American Thought Leaders - How Free Societies Fall for Totalitarian Temptations: Ryszard Legutko
Episode Date: August 5, 2024Ryszard Legutko fought for freedom in Poland as an underground editor in the anti-communist Solidarity movement. But after democracy was restored in Poland, he began seeing trends he didn’t expect i...n not just Poland, but many other liberal democracies as well.A professor, philosopher, and most recently a politician, Ryszard Legutko explains his findings in his book “The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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The freedom that we have is being more and more restricted
and the legal system is being more and more repressive.
Ryszard Legutko fought for freedom in Poland
as an underground editor in the Solidarity Movement.
But after democracy was restored in Poland,
he began seeing something he didn't expect.
There are some tendencies that remind me of what was happening
under the communist regime. I find it really astonishing.
He observed that despite being free,
liberal democracies display some unsettling characteristics.
There is some kind of convergence of the totalitarian tendencies
which we had under communism.
A professor, philosopher, and most recently a politician,
Rishad Legutko explains his argument in his book,
The Demon in Democracy.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Rishad Legutko, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you for having me.
I've been reading your book, The Demon in Democracy,
and you make some pretty startling observations. And I actually want to start there because you're issuing a challenge
to liberal democracy itself. It's kind of shocking. I mean, obviously, it's the best system we have, right? Well, not necessarily.
Well, the book has several layers, but the main point I'm making is that the political
system which is called liberal democracy, which you find here in the States or in Europe, Western, Eastern, New Zealand, Australia, Canada,
that this system resembles more and tendencies which we had under communism,
some kind of despotic tendencies in the countries I mentioned, all considered to be liberal democratic.
We shouldn't be deluded by the names, by the terminology.
If something is called liberal, it does not mean that it expresses the spirit of liberty or if something is called democratic
it doesn't mean that it
implies the rule of the people
we live in a time where manipulation of language
is a widespread sort of phenomenon
so don't think about the words.
Think about the reality, which is behind those words.
Well, I mean, what's fascinating,
you make a point very early in the book where you say,
you know, if I was in communism, and you were, by the way, right?
Of course, you were an editor of a very prominent underground magazine, Arca.
You were very familiar with the realities of this system,
and you saw the transition through 89.
But you say, in under communism, I wouldn't be able to write my book, right?
Right. Yeah, sure.
I mean, in some ways, you're appreciative of liberal democracy, actually. The point I'm making is not that these two systems are identical.
That would be preposterous.
What I'm saying is that there are some tendencies that remind me of what was happening under the communist regime,
and I find it most disquieting.
I find it really astonishing.
And the sooner we realize that these tendencies exist,
the better, because we could change things
if we still live in this illusion that this is the best of all possible
worlds when we will discover that this is not the case it might be too late another observation that
you made was that and this i guess this is one of the things that got you started thinking about all this, is that 1989 happens, we have the roundtable, and then on the other side, democracy happens.
But the communists, many of them just very neatly and seamlessly transition into some
kind of social democrats, and actually are quite successful in working in the system.
Meanwhile, some people who are anti-communists,
perhaps from Solidarność Valcząca or one of these groups which are explicitly anti-communist,
they have a lot of trouble, which isn't what you expected.
Icky, tell me a little bit about that.
That was something that struck me when I became a member of the European Parliament, which was I think
2009, and when I saw former communists, former apparatchiks adapting themselves to the system, accommodating, being accepted as exemplary Europeans,
liberal, perfect, impeccable liberal Democrats,
whereas people like myself were considered to be a sort of troublemakers,
people that shouldn't be there in the first place,
because we have some weird ideas
right about I don't know family okay or
tradition European tradition or nation-state things like these so what So, what I saw was the rule of one political coalition, one political party in a way, and the hands of liberal left since the very beginning,
at least for quite a long time, and they impose one and the same ideology.
If you are a dissenter, you are considered to be a dangerous person,
and you are surrounded by a cordon sanitaire.
Thank God you're not incarcerated or arrested, but you are ou something that contradicts the principles of the modern democratic state, as it is described in the books, in theories, right? Democracy should be a system for everybody. We compete. We, that is,
political groups compete. We want to attract if you will, population, and we represent the interest. We have our ideas. We have been delegated to advance certain principles, but we cannot do it because we are not accepted as part
of the system. So this is extremely, I would say, dangerous. Especially this quasi one-party
rule. You can see that what has happened over the last decades, especially in European politics,
is the disappearance of the traditional division between the left and the right,
that is the party of change and the party of continuity. European politics for a long time was determined by a conflict, a competition, right, between those two political orientations.
