Breaking Bad

Nationalist Populism and the Troglodyte Society

I recently watched the beautiful Chilean documentary La memoria infinita (The Eternal Memory) on BBC Iplayer. For those who don’t know, it’s an intimate portrait of the late Chilean journalist Augusto Góngora and his wife Paulina Urrutia, as Góngora slips into Alzheimer’s. Much of it was shot by Urrutia during the Covid pandemic, when it was impossible for the camera crew to be in the house.

Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease, but this isn’t a depressing film. Even as Góngora’s world slowly crumbles to the point when he can’t even recognize his own reflection in the mirror, there is so much humanity, humour, love and devotion in their relationship that the film becomes an act of celebration and affirmation of their relationship and the lives they led.

Góngora was a tv journalist with the independent news programme Teleanálisis during the Pinochet regime, which bravely covered aspects of Chilean society that the dictatorship tried to ignore, and tried to give a voice to its victims. With the return of democracy, he turned his attention to culture and cultural politics, producing a series of programmes on writers, artists and film directors.

Urrutia is a film and stage actress, a trade unionist and academic, who became president of the National Council of Culture and the Arts in 2006 under the government of Michelle Bachelet. The scenes of the couple coping with the COVID pandemic and with Góngora’s failing memory, are interspersed with footage from their earlier lives and careers, which give you an insight into their broad private and public trajectories.

Both of them, separately and together, lived virtuous lives - in the sense that the concept of virtue was used in the Enlightenment, to describe a sense of moral purpose and public duty and the desire to do good in the world. In Letters XI and XII from the Persian Letters, the philosopher Montesquieu’s imaginary traveller Usbek depicts a mythical Arabian tribe of Troglodytes, whose members acted purely out of ‘savage instincts. Every man determined to do what was right in his own eyes; and in attending to his own interests, the general welfare was forgotten.’

In Montesquieu’s parable, such behaviour brings the Troglodytes to ruin and self-destruction. Only two families escape the collapse of their society, whose leaders

loved their wives, and were beloved most tenderly. Their utmost care was given to the virtuous training of their children. They kept before their young minds the misfortunes of their countrymen, and held them up as a most melancholy example. Above all, they led them to see that the interest of the individual was bound up in that of the community; that to isolate oneself was to court ruin; that the cost of virtue should never be counted, nor the practice of it regarded as troublesome.

La memoria infinita gives you a strong sense of this unassuming but formidable couple, who survived dictatorship, and remained committed to truth-telling, social justice, and democratic politics; who never lost their sense of culture as a source of pleasure, and also as a democratic instrument and a means of deepening and widening our understanding of society and the world; who lived according to the notion that the fate of the individual is bound up with the community.

You see these principles played out in footage of Urrutia in a play about torture during the Pinochet years; of Góngora watching the violent repression of street protests that his tv programme once covered and remembering the people who died to make Chilean democracy possible; of his interviews with Chilean filmmakers and artists; of a book launch on historical memory in which he explains to his audience how the reconstruction of the past is the key to constructing a better future.

This last footage alternates with a painful scene of Góngora during the pandemic, barely able to reconstruct his own past, and fearfully holding onto a handful of books in the belief that someone might steal them. Yet even in these dark hours, the two of them still cherish each other, and their lives still have a moral coherence that is conspicuously absent in our miserable era of the political grifter, the sociopath, and the headlong race towards the lowest common denominator.

The gilded rapist-felon Donald Trump is the most obvious and most grotesque manifestation of this absence - for reasons too numerous to go into here. But there are so many other politicians like him, who are inspired by him, who exude the same cruelty and malice, the same fanaticism, venality and corruption, the same vulgarity, stupidity and narcissism.

Bolsonaro, Johnson, Milei, Abascal, Duterte - the list is endless. And this dismal procession of monstrosities is made possible by a global movement that includes media outlets like Fox News and GB News, legions of Internet trolls and Youtubers, Katie Hopkins, the Tate brothers and Elon Musk. Crucially, it also includes voters, millions of whom no longer want their leaders to be good, generous, altruistic, thoughtful, or honest, but revel in their lunacy, fakery and feckless viciousness.

