Justifying Authoritarianism

Hannah, could you characterize the crisis of the establishment out of which Trump was first elected? To when would you date it and what ideas fell into doubt?

I think the crisis of the establishment goes back to the end of the cold war.

This was a moment when the establishment was on the surface triumphant.

The Soviet union had collapsed and the United States was as people call it, the unit polar power.

And there was a sense of optimism about the future.

But underneath, cracks in the consensus were beginning to break.

And so in the 1990s, you first had these fringe figures emerge on the right in particular, figures like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, who were poking holes at the establishment from the right.

And as time goes by, those energies, they sort of were sublimated for a while.

Then you fast forward to the 21st century and you have a series of crises that were not really fully acknowledged as such, but that includes the post 9-11 wars that proved to be disastrous.

the 2008 financial crisis as well.

And that begins to widen the cracks in the consensus, the establishment consensus.

And as many people have noted, this was something that Donald Trump was able to exploit when he ran for president the first time in 2016, really kind of drilling down on a sense of disillusionment about the status quo.

So how have conservatives fared? The conservative establishment, you know, because this is characterized as a crisis of liberalism, but liberalism means something more broadly than center left or even centrist politics.

Yes.

So in America, liberalism has become synonymous often with progressives and the Democratic Party.

But in the rest of the world, and for political theorists and historians, liberalism is a much broader category.

It really goes back to the Enlightenment.

It includes a fundamental faith in individual freedom and free markets.

and private property and representative democracy.

And this is really the substrate in which the American political tradition grows.

And it is, by the time you get to the modern party system, the modern Republican Party and the modern Democratic Party, a bipartisan consensus.

That consensus expands as well into what is sometimes called liberal internationalism, a faith in America's role in the world, its role as a leader and shaper of world affairs.

So when people talk about the crisis of liberalism, they're referring not simply to this narrow sort of progressive world, but really to a bipartisan consensus that crystallizes at the end of World War Two, and that reigns until the end of the Cold War, and is able to hold itself together more into the second decade of the 21st century.

And it's really Donald Trump's election that begins to expose the degree to which that consensus has actually collapsed.

Well, it's been observed that the Republican Party in recent years has lost ideological coherence and actually didn't even issue a platform in the last election that is really held together by support for this charismatic figure, Donald Trump.

Hannah, could you characterize the crisis of the establishment out of which Trump was first elected? To when would you date it and what ideas fell into doubt?

I think the crisis of the establishment goes back to the end of the cold war.

This was a moment when the establishment was on the surface triumphant.

The Soviet union had collapsed and the United States was as people call it, the unit polar power.

And there was a sense of optimism about the future.

But underneath, cracks in the consensus were beginning to break.

And so in the 1990s, you first had these fringe figures emerge on the right in particular, figures like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, who were poking holes at the establishment from the right.

And as time goes by, those energies, they sort of were sublimated for a while.

Then you fast forward to the 21st century and you have a series of crises that were not really fully acknowledged as such, but that includes the post 9-11 wars that proved to be disastrous.

the 2008 financial crisis as well.

And that begins to widen the cracks in the consensus, the establishment consensus.

And as many people have noted, this was something that Donald Trump was able to exploit when he ran for president the first time in 2016, really kind of drilling down on a sense of disillusionment about the status quo.

So how have conservatives fared? The conservative establishment, you know, because this is characterized as a crisis of liberalism, but liberalism means something more broadly than center left or even centrist politics.

Yes.

So in America, liberalism has become synonymous often with progressives and the Democratic Party.

But in the rest of the world, and for political theorists and historians, liberalism is a much broader category.

It really goes back to the Enlightenment.

It includes a fundamental faith in individual freedom and free markets.

and private property and representative democracy.

And this is really the substrate in which the American political tradition grows.

And it is, by the time you get to the modern party system, the modern Republican Party and the modern Democratic Party, a bipartisan consensus.

That consensus expands as well into what is sometimes called liberal internationalism, a faith in America's role in the world, its role as a leader and shaper of world affairs.

So when people talk about the crisis of liberalism, they're referring not simply to this narrow sort of progressive world, but really to a bipartisan consensus that crystallizes at the end of World War Two, and that reigns until the end of the Cold War, and is able to hold itself together more into the second decade of the 21st century.

And it's really Donald Trump's election that begins to expose the degree to which that consensus has actually collapsed.

Well, it's been observed that the Republican Party in recent years has lost ideological coherence and actually didn't even issue a platform in the last election that is really held together by support for this charismatic figure, Donald Trump.