experiencing the rise of populism, it’s commonplace for the populist leader to be described as childlike. Reducing a political problem to the level of dealing with a naughty infant has a soothing effect, a comforting belittlement of a large problem. On 5 January 2018, the New York Times published a reader’s letter that included the sentence: ‘Looking at Thursday’s headlines [on the war of words between Trump and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon] makes me wonder whether we have a government or a middle school student council.’ The confidence of being the only adult in the room must have made the letter writer feel somehow secure. Just as the first minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, must have felt on 15 November 2016, when he said, ‘This is like giving a chainsaw to a child,’ in response to Nigel Farage’s name being put forward as someone who could help boost trade relations with Trump’s America.
Portraying populist leaders as infantile is not the only trap that is all too easy to fall into. Scrutinising their childhoods to search for the traumas that must have turned them into such ruthless adults, and by doing so bandaging the political reality with some medical compassion that the populist leader didn’t actually ask for, is another common ploy used by critics to avoid feeling genuine political anxiety. Poland’s former populist prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński and Turkey’s Erdoğan have both undergone such examinations in absentia by prominent psychiatrists, and have likewise been described as broken children. Elżbieta Sołtys, a Polish social scientist and psychologist, diagnosed Kaczyński as a traumatised child. In one interview she said it was probable that his low emotional intelligence was connected to his loveless and strict upbringing, adding that his current fury was an explosion following years of suppression. Erdoğan’s diagnosis was similar. His father used to hang him by his feet in order to stop him swearing, and as a result an entire country now has to suffer his volatile mood swings.
The primary consequence of calling these leaders infantile, and psychologising their ruthlessness, is simply to make their critics feel more adult and mentally healthy by comparison. It attributes childish politics entirely to the populist leader and his supporters. As if everyone else (including the writer of this book, and its readers) were completely immune to an infantilised perception of the world. Well, it’s not like that. You know that, right?
‘Why do you watch these films? These are just fairy tales for kids. You’re grown men, goddamn it!’
It is 2016, and my friend Zeynep is talking to some Turkish male friends of ours in Istanbul. We are all in our forties, and the men she is reprimanding are all successful, upper-middle-class, well-educated. They have just finished playing fantasy football on the PlayStation, and are now trying to choose which movie to watch. Although they are the same age as the prophets and the revolutionary leaders of the last century, with their backpacks dumped on the sofa they look like adolescents just back from school. Their political activity is limited to voting, mostly because they consider politics beneath them. Of course they are not as infantile as the people who believe a bigot who keeps repeating the fairy tale of ‘making Turkey great again’. However, they do have a soft spot for fairy tales; it’s just that theirs involve vampires, superpowers and Cristiano Ronaldo. As Zeynep refuses to make light of the situation, the men first try to fend off her attack with laughter, just as boys would. But Zeynep insists: ‘I mean, seriously. Why?’ They then choose to watch The Hunger Games, perhaps as an attempt at conciliation, but she’s still waiting for a substantial answer, some sign of self-awareness or self-criticism, as girls do. The men quickly move to hawkish diplomacy. One of them, not jokingly, says, ‘Well, you watch cartoon movies, don’t you? You’re no better than us, Mom!’
Zeynep and I take our adult discussion into another room. She talks about how infantile this generation of men are, as millions of women surely do in countless other countries. And I start going on about Mark Fisher’s theory of capitalist realism, the ethical hegemony of ‘That’s the way the world is,’ and the depressive hedonia that comes with it. But then we start talking about how the new Lego movie is actually hilarious. Later that night I think about the question of whether the image of the ‘good’ leaders of our times is more adult than the ‘evil’ ones’, or not.
‘I drive an old Volkswagen because I don’t need a better car.’