This trajectory isn’t exclusively rightwing - there are grifters on the left too, who share some of these qualities. But it is the new ethnonationalist-populist right that has done more than any other political movement to break down the norms and standards that are essential to democratic governance. This is a movement that has turned ‘virtue signalling’ into a term of abuse, that actively promotes incompetents, charlatans, fanatics, petty tyrants and outright crooks into high office in order to further its political goals, and seeks to bully and destroy individuals and institutions that oppose it.

Take this month’s encounter between Doctor Anthony Fauci and the House Select Subcommittee on the COVID-19 pandemic. In a normal world, this should have been an opportunity for US government representatives and the most influential scientist during the pandemic to discuss what went wrong and what right, and how America might better prepare itself for the next one.

But we have left that world some time ago. And so what America got was a stream of hostile Republican ‘politicians’, mostly notably the living troll Marjorie Taylor Greene, accusing Fauci of hypocrisy, negligence, covering up the ‘truth’ about the origins of COVID, and ruining the lives of Americans with bad science.

Greene refused even to call Fauci ‘Doctor’ , and berated what she called ‘your science’, while calling on him to be tried and put in jail. Bear in mind that Fauci has been a dilligent public servant for four decades. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), he has helped diagnose and treat illnesses that include AIDS and COVID-19. He has saved millions of lives. Greene is a white supremacist, conspiracy theorist, and trash-politician who has not contributed a single useful thing to American society. In the Persian Letters, Montesquieu’s traveller rejects the idea that the Troglodytes are ‘counterfeit presentments of the lower animals’:

They had not fur like bears; they did not hiss like serpents; and they did possess two eyes: but they were so malicious, so brutish, that they lacked all notion of justice and equity.

That is Taylor Greene, and so many others like her, in a nutshell. And in a country that still retained any sense of civic virtue - or even basic self-interest - she would not even be a congresswoman, let alone have been allowed to harangue a scientist who has already received death threats precisely because of the charges that Greene and her bug-eyed cohorts have thrown at him.

But then, in a normal world, a president who has been found guilty of rape, bribing a porn star, or encouraging an attack on the Capitol building in an attempt to overturn an election result, would not be the current favourite to win the US election. And Republican politicians would not be grovelling at his feet. And Republican voters would not be wearing t-shirts that proclaim ‘I’m voting for the felon.’

This is what happens when you abandon any commitment to public virtue - you will vote for the felon. I know there are many complex reasons why we have reached this stage - not the least of which are the failings of the governments and institutions that preceded the monstrosities who currently assail us. I am not hearkening back to a golden age of public integrity. I know there have been lying, corrupt politicians, who have got away with it in the past.

But it is still something of a novelty for those of us born in the middle of the twentieth century - with the memory of fascism haunting our youthful political lives - to find ourselves once again faced with a political movement that doesn’t even pay lip service to the ideal of public service, integrity and honesty, supported by millions of voters who don’t care about these things either.

Call it moral degeneration, post-truth politics, or political decadence, but it’s also a seedbed for fascism and democratic collapse. Because if you abandon even the attempt to get the best - or at least better - people in public life, you will get people like Trump or George Santos. If voters will knowingly vote for ‘the felon’, simply because he is their felon, then why bother electing someone who even tries to live with some integrity?

If people like Boris Johnson can prosper from a life of deceit and self-interest, then why bother trying to live any other kind of life?

All this might seem like good knockabout fun to those who hold all politicians in contempt, or don’t believe that ‘experts’ have anything to tell them. But the longer this goes on, the more the threshold of acceptability is lowered, and the more standards will drop, as more and more people discover that there are no moral, ethical, or even legal barriers to self-advancement.

In the end, such behaviour will gradually erode any notion of politics as an instrument of the common good, leaving only politics-as-war, or politics-as-grift. And in these circumstances, virtue will not triumph and the monsters who come next are likely to be worse than the ones who came before.

Because if our leaders have nothing to correct what Montesquieu called their ‘natural wickedness’, then we will find ourselves in the society of the Troglodytes, where ‘the people were swayed only by their savage instincts. Every man determined to do what was right in his own eyes; and in attending to his own interests, the general welfare was forgotten.’

We aren’t there - yet - but this is the direction of travel of the nationalist right, and there are too many powerful people determined to quicken the process. They want us all to think and behave like Troglodytes, because this is what they have always done.

The love story of Augusto and Paulina is a reminder that we don’t have to accept that invitation to be the worst we can be; we always have a choice, and even in these dire times, there are people around who can remind us why humanity is still worth saving and fighting for.