Why the ‘rules’ of political outsiders don’t always stand in the way of the system
Over the years, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern in the emails I receive from readers about my columns on authoritarianism, far-right populism, democratic decline, and related topics: a very similar kind of shock on the news, and a very similar kind concerned about what that might mean for the future.
These messages tend to follow a rough structure: shocked by the news, but mostly surprise because the event seems to clash with the apparent rules of political success which, as many people understood, should have made such politicians ineligible.
And then comes the concern about the future: If those rules didn’t apply, readers wondered, what other outcomes might there be?
So, for example, when Donald Trump won the 2016 election in the United States, many people emailed to express their shock that it possible for a candidate to publicly win an election referring to Mexican immigrants as “rapists”, or saying that a federal judge cannot be impartial because of his Mexican-American heritage, and wondered what that might mean for the future of American democracy.
And I’ve heard similar, albeit less frequent, sentiments from readers about the rising popularity of the far right in Europe, including confusion about how the perceived rules of the wider political system, which made such ideas seem taboo for decades, had or hadn’t applied. .
I’ve thought a lot about what might be behind the concerns raised, partly out of a responsibility to the readers who wrote, and partly because I myself sometimes felt similar confusion. So much so that I’ve learned to catch myself thinking “that just can’t be done” and stop thinking about the consequences if it did.
There is something important among these concerns that has not received as much attention as it deserves. Namely, that many of what once seemed like political “rules” were actually norms about the behavior of powerful people in politics, business, the media, and other fields. Those elites have either lost the power they once had to enforce norms, or they’ve decided to change their own behavior. We are only just beginning to understand the consequences of that shift.
That began to crystallize for me during a conversation with Steven Levitsky, the Harvard political scientist who co-wrote the book How Democracies Die. When political parties, major media organizations and prominent pressure groups were strong enough to act as gatekeepers in politics, the norms of those elites became goods the norms of politics, he said.
“If you go back 40, 60, 80 years in any democracy, politicians who wanted to get elected and maintain a political career depended so heavily on the political establishment that they had to conform to certain norms and policy parameters imposed by the establishment” , he said. told me.
At the time, it was almost impossible for a politician to get elected after violating mainstream norms, as their political party could cut off access to money and media, thus crushing a campaign.
“That had a moderating effect,” he said. “Politicians, of course, had to chase votes and give voters what they wanted. But always within parameters set by the established order, certain normative lines of conduct. You know how you talked, the policies you proposed, how you treated other politicians, how you treated the media. There were certain codes of conduct and policy parameters that could only be broken at great cost.”
But now charismatic politicians can reach voters directly through social media, and the political establishment has lost much of its ability to control those norms. So in 2016, even though some Republican Party leaders condemned many of Trump’s comments, that didn’t stop him from winning the presidential nomination. In Brazil, mainstream candidates like Geraldo Alckmin in 2018 had the support of the political establishment and greater access to mainstream media, but Jair Bolsonaro was able to spread his message through YouTube and Whatsapp.
In a sense, this is the same point that Pavithra Suryanarayan, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, raised when I spoke to her a few weeks ago. The main task of political parties is to keep extremists out of their party, she said, but they don’t.
The consequence of this is perhaps most noticeable when an outside politician wins an election. But amid weakening gatekeepers, the unpredictability of politics also influences mainstream candidates and policies.
“This has always been the problem of places like India, the weakness of parties,” she told me recently. “A whole lot of the anomalous kind of politics going on in those places can be explained by the organizational weakness of parties. But now we have come full circle where the same kind of disease is spreading to the West.”
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