A Global Theory of Global Theories

Let's Help Harvard's Authoritarianism Expert See the Next Level

I hate podcasts (did I mention that a hundred times?) but here’s a really detailed interview with Harvard’s Pippa Norris, one of the authoritarianism experts I cite most.

That’s 90 minutes long, so here’s the gist. Norris presents a “global theory” of populism as a politics of resentment, rooted in cultural backlash. Norris does believe that progressive values, secularization, fairness, and social tolerance are improving globally, at a slow, generational level. She cites my main mentor on this, Ronald Inglehart of U Michigan.

But there is pushback. Wherever once-dominant groups find themselves losing control, they close ranks around the “real” and “authentic” people, she says, and lash out at minorities and sexual and cultural differences. Global politics is reorienting, moving away from a left-right economic axis toward an up-down social axis. Identity and moral values are the basis of today’s populism, and can take a right form (Hungary) or a left one (Mexico).

But Norris seems to have a blind spot—she can’t see beyond the political science. She asks repeatedly why people feel resentment and grievance when material progress is happening, and seems to have no answer. She thinks there is some mysterious, undiscovered force driving them toward authoritarianism.

Pippa, I can help. My book delves deeply into the psychological motivations and the underlying cognitive processes that create an authoritarian movement. The answer is, we are physically, emotionally, and mentally trapped in bodies that evolved for a different world, and there is a rich field of evolutionary science that explains how and why we respond this way. (The subject of a forthcoming newsletter.) Even neuro-imaging can reveal a lot about these brain traps, and how politicians weaponize them against democracy itself.

Norris inches up to this answer, but then defaults to explanations around economic fears and racism. She acts surprised at new research showing that authoritarian leaders are actually popular, whereas psychology and sociology have documented this appeal for decades. (Theodore Adonro call your office.)

This is what my book offers: a synthesis of answers, an overview bringing together these many diverse fields of research, from first-person reporting to anthropology, and tear gas to dynamic neural imaging. Norris is a deep expert, but sometimes it takes a wider view.

Norris ends with a powerful but depressing prediction: there is no easy way out. Right now we are in a cycle of political reset, or transition, that could take 15 years. The challenge, she says, it to outlast the authoritarians, to preserve democracy and let generational, tidal movements of positive change win out in the long run.

So where there is no clear way to defeat the authoritarian problem, we must focus instead on the incremental—expand voting, win state houses, defend institutions, build new economic and ecological realities on the ground.

There is nothing to do, except to do the right thing, over and over.

That and writing books.