Amazon.com: Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred: John Lukacs: Books

From Publishers Weekly
A prolific historian and theorist of international relations, Lukacs (The Hitler of History) offers a compact view of political change in Europe and the United States from the Napoleonic Wars to the present, with a particular focus on his area of expertise, WWII and the decades just before and after. For him, Western democracy as we have known it may have already begun to follow a course similar to that of Nazi Germany, where demagogic populists seized power, took control of the media and brainwashed their way through subsequent "elections." Lukacs derides familiar models of modern politics that pit liberals against conservatives; true conservatives, who stress aristocracy and traditional authority, have (he argues) been in decline since at least 1870. Instead, modern history shows a steady increase in popular sovereignty, in the power of public opinion and in the appeal of aggressive nationalism, which tends to control that opinion given a chance—with the aid of mass media. Lukacs decries the "devolution of liberal democracy into populism" and "popular nationalism," especially but not only under George W. Bush. He also decries gay marriage, television, contemporary feminism, "permissiveness" and American "decadence." His hauteur, fast pace and frequently cantankerous asides may impede what is otherwise a thoughtful warning from a very knowledgeable source. (Mar.)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
The publishers of John Lukacs's new book believe that it is "sure to inspire lively debate about the precarious state of American democracy today." They may be right, but I doubt it. Books that have that effect are almost always ones that advance a big, bold, easily graspable thesis and then proceed to develop it in an uncomplicated way.

Lukacs's latest work -- he has published more than 20 books of history, including such classics as Five Days in London, May 1940 and The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler -- is not of that kind. It is, rather, a rich and sober meditation by a mind that knows much, including the limits of what it knows, about the nature, relationships and mutations of the forces that have shaped the politics of the Western world over the past century. Its mood -- allowing for occasional waspish deviations, as when he dismisses one widely respected theorist as "a muddled and dishonest thinker" and another as "an idiot savant" -- is discursive and reflective, almost elegiac at times.

Its structure is not simple and linear but convoluted. Lukacs's approach involves circling around and around his key concepts -- democracy and populism, patriotism and nationalism, conservatism and liberalism, socialism and fascism -- viewing them from different angles, making subtly different points about them, showing how they have mutated over time and how their relationships to one another have altered. While it lacks the hurly-burly heat and excitement of the op-ed page, this kind of calm and unhurried analysis has its charm and is more likely to cast light.

If Lukacs does not advance anything as overt and explicit as a thesis, he does develop two very important themes, one implicitly and the other directly. The first, implicit one is a denial of what has become a crucial article of faith for many Americans, including some leading intellectuals: American "exceptionalism." This is a belief of enormous importance in determining how the United States uses its immense power to deal with the rest of the world. The belief manifests itself in many ways: in the assertion of a divinely ordained mission; in an insistence on the U.S. right to apply double standards in its own favor and reject "moral equivalence"; in the claim to the indispensability of U.S. participation in all matters; in the insistence that, while every other country's power needs to be balanced and contained, it is iniquitous and insulting to suggest that America's power needs to be. In short, America's exceptional nature -- as a cause as well as a country -- entitles it to exceptional treatment and rights. This belief, as much as the crude fact of American power, explains what the foreign policy scholar Stephen R. Sestanovich has recently christened "American maximalism" in U.S. dealings with the rest of the world.

Lukacs does not deal with the notion of American exceptionalism directly. But his views on the subject are perfectly evident from the way in which, as he moves freely back and forth between discussing European and American politics, he always assumes that the same forces have been and are at work on both sides of the Atlantic. There have been important differences, of course, but they have been differences of circumstances (particularly the uneven impact of the two world wars) rather than of essences. To Lukacs, the United States and the rest of the political world are part of the same universe of discourse, subject to the same laws of cause and effect and to the same standards of judgment.

The second, and explicit, theme of Lukacs's book (made even more explicit in the concluding chapter he has added to a new edition of an earlier history of the United States, A New Republic) is the decline of the American political culture and society. This has occurred and even gathered momentum as the country's power has grown. Lukacs is not alone, of course, in identifying this decline, which has been a principal theme of conservative lament for many years. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, for example, no less a figure than Irving Kristol was writing of "clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society."

Kristol blamed it all on liberalism. Lukacs too dilates on the weakness and failure of liberalism, but he also identifies other culprits, among them the displacement of patriotism by an increasingly raucous nationalism, the collapse of democracy into a manipulative populism, the wave of public religiosity and the decline of public education. He writes of an "immense coarsening of civilized life" and observes that "the founders of the Republic may have overestimated the potential intelligence of the people. But two centuries later the opposite has occurred. The symptoms of a cynical, often crude, underestimation of the mental and spiritual capacity of the people are all around us."

It is when one considers Lukacs's two themes together that the nature of what one might term the American problem becomes evident. While the United States asserts the right and duty to lead and transform the world on the basis of its claimed exceptional status, the country's internal condition is deteriorating to a point that alarms good judges and sincere patriots.

All this was evident before Sept. 11, 2001. But the true historical import of what happened on that day may turn out to be that it tipped America's priorities decisively away from the work of healing itself by restoring the integrity and vitality of its own democracy, and toward installing quasi-democracy in unlikely places under the shadow of its military might.

Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (Hardcover)

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