How to Lose a Country

Something has indeed been unleashed around the Western world. In several countries an invisible, odourless gas is travelling from the provinces to the big cities: a gas formed of grudges. A scent of an ending is drifting through the air. The word is spreading. Real people are moving from small towns towards the big cities to finally have the chance to be the captains of their souls. Nothing will stay unchanged, they say. A new we is emerging. A we that probably does not include you, the worried reader of this book. And I remember how that sudden exclusion once felt.

‘No, we are different. We are not a party, we’re a movement.’

It is autumn 2002, and a brand-new party called the Justice and Development Party, AKP, with a ridiculous lightbulb for an emblem, is participating in a Turkish general election for the first time. Being a political columnist, I travel around the country, stopping off in remote cities and small towns, to take the nation’s pulse before polling day. As I sit with representatives of other, conventional parties in a coffee shop in a small town in central Anatolia, three men stand outside the circle, their eyebrows raised with an air of lofty impatience, waiting for me to finish my interview. I invite them to join us at the table, but they politely refuse, as if I am sitting in the middle of an invisible swamp they don’t want to dirty themselves in. When the others eventually prepare to leave, they approach me as elegantly as macho Anatolians can. ‘You may call us a movement, the movement of the virtuous,’ the man says. ‘We are more than a party. We will change everything in this corrupt system.’ He is ostentatiously proud, and rarely grants me eye contact.

The other two men nod approvingly as their extremely composed spokesman fires off phrases like ‘dysfunctional system’, ‘new representatives of the people, not tainted by politics’, ‘a new Turkey with dignity’. Their unshakeable confidence, stemming from vague yet strongly held convictions, reminds me of the young revolutionary leftists I’ve written about for a number of years in several countries. They give off powerful, mystic vibes, stirring the atmosphere in the coffee shop of this desperate small town. They are like visiting disciples from a higher moral plane, their chins raised like young Red Guards in Maoist propaganda posters. When the other small-town politicians mock their insistence on the distinction between their ‘movement’ and other parties, the three men appear to gain in stature from the condescending remarks, like members of a religious cult who embrace humiliation to tighten the bonds of their inner circle.

Their spokesman taps his fist gently, but sternly, on the table to finish his speech: ‘We are the people of Turkey. And when I say people, I mean real people.’

This is the first time I hear the term ‘real people’ used in this sense. The other politicians, from both left and right, are annoyed by the phrase, and protest mockingly: ‘What’s that supposed to mean? We’re the real people of Turkey too.’ But it’s too late; the three men delight in being the original owners of the claim. It is theirs now.

After seeing the same scene repeat itself with little variation in several other towns, I write in my column: ‘They will win.’ I am teased by my colleagues, but in November 2002 the silly lightbulb party of the three men in the coffee shop becomes the new government of Turkey. The movement that gathered power in small towns all over the country has now ruled Turkey uninterrupted for seventeen years, changing everything, just as they promised.

‘We have the same thing here. Exactly the same thing! But who are these real people?’

It’s now May 2017, and I am first in London, then Warsaw, talking about Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy, telling different audiences the story of how real people took over my country politically and socially, strangling all the others who they deemed unreal. People nod with concern, and every question-and-answer session starts with the same question: ‘Where the hell did these real people come from?’

They recognise the lexicon, because the politicised and mobilised provincial grudge has announced its grand entrance onto the global stage with essentially the same statement in several countries: ‘This is a movement, a new movement of real people beyond and above all political factions.’ And now many want to know who these real people are, and why this movement has invaded the high table of politics. They speak of it as of a natural disaster, predictable only after it unexpectedly takes place. I am reminded of those who, each summer, are surprised by the heatwave in Scandinavia, and only then recall the climate-change news they read the previous winter. I tell them this ‘new’ phenomenon has been with us, boiling away, for quite some time.

In July 2017, a massive iceberg broke off from Antarctica. For several days the news channels showed the snow-white monster floating idly along. It was the majestic flagship of our age, whispering from screens around the world in creaking ice language: ‘This is the final phase of the age of disintegration. Everything that stands firm will break off, everything will fall to pieces.’ It wasn’t a spectre but a solid monster telling the story of our times: that from the largest to the smallest entity on planet earth, nothing will remain as we knew it. The United Nations, that huge, impotent body created to foster global peace, is crumbling, while the smallest unit, the soul, is decomposing as it has never been before. A single second can be divided up into centuries during which the wealthy few prepare uncontaminated living spaces in which to live longer while tens of thousands of children in Yemen die of cholera, a pre-twentieth-century disease. The iceberg was silently screaming, The centre cannot hold.

