I have to wonder if one factor of difference between the people today and those in the past is also how we consume information.
People of the past had limits on what information they could get and they certainly didn't have information that was catered to them alogrithmically to reinforce their own beliefs that things are worse than they really are.
There are plenty of people I know and respect who truly believed that America was on the brink of collapse due to the information they consumed.
Do you think the current populist wave is not just due to progress but also the proliferation of information to convince normal people that things really are dire?
What you say is true, but it's not as distinctive as many people think. In the past it was common for Americans to choose their newspapers based on their political parties. People always like to have their intelligence flattered by reading things that agree with them.
One of the things I like about Substack is the thoughtfulness of both the writers and the commenters. If you write something on Facebook that is longer than a paragraph and does not include a cat video, few will read it. And the comments will often be deranged. I finally threw in the towel on Facebook.
I have lived in Poland the last eleven years. Before that, I did a couple of stints in Russian Karelia totalling four years, with three years in Dallas in between. I had been following Russia since the 1990's. So I have sort of followed the progression of authoritarianism in Europe.
You are absolutely right about the role of the media. Gaining control of the media is step one in the authoritarian playbook. When Putin came to power in 2000, he immediately set about doing so. And it wasn't hard. Russia had no real history of a free press with a somewhat adversarial relationship with the government. So when communism ended, those who made a living with words became hired guns for whoever would pay them. In the "Wild West" days of the 1990's, every business and political faction had reporters on the payroll and the standards for truth were pretty low. So when Putin tried to take over control of the press, there was not a lot of public outcry. Soviets and Russians had never really valued an independent media. Putin branded his assault on the media as a "cleaning up" of the media. And it used various techniques. The most effective one was not intimidating journalists. Although that one was used some. The most effective tool was getting political allies to buy up the media. And when Russia became flush with cash when energy and metals prices spiked in the mid-2000's, that changed over to having government controlled energy monopolies like Gazprom expanding into mass media.
Poland, for the time being seems to have fought off authoritarianism. But like in the US, the authoritarians have not given up. Poland is 96% ethnic Polish and 94% Roman Catholic. So appeals against "the other" gain traction in some sectors. I live in a rural area in the mountains near the border with Slovakia. I would classify my region as pretty "Trumpy." A lot of small businesses are struggling and most of the grocery stores are now foreign chains. A lot of people's children have either moved to larger cities in Poland or overseas (mostly other EU states) in search of prosperity. People are definitely better off than during the Soviet occupation. But they have also visited, lived or worked elsewhere and know that some places are more prosperous than others. And even though the EU has pumped in a ton of money to improve infrastructure in places like Poland, there are some politicians and media who portray Europe as a malign force.
Our neighbor to the south, Slovakia, just saw Fico come back to power not long ago. He was prime minister a number of years ago but was chased from power when people close to him were linked to the murder of an investigative journalist reporting on government corruption. Slovakia is a funny country. During WWII it was a Nazi ally who assisted Germany in the invasion of Poland. It was run by an ultra nationalist Roman Catholic priest (Tiso). He was hanged as a war criminal after the war. His original motivation for aligning with the Nazis was to seek their help in pulling Slovakia out of the somewhat contrived post-WWI country of Czechoslovakia, in which Slovakia was the junior partner. But he was also a rabid anti-Semite. Slovakia actually paid the Nazis to deport their significant Jewish population, but only if the Germans guaranteed that they would "never return." Slovakia also had a signigicant population of Sinti and Roma. They were an unassimilated minority not that popular with the rest of the population. They were dealt with harshly by the Germans and the government did not intervene on their behalf.
The threads that seem to run through the slide to authoritatianism are multiple. Ethnic resentment, a feeling that others are prospering more than you, a degree of economic uncertainty, elites that you don't think share your values and concerns. But there needs to be a catalyst. These on their own are often not enough.
