Critics of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are despondent. Turkey’s strongman has sidelined parliament, harassed opposition newspapers, imprisoned critics and weakened the independence of the judiciary. Yet he has just been re-elected on a ticket of scrapping the prime ministership and helping himself to even greater powers. Turkey’s tradition of political pluralism, long an inspiration to the region — indeed, to reformers across the Muslim world — becomes more compromised by the day.
The trouble is that many of Erdoğan’s opponents, at least outside Turkey, then overstate their case. They claim that Turkey clandestinely supports Islamist terrorists; that it is imposing sharia law; that it has turned against its Nato allies; that it is on the way to becoming an Iranian-style theocracy.
These false assertions understandably push Turks toward their government. Turkey has not sided with the jihadis. It joined the anti-IS coalition in 2014, first making its bases available to U.S. forces, then launching its own strikes. At the same time, it started training Peshmerga forces from Kurdish Iraq. (Western commentators sometimes refer lazily to Turkey fighting “the Kurds,” failing to distinguish between the Marxist PKK and the Kurdish regional government in Erbil, which enjoys cordial relations with Ankara.)
Turks had every reason to strike at the desert bandits, who had either claimed responsibility for, or been otherwise implicated in, bomb attacks in Reyhanlı, Diyarbakır and Suruç, as well as a monstrous suicide bombing in Ankara which killed more than 100 people.
Nor has Turkey abandoned democracy. No one seriously denies that President Erdoğan was genuinely re-elected in a free ballot. Turkey’s imperfect system remains far more open and accountable than that of any Arab state.
As for the idea that Erdoğan has created some sort of “Handmaid’s Tale” regime, just spend a week in Turkey. Listen to the way people talk. Look at the way they dress. Watch their raunchy TV adverts. Yes, Erdoğan lifted some of the more extreme anti-clerical restrictions from Atatürk’s time (now that genuinely was a dictatorial era); but Turkey remains a secular state.
No, we are dealing with something far more mundane than a slide into Islamism — namely, a slide into autocracy. Erdoğan is a Putin, not a Khamenei. We can see the same pattern in several countries where the constraints of a parliamentary system have fallen to one-man rule. It can happen in EU democracies, as Viktor Orban has demonstrated in Hungary. It can happen in bureaucratic dictatorships, such as China, whose People’s Congress recently agreed by 2,958 to 2 to lift the term limits so that President Xi can rule for life.
The reverse can also happen, of course. Our tendency to dwell on bad news might create the impression that the world is sliding into despotism, but the long-term tendency is still toward greater accountability. For every Turkey, there is a Malaysia; for every Russia a Pakistan; for every Hungary a Zimbabwe. Indeed, dictatorships in Africa have gradually become a rarity: This year sees 19 elections on that continent. Latin America’s flirtation with caudillismo, which peaked early in this century, is also passing.
Autocracies, in other words, come and go. People can turn to Führerprinzip from a variety of motives: insecurity, disillusionment, fear. They can likewise abandon it for all sorts of reasons. The dots and commas of their country’s constitution don’t guarantee either outcome.
The one constant down the years has been the United States of America — the only presidential system that has never descended into even mild tyranny. Bill Buckley used to argue that presidential democracy was a dangerous export, because the Latin American states that copied it often dropped the checks and balances.
In fact, those checks and balances depend, more than we generally like to admit, on self-restraint, decency and precedent — especially, in the United States, the self-denying precedent set by George Washington. Take those things away, and a constitution can prove remarkably flimsy.
The most alarming tendency in the United States in recent decades has been pundits’ indifference to due process when they happen to favor a particular outcome. The people who have complained most strenuously about Donald Trump’s abuses of executive power were often silent when Barack Obama did similar things — and vice versa.
Not that we need to worry about American democracy: Its roots are deep enough to stand against any storm. But every expansive interpretation of the rules — every removal of a critic, every threat against the judiciary, every dodgy executive order, every bogus citation of security concerns — succors tyrants across the oceans.
That “city upon a hill” thing? It works both ways, cousins. The eyes of all people, including some nasty dictators, are upon you.
