A secular vs. religious catfight

‘We are Muslims too.’ This was the most frequent introduction offered by social democrat participants in TV debates in the first years that the AKP held power in Turkey. Just as what constituted being part of the we, ‘the real, ordinary, decent people’, meant supporting Brexit in Britain or accepting a bit of racism in the Netherlands, so did being conservative, provincial Sunni Muslim in Turkey.

Once the parameters had been set by the original owners of we, everyone else started trying to prove that they too prayed – just in private. Soon, Arabic words most people had never heard in their lives before became part of the public debate, and social democrats tried to compete with the ‘real Muslims’ despite their limited knowledge of religion. religion. The AKP spin doctors were quick to put new religious concepts into circulation, and critics were forever on the back foot, constantly having to prepare for pop quizzes on ancient scriptures.

One might wonder what would happen if you passed all the tests for being as real as them, as I did once. In 2013, after studying the Quran for over a year while writing my novel Women Who Blow on Knots, I was ready for the quiz. When the book was published, I was invited to take part in a TV debate with a veiled AKP spin doctor – a classic screen charade that craves a political catfight between a secular and a religious woman.

As I recited the verse in Arabic that gave the title to my novel and answered her questions on the Quran she smiled patronisingly and said, ‘Well done’. I was politely reminded of the fact that I was at best an apprentice of the craft she had mastered, and somehow owned. owned.

She made it very clear that people like me could only ever inhabit the outer circle of the real people. No matter how hard we toiled, we could only ever be members of the despised elite.

Just as what constituted being part of the we, ‘the real, ordinary, decent people’, meant supporting Brexit in Britain [...] so did being conservative, provincial Sunni Muslim in Turkey.

Any attempt to hang out at one of Nigel Farage’s ‘real people’s pubs’ or a Trump supporters’ barbecue would doubtless end with a similar patronising smile, and maybe a condescending pat on the shoulder: ‘Way to go, kiddo!’

One of the interesting and rarely mentioned aspects of this process is that at times the cynical and disappointed citizens, even though they are critical of the movement, secretly enjoy the fact that the table has been messed up. The shocked face of the establishment amuses them.

They know that the massive discontent of the neglected masses will eventually produce an equally massive political reaction, and they tend to believe that the movement might have the potential to be this long-expected corrective response to injustice. Until they find out it is not. ‘The insinuation that the exterminator is not wholly in the wrong is the secret belief of the age of Kafka and Hitler’, says the authority on German literature J. P. Stern.

The limitless confidence of the movement is not, therefore, entirely based on its own merit; the undecided, as well as many an adversary, can furnish the movement with confidence through their own hesitations. After all, there’s nothing wrong with saying the establishment is corrupt, right? By keeping its ideological goals vague and its words sweet, the movement seduces many by allowing them to attribute their own varying ideals or disappointments to it. What is wrong with being decent and real anyway?

‘I don’t understand how they won. I’m telling you, lady, not a single passenger said they were voting for them. So who did vote for these guys?’ This was the standard chat of taxi drivers in Turkey after the AKP’s second election victory. As a consequence, ‘So who did vote for these guys?’ became a popular intro to many a newspaper column.

Clearly neither taxi drivers nor the majority of opinion-piece writers could make sense of the unceasing success of the movement, despite rising concerns about it. After hearing the same question several times, I eventually answered one of the taxi drivers with a line that became the intro to one of my own columns: ‘Evidently they all catch the bus.’

Fed-up fishermen

After the Brexit referendum, many people in London doubtless asked themselves a similar question. If I’d been a British columnist, the title for my column might have been ‘The Angry Cod Beats European Ideals’. Among the groups who voted Leave in the referendum were Scottish fishermen, who have obsessed for many years over the fact that European fishermen were allowed to fish in Scottish waters, as well as pissed off about an array of other European things that are of next to no consequence to Scotland.