It’s November 2015, and the former Uruguayan president José Mujica is speaking on stage. I’m chairing what will come to be remembered as an almost legendary talk to an audience of five thousand people, most of them not actually inside the congress building in Izmir, but outside watching on a giant screen. Mujica wants to talk about how Uruguay needs meat-cutting machines (because in order to be able to export its meat the country needs to be able to cut it in accordance with the regulations of other countries), but the audience seems to prefer the fun stuff: the cute old Beetle, his humble house, and so on. The next day, Mujica is described the same way in all the newspapers: ‘The humblest of presidents who drives a Volkswagen Beetle and lives in a small house …’ There is no mention of him being a socialist, no ideological blah blah, none of the boring adult content. He is like Bernie Sanders, portrayed as the wise, cool old man during the Democratic primaries, or Jeremy Corbyn, whose home-made jam and red bicycle got more attention than his politics. These are the dervishes of our time, reduced to the kindly old men of fairy tales: fairy tales that attract those who see themselves as the adults and mock the ‘infantile’ supporters of populist leaders.
Much of the literature on populism and totalitarianism interprets the infantile narrative of the populists, as well as that of the ‘deceived’ masses who support them and choose to think in their fairy-tale language, as a political reaction that is specific to them. However, it would appear to be neither a reaction, nor specific. Rather, it’s a coherent consequence of the times we live in, and something that contaminates all of us, albeit in different ways. Although it may seem that the current right-wing populist leaders are performing some kind of magic trick to mesmerise the previously rational adult masses and turn them into children, they aren’t the ones who opened the doors to infantilised political language. The process started long before, when, in 1979, a famous handbag hit the political stage and the world changed.
That was the year a woman handbagged an entire nation with her black leather Asprey and said: ‘There is no alternative.’ When Margaret Thatcher ‘rescued’ a nation from the burden of having to think of alternatives, it resonated on the other side of the Atlantic with a man who perfected his presidential smile in cowboy movies. As the decade-long celebration of alternativelessness turned into a triumphalist neo-liberal disco dance on the remains of the Berlin Wall, the mainstream political vocabulary became a glitterball of words like ‘vision’, ‘innovation’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘motivation’, while gradually distancing itself from sepia, adult concepts like ‘solidarity’, ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’. Because ‘That’s the way of the world.’
Meanwhile in Turkey, such terms, along with two hundred other ‘leftist words’, were officially banned from the state lexicon, and removed from the state TV channel, after the military coup in 1980. Whether through violence or neoliberalist persuasion, the mainstream vocabulary used globally to talk and think about the world and our place in it – regardless of what language we speak – was transformed into a sandpit for us to play safely in: socialism and fascism on opposite sides as the improbables of politics, religion and philosophy on the other sides as the irrelevants of ethics. Politics was reduced to mere administration, with people who knew about numbers and derivatives put in charge of taking care of us. It became the sort of bitter drink children would instinctively avoid, but if people did insist on having a taste, then bucketfuls of numbers were poured into their glasses to teach them a lesson. It is not surprising that Nigel Farage has said, ‘I am the only politician keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive.’ And although it angered many when Thatcher’s biographer Jonathan Aitken said, ‘I think she would have secretly cheered [Farage]’ for his anti-refugee politics, it is nevertheless easy enough to picture Thatcher living down to her 1970s nickname by snatching milk out of the hands of Syrian children while saying, ‘People must look after themselves first.’ Ronald Reagan was likewise no less childlike when his team came up with the ‘Let’s make America great again’ slogan for his election campaign in 1980.
The infantile political language of today, which seems to be causing a regression across the entire political spectrum, from right to left, is not in fact a reaction against the establishment, but instead something that follows the ideological fault lines of the establishment that was created in the eighties. The only significant difference between the forerunners and their successors – apart from the illusory economic boom that made the former look more upstanding than they actually were, and the response to the flood of refugees that makes the latter look even more unpleasant than they actually are – is that today the voice of populist infantile politics is amplified through social media, multiplying the fairy tales more than ever and allowing the ignorant to claim equality with the informed. They are, therefore, powerful enough this time around for there to be no limits to their attack on our capacity for political thought and basic reasoning. And we all now know that they are definitely less concerned with manners.
