Angel Jaramillo Torres*
The great technological revolution integrating digital, biological, and physical systems could liquidate the only remaining political alternative: liberalism, given that Fascism and Communism were defeated, the former in 1945 and the latter in 1989.
The coming decades will witness the end of homo sapiens and the rise of homo Deus, perhaps leading to the transformation of politics into the extermination of one species against another.
But the main danger today comes not from technology but politics. In this sense, authoritarian populisms represent our most significant risk. By a chance that is increased by the prevailing confusion about the meaning of this phenomenon on a planetary scale, any attempt to explain the authoritarianism of the 21st century runs the risk of appearing to be a simple exercise in hubris.
But some things can be said. To some extent, populism stems from the need to found modern civilization not on trade and money but concern for the general welfare.
Liberal democracy has attempted to combine the economic interest of individuals and the general public interest. Communism and Fascism rebelled against this. But the communist idea was afflicted by a series of drawbacks, which had to do with the incompatibility between the desire for absolute social justice and human nature. Fascism, in turn, failed because it demanded that human beings forget compassion and embrace instead cruelty in the hope of curing human beings of the weaknesses to which, it was argued, both liberalism and communism led them.
Both communism and Fascism argued that liberalism was afflicted with the inability to defend itself against the onslaught of its enemies. They were wrong. Liberal society created institutions of self-defense, such as NATO, which was instrumental in defeating the Soviet Union and its imperial dreams.
But the arrival of the 21st century brought another danger, this time not from ideologies but from political theology.
The precedent of the most significant impact of the arrival of the authoritarian populisms of the 21st century is this return of political theology. The difference between the three waves of modernity – liberalism, communism, and Fascism – and contemporary populism lies precisely in the fact that the former was founded on the precepts of political philosophy. In contrast, a shift toward political theology inspires the religious populism of the 21st century.
So far, no one has connected the rise of so-called political Islam and the populist movements of the 21st century. The relationship between the two can perhaps be found in the rise to power of Vladimir Putin in 1999. The explanation of the case is not that Russian orthodox thought took up elements of Islamic radicalism but that both phenomena coincide in their criticism of liberalism of philosophical origin from the theses that sustain the morality of obedience to a leader who, for the purposes of political practice, replaces the omnipotent God.
If we had to define a characteristic that permeates all authoritarian populisms of the present century, it would be, precisely, the bond of obedience between the leader and the “people”. The apparent natural predisposition of the Russian people to obey the leader makes Putinism the most developed political movement of what we could call theological populism.
Liberal democracy is the main target of the authoritarian religious assault because liberalism constitutes the most finished product of philosophy put into political practice. The inability of the authoritarian personality to accept any complexity is due to the resentment of the losers in liberal regimes, which best explains the gangster morality that characterizes today’s populist leaders. Willingness to obey is perhaps the main attribute of tyrannical populism. Populists seek to establish a monopoly of representation where the people -as they conceive it- is a homogeneous whole that rejects minorities.
How can we clarify the phenomenon of the leader who suddenly establishes a direct relationship with the population (the People) over the republican institutions? Populism is a strategy to divide society between the people and their enemies with the intention of bringing the former to power. The friend-enemy dichotomy determines the essence of the political phenomenon in the same way that the beauty-ugliness opposition regulates the aesthetic and the good-bad the ethical.
Three waves of ideas and practices raised by political theology have gradually entered the societies of the 21st century. The first wave would have been that of Islamic radicalism, whose ideas were attractive to the Russian political theologians of Vladimir Putin’s regime to the extent that they themselves created a second wave. These ideas eventually spread to the epicenter of liberalism: Europe and the United States, promoting the third wave.
The arrival to power of Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez, the non-plus ultra of right and left-wing populism in the world, happened almost simultaneously. And both have made a generalized use of religion in the service of their respective ideologies. Apparently, the Retour à Dieu is the horizon of our time. Thus, Fascism (Vladimir Putin) and communism (Hugo Chavez) returned through the back door, this time with the impulse of theological ideas. The theater of action of Putin’s new theological Fascism was Europe, where he skillfully used modern propaganda techniques to promote radical right-wing parties that have gained more and more power in parliaments. In Latin America, Chavismo or Bolivarianism did something similar, but not to promote radical right-wing but radical left-wing movements. Thus ideas were promoted that combined Marx and the New Testament, despite being contradictory. It is from these ideas that Obradorism in Mexico comes from. Its leader, the current president Lopez Obrador, has connected with an important fringe of the Mexican people because Marxism, through Christian propaganda, can more easily penetrate the popular psyche.
However, this Christian Marxism is more authoritarian than the two elements that constitute it due to what was previously discussed. The only antidote to this authoritarian expression of political theology is the use of liberal reason. This is the battle of our times.
*Angel Jaramillo Torres holds a BA in International Relations at El Colegio de México and a Ph.D. in Political Science at the New School for Social Research. He is co-editor of the two-volume series Trump and Political Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). His journalistic work has been published in Spanish and English outlets. He resides in México City.