Drop Bothsideism

Western media are not equipped to handle right-wing populists like Donald Trump, Orbán, or the AfD. Moreover, constitutional theorists who argue that democracy should be purely procedural are joining the populist chorus.

It must be pretty depressing to be a Ukrainian soldier right now. Imagine spending your second year in the trenches with Russian artillery shells flying around with no prospect of it stopping anytime soon. Granted, the Ukrainians have delivered positively on the battlefield in recent months, not least with the attacks into Russian Kursk. But “Winter is coming”, and right now Ukraine is looking into the third winter with constant attacks on infrastructure and key supply chains.

If you look at the so-called freedom loving Western world, which again and again promised to have the Ukrainians’ back and to do “what ever it takes” to help fight the Russian invasion, the disillusionment must be even greater. The arms and munitions are not coming, and the West is not delivering enough to win the war.

Let’s take Europe first. The months-long government crisis in France and the humiliating defeat of the German traffic light government in the eastern German states, Thüringen, Saxony and nearly also in Brandenburg – projecting what waits in next year’s German federal election – seriously questions what is left of Europe’s resolve. Not to speak of the already battered France-German axis.

And although Ursula von der Leyen hopefully takes advantage of the power vacuum to step up as the EU’s real “commander in chief”, European cooperation is seriously shaken by war fatigue, self-pity and not least the lack of political will.

If the Ukrainians had hoped to rely on the Americans, they also have to be particularly optimistic. Although Kamala Harris has done well in her very short race for president of the United States, the polls still predict a dead heat and a 50 percent chance that Trump may put the final nail in the coffin of American democracy.

If he wins, the Ukrainians, and we in Europe, need to buckle up and prepare for a four-year rollercoaster ride that – if we survive – will disrupt everything from security guarantees to good trade relations. If Trump loses on the other hand, it won’t go quietly either, as he and his close allies have already announced that the election then – again – will be stolen. This is one of the reasons why a rising number of American observers fear that this November’s election could be the last democratic election in the US.

More and more commentators and democracy scholars therefore suggest that we drop the “bothsideism” that we in the West have hailed the past decade in our zeal to “understand populism”. According to Webster’s dictionary, “bothsideism” means that the mainstream media and commentators, in a misguided attempt to balance opinions, give credence to views, positions, or actions that undermine the very same democracy that makes the expression of the viewpoint possible in the first place.

In Germany, the media has been quite careful not to fall into the “Bothsideism-trap” as regards its AfD coverage and kept a critical stance to the extreme right, but in the coverage of the US presidential election no media pundits in the US or in Europe have truly succeeded in calling out the grotesque lies, name-calling and absurdities we have been facing over the past months and years. Instead, pundits and media outlets relativize and downplay the utterly grotesque actions, claims and disinformation that Trump (and his running-mate J.D Vance) have been spewing since Trump first ran for the job as leader of the free world.

“Bothsidesism is poisoning America” as Laila Lalami put it in an article in 2019. Here she describes how journalists, in fear of being exposed as biased, become “co-producers” of Trump’s absurd stories, for example, that the 2020 election was stolen. They downplay his criminal actions or indirectly play along with the idea that the violence Trump himself orchestrated on January 6, 2021, was not a “real” coup, but just a bunch of slightly confused people having a picnic in Congress.

The warning against “bothsideism” is that media and commentators – knowing it is problematic – unwittingly contribute to disinformation and to legitimizing lies themselves. Hence, while you should always be open to the views of your opponent, this – hopefully – doesn’t include lies, manipulations and threats to democracy. Still, Western democracies and their analysts are notoriously ill-equipped to deal with the transformation of politics that today’s populists represent.

Recent year’s media coverage of Viktor Orbáns destruction of democracy in Hungary is evidence of this. In the age of populism where the “elite” is presented as “the enemy of the people”, critical voices are not welcome when calling out a man who has won the national election four times in a row. Also, not when we know that he used his first election-win to prepare for the next by gerrymandering, packing courts and media and gradually simply dismantling “real” democracy and the rule of law.

Elections and voting are not enough to build a democracy even though the so-called behavioral school in political science often assumes this. Indeed, the German lawyer and political scientist Karl Loewenstein already in the 1930s pointed out that defining democracy only by voting and forming majorities would reduce true substantive democracy to what he called “democratic fundamentalism”. Today this view has become so widespread that it is close to impossible to fight populism.

Populism has killed (militant) democracy

“Bothsideism” in fact has a lot in common with Loewenstiens idea of “democratic fundamentalism” while standing in sharp contrast to his equally famous term “Militant democracy” – sometimes also called “defensive democracy”. What Loewenstein argued was that in light of both the rise of fascism and communist movements and parties in the 1930’s extraordinary measures could be necessary to protect not just the formal part of democracy but its core values. After the Second World War and the extermination of 6 million Jews and other minorities, the view that democracy has a substance that should be protected became particularly important in Germany but also spread with the idea of constitutionalism, judicial review and strong courts to guard these values in most of the rest of Europe.

In our current age of populism, however, we have missed these important points and keep telling ourselves that everyone’s voice is always equally valid – also when based on lies and disinformation. It’s just another “point of view”. What populism has undermined is thus the right but also the courage to call out those who deliberately spread lies but as well as those who in doing so openly use democratic institutions to destroy democracy. Moreover, populism has proved so powerful that many of its traits are currently encroaching into legal theory. Here theorists have begun to question not just militant democracy but also constitutionalism – both at the national and the European level calling constitutionalism “an ideology” and even “opium for the lawyers”, to quote Professor Martin Loughlin. In his book Against Constitutionalism he suggests a return to a world where the political procedures of voting and forming of majorities are what constitutes a true