Similarly, in countries such as Hungary and Poland where right-wing populism is in control of the political discourse there has always been a ‘condescending Brussels elite’, or ‘the damn Germans’, who stand in the way of better lives for ordinary men, as well as the nation’s ‘greatness’.

I am aware that what I have written above might seem like the condescending remarks of a cosmopolitan, unreal person, and that there is, of course, a real and solid sense of victimhood behind all of these new movements: many of their members are indeed the people who catch the bus, and who have seen the price of their fish and chips rise. It would therefore, as Greek economist and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis says, be inconsequential mental gymnastics for intellectuals to analyse these movements only ‘psychoanalytically, culturally, anthropologically, aesthetically, and of course in terms of identity politics’.

In countries where right-wing populism is in control of the political discourse there has always been a ‘condescending Brussels elite’, or ‘the damn Germans.”

And I agree with him on the fact that ‘the unceasing class war that has been waged against the poor since the late 1970s’ has been intentionally omitted from the narrative, and carefully kept outside the mainstream global discussion.

Invented victimhood

Moreover, these right-wing populist movements can, in fact, also be seen as newly-built, fast-moving vehicles for the rich, a means for the ruling class to get rid of the regulations that restrain the free-market economy by throwing the entire field of politics into disarray. After all, there is certainly real suffering, genuine victimhood behind these movements. However, they do not only emerge from real suffering, but also from manufactured victimhood. In fact, it is the latter that provides the movement with most of its energy and creates its unique characteristics. In Turkey, the invented victimhood was that religious people were oppressed and humiliated by the secular elite of the establishment. For Brexiteers it is that they have been deprived of Britain’s greatness. For Trump voters it is that Mexicans are stealing their jobs.

For Polish right-wing populists it is Nazis committing crimes against humanity on their soil without their participation and the global dismissal of the nation’s fierce resistance to the German invasion in 1939. For Germany’s AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) it is the ‘lazy Greeks’ who benefit from hard-working real Europeans, etc. etc.

The content really doesn’t matter, because in the later stages it changes constantly, transforms and is replaced in relation to emerging needs and the aims of the movement. And every time the masses adapt to the new narrative, regardless of the fact that it often contradicts how the movement began in the first place.

In Turkey, the Gülen movement, a supranational religious network led by an imam who currently lives in Pennsylvania, was an integral part of Erdoğan’s movement, until it was labelled terrorist overnight. The same AKP ministers and party members who had knelt to kiss the imam Fethullah Gülen’s hand were, less than twenty-four hours later, falling over themselves to curse him, and none of Erdoğan’s supporters questioned this shift.

But how, one might ask, did the masses, dismissing the entirety of world history, start moving against their own interests, and against what are so obviously the wrong targets? Not the cheap-labour-chasing giant corporations, but poor Mexicans; not the cruelty of free-market economics, but French fishermen; not the causes of poverty, but the media. How did they become so vindictive against such irrelevant groups? Why do they demand respect from the educated elite, but not from the owners of multinational companies? And why did they do this by believing in a man just because he was seemingly ‘one of them’?

‘This is almost childish’, one might think. It seems infantile. And it is. That’s why, first and foremost, such leaders need to infantilise the people. Infantilisation of the masses through infantilisation of the political language is crucial. Otherwise you cannot make them believe that they can all climb into an imaginary car and travel across continents together. Besides, once you infantilise the common political narrative, it becomes easier to mobilise the masses, and from then on you can promise them anything.

‘… and that was when Chávez gathered his loyal friends under a fig tree on top of a hill. They all swore on the Bible. That’s how and why the revolution started.’ The Venezuelan ambassador to Turkey accompanied his closing words with a rehearsed hand gesture, indicating Heaven above, from whence the irrefutable truth had come. His finger lingered there for a dramatic moment, pointing to the ceiling of the Ankara Faculty of Law. His presentation was over, and as his fellow panellist it was my turn to address the question of how the Venezuelans managed to make a revolution.

