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