In places like Hungary and Slovakia one of the big catalysts was banks from places like Germany and Austria coming in. They offered affordable mortgages in currencies other than the national currency. Because the dollar and euro were more stable currencies, the interest rates were lower. This was less an issue in Slovakia which used the euro but a huge issue in Hungary which did not. But easy credit for people with comparatively low incomes can cause problems. People completely failed to take into account exchange rate risk and economic volatility. And it does not appear that either their banks or their governments gave them sufficiently stern warnings about the risks. Long story short, over time their national currencies lost value and their mortgage payments rose astronomically. Sometimes double or triple. So they did indeed cause real hardship for these unwary people, and they blamed not themselves, but Europe.
All authoritarian countries need both a foreign threat and internal enemies to prosper. The threat tends to be foreign governments and businesses and the internal enemy is ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities and the free press and liberal politicians who appear sympathetic to them. A lot of the currency instability was brought on by the Greek debt crisis. Not that these economies were that interlinked to Greece or Ireland or other troubled banking systems. But it shown a light on the same policies that the governments of Slovakia, Hungary and some others had been pursuing. And faced with a genuine economic crisis, these governments and their allies in the press sought to shift the blame onto anyone but themselves.
The second catalyst was refuges coming from places like Syria because of the war there. These refugees were mostly headed for wealthier states like Germany and Sweden and merely needed to pass through places like Serbia, Hungary, and Slovakia. But politicians saw an opportunity to use the issue to arouse their mostly older, mostly rural voting bases. A compliant press cooperated.
And in countries like Germany and Sweden which did in fact get a lot of refugees there has been political backlash.
I live in a town of about 34,000 in a mostly rural area. We are mostly surrounded by villages. It is almost exclusively White. There are a few Turks who run kebab shops. There are a very few Roma. As near as I can tell, the Chinese and Mexican restaurants are staffed by Poles. The Chinese restaurant is a mixed bag but the Mexican restaurant is not bad. I have seen probably less than a dozen Black people since I have lived here. And I been here eleven years now. That is not counting going to Kraków and Warszawa where there are slightly more, but still not a lot. Most Blacks I've seen in town were either passing through here on the way to the nearby mountain resort of Zakopane or local Polish girls home on visits who had Black husbands. Most probably met US servicemen in Germany or they lived in the States. There is a big Polish ex-pat community in the Chicagoland area of the Midwest.
But if you were to ask the average person in my lily White town, fear of immigrants would not be that far down their list of concerns. The actual incidence of contact with immigrants being negligible. Fear is a creation of politicians and the media. The one exception to that might be the influx of women and children from Ukraine who came through at the beginning of the war in 2022. Otherwise, immigrants are few and far between. I'm only aware of one other American in town. A guy who came shortly after the end of communism, is married to a Polish woman and runs a language school. There are however some older people who lived and worked in Europe or North America and retired back here, but they are Poles.
Authoritarian governments don't create divisions. They merely amplify pre-existing ones. And they are very good at it.
When I listen to the rhetoric of those around Trump, it is not much different than I was hearing from those around Putin twenty years ago. And the Putin rhetoric has become much more unhinged since then. The more crazy shit you say, the more the public gets used to it and it becomes the baseline. So to energize the political base, the rhetoric needs to get more and more extreme, otherwise people just tune it out. Those around Trump seem to realize this.
But the thing that worries me the most about the trend in the US is self-censorship by the mainstream media. Newspapers used to be run by newspapermen. Now more and more are controlled by billionaires with other business interests. While the press has some level of constitutional protection, companies like Amazon do not. Trump can go after the holdings of billionaires with little legal or political consequences. He has created a climate of fear in order to threaten the thing that rich people care about most, their money. Just as Putin co-opted his oligarchs and drove out those who would not play ball, Trump will attempt to do the same.
There is one thing that Putin well understood. It is wisest to use political violence as a last resort, not a first resort. You don't need a secret police to drag people away in the middle of the night. You just need to create a climate of resignation where both the people and the institutions surrender in advance. Is Trump smart enough to understand that? I have my doubts. But Bannon and Kash Patel and others atound him definitely understand.