Now you don't have it anymore.
After 1968, symbolically speaking, of course, the European politics shifted radically to the left, the right is no longer considered to be a legitimate part of the political life.
So the difference between today's right and today's left is very small.
I would say it's negligible.
The Tories and the Labour in Britain, are they different?
The Tories is really a leftist party.
At least its leaders are.
Take Christian Democrats in Germany.
Christian Democrats are Christian Democrats by name only.
And their agenda is the leftist agenda. Same-sex marriage was introduced in England by the Conservatives, in France by the Socialists,
in Germany by Christian Democrats and the left by the Grand Coalition.
That's the common agenda and you can take all the items one by one and you see
that the differences are really negligible.
So what you have is some kind of what somebody called extreme center,
right, extreme center which is the leftist agenda
which is considered to be the only one that is legitimate,
that is acceptable, and whoever does not accept it is surrounded by a colonel sanitaire.
And what you explore in the democracy is that somehow this phenomenon might actually be
inherent to the system, to liberal democracy itself.
One of the things you talk about, and this is where you challenge my assumptions,
is, well, you said a similarity. In communism, communism is a process. It's also the end in
itself. This is where we're heading
towards the perfect communism, and you can't challenge the goodness of communism, right?
And so with liberal democracy, similarly, you said, actually, this is a very similar situation.
So in that sense, it's a totalizing system. I don't know if it's the exact words you used,
but that's what I got out of it. And I thought to myself, my goodness, I actually, in my own mind, I don't feel like I can challenge liberal democracy as a concept.
No, obviously that's a good, obviously that's good, right?
This is my own kind of self-reflection, right?
And it becomes kind of a blind spot because, like you said, language can be changed, right?
And that affects us all.
Yeah, we are too much attached to words and we react to words, to certain slogans,
and do not see reality behind those words.
This was fascinating, something that you mentioned that, I mean it just didn't occur to me, but in communism,
communism politicizes everything, right?
But you make a really good point that just inherently,
inherent to liberal democracy,
we're voting about everything,
or we're electing people to vote about it.
We're politicizing everything too, in fact, right?
Yeah, we politicize,
that's exactly one of the points I meant.
Yes, exactly.
This system initially should have retained
and preserved a lot of non-political areas.
Just let people do what they want. There are certain areas of life that
should be protected against the intrusion, the political interference. But that's not
the case, for the reasons which I will not go into. But as under the Communists, everything
had to be Communist. Communist, not just family, but Communist family. Not morality, but Communist
morality. Not art, but Communist art, and so on and so on. So now everything has to be liberal democratic or liberal or democratic
or liberal democratic.
I mean, art is not democratic, right?
Family is not a democratic institution.
It's a hierarchical institution. So trying to democratize family is, in fact,
a step towards the destruction of the family.
Schools, universities are inherently hierarchic,
or I will use this word, which is a hateful word nowadays,
aristocratic, right?
In the original etymological sense, right?
Aristos in Greek means the best.
It's not hereditary, aristocracy, of course.
So these are aristocratic institutions, hereditary.
They are teachers and they are pupils, disciples.
They are the masters and those who try
to follow the masters and learn from them.
All these things are necessary
for the well functioning of the society.
And really we live in a society that is more and more politicized, which is the same, ideologized, right?
Ideology.
You see political ideology.
You go to a theatre without not being exposed to, I don't know, woke emancipation, racism,
repression. You cannot go to a university without being exposed to the same language,
the same political ideology and literature and everything is the same, right?
You cannot read the papers without having the same ideas
pumped into your head all the time.
So this is something extremely dangerous.
And the consequence of it is, of course, that if you dissent from what is acceptable, if you dissent from the ideological directives, you are in trouble.
You may lose your job, right?
You may be reprimanded.
There are some countries where you can be arrested well at the very least looked at with suspicion
as opposed to just kind of another normal
member
if somebody told me
10-15 years ago
that it would be possible to have a liberal democratic system
in which you can go to jail for using a wrong personal pronoun.
I would consider him insane. I mean, this is impossible.
What was impossible is now possible.
You may go to jail for, which is in this newspeak
called misgendering, right? This is simply outrageous. So in the freedom that we have
is being more and more restricted. And the legal system is being more and more repressive.
All these things, sooner or later,
are inscribed into the legal system, into laws.
