Moises Naim, acclaimed author and public intellectual, has just published a well-received and dramatic book on the new politics of our time, The Revenge of Power (2022). It is, alas, the politics of fake and fraudulent leaders, and invites urgent introspection on the part of the Guyanese body politic.
Featuring prominently in it are Silvio Berlusconi, Hugo Chavez, Victor Orban, Rodrigo Duterte, Donald Trump, and Jair Bolsonaro. It is a book about how autocrats are reinventing politics for the twenty-first century using populism, polarisation, and post-truth. At stake is a battle between autocracy and democracy, a delicately poised battle.
Naim analyses this struggle world-wide and identifies a number of trends that bear reflection for countries such as Guyana. At the heart of the analysis are shallow leaders who capture their electorates through fakery and slick dominance of the media.
Show-man, TV politics, has replaced the old politics of ideas and debate. The politics of entertainment is replacing the politics of ideology and programmes. Statesmanship is receding rapidly, replaced by fluffery. Leaders invent false narratives about themselves, inventing their biographies. Truth is replaced by fraud. Political debate is replaced by slick propaganda.
Parliamentary processes are manipulated and replaced by ‘autocratic legality’ and pseudo-laws. The judiciary is corrupted and checks and balances disappear. One could legitimately ask where checks and balances now stand in our Dear Land.
Political tribalism becomes the order of the day, in which self-adoring leaders pander to, and manipulate their fans, and their opponents are demonised: the phenomenon of political tribalism.
Practitioners of this new dark politics seek to perpetuate their stay in power. A 2020 study in the Columbia Law Review found that, since the year 2000, evasion of presidential term limits has become exceedingly common: “About one-third of all presidents who reached the end of their term made a serious attempt to overstay”. Guyana has seen echoes of this during both dispensations.
Corruption is an inevitable feature of the new politics of fakery and fraud, which has seen “the transformation of corruption into an instrument of national strategy.” Transnational criminal networks engage in collaboration across geographies and criminal enterprises proliferate:
“At the far end of populism, polarization, and post-truth lies an international system littered with actors that see lawlessness as the normal condition of humankind, actors only too happy to traffic anything and everything for profit…Lawlessness everywhere is a threat to security everywhere.”
All over the world, new elites are replacing the traditional politics of integrity and honour. They are building modern mafia states: vast criminal enterprises headquartered in presidential palaces. This is an important facet of what Francis Fukuyama has called ‘political decay’.
Naim cites Freedom House’s 2020 report, Freedom in the World, which reported that seventy-three countries had a lower ‘freedom score’ in 2020 than the year before. Only twenty-eight nations had seen their scores rise. “Ominously, the report noted that 75 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that experienced a diminution of voters’ rights.”
Naim thinks that there are five battles ahead that need to be won: 1. The battle against the Big Lie. 2. The battle against criminalized governments. 3. The battle against autocracies that seek to undermine democracies. 4. The battle against political cartels that stifle competition. And 5. The battle against illiberal narratives.
The book ends with a lament that, as hyper-partisans take over political institutions and social media, regular people find themselves choosing between parties they barely recognize and that don’t fully represent their values and interests. Typically, the result is that they turn away from politics altogether or fall in line with whichever side their family, friends, and neighbours back in order to keep a sense of identity, of group belonging. Their alienation prepares the ground for one of the worst maladies of our time: anti-politics.
Naim offers two suggestions: ranked-choice voting, a system under which each voter ranks candidates on the ballot by order of preference rather than casting a single vote. A political system that uses ranked-choice voting to elect its representatives will, as a rule, elect politicians who try to embody the broad centre of the political spectrum. The system is already in use in general elections in Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, and in mayoral elections in the UK.
His second suggestion is to use citizens’ juries and citizen’ assemblies to discuss specific problems and devise recommendations on how to address them. Ireland uses these panels to present recommendations on which the Parliament then votes. It used this process for dealing with the highly contested issue of abortion, which it then legalised, following a recommendation by a citizens’ assembly.
The times, Naim concludes, “call for bold experimentation in government – not just innovative policies, but also innovating ways of making policy.” Might one try this in the latest episode in ‘constitutional reform’ in Guyana? Or are we to see more of the politics of fakery and fluffery? And where are the ideas of the opposition?
