ABSTRACT

Democracies around the world face a two-pronged crisis. One part of it brought figures such as Trump, Johnson, and Orban into office in the first place; another is still currently unfolding as these antipluralist, often demagogic, politicians exert state power. The variegated forms of illiberalism materialize in otherwise very different contexts because they have a set of common denominators and should therefore be examined in a comparative perspective. Whereas too much of the work on so-called populism focuses only on unit-level idiosyncrasies, often mired in the present, we seek to identify the broader context in which the emergence of illiberalism happens: a decline of political liberalism as a set of historical ideas and practices. Crucially, a politics of no alternatives—sometimes labeled as neoliberalism—is in the process of being replaced by a politics of fear which instrumentalizes anxieties to redefine democracy, the demos, and the state. This chapter argues that a better understanding of what is happening globally across different contexts is a crucial first step for those who are seeking to persevere through liberal democracy’s crisis of conviction.