Dr. Brands, I really enjoyed your article "Liberalism and Its Discontents." I think you make some very valid points about the causes of mass movements and the role of political polarization in those movements.
I also noticed that Eric Hoffer points out something similar in his book "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements." In that book, he argues that poor people are not usually the ones who join revolutions. Instead, he says that people who have seen a sharp drop in their standard of living are much more likely to get caught up in a cause like this because they can still remember how good they used to have it, and thus are more prone to feel that their circumstance was a product of corruption or treachery.
One thing people tend to forget about WWII in Asia, is that it was global protectionism that contributed to it. Smoot-Hawley was passed by the US Congress in I think 1930. Other countries passed retaliatory measures. So world trade abruptly ground to a halt. Japan was a country with a growing manufacturing economy that was light on natural resources. They needed natural resources and markets for manufactured goods. Now they had neither. Their solution? Create an empire as they had seen Britain do a century earlier.
So Japanese militarism grew and they invaded Manchuria in 1931. And when the local populations objected, they murdered them. The Japanese pillage of Manchuria provoked international revulsion and harsh economic sanctions against Japan. And once Japan had gone down this road, there was no turning back. They repeatedly doubled down.
It might be a slight oversimplification to say that Smoot-Hawley was the father of Pearl Harbor, but it is not wrong.
Could the decisions of other governments have prevented this situation? Maybe, but it didn't happen. Positions became hardened, not more conciliatory.
So don't assume that economic "warfare" cannot evolve into actual warfare. That is not the lesson of history. When we forsake the behaviors that made the world more peaceful and prosperous, things can change. Free trade had a generally positive effect on the progress of societies. Not without some issues, but a clear net positive. It's abrupt end is likely to have consequences. We should be wary.
Nice read as always Dr. Brands.
I have to wonder if one factor of difference between the people today and those in the past is also how we consume information.
People of the past had limits on what information they could get and they certainly didn't have information that was catered to them alogrithmically to reinforce their own beliefs that things are worse than they really are.
There are plenty of people I know and respect who truly believed that America was on the brink of collapse due to the information they consumed.
Do you think the current populist wave is not just due to progress but also the proliferation of information to convince normal people that things really are dire?
What you say is true, but it's not as distinctive as many people think. In the past it was common for Americans to choose their newspapers based on their political parties. People always like to have their intelligence flattered by reading things that agree with them.
One of the things I like about Substack is the thoughtfulness of both the writers and the commenters. If you write something on Facebook that is longer than a paragraph and does not include a cat video, few will read it. And the comments will often be deranged. I finally threw in the towel on Facebook.
I have lived in Poland the last eleven years. Before that, I did a couple of stints in Russian Karelia totalling four years, with three years in Dallas in between. I had been following Russia since the 1990's. So I have sort of followed the progression of authoritarianism in Europe.
You are absolutely right about the role of the media. Gaining control of the media is step one in the authoritarian playbook. When Putin came to power in 2000, he immediately set about doing so. And it wasn't hard. Russia had no real history of a free press with a somewhat adversarial relationship with the government. So when communism ended, those who made a living with words became hired guns for whoever would pay them. In the "Wild West" days of the 1990's, every business and political faction had reporters on the payroll and the standards for truth were pretty low. So when Putin tried to take over control of the press, there was not a lot of public outcry. Soviets and Russians had never really valued an independent media. Putin branded his assault on the media as a "cleaning up" of the media. And it used various techniques. The most effective one was not intimidating journalists. Although that one was used some. The most effective tool was getting political allies to buy up the media. And when Russia became flush with cash when energy and metals prices spiked in the mid-2000's, that changed over to having government controlled energy monopolies like Gazprom expanding into mass media.