In the barrios of Caracas

This was 2007, a year after I’d published We are Making a Revolution Here, Señorita!, a series of interviews I’d conducted in the barrios of Caracas about how the grassroots movement had started to organise itself in communes long before Hugo Chávez became president. I was therefore quite certain that the real story did not involve mythical components like fig trees on hilltops and messages direct from Heaven. I had maintained a bewildered smile in silence for as long as I could, expecting His Excellency sitting next to me to apply a little common sense, but I found my mouth slowly becoming a miserable prune, as my face adopted the expression of a rational human being confronted by a true believer.

It was already too late to dismiss his fairy tale as nonsense, so I simply said: ‘Well, it didn’t really happen like that.’ There were a few long seconds of tense silence as our eyes locked, mine wide open, his glassy, and my tone changed from sarcasm to genuine curiosity: ‘You know that, right?’ His face remained blank, and I realised, with a feeling somewhere between compassion and fear, that this well-educated diplomat was obliged to tell this fairy tale.

Hugo Chávez’s name was already in the hall of fame of ‘The Great Populists’. He was criminalising every critical voice as coming from an enemy of the real people while claiming to be not only the sole representative of the entire nation, but the nation itself. Evidently he was also concocting self-serving tales and making them into official history, infantilising a nation and rendering basic human intelligence a crime against the proceso, the overall transformation of the country to so-called socialism – or a version of it, tailored by Chávez himself.

The ambassador looked like a tired child who just wanted to get to the end of the story and go to sleep. I didn’t know then that in a short while grappling with fairy tales would become our daily business in Turkey, and that we would be obliged to prove that what everybody had seen with their own eyes had really happened.

The man was criminalising every critical voice as coming from an enemy of the real people while claiming to be not only the sole representative of the entire nation, but the nation itself.

‘It is alleged that the American continent was discovered by Columbus in 1492. In fact, Muslim scholars reached the American continent 314 years before Columbus, in 1178. In his memoirs, Christopher Columbus mentions the existence of a mosque on top of a hill on the coast of Cuba.’  On 15 November 2014, President Erdoğan told this tale to a gathering of Latin American Muslim leaders.

The next day journalists around the world reported on the Turkish president’s bombastic contribution to history, hiding their smirks behind polite sentences that confidently implied, ‘Of course it didn’t happen like that, but you know that anyway.’

Neither Brexit nor Trump had happened yet. The Western journalists therefore didn’t know that their smirks would become prunes when rationality proved helpless against not only the nonsense of a single man, but the mesmerised eyes of millions who believed his nonsense.

By means of hands-on exercises and tangible techniques, participants learn to better assess populist arguments, to quickly identify their strengths and weaknesses, to concisely formulate their own arguments, and to confidently and constructively confront people with populist standpoints.’

How to use logic against populists

I am quoting from an advertisement for the Institut für Argumentationskompetenz, a German think tank. The title of the course they offer clients is ‘How to Use Logic Against Populists’. Evidently the helplessness of rationality and language against the warped logic of populism has already created considerable demand in the politics market, and as a consequence martial-arts techniques for defensive reasoning are now being taught. The course involves two days of workshops, and attendees are invited to bring their own, no doubt maddening, personal experiences along.

Were I to attend the course with my sixteen years’ worth of Turkish experiences, I would humbly propose, at the risk of having Aristotle turn in his grave, opening this beginner’s guide to populist argumentation by presenting Aristotle’s famous syllogism ‘All humans are mortal. Socrates is human. Therefore Socrates is mortal.’

Although the fallacies seem egregious, they did not appear childish to half of Britain when Boris Johnson and his ilk in the Conservative Party and the Leave campaign exercised them liberally during the Brexit debate. As Zoe Williams wrote in The Guardian on 16 October 2016: ‘You’d hope for consistency and coherence; in its place the bizarre spectacle of a party claiming to have been against the single market all along, because Michael Gove once said so.’

