Authoritarianism, Democracy, and Liberalism: On Dylan Riley's article

"Who's to say?"

I got very irritated this morning by an article in The New Statesman by Dylan Riley, entitled "Why liberal democracies do not depend on truth.” Riley, the author of the very interesting book The Civic Foundations of Fascism, argues that liberal democracies have become besotted with “truth” as its dispensed by experts and bureaucrats, instead of following an older liberal tradition where truth was the result of the process implied by liberal institutions: through the free press and parliament we can arrive at the truth. We need the conditions for free and open debate not just trust in experts and “adults in the room.” I have to say I am broadly in agreement with this: I am very critical of the contemporary liberal emphasis on the performance of technocratic expertise.

But what bothered me were a couple passages in the piece. The first objection is pretty superficial:

All the sententious blather about the nefarious effects of the “big lie” together with the obligatory references to Hannah Arendt, focus on a defence of this sort of regime. If only we had a shared truth, then all would be the best, in the best of all possible worlds: that is to say, the world of liberalism.

I realize Riley is blasting her liberal epigones, but this is pretty much the opposite of what Arendt said about truth and politics. The political sphere Arendt envisioned was one where opinion and discourse were central, and the invocation of an overriding “Truth” could only end discussion and stifle this plurality. In fact, without shared opinion there can be no politics. From “Truth and Politics”:

It’s true that factual truth is required for these debates to have any ground, but factual truth is also reliant on a set of fundamentally public institutions of inquiry.

So it seems like Arendt should bolster Riley’s argument, but, whatever, this is not the central problem of the piece. Here is the other part that’s a problem for me:

To me the thing that distinguishes democracy from the mere authoritarian pretense to speaking on behalf of the democratic subject is that we have certain public procedures to verify who has the mandate of the people, like elections. The real winner of the election has a claim that goes beyond pretense to speak for the people. Granted they don’t really speak for everybody, sure, but we can meaningfully differentiate between claims to speak for the people. I think we can say authoritarianism is when the ruler claims the absolute authority to speak on behalf of the people or whatever other “mythological” source of legitimacy, unmediated by what the public actually may think or want. Whether they have public support or not is secondary, the leaders claim is what’s important. Trump claimed to speak for the people despite whatever the election, public opinion, etc. said. In making this claim, he violated what I think you can say is a central principle of democratic rule, without which you don’t really have a democracy: the political equality of citizenship. Trump said, in effect, “All these other people’s votes don’t matter, they are not real.” That’s not really democratic except as propaganda; it’s plainly authoritarian. It’s worth pointing out here that Riley is not really making an argument against liberal proceduralism, because he’s calling for more robust procedures of public debate, and calling upon the classical liberal tradition (Mill) to do so.

This brings me to another point about Riley that connects back to the fascism debate. Riley is often invoked during the fascism debate as proof that Trump wasn’t fascism, because Trumpism and the United States lacked the “thick institutional associationism” that fascism required. In Riley’s argument, fascism is a form of “authoritarian democracy” that rejects liberalism but is nonetheless democratic, in that it reflects the popular will through civic associations. Riley’s argument there is that being “democratic” is not just a type of pretense, some kind of invocation of a mythological subject, but has a real institutional meaning. Incidentally, one argument I heard against using “fascism” was that the insurrectionists and Trump could not really be fascist because they spoke in terms of “democracy” and were trying to express a “true democracy” as they understood it, but it seems like on Riley’s account that should actually be evidence for saying they are fascists. (I still don’t understand if Riley thinks democracy is something you can just claim to represent or if it requires some actual institutional support.)

But back to his piece for one more point:

I think I agree, but let’s be clear what Riley is advocating. If the representatives of the public (the state in our institutional set up) made any changes to the platforms that moderated or regulated speech, which in order to live up to the promise of being “rational”they would have to, “rationality” requires certain rules of argument and evidence, the charge of elite censorship and authoritarianism etc. would hardly disappear. It would probably be much worse. The decision about what’s “rational” is more fraught than what’s “democratic”: in the latter case we just have to be able to count. In the present situation we at least have the alibi of civil society and private property for censorship. On Riley’s suggestion we would not, and the charge of being Big Brother would actually be a bit more weighty.