Jan-Werner Müller teaches politics at Princeton. His book on architecture and democracy will be published next year.
Italy is often thought of as a political laboratory, anticipating events in other countries: fascism in the 1920s; the showman-businessman turned politician in the 1990s; populism in the 2010s. Great significance has been attributed to the government of Giorgia Meloni, who became prime minister in 2022. For some, it signals the return of fascism in a novel form; for the majority of pundits...
The speed with which former opponents of Trump are adapting to his re-election and displaying anticipatory obedience has been greater than anyone could have, well, anticipated. Prominent examples include Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and congressional Democrats who seem to think that performing bipartisanship by loudly declaring their willingness to work with Trump might somehow be rewarded.
Just like after the US presidential election in 2016, we are hearing endless exhortations from pundits (and some Democratic politicians) to make an effort to understand Trump supporters, to earn their respect, to be curious about them, not to be condescending etc. There are two obvious problems with this kind of rhetoric: first, nobody asked Trump voters after 2020 to show empathy with, let’s say, African American women and try to comprehend why they had strongly supported Biden. As so often, the lazy talk of ‘polarisation’ obscures a profoundly asymmetrical situation. Second, the ‘arrogance’ of liberal elites is largely an invention of right-wing media.
Analogies with 20th-century fascism are not particularly helpful for understanding our times, but one parallel is instructive: it is not ‘ordinary people’ who decide they’ve had enough of democracy; it is elites, and economic elites in particular. Blackshirts marched on Rome, but Mussolini arrived by sleeper car from Milan because the leading strata of the Italian state had invited him to govern. People today also often take their cues from business leaders, in particular a pop culture figure like Musk. All the self-serving talk of ‘disruption’ can be adapted to make Trump acceptable, as can the studied neutrality of oligarchs who not only own their own rockets, but their own newspapers: refusing to endorse Harris sends a signal that it’s rational to be intimidated by Trump.
In If We Burn, a history of protest between 2010 and 2020, Vincent Bevins writes that the decade ‘surpassed any other in the history of human civilisation in its number of mass street demonstrations’. The responses to Black Lives Matter, Covid-19 restrictions and most recently the Israel-Hamas war suggest this decade may be just as tumultuous. Yet many governments are...
This week, we talk to regular LRB contributor Jan-Werner Müller about populism, Trump and the state of democracy.
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