My research this semester has focused on Hobbes, so I’m a bit disposed to find him lurking around every corner and behind every thesis. With that caveat, an interview published this morning at The Atlantic with Yascha Mounk really resonates—in my eyes—with some big questions at the center of Hobbesian political thought without ever mentioning his name.
As he relates in the interview, Mounk’s earlier research presents a declining confidence in demoncracy among economically advanced, liberal nations:
I started to look at whether citizens really were as satisfied with democracy as everyone assumed. And the results were pretty shocking. In the United States, for example, over two-thirds of older Americans believed that it was absolutely essential to live in a democracy; among millennials, less than one-third did. Twenty years ago, one in 16 Americans thought that “army rule” was a good system of government. A few years ago one in six did. And the figures are similarly worrying for a whole range of countries in Western Europe.
On the one hand, part of this research documents shifting preferences toward authoritarian models of government. For example, Mounk points to an alarming rise in support for “a strongman leader who does not have to bother with politicians or elections.” One motivation for these shifts, he argues, is a broader reaction against distant, opaque, and ultimately unfair governance: “People aren’t just unhappy with particular parties or governments; they’re increasingly pissed off at the political system as a whole. That makes them much more open to populists, whose core claim is virtually always that the system is rigged.”
On the other hand, there’s an epistemic dimension to Mounk’s thesis that recalls some of the scholarship around Hobbes’ scientia civilis—his “civil science.” Often seen as attempts to provide demonstrative, unimpeachable knowledge about how to organize a society, Hobbes’ later works (like Elements of the Law, De Cive, and Leviathan) apply standards of natural science and mathematics to politics. There are right answers and wrong answers, things proven and things disproven. (This picture of Hobbes’ later writings is admittedly pretty reductive. For a fuller account, the introduction to Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric is a good place to start.)
This Hobbesian confidence in one’s political positions—that they have been almost-mathematically demonstrated and therefore merit if not demand the agreement of all others—seems to be an important but unstated component of Mounk’s view of contemporary populism:
The point of democracy is to empower people to hold elites accountable when they aren’t being sufficiently responsive to their interests. So lots of democratic politicians run on saying that elites have become remote and that they plan to serve the forgotten people.
But Carter never painted people who disagreed with him, or who wanted to vote for Gerald Ford, as illegitimate. He never claimed that media organizations who held him to account were traitors. He never said that courts that struck his favored policies down were enemies of the American people. So what defines populists—and makes them dangerous—is the claim that anybody who disagrees with them does not have a legitimate role to play in democratic politics.
Once some populist leader who considers himself especially brilliant—someone who went to “the best schools,” say—comes upon the demonstrably Correct Answers to policy problems, the possibilities for philosophical dialogue or justified opposition vanish. Courts, newspapers, and those across the aisle no longer have “a legitimate role to play in democratic politics” aside from their capacity to nod in agreement.