ANGER, FEAR, DOMINATION

A distinguished political scientist examines the poisoning of civic discourse.

Galston, a Brookings Institution fellow, writes that the three dark passions of his title “fuel today’s attacks on liberal democracy,” harnessed by demagogues—he means mostly Donald Trump, of course—to dismantle democratic rule. That exploitation at heart involves “pitting people against one another.” Whereas a good leader in a democracy aims to govern for all and to balance contending interests, a bad one will do whatever can be done to whip up resentments and especially fear—of the other, of the unknown—to accomplish the central goal of dominating the polity. Defenders of that liberal democracy, Galston argues, make a fundamental mistake in discounting the power of anger and fear: the passions represent reactions to actual events, whether disproportionate or not, and operate on the notion that somehow people have been wronged and shamed and need to take revenge, the strongest anger being “anger born of humiliation.” Liberal democracies, the author notes, can also be slow to respond to moving toward desired goals, which leads to frustration at gridlock, and the defenders also do ill to ignore what Galston considers to be prima facie: The culture wars are very real, even as liberals tend to insist that “economic issues are the real issues.” In this light, he says, Christian fundamentalists supported the morally questionable Trump precisely because they believed they were losing the culture wars, and they wanted “a fighter, not a preacher” to take up their cause, regardless of manifest character flaws. Against all this, Galston imagines political leaders who actually speak to issues with an eye to building popularly supported solutions; moreover, rather than reactively deflect, those leaders would build public trust through “speech that accepts responsibility.” In light of current realities, all that seems a pipe dream—but one well worth dreaming.

A timely, thoughtful consideration of liberal democracy and its legion of enemies.