Turkey’s re-election this week of its authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offers a warning that applies to other countries confronting the rise of right-wing populism, including the U.S., columnist Bret Stephens writes for The New York Times.
Erdogan’s re-election came amid skyrocketing unemployment that last year topped out at 85 percent and remains a stubborn 40 percent, along with the widespread perception that under Erdogan the Turkish government responded poorly to a series of earthquakes that killed an estimated 50,000 people.
Leaders typically don’t do well in elections held amid conditions such as these, but according to Stephens, Erdogan bucked that trend in large part as a result what French philosopher Jean-François Reve described as the “The totalitarian phenomenon.”
Reve said this phenomenon “is not to be understood without making an allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or — much more mysteriously — to submit to it.”
Stephens writes that, “It’s an observation that should help guide our thinking about the re-election this week of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. And it should serve as a warning about other places — including the Republican Party — where autocratic leaders, seemingly incompetent in many respects, are returning to power through democratic means.”
Stephens notes that a Turkish voter in an interview in The Economist explained support for Erdogan by saying, “We love him. … For the call to prayer, for our homes, for our headscarves.”
Stephens writes “That last line is telling, and not just because it gets to the importance of Erdogan’s Islamism as the secret of his success. It’s a rebuke to James Carville’s parochially American slogan, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’
“Actually, no: It’s also God, tradition, values, identity, culture and the resentments that go with each. Only a denuded secular imagination fails to notice that there are things people care about more than their paychecks.”
Stephens in November wrote that after the midterms revealed Trump’s waning influence on the electorate that America was ready to move on from the former president in in a column published under the headline “Donald Trump is Finally Finished.”
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“Silly me,” Stephens writes in the article. “The Trump movement isn’t built on the prospect of winning. It’s built on a sense of belonging: of being heard and seen; of being a thorn in the side to those you sense despise you and whom you despise in turn; of submission for the sake of representation. All the rest — victory or defeat, prosperity or misery — is details.
“Erdogan defied expectation because he understood this. He won’t be the last populist leader to do so.”