So it's not only that socially you will be ostracized,
or you will lose your friends. You will be repressed simply. I mean this
this is shocking. You use this term coercion to freedom so explain that to
me. Well that's a that that goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau who had this idea that the society should be what
he called Volonté Générale, the general, goals that we pursue.
And there might be some people who will,
mavericks, eccentrics, or troublemakers,
who would say, no, no, I want it my own way.
And then you can coerce them.
And it is a good kind of coercion
because you coerce those people to freedom.
It sounds, of course, awful now when we read this.
Having all this experience, you know, Rousseau was,au was mid-18th century.
You hadn't seen the application of that yet.
For instance, today
as
toute proportion gardée
we have something which is similar to what was
happening in the Soviet Union or under the communist regime that if you were
one of those troublemakers who did not fit into the system did not follow the rules, right? They were outsiders or they defied the system.
He was considered not only dangerous,
he was considered to be sort of sick.
It's a form of disease.
And then he should be treated, right?
He should go to hospital and some kind of medication, therapy.
And we have something like this today.
Isn't that where the term re-education comes from?
Yes, re-education.
Now, today, if you are considered to be an unruly
person, having wrong ideas, the court, I think even the
management of the company, can order you to
undergo a therapy.
The ideas that you express are not just wrong ideas or controversial ideas or whatever.
There is something wrong with you, so you have to undergo therapy.
You have to be a different person.
In the Soviet Union, they sent us to the psychiatric hospital.
It was called Psyhushka.
You are sick, so you have to be treated by the psychiatrist.
And then you will become a normal person.
You will conform.
So something like that is going on today.
And it's considered to be normal.
Or take another example, raising consciousness.
That's also the expression that goes back to the communist times.
You were not aware of the blessings and the goodness of communism. So you have to undergo all sorts of courses.
Well, you have to take some lessons.
And the teachers were telling you,
they were trying to open your eyes
and see how happy you are to live under the communists and what
precious and valuable message the communist ideology conveys.
I've been on this show, I've covered, for example, multiple times I bring references
to Herbert Marcuse and his work around the concept of repressive tolerance.
I see that as a kind of seminal work in the sense that there's this idea that certain kinds of
people or certain kinds of ideas shouldn't be tolerated. They're beyond the pale,
so we have to kind of struggle against them. so that's a different view.
That's saying, well, this communist neo-Marxist idea
or cultural Marxist idea fed into our system
and that has changed how politics works.
But you're actually saying something quite different.
You're saying that the seeds of all of this type of thinking that you're describing,
which you're comparing with the Soviet Union, actually comes from liberal democracy itself, I think.
Which is a completely different way of looking at it.
In a way.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, in the imagination of a whole bunch of people who had subscribed to the first option I gave you right you were
sort of imagining that the communists have caught at some level sort of you
know infiltrated into the Constitutional Republic of America the liberal
democracy of Canada so forth this is a different way of looking at it this is
saying something like you know people who just truly believe in liberal democracy, right,
that this is their vision.
They may fall into this autocratic-type thinking
and, you know, coercive policy and so forth
outside of needing any of that, right?
That's what I mean.
Yeah, I understand. I would say this is's what I mean. Yeah, I understand.
I would say this is both.
I mean, because, yes, Marxism or neo-Marxism
infiltrated and became a part of today's culture
in liberal democratic society.
But you're right that my argument was slightly different.
But let's take first liberalism and democracy because I think it would make it make clear why
why is it that liberalism may result in a kind of despotic system.
I don't believe that liberalism is about liberty.
And when I say that, I do not mean today's liberalism.
I mean liberalism as such.
John Locke, John Stuart Mill, all the big guys
from the liberal tradition.
The liberal
would say something like this.
We defend freedom.
And freedom is
that is
the absence
of coercion.
Freedom is like
having free space where you can
do whatever you like.
You may smoke a cigarette having free space where you can do whatever you like, right?
You may smoke a cigarette or you can refuse to smoke a cigarette.
We want to be safe in our homes, in our private life.
Whenever we go, we like to have this free space to do what we like, of course. And now if you want to introduce or establish a liberal order,
then you have to distribute this freedom, right?
So that everybody is happy with the freedom they have.
And how do you do that?
Who's responsible for distribution of freedom,
of distribution of these free spaces for each person or each community?
And the liberals would say, well, we are in favor of freedom.
And then I would say, why you?
I mean, why do you put yourselves above everyone else? If you distribute freedom, that means you claim for yourself quite a menacing power. I mean, there are several other groups who also can be responsible for that.
