This by the very sharp Henry Farrell seems to me to be largely wrong.
Farrell thinks that parties, plural, became "unwilling to compete for voters across tricky political issues". I see it as right-wing party, singular, taking the neo-fascist turn to which the system was always vulnerable—winning mass support for policies of plutocracy and kleptocracy by mobilizing fear and hatred of a distinct and sinister internal and external other.
Four times in the past hundred yeras have we seen this in the United States. Teddy Rooevelt vs. the Malefactors of Great Wealth, Ike Eisenhower vs. the McCarthyites, and Richard Nixon's Flaws vs. Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan were three earlier episodes. We won through because of conservative elitss that valued liberty and an open society. We may win through again: Henry Farrell: The Hollowing Out of Democracy: "There are strong similarities between what is happening in the United States, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and France... where democracy is backpedaling rapidly, such as the Philippines. This is the product both of common shocks... and of cross-national reinforcement... the family resemblances are undeniable. What Davies arguably gets wrong though is the significance of these changes...
...Notably, he doesn’t provide any very specific theory of why we are changing from one alignment to another.... The most convincing of these theories is... Peter Mair... Colin Crouch... the shock to party systems... failures of systems of representation.... “Cartel parties”... declined to compete for voters across tricky political issues... delegating these issues to purportedly non-political bodies within the state... or above them.... This coincided with the fracturing of traditional class alignments, which made it harder for voters to organize according to their material interests, and for parties to compete for voters on the basis of those interests.... The old parties had no useful solutions to offer, while the real decisions were being taken at a level where voters had little influence. Under this account, populism is a “predictable reaction to the increasingly undifferentiated policy positions of the mainstream parties and the growing detachment of elected politicians from civil society.”...
This does not mean that we are staggering along the precipice, about to fall into a new age of violent irredentist and indeed eliminationist nationalism. What it does mean is that we cannot assume that forces which are at best indifferently committed to democracy will necessarily be contained within democratic institutions.... Such optimism may not only be misleading, but actively treacherous...
#shouldread