Poland, for the time being seems to have fought off authoritarianism. But like in the US, the authoritarians have not given up. Poland is 96% ethnic Polish and 94% Roman Catholic. So appeals against "the other" gain traction in some sectors. I live in a rural area in the mountains near the border with Slovakia. I would classify my region as pretty "Trumpy." A lot of small businesses are struggling and most of the grocery stores are now foreign chains. A lot of people's children have either moved to larger cities in Poland or overseas (mostly other EU states) in search of prosperity. People are definitely better off than during the Soviet occupation. But they have also visited, lived or worked elsewhere and know that some places are more prosperous than others. And even though the EU has pumped in a ton of money to improve infrastructure in places like Poland, there are some politicians and media who portray Europe as a malign force.
Our neighbor to the south, Slovakia, just saw Fico come back to power not long ago. He was prime minister a number of years ago but was chased from power when people close to him were linked to the murder of an investigative journalist reporting on government corruption. Slovakia is a funny country. During WWII it was a Nazi ally who assisted Germany in the invasion of Poland. It was run by an ultra nationalist Roman Catholic priest (Tiso). He was hanged as a war criminal after the war. His original motivation for aligning with the Nazis was to seek their help in pulling Slovakia out of the somewhat contrived post-WWI country of Czechoslovakia, in which Slovakia was the junior partner. But he was also a rabid anti-Semite. Slovakia actually paid the Nazis to deport their significant Jewish population, but only if the Germans guaranteed that they would "never return." Slovakia also had a signigicant population of Sinti and Roma. They were an unassimilated minority not that popular with the rest of the population. They were dealt with harshly by the Germans and the government did not intervene on their behalf.
The threads that seem to run through the slide to authoritatianism are multiple. Ethnic resentment, a feeling that others are prospering more than you, a degree of economic uncertainty, elites that you don't think share your values and concerns. But there needs to be a catalyst. These on their own are often not enough.
In places like Hungary and Slovakia one of the big catalysts was banks from places like Germany and Austria coming in. They offered affordable mortgages in currencies other than the national currency. Because the dollar and euro were more stable currencies, the interest rates were lower. This was less an issue in Slovakia which used the euro but a huge issue in Hungary which did not. But easy credit for people with comparatively low incomes can cause problems. People completely failed to take into account exchange rate risk and economic volatility. And it does not appear that either their banks or their governments gave them sufficiently stern warnings about the risks. Long story short, over time their national currencies lost value and their mortgage payments rose astronomically. Sometimes double or triple. So they did indeed cause real hardship for these unwary people, and they blamed not themselves, but Europe.
All authoritarian countries need both a foreign threat and internal enemies to prosper. The threat tends to be foreign governments and businesses and the internal enemy is ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities and the free press and liberal politicians who appear sympathetic to them. A lot of the currency instability was brought on by the Greek debt crisis. Not that these economies were that interlinked to Greece or Ireland or other troubled banking systems. But it shown a light on the same policies that the governments of Slovakia, Hungary and some others had been pursuing. And faced with a genuine economic crisis, these governments and their allies in the press sought to shift the blame onto anyone but themselves.
The second catalyst was refuges coming from places like Syria because of the war there. These refugees were mostly headed for wealthier states like Germany and Sweden and merely needed to pass through places like Serbia, Hungary, and Slovakia. But politicians saw an opportunity to use the issue to arouse their mostly older, mostly rural voting bases. A compliant press cooperated.
And in countries like Germany and Sweden which did in fact get a lot of refugees there has been political backlash.
I live in a town of about 34,000 in a mostly rural area. We are mostly surrounded by villages. It is almost exclusively White. There are a few Turks who run kebab shops. There are a very few Roma. As near as I can tell, the Chinese and Mexican restaurants are staffed by Poles. The Chinese restaurant is a mixed bag but the Mexican restaurant is not bad. I have seen probably less than a dozen Black people since I have lived here. And I been here eleven years now. That is not counting going to Kraków and Warszawa where there are slightly more, but still not a lot. Most Blacks I've seen in town were either passing through here on the way to the nearby mountain resort of Zakopane or local Polish girls home on visits who had Black husbands. Most probably met US servicemen in Germany or they lived in the States. There is a big Polish ex-pat community in the Chicagoland area of the Midwest.