The progressive movements that sprang up all around the world, from the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999 to the 2011 uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, were in many respects a response to these fractured times. In a world where more people are talking, but fewer are being heard, they wanted to tell the rest of humanity, through their bodies, that regardless of our differences we can, and indeed must, come together to find collective answers to our age of disintegration, otherwise everything will fall apart. They demanded justice and dignity. They demanded that the world realise that a counter-movement is necessary to reverse the global course of events. They showed us that retreat is not the only response to the global loss of hope. They were the ones who resisted the temptation to ‘yield to the process of mere disintegration’, and rejected the notion that it is ‘a historical necessity’.* Their answer to disintegration was to create new, invigorating, temporary and miniature models of loose collectives in squares around the world. In several different languages they responded to the famous words of W.B. Yeats with the message that, if people unite, the centre can hold.

As time passed, however, many of these progressive movements ended up suppressed, marginalised or swallowed back into the conventional political system. For several understandable reasons they couldn’t accomplish what they started – not yet. However, their voice was clearly heard when they announced globally that representative democracy (abused by financial institutions and stripped of social justice) was undergoing its biggest crisis since the Second World War.

Today we are witnessing the response to similar fears of an entirely different mass of people, one with a more limited vocabulary, smaller dreams for the world, and less faith in the collective survival of humanity. They too say that they want to change the status quo, but they want to do it to build a world in which they are among the lucky few who survive under the leadership of a strong man. It is no coincidence that ‘wall’, whether literal or virtual, has become the watchword among rising right-wing political movements. ‘Yes, the world is disintegrating,’ they say, ‘and we, the real people, want to make sure we’re on the sunny side of the dividing wall.’ It is not that they want to stand by and watch babies die in the Mediterranean, it is just that they don’t want to die as well. What we are hearing, as it carries from the provinces to the big cities, is the survival cry of those whose fear of drowning in the rising sea of disintegration trumps their interest in the survival of others. And so, ruthlessly, they move.

Political movements are promises of transition from actuality to potentiality – unlike political parties, which must operate as part of actuality, playing the game but standing still. This is why, from Turkey to the United States, including the most developed countries with their seemingly strong democratic institutions, such as France, the UK and Germany, we have seen people assemble behind relentless, audacious populist leaders, in order to move together and attack the actuality they call the establishment; to attack the game itself, deeming it dysfunctional and corrupt. A movement of real people is the new zeitgeist, a promise to bring back human dignity by draining the swamp of the stagnant water that politics has become. In other words, les invisibles, the masses, long considered to be indifferent to politics and world affairs, are globally withdrawing their assumed consent from the current representative system, and the sound of it is like a chunk of ice breaking off from Antarctica.

The job of changing the global course of events is, of course, too big a task for the fragile I, and so we is making a comeback in the world of politics and ethics. And this comeback is at the heart of the global phenomenon that we are witnessing. We wants to depart from the mainland of political language, dismantle it and build a new language for the real people. If one wants to know who the real people are, one must ask the question, what is we? Or why is it that I don’t want to be I any more, but we?

It is one of those crowded Sundays on the European side of the Bosporus in the summer of 2015. Sunday is the day that the upper-middle classes of Istanbul move en masse to the cafés on the seaside for the famous Turkish breakfast, which lasts more or less the entire day. The cafés are located alongside the Ottoman fortress walls, where bloody wars were fought to enable us to one day have these glorious feasts and to be irritated when our order is late. There is a family over there, on the pavement, in their best outfits. Not wealthy enough to sit at the cafés, but able to make ends meet so that they can stroll through the richest neighbourhood on the Bosporus and watch the arduous weekend breakfast campaign. The two small kids are being led by their young mother, who is trying hard not to make it too obvious that this is their first time in this part of the city. The father seems to be searching for something on the ground as he walks. Then he stops, and points to a spot on the pavement. ‘Here! Here!’ he shouts happily. ‘This is the one. This one. I put that there.’ His gaze then proudly travels the full length of the paving. ‘This is the longest road in Istanbul,’ he says, ‘and we made it.’

I have always wondered whether the families of the fallen workers of the great bridges, great tunnels, great roads, ever visit the little memorial plaques attached to those constructions. Do they take pictures in front of them, pointing at a name? And is it essential that they describe the road as ‘the longest’, the tunnel ‘the deepest’, their country ‘the greatest’? Otherwise, will their relative’s life and death be meaningless? Some of us cannot and never will understand why a man who can hardly make a living is proud of the fact that Erdoğan’s is ‘the greatest palace’, or why he rejoices when he hears that the daily cost of running that palace is ten times more than he earns in a year. For many of those who are privileged enough to be in a position to try to analyse the important matters of big politics, the ordinary man’s feeling of smallness and the rage it engenders are inaccessible, and so it is equally hard for them to comprehend how that smallness might desperately crave to be part of a we that promises greatness.