In other words, argumentum ad ignorantiam. Michael Gove was the man who – bearing a striking resemblance to the populist driving Aristotle crazy above – declared that ‘People in this country have had enough of experts!’ It was comments like this that led the other half of Britain to believe that pro-Brexit arguments were too puerile to take seriously, and that only children could fall for them. Like millions of people in Europe, they also thought that if populist leaders were repeatedly portrayed as being childish, they would never be taken seriously enough to gain actual power.

‘I will tell you one description that everyone [in the White House] gave – that everyone has in common. They all say he is like a child.’ Almost a year after the Brexit referendum, Americans were exercising the same ‘adult strategy’ on the other side of the Atlantic. When Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published in the US in January 2018, its author Michael Wolf repeated this punchline in several television interviews. The concerned nods of the composed presenters, together with Wolf’s expression of someone bring bad news, created the impression of a parent-teacher meeting being held to discuss a problem child.

Poland’s former populist prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński and Turkey’s Erdoğan have both undergone such examinations in absentia by prominent psychiatrists and have likewise been described as broken children.

Elżbieta Sołtys, a Polish social scientist and psychologist, diagnosed Kaczyński as a traumatised child. In one interview she said it was probable that his low emotional intelligence was connected to his loveless and strict upbringing, adding that his current fury was an explosion following years of suppression. Erdoğan’s diagnosis was similar. His father used to hang him by his feet in order to stop him swearing, and as a result an entire country now has to suffer his volatile mood swings.

The primary consequence of calling these leaders infantile and psychologising their ruthlessness, is simply to make their critics feel more adult and mentally healthy by comparison. It attributes childish politics entirely to the populist leader and his supporters. As if everyone else (including the writer of this book, and its readers) were completely immune to an infantilised perception of the world. Well, it’s not like that. You know that, right?

Uruguay needs meat-cutting machines

‘I drive an old Volkswagen because I don’t need a better car.’ It’s November 2015, and the former Uruguayan president, José Mujica, is speaking on stage. I’m chairing what will come to be remembered as an almost legendary talk to an audience of five thousand people, most of them not actually inside the congress building in Izmir, but outside watching on a giant screen. Mujica wants to talk about how Uruguay needs meat-cutting machines (because in order to be able to export its meat the country needs to be able to cut it in accordance with the regulations of other countries), but the audience seems to prefer the fun stuff: the cute old Beetle, his humble house, and so on).

The next day, Mujica is described the same way in all the newspapers: ‘The humblest of presidents who drives a Volkswagen Beetle and lives in a small house...’ There is no mention of him being a socialist, no ideological blah blah, none of the boring adult content.

He is like Bernie Sanders, portrayed as the wise, cool old man during the Democratic primaries, or Jeremy Corbyn, whose home-made jam and red bicycle got more attention than his politics. These are the dervishes of our time, reduced to the kindly old men of fairy tales: fairy tales that attract those who see themselves as the adults and mock the ‘infantile’ supporters of populist leaders.

Much of the literature on populism and totalitarianism interprets the infantile narrative of the populists, as well as that of the ‘deceived’ masses who support them and choose to think in their fairy-tale language, as a political reaction that is specific to them. However, it would appear to be neither a reaction, nor specific. Rather, it’s a coherent consequence of the times we live in, and something that contaminates all of us, albeit in different ways.

Handbagging a nation

Although it may seem that the current right-wing populist leaders are performing some kind of magic trick to mesmerise the previously rational adult masses and turn them into children, they aren’t the ones who opened the doors to infantilised political language. The process started long before, when, in 1979, a famous handbag hit the political stage and the world changed.

That was the year a woman handbagged an entire nation with her black leather Asprey and said: ‘There is no alternative!’ When Margaret Thatcher ‘rescued’ a nation from the burden of having to think of alternatives, it resonated on the other side of the Atlantic with a man who perfected his presidential smile in cowboy movies.

