This Virus is Stronger and Smarter Than Politicians, Leaders and Perpetual Presidents

Populist leaders like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson and U.S. President Trump are presiding over the world’s highest COVID-19 death tolls, thanks to denial of the public health threat or unwillingness to implement painful solutions. And their popularity is fading fast. Bolsonaro and Trump have plunged in the polls, a condition that has spread to Europe’s far-right. The prognosis? A Democratic world shifting back toward liberalism, posits journalist James Traub. But without addressing the preexisting conditions — weakened institutions and a lack of social cohesion — a relapse is likely.

Something may have broken—or rather, begun to break—last month when U.S. President Donald Trump held an indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma in open defiance of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic and found, to his shock and outrage, that his own supporters had failed to show up. That something is the politics of alternate reality that he and other illiberal populists have ridden to power in recent years.

It has long been understood that totalitarian leaders sustain themselves through the manipulation of reality; that, after all, is the theme of George Orwell’s 1984 and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Orwell, who understood clearly the power of language to obscure rather than reveal, would hardly have been shocked to see the practice transposed to democracies, but it didn’t fully happen in his day. Perhaps it awaited the shotgun marriage of extreme polarization and social media.

                  

Sources: Ozy and Foreign Policy