‘I play to people’s fantasies. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It is an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion.’

In his debut work of literature, The Art of the Deal,† Donald Trump was already describing the ‘truthful hyperbole’ that would later put him in the White House. He must be proud to have demonstrated that in order to become the American president he had no need to read any books other than his own. Trump knew one simple fact about people that many of us choose to ignore: that even though individualism as a concept has been elevated for many decades, the ordinary man still needs a shepherd to lead him to greatness. He knew how diminishing and disappointing it can feel to realise that you are only mediocre, in a world where you have constantly been told that you can be anything you want to be.

He also knew that the call to break the imaginary chains of slavery preventing the real people from reaching greatness would resonate with his supporters, regardless of the fact that it sounded absurd to those who had had the chance to become what they wanted to be. ‘It’s not you,’ he told them. ‘It’s them who prevent us from being great.’ He gave them something solid to hate, and they gave him their votes. And once he started speaking in the name of we – as has happened many times over the course of history – they were ready to sacrifice themselves. As Americans know very well from their own constitution, the words ‘We, the people’ can build a new country and bring empires to their knees. And believe it or not, even the British, a people who take pride in not being easily moved, are also not immune to the allure of we.

‘We have fought against the multinationals, we have fought against the big merchant banks, we have fought against big politics, we have fought against lies, corruption and deceit … [This is] a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people.’

Although this may sound like Salvador Allende, Chile’s Marxist leader, speaking after his election victory in 1970, it was in fact Nigel Farage, the erstwhile leader of UKIP – and incidentally a former banker himself. He uttered these words on the morning of 24 June 2016, the day after Britain’s Brexit referendum. He too was using the age-old magic of speaking in the name of ‘the people’. On the same day, however, many cosmopolitan Londoners, who were automatically excluded from this inflaming narrative, found themselves wondering who these real people were, and why they bore such a grudge against the big cities and the educated. And those who were old enough were beginning to hear echoes sounding from across the decades.

After the horrific experiences of the Second World War, not many people in Western Europe expected the masses ever again to lust after becoming a single totality. Most happily believed that if humans were free to choose what they could buy, love and believe, they would be content. For more than half a century, the word I was promoted in the public sphere by the ever-grinning market economy and its supporting characters, the dominant political discourse and mainstream culture. But now we has returned as the very essence of the movement, burnishing it with a revolutionary glow, and many have found themselves unprepared for this sudden resurrection.

Their voice has been so loud and so unexpected that worried critics have struggled to come up with an up-to-date political lexicon with which to describe it, or counter it. The critical mainstream intelligentsia scrambled to gather ammunition from history, but unfortunately most of it dated back to the Nazi era. The word ‘fascism’ sounded passé, childish even, and ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘totalitarianism’ were too ‘khaki’ for this Technicolor beast in a neoliberal world. Yet during the last couple of years numerous political self-help books filled with quotes from George Orwell have been hastily written, and all of a sudden Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is back on the bestseller lists after a sixty-eight-year hiatus. The hip-sounding term that the mainstream intelligentsia chose to use for this retro lust for totality was ‘rising populism’.

‘Rising populism’ is quite a convenient term for our times. It both conceals the right-wing ideological content of the movements in question, and ignores the troubling question of the shady desire of I to melt into we. It masterfully portrays the twisted charismatic leaders who are mobilising the masses as mad men, and diligently dismisses the masses as deceived, ignorant people. It also washes away the backstory that might reveal how we ended up in this mess. In addition to this, there is the problem that the populists do not define themselves as ‘populists’. In a supposedly post-ideology world, they are free to claim to be beyond politics, and above political institutions.

Political thought has not been ready to fight this new fight either. One of the main stumbling blocks is that the critics of the phenomenon have realised that ‘rising populism’ is the strange fruit of the current practice of democracy. As they looked deeper into the question they soon discovered that it wasn’t a wound that, all of a sudden, appeared on the body politic, but was in fact a mutant child of crippled representative democracy.

Moreover, a new ontological problem was at play thanks to the right-wing spin doctors. Academics, journalists and the well-educated found themselves included in the enemy of the people camp, part of the corrupt establishment, and their criticism of, or even their carefully constructed comments on, this political phenomenon were considered to be oppressive by the real people and the movement’s spin doctors. It was difficult for them to adapt to the new environment in which they had become the ‘oppressive elite’ – if not ‘fascists’ – despite the fact that some of them had dedicated their lives to the emancipation of the very masses who now held them in such contempt. One of them was my grandmother.

