Amanda Marcotte: How the dangerous rise of global authoritarianism is driven by sexism and misogyny

By Dilip -
What if the reason democracy is collapsing around the world is because men really don’t want to do the dishes? That might sound a bit silly, but it was a thought that kept creeping up on me while reading this excellent and thoughtful examination of the rise of anti-liberalism around the globe by Zack Beauchamp at Vox. 

By “anti-liberalism,” Beauchamp doesn’t mean a rejection of the narrowly defined liberalism of the Democratic Party, but the “school of thought that takes freedom, consent, and autonomy as foundational moral values” that is traditionally understood to have been defined by Enlightenment philosophers, particularly John Locke, and underpins the institution of democracy itself.

As Beauchamp explains, the political compromises necessitated by liberal democracies frustrate radicals on both the left and the right, but especially the right, and so there’s increasing talk — again, mostly on the right — of abandoning liberal democracy and turning to authoritarian governments that will foist radical ideologies on the public, whether they like it or not.  Politicians like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and, yes, Donald Trump of the United States are all hostile to the core values of liberal democracy, Beauchamp argues, which include “democracy, the rule of law, individual rights, and equality.”

Beauchamp outlines a number of largely convincing reasons why increasing numbers of people are embracing illiberalism: Economic losses, global violence, cultural changes, decaying institutions such as the church or the nuclear family. But, even though Beauchamp recommends reading outside the dead white male canon to understand liberalism, he underplays what I believe is a major, if not the major, objection that conservative thinkers have to liberal democracy: They hate the liberation of women. And they really do not want to the dishes....
https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/how-the-dangerous-rise-of-global-authoritarianism-is-driven-by-sexism-and-misogyny/


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