And then what is the criteria of distributing freedom? And most of the answers is equality.
That is, everybody should have more or less the same amount of freedom. Now that is again another controversial, if not dangerous, notion. You have a society
that is somehow historically structured. That is you have, for instance, you have a Christian
society, in the sense that the society that was created or evolved in the Christian tradition, and you have powerful Christian communities,
you have Christian institutions.
Now, if you as a liberal are in control of the society,
then the power that you have gives you the opportunity or the instruments to say, no, you have too much freedom, right?
You Christians have too much freedom. Those guys, I don't know, Buddhists or whatever, right,
have little. So we take some freedom from Christians and give it to Buddhists. Or heterosexual men have too much freedom.
The space they have for themselves is too big.
But homosexual men have too little.
So you see, liberalism is in fact a kind of social engineering. And it may be very brutal because it implies restructuring,
even recycling of the society.
That is, liberalism is not about live and let live.
It's this constant restructuring
of the society always in the name of freedom.
David Plylar, Right.
Now you're answering the question, coercion to freedom again.
And democracy, well, democracy is again a very, well,
interesting and complicated notion.
I will not go into it.
But America was considered, I mean America,
the United States, right?
Was considered to be the first democratic nation.
And I recommend the book, classical, right?
The book on the states, Democracy in America by Tocqueville, right?
A French aristocrat who visited the United States in the early 1830s,
and he wrote a book which is kind of...
Seminal.
Seminal, yeah.
Well, I was going to say, it's the first modern democracy.
Of course, we have the demos from...
Right, right.
Of course, of course.
And he was very much in favor of what he saw.
You can find some beautiful passages about how Americans in democracy they build up,
they organize themselves.
There's energy and all this.
But then the book ends with a sort of prediction
which is very disconcerting.
I mean this system can develop into something new for which, he says, for which I have no name, but this is a new despotism, which he called despotism bienveillant à tout, despotism that is benevolent and mild. and that people will sort of lose their will
and will be satisfied with the pleasures,
with fun they will have, entertainment,
and they will lose their will
and they will be controlled by this benevolent despot,
bureaucracy, modern state, or corporations, or whatever.
And then there's a series of books which shows that this is something
that democracy can generate, and often generates, a mass society
where people are really indistinguishable from one another.
They are the products of corporations, fashion.
They dress the same.
They use the same language, the same expression.
Their imaginations
are more or less alike
because they are fed
by the same images
so all these things
are happening
and you cannot be satisfied
with the
notion that it is the best
of all political systems
by the way it is not the best of all political systems. By the way, it is not the best of all political systems.
When the book was published, one of the criticisms that was usually raised,
if you are not dissatisfied, if you are dissatisfied with liberal democracy,
what, pray, is the alternative?
Give me the alternative. What do you want?
And I say, well, I'm not very original.
I'm in favor of something with which the Greeks,
the ancient Greeks, Plato and Aristotle,
called the mixed regime.
That is a system that is sort of structurally pluralistic.
By the way, I think the United States was constructed,
I mean the system of course, was constructed basically as a mixed regime
by the framers, right,
those who wrote the Constitution and who set up the system.
But 50 or 60 years later, Tocqueville did not see the mixed regime.
What he saw was democracy.
But if you read the Federalist Papers, people like
Madison, you see that they were all very well educated people, educated on
classical political thought. They did not want America to become democracy.
They wanted America to become republic. That was their word, right?
Republic.
And that was some kind of a mixed regime.
The president being American president,
having enormous power,
was sort of equivalent of the king, right?
Senate was to be,
I don't know, equivalent of the Council of the Elders as it was in ancient systems.
And of course the House of Representatives was the
representatives of the demos.
So these ideas were very much alive and the framers of the American system
found them inspiring
and most of the countries in Europe
Britain, Britain was a monarchy
but Montesquieu when he wrote about Britain
he said it's a sort of republic
formally it's a monarchy
but it's a republic in the sense of mixed regime.
The word politia, which the Greeks used,
was translated into Latin by the word repubblica, republic.
So this idea of mixed regime was quite, I would say,
entrenched in political thought.
Later on we became infatuated with the notion of liberal democracy
and it made our minds very dogmatic
and we do not want to discuss these things because immediately somebody will accuse you
of being illiberal or anti-democratic
and a Nazi, a fascist.
So you better shut up.
A lot of people prefer to shut up
than risk being in trouble.
I recently was looking
at what the most popular texts being read
in the U.S. and Canada are.
And you have, you know, Das Kapital
and the Communist Manifesto,
always near the top.
