How to Lose a Country: The Seven Warning Signs of Rising Populism

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_6a3ef982-8e13-5695-b26a-3dcd1194a6dd) 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_60d18ad8-0133-5ef0-ace5-bc362cd0e202) 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_bcda8273-5b1a-5706-8b23-63c312190421) 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_2b6444ff-02b3-55ad-9a95-efd3d92b9751) 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_b978ec3b-ad2d-5a70-a1bc-0740d1a410b1) Karl Jaspers, Preface to Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Schocken, 1951).

† (#ulink_9a380ac9-0e0e-54bb-8e59-3a5aad4fe3d4) Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal (Random House, 1987).

‡ (#ulink_0818a90f-bd34-5d84-8c5d-c7bb95934985) Megan McArdle, ‘“Deplorables” and the Myth of the Single-Issue Voter’, Bloomberg, 19 September 2016.

§ (#ulink_2de31cc9-c1e7-523a-87b6-b4f379aeb1a9) Fiona Hill, ‘This is What Putin Really Wants’, Brookings, 24 February 2015.

¶ (#ulink_4c2ea443-9054-5315-a784-51d3251f3d2f) Quoted in Michael Wood, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

** (#ulink_354dd8ab-55cf-56f7-a8c2-854997e7a139) Yanis Varoufakis, ‘The High Cost of Denying Class War’, Project Syndicate, 8 December 2017.

TWO

Disrupt Rationale/Terrorise Language (#u70767a13-8671-551d-a367-ef6ee0178b38)

‘… 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.