"The totalitarian phenomenon," the French philosopher Jean-François Revel once remarked, "cannot be understood without taking into account the thesis that an important part of every society is made up of people who actively desire tyranny:
either to exercise it themselves or, what is much more mysterious, to submit to it."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech during the 79th General Assembly of the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey (TOBB) at the TOBB Towers in Ankara, May 30, 2023. (Photo by Adem ALTAN/AFP)
It's an observation that should help guide our reflection on this week's re-election of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.
And it should serve as a warning about other places — including the Republican Party — where autocratic leaders, seemingly incompetent in many respects, are returning to power by democratic means.
Many analyses do not describe Erdogan's narrow but comfortable victory in Sunday's runoff over former official Kemal Kilicdaroglu.
The president, they say, has spent 20 years in power tipping every imaginable balance in his favor.
Erdogan has used regulatory means and abused the criminal justice system to effectively control the media.
He has exercised his presidential power to grant subsidies, tax cuts, cheap loans and other handouts to favored groups.
He has attempted to criminalize an opposition party on the grounds of links to terrorist groups.
In December, a Turkish court expelled Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, Erdogan's most serious rival, from politics, sentencing him to prison for insulting public officials.
Also then, Kilicdaroglu was considered a colorless and inept politician, promising a return to a previous status quo that many Turks remember, unfondly, as a time of periodic economic crises and a kind of repressive secularism.
All of this is true, as far as possible, and helps underscore the worldwide phenomenon of what Fareed Zakaria aptly calls "free and fair elections."
But it doesn't go far enough.
Erdogan's Turkey is in a dreadful state and has been for a long time.
Inflation reached 85% last year and remains above 40%, thanks to Erdogan's insistence on cutting interest rates in the face of rising prices.
Erdogan has used a series of trials – some based on real events, others on pure fantasy – to eviscerate civil liberties.
February's earthquakes, which claimed some 50,000 lives and caused twice as many injuries, were mismanaged by the government and exposed the corruption of a system that cares more about patronage networks than well-constructed buildings.
According to normal political expectations, Erdogan should have paid the political price with a crushing electoral defeat.
Reasons
Not only did it survive, but it increased its share of votes in some of the hardest-hit and most abandoned cities after the earthquakes.
"We want it," explained one resident quoted in The Economist.
"For the call to prayer, for our homes, for our handkerchiefs."
That last sentence is revealing, and not just because it hits at the importance of Erdogan's Islamism as the secret to his success.
It is a rebuke to James Carville's parochially American slogan:
"It's the economy, stupid."
Not really: it is also God, tradition, values, identity, culture and the resentments that accompany each one.
Only a stripped secular imagination fails to realize that there are things that people care about more than their salary.
There is also the question of power.
The classical liberal political tradition is based on the suspicion of power.
The anti-liberal tradition is based on its exaltation.
Erdogan, as the tribune of the ordinary Turk, built himself an aesthetically grotesque 1,100-room presidential palace for $615 million.
Far from scandalizing his supporters, he seems to have loved it.
They do not see in him a sign of extravagance or wastefulness, but the importance of man and the movement to which they adhere and submit.
All of this is a reminder that political signals are often transmitted on frequencies that liberal ears have trouble hearing, let alone decoding.
Wondering how Erdogan is likely to be re-elected after having so profoundly shattered his country's economy and institutions is akin to asking how Vladimir Putin can retain considerable domestic support after his debacle in Ukraine.
Perhaps what a critical mass of ordinary Russians wants, at least on a subconscious level, is not an easy victory.
It is a unifying test.
Which brings us to another aspiring strongman at his Palm Beach palace.
In November, I was sure that Donald Trump was, as I wrote, "finally finished."
How could they continue to support him, save his most servile supporters, after he had again cost the Republicans the Senate?
Wouldn't this ultimate test of defeat be the straw that broke the camel's back for the devotees who had been promised "so much to win"?
Fool of me.
The Trump movement is not based on the prospect of winning.
It is built on a feeling of belonging:
to be heard and seen; of being a thorn in the side of those you feel despise you and those you despise in turn; of submission for the sake of representation.
Everything else – victory or defeat, prosperity or misery – are details.
Erdogan defied expectations because he understood it.
He will not be the last populist leader to do so.
See also