The Bible's also near the top.
You know, it's sad that de Tocqueville's
Democracy in America isn't near the top
because it's a very, you know,
I guess a very apropos.
It's a fantastic book.
Right.
Absolutely.
One of the fundamental things.
It would be helpful because it provides, it shows the great, you know, the wonder and the beauty.
It also shows, you know, the possible outcome that he's already kind of seeing beginning.
It's fascinating. So one thing that you've written
that really struck me is you said, you know, the idea of human beings having inalienable rights
is counterintuitive and extremely difficult to justify. I just take it for granted.
Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a. It sounds very illiberal.
It sounds blasphemous.
Sacrilege.
Yeah, it's a vital part of the American creed, right?
We hold these truths, we serve evidence that all men are created equal
and are endowed by the creator
with the inalienable rights of life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness.
I find it very strange.
Why is it self-evident?
Self-evident for whom?
You do not find it anywhere.
It's not one of those tautologies like two plus two is four.
It's not a Christian notion. It's not in the Bible. It's not in the theological tradition.
It's not in the classical philosophy. It's not self-evident at all. I mean, why should we have any civil rights? You may say that for people, for human development, for life,
you have to have some liberty, freedom,
because it's an indispensable condition for a decent human being.
But there are other things also that are essential for development. The ancient sages talked about virtue, courage, wisdom, spiritual sensitivity. So all these things are important. Now if you define a human being by the concept of rights, it means by the mere fact that you are born, you can make certain claims.
And I don't see why.
It's like in hereditary aristocracy.
You could make certain claims because you are born in a good family
or considered to be a good family.
You could have, I don't know, slaves, right?
You could have all sorts of riches because, well,
you were born into a rich family.
But the true aristocracy was different.
There is the saying, noblesse oblige.
If you are a nobleman and have aspiration to be a good human being, well developed human
being, you are defined more by duties, by obligations, not by rights.
Yes, you have to defend your freedom,
but freedom is all these things, all these virtues,
and all these duties to your loved ones,
your family, your country, your community,
to truth, beauty, and all these things. I mean, this is how a human being should be defined
not by rights, especially that
the rights have
derailed, nowadays you have
the multiplicity of rights, rights killing rights
you have people talking about
rights, freedom of speech
is diminishing.
It was considered to be the essential right.
But now it's argued that it infringes on other rights, basically.
Well, it infringes on the rights that are the expression of power of one group, right? If people hope at the beginning, the declaration of human rights,
that this will somehow make us safer,
that our freedoms will be guaranteed, it didn't work.
We have less and less freedom.
Or a right to life, right?
Abortion is everywhere.
So, right to life? I mean everywhere so right to life i mean it's a laughing stock doesn't exist in in most of the countries so this did not really
function well because i think the notion itself is is misconceived it's uh It's not defensible
because it makes a wrong assumption about human beings.
We are not rights-bearing entities.
We are more than that.
Your book, The Demon in Democracy,
is an incredible, I think, contribution to thought
because I don't think anybody would disagree
that there's something wrong at present
with our democratic systems, the way they function.
There would probably be strong agreement on all fronts
on this question, right?
And I think you provide some very insightful ways
to try to understand where some of those things went wrong.
That's why I want to encourage our viewers to actually read your book.
Any final thoughts as we finish?
Well, I think the basics, we have to start from politics.
I mean, one way to start was, of course, politics,
because politics now is everywhere.
Politics is about equilibrium,
that we should regain this equilibrium.
That is, again, the party of change, the party of continuity.
There should be an option, an alternative, right,
between the left and the right.
Not one mainstream.
And whoever does not belong to the mainstream
is a Nazi, right?
Or a fool or an insane person
that should be treated
by psychiatrists. or an insane person that should be treated by a psychiatrist.
So I think this is basic.
There should be some balance.
And that's where democratic politics works.
We should have a choice whether we
want to move towards more radical change or whether we
want to rather stick to the continuity, conserving what we have, making some adjustments.
This is the natural political process. If we have only one direction, and this is what is called extreme center,
radicals, right? Radicals having power and making more and more crazy things, crazy experiments with then we are on the slippery slope
and the system will become more and more despotic
and that has to be prevented.
So choice, equilibrium,
some kind of political and ideological balance.
This is a healthy political structure. If we don't have it, then the system
will degenerate. Well, Professor Richard Legutko, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you.
It's been a pleasure for me. Thank you all for joining Professor Richard Legutko and me on this
episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.