As the decade-long celebration of alternativeness turned into a triumphalist neoliberal disco dance on the remains of the Berlin Wall, the mainstream political vocabulary became a glitterball of words like ‘vision’, ‘innovation’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘motivation’, while gradually distancing itself from sepia, adult concepts like ‘solidarity’, ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’. Because ‘That’s the way of the world’.

Meanwhile in Turkey, such terms, along with two hundred other ‘leftist terms’, were officially banned from the state lexicon, and removed from the state TV channel, after the military coup in 1980. Whether through violence or neoliberalist persuasion, the mainstream vocabulary used globally to talk about the world and our place in it – regardless of what language we speak – was transformed into a sandpit for us to play safely in: socialism and fascism on opposite sides as the improbables of politics, religion and philosophy on the other sides as the irrelevants of ethics.

Politics was reduced to mere administration, with people who knew about numbers and derivatives put in charge of taking care of us. It became the sort of bitter drink that children would instinctively avoid, but if people did insist on having a taste, then bucketfuls of numbers were poured into their glasses to teach them a lesson. It is not surprising that Nigel Farage has said: ‘I am the only politician keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive.’

And though it angered many when Thatcher’s biographer Jonathan Aitken said, ‘I think she would have secretly cheered [Farage]’ for his anti-refugee policies, it is nevertheless easy enough to picture Thatcher living down to her 1970s nickname by snatching milk out of the hands of Syrian children while saying, ‘People must look after themselves first.’

Illusory economic bloom

Ronald Reagan was likewise no less child-like when his team came up with the ‘Let’s make America great again’ slogan for his election campaign in 1980. The infantile political language of today, which seems to be causing a regression across the entire political spectrum, from right to left, is not in fact a reaction against the establishment, but instead something that follows the ideological fault lines of the establishment that was created in the eighties.

‘The use of coarse language stresses that he is in tune with the man on the street. The debunking style, which often slides over the edge into insult, emphasises his desire to distance himself from the political establishment.

Although this description would fit Trump, Erdoğan, Geert Wilders and any other populist leader, it actually refers to Beppe Grillo, former comedian and the leader of the Italian Five Star Movement (as described by the two Italian political scientists Fabio Bordignon and Luigi Ceccarini). He is just another example of how the populists politicise so-called everyday language in order to establish a direct line of communication to the real people.

Once this connection is established the leader has lift-off, enabling him to appear not only to fly above politics, but as high as he wants to go: the sky is the limit. The perceived sincerity, or genuineness, of direct communication with the masses, and the image of the leader merging to become one with them, is a common political ritual of populism. Hugo Chávez did it every week on his personal TV show Alo Presidente!, Erdoğan has done it through his own media, Grillo performed the same stunt through his website, and Trump uses his famous tweets to have a heart-to-heart with his people, unfiltered by the media elite.

The one important trick the populist leader has to pull off is that of making his supporters believe he is rejecting the elitist snobs and their media. He does so by including the media in his definition of ‘the political elite’, positioning it as an opponent – despite the fact that it is through the media that his connection to those masses is enabled.

This is a new political game that journalists are mostly unprepared for. It is a populist trick that Putin and Trump have both played on several occasions. On 7 July 2017, during the photo op before their one-on-one meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Putin leaned towards Trump, gestured at the journalists in the room and asked: ‘These the ones hurting you?’ Trump did not hesitate to respond: ‘These are the ones, you’re right about that.’

Taking down the weaker kids

All at once it was as if the bully and the more established bully were preparing to take down some weaker kids in the playground. The journalists at the summit were shocked by this sudden and unprecedented switch of the spotlight. Not only were they themselves the story, they also found themselves portrayed as opponents on the political stage. The supporters of both leaders no doubt enjoyed the moment and relished the idea that a good wrestle – in either the American or the Russian style – was about to begin to knock out the spoiled media brats.