‘The use of coarse language stresses that he is in tune with the man on the street. The debunking style, which often slides over the edge into insult, emphasizes his desire to distance himself from the political establishment.’* (#litres_trial_promo)
Although this description would fit Trump, Erdoğan, Wilders and any other populist leader, it actually refers to Beppe Grillo, former comedian and the leader of the Italian Five Star movement. He is just another example of how the populists politicise so-called everyday language in order to establish a direct line of communication to the real people. Once this line is established the leader has lift-off, enabling him to appear not only to fly above politics, but as high as he wants to go: the sky is the limit. The perceived sincerity, or genuineness, of direct communication with the masses, and the image of the leader merging to become one with them, is a common political ritual of populism. Hugo Chávez did it every week on his personal TV show Alo Presidente!, Erdoğan has done it through his own media, Grillo performed the same stunt through his website, and Trump uses his famous tweets to have a heart-to-heart with his people, unfiltered by the media elite. The one important trick the populist leader has to pull off is that of making his supporters believe he is rejecting the elitist snobs and their media. He does so by including the media in his definition of ‘the political elite’, positioning it as an opponent – despite the fact that it is through the media that his connection to those masses is enabled.
This is a new political game that journalists are mostly unprepared for. It is a populist trick that Putin and Trump have both played on several occasions. On 7 July 2017, during the photo op before their one-on-one meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Putin leaned towards Trump, gestured at the journalists in the room and asked, ‘These the ones hurting you?’ Trump did not hesitate to respond, ‘These are the ones. You’re right about that.’ All at once it was as if the bully and the more established bully were preparing to take down some weaker kids in the playground. The journalists at the summit were shocked by this sudden and unprecedented switch of the spotlight. Not only were they themselves the story, they also found themselves portrayed as opponents on the political stage.
The supporters of both leaders no doubt enjoyed the moment, and relished the idea that a good wrestle – in either the American or the Russian style – was about to begin to knock out the spoiled media brats. Meanwhile the bewildered members of the press found themselves helplessly giggling and dancing around the ring in their efforts to avoid the attacks.
The global media probably wouldn’t have been interested in what Thailand’s prime minister, Prayuth Chanocha, had to say at a press conference on 9 January 2018 had he not put a lifesize cardboard cut-out of himself in front of a microphone and told the assembled journalists to ‘Put your questions to this guy.’ He then left the venue with a swagger, the very image of the jolly populist leader who had already achieved a lot, and it wasn’t even midday yet. The journalists were left smiling awkwardly, as if a child had just done something outrageous and there was nothing the adults present could do but hide their embarrassment by laughing. The BBC used the same type of laughter in a trailer that shows Trump heckling a BBC reporter – ‘Here’s another beauty’ – at a press conference while the other journalists present smile with raised eyebrows like intimidated adults in the school playground. Erdoğan does it in a more Middle Eastern macho style, occasionally reprimanding the members of his own media, jokingly treating them like little rascals, but his little rascals, live on air, at which they giggle obediently every time.
Numerous critics and analysts believe that by displaying such rudeness, populist leaders reject the notion that the media plays an integral role in democracy. However, looking at different examples around the globe, it seems that this ostentatious offensiveness is actually a requirement to establish direct communication between the leader and the masses. Furthermore, it is not actually a rejection of the media at all, but is rather a means of embracing and using them. The question of whether journalists are capable of refusing to play the role assigned to them and defending their personal and institutional dignity is another story, one that will be discussed in the next chapter. Suffice to say, there can be no doubt that they serve as a whipping boy who must be beaten whenever a display of ‘These are my people and I don’t give a damn what the establishment write about us’ is required. The leader does not even have to talk about the hideous nature of loser Socrates; dismissing oppressive Aristotle serves well enough.
‘It’s like making a milkshake without the lid on,’ wrote a Turkish Twitter user, trying to describe the impossibility of having a proper political discussion with Erdoğan supporters. The guy had evidently been subjected to more seasoned versions of the populist logic and debating tactics than in our earlier Aristotle conversation, which are far harder to pin down. They vary from whataboutism to an ever-shifting ground of contradictory arguments; from bringing up the utterly irrelevant to being proudly inconsistent. And when the logic begins to feel like milkshake dripping down the wall, it seems there are only two ways to go: the French way or the American way.
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