Authoritarian Structures and Trends in Consolidated Democracies
Abstract
The chapter proposes replacing “illiberal” with the term “authoritarian” to move beyond contemporary analyses of freedom or civil and political rights and thus also foreground questions of economics, distribution, and the market. In doing so, it lays out the relational character of authoritarianism in order to bring those who support autocratic regimes into the picture as important actors. After distancing itself from the label “illiberalism,” the text then unpacks the different ways in which liberal democracies contain structures that promote authoritarian turns and trends: prerogative and discretion, emergency powers and executive privileges, etc. It ends with an exploration of contemporary trends across consolidated democracies (some of them “established,” others not) which contain embedded phenomena, such as post-truth public discourse and the erosion of democratic norms, appropriating political power as private property, and the cult of the immediacy and institutional deconsolidation.