The global media probably wouldn’t have been interested in what Thailand’s prime minister, Prayuth Chanocha, had to say at a press conference on 9 January 2018 had he not put a lifesize cardboard cut-out of himself in front of a microphone and told the assembled journalists to ‘Put your questions to this guy’.

Then he left the venue with a swagger, the very image of the jolly populist leader who has already achieved a lot, and it wasn’t even midday yet. The journalists were left smiling awkwardly, as if a child had just done something outrageous and there was nothing the adults present could do but hide their embarrassment by laughing. The BBC used the same type of laughter in a trailer that shows Trump heckling a BBC reporter – ‘Here’s another beauty’ – at a press conference while the other journalists present smile with raised eyebrows like intimidated adults in the school playground.

Journalists serve as a whipping boy who must be beaten whenever a display of ‘These are my people and I don’t give a damn what the establishment write about us’ is required. The leader does not even have to talk about the hideous nature of loser Socrates; dismissing oppressive Aristotle works well enough.

As the prominence of progressive intellect is gradually reduced to point-scoring against an opponent on social media or on the TV screen, the question of respectability becomes a problem for the critics of populism. Meanwhile, as the populist movement gains in power, the number of intellectuals lining up alongside the populist leaders rises – not because supporting them becomes less embarrassing, but because it has become normal.

This is why Donald Trump received a standing ovation from Congress for his State of the Union address in January 2018, something that would have seemed unimaginable to many Congress members only a year before, when he first entered the White House. The power of numerical normality encourages further departures from rationality and expands the limits of vulgarity until it has invaded the entire public sphere.

As the populist movement gains in power, the number of intellectuals lining up alongside the populist leaders rises.

One hardly realises how dire the damage to free thought and free speech is until the day comes when, for example, an important petition against the populist leader is launched, and you find yourself struggling to come up with prominent names who have not been tainted by the cage fight or driven crazy by the chaos. And in the end you come up with none. The critical voice becomes orphaned in the public sphere, and the opposing masses become a silent ship adrift without a lighthouse as they lose their opinion leaders.

Their desperation deepens as they realise that the centrifuge of the dominant narrative has sucked in those they believed knew better. At the same time, the populist media discourse is amplified and repeated to such a degree that even opposing elements of society begin to lose track of its serial crimes against rationality. That’s when you find yourself, finally, too exhausted to say, ‘Well it didn’t happen like that. You know that, right?’

Have you no sense of decency?

There is no law to prevent right-wing populist political language invading and destroying the public sphere. Therefore, when dissident voices become choked with anger, exhausted by the tireless attacks of party apparatchiks and maddened by the slipperiness of the ever-changing populist discourse, their last resort becomes begging for simple ethical manners, and shouting in the street or on social media, ‘Have some decency!’

At one point this might have worked, too. ‘Have you no sense of decency?’ asked the American lawyer Joseph Welch on 9 June 1954. Welch was serving as the chief counsel for the United States Army, which was under investigation for communist activities in the Army-McCarthy Senate hearings, and in one of the televised sessions Senator Joseph McCarthy launched an attack on a young man employed in Welch’s Boston law office. As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy’s career: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, ‘Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir?’ After a four-year-long communist witch-hunt, Welch’s question led to the evaporation of McCarthy’s popularity virtually overnight.

The world has altered dramatically since Joseph Welch changed American history simply by asking a question. And over the last decades the veins of rationality have become swollen with fury from calling – to no avail – for shame, while the populist has simply widened his grin and taken pride in his victory. We have finally lost what Albert Camus called ‘the old confidence [that] man had in himself, which led him to believe that he could always elicit human reactions from another man if he spoke to him in the language of a common humanity’. And so it is no wonder that more and more people are surrendering to the weariness of the child who just wants to get to the end of the tale and go to sleep.