‘Are they now calling me a fascist, Ece?’

My grandmother, one of the first generation of teachers in the young Turkish republic, a committed secular woman who had spent many years bringing literacy to rural children, turned to me one evening in 2005 while we were watching a TV debate featuring AKP spin doctors and asked, ‘They did say “fascist”, right?’ She dismissed my attempt to explain the peculiarities of the new political narratives and exclaimed, ‘What does that even mean, anyway? Oppressive elite! I am not an elite. I starved and suffered when I was teaching village kids in the 1950s.’

Her arms, having been folded defensively, were now in the air, her finger pointing as she announced, as if addressing a classroom, ‘No! Tomorrow I am going to go down to their local party centre and tell them that I am as real as them.’ And she did, only to return home speechless, dragging her exhausted eighty-year-old legs off to bed at midday for an unprecedented nap of defeat. The only words I could get out of her were: ‘They are different, Ece. They are …’ Despite her excellent linguistic skills, she couldn’t find an appropriate adjective.

I was reminded of my grandmother’s endeavour when a seventy-something American woman approached me with some hesitation after a talk I gave at Harvard University in 2017. Evidently one of those people who are hesitant about bothering others with personal matters, she gave me a fast-forward version of her own story: she had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s, teaching English to kids in a remote Turkish town, then a dedicated high school teacher in the USA, and since her retirement she had become a serious devotee of Harvard seminars. She was no less stunned than my grandmother at the fact that Trump voters were calling her a member of the ‘oppressive elite’. She said, ‘I try to explain myself to them when we talk about politics, but …’ A ruthless political narrative that labelled her lifelong labours as both unimportant and oppressive was gaining traction. In this new political scenario, she found herself trying to crawl out of the deep hole that had been dug for elites, a hole that was proving too deep for her frail legs. The more serious problem was that the real people never asked her to join them, or offered to help her climb out of the hole. All they demanded from her was ‘respect’.

‘Respect is something I hear a lot about from Trump voters. The spirit of the sentiment is often: “Maybe Trump’s a jerk, maybe he won’t do what he says he will, but he acts as if people like me are important, and the people who disrespect me aren’t.”’

In September 2016 the Chicago Tribune published a Bloomberg opinion piece by Megan McArdle.‡ As she had expressed before in other columns, McArdle was stunned by the fact that any conversation with Trump supporters was usually brought to a halt by the word ‘respect’. When Trump entered the scene, bucketloads of ‘respect’ flushed through American politics, and Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ comment about Trump supporters gave them yet another angle to exploit. Suddenly the media was questioning its own ability to respect ordinary people. Self-criticism among journalists, together with the massive attacks on the media from Trump supporters for being disrespectful towards real people, became impossible to ignore. So much so that after the election the New York Times opened a ‘Trump voters only’ section in which they could express themselves free from the condescending filter of the elitist media. Even if the new platform might have functioned as a rich source of raw research material for academics, it was definitely a triumph for Trump voters in their quest for gaining respect, a victorious battle in the long war of recognition.

We always holds its challengers to ethical standards (such as objectivity) that it does not itself feel obliged to meet, because the original owners of we have a monopoly on morality and the privilege of being the real voice of the masses. End of story. Critical voices become so paralysed that they don’t notice that the ‘respect’ we demand of them is actually an unquestioning silence.

The magic word ‘respect’ is also frequently used by the right-wing Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán. ‘Respect to the Hungarians!’ was his party’s 2014 European Parliament electoral slogan. Between then and the end of 2017, Orbán relentlessly reiterated the central importance of respect. He demanded respect from Germany, the United States and the EU, and when attacked for his xenophobic policies he replied: ‘According to my thinking, this is a sign of respect.’ He announced his solidarity with Poland because Poland wasn’t respected enough, and offered his respect to Trump, Vladimir Putin and Erdoğan. He also complained that ‘respect is a scarce commodity in Europe’, and asserted that only respect could save the continent.

Erdoğan likewise introduced excessive amounts of ‘respect’ into Turkish politics after he came to power in 2002. He repeatedly demonstrated to the Turkish people that respect no longer had to be earned, it could simply be unconditionally demanded. Whenever there were serious poll-rigging claims, he demanded respect for ‘my people and their choices’, just as he demanded respect for court decisions only when they resulted in his opponents being imprisoned. However, when the Constitutional Court decided to release journalists arrested for criticising him, he said, ‘I don’t respect the court decision and I won’t abide by it.’ As with Orbán, Trump and others, respect is a one-way street for Erdoğan: he only accepts being on the receiving end.