But if you were to ask the average person in my lily White town, fear of immigrants would not be that far down their list of concerns. The actual incidence of contact with immigrants being negligible. Fear is a creation of politicians and the media. The one exception to that might be the influx of women and children from Ukraine who came through at the beginning of the war in 2022. Otherwise, immigrants are few and far between. I'm only aware of one other American in town. A guy who came shortly after the end of communism, is married to a Polish woman and runs a language school. There are however some older people who lived and worked in Europe or North America and retired back here, but they are Poles.
Authoritarian governments don't create divisions. They merely amplify pre-existing ones. And they are very good at it.
When I listen to the rhetoric of those around Trump, it is not much different than I was hearing from those around Putin twenty years ago. And the Putin rhetoric has become much more unhinged since then. The more crazy shit you say, the more the public gets used to it and it becomes the baseline. So to energize the political base, the rhetoric needs to get more and more extreme, otherwise people just tune it out. Those around Trump seem to realize this.
But the thing that worries me the most about the trend in the US is self-censorship by the mainstream media. Newspapers used to be run by newspapermen. Now more and more are controlled by billionaires with other business interests. While the press has some level of constitutional protection, companies like Amazon do not. Trump can go after the holdings of billionaires with little legal or political consequences. He has created a climate of fear in order to threaten the thing that rich people care about most, their money. Just as Putin co-opted his oligarchs and drove out those who would not play ball, Trump will attempt to do the same.
There is one thing that Putin well understood. It is wisest to use political violence as a last resort, not a first resort. You don't need a secret police to drag people away in the middle of the night. You just need to create a climate of resignation where both the people and the institutions surrender in advance. Is Trump smart enough to understand that? I have my doubts. But Bannon and Kash Patel and others atound him definitely understand.
I have grave concern for the future of America.
Dr. Brands, I really enjoyed your article "Liberalism and Its Discontents." I think you make some very valid points about the causes of mass movements and the role of political polarization in those movements.
I also noticed that Eric Hoffer points out something similar in his book "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements." In that book, he argues that poor people are not usually the ones who join revolutions. Instead, he says that people who have seen a sharp drop in their standard of living are much more likely to get caught up in a cause like this because they can still remember how good they used to have it, and thus are more prone to feel that their circumstance was a product of corruption or treachery.
One thing people tend to forget about WWII in Asia, is that it was global protectionism that contributed to it. Smoot-Hawley was passed by the US Congress in I think 1930. Other countries passed retaliatory measures. So world trade abruptly ground to a halt. Japan was a country with a growing manufacturing economy that was light on natural resources. They needed natural resources and markets for manufactured goods. Now they had neither. Their solution? Create an empire as they had seen Britain do a century earlier.
So Japanese militarism grew and they invaded Manchuria in 1931. And when the local populations objected, they murdered them. The Japanese pillage of Manchuria provoked international revulsion and harsh economic sanctions against Japan. And once Japan had gone down this road, there was no turning back. They repeatedly doubled down.
It might be a slight oversimplification to say that Smoot-Hawley was the father of Pearl Harbor, but it is not wrong.
Could the decisions of other governments have prevented this situation? Maybe, but it didn't happen. Positions became hardened, not more conciliatory.
So don't assume that economic "warfare" cannot evolve into actual warfare. That is not the lesson of history. When we forsake the behaviors that made the world more peaceful and prosperous, things can change. Free trade had a generally positive effect on the progress of societies. Not without some issues, but a clear net positive. It's abrupt end is likely to have consequences. We should be wary.
Fact check - Trump had more of the popular vote this last election, not less.
"In neither of Trump’s two victories did he receive a majority of the popular vote."
Trump's final tally in 2024 was 49.9 percent. More than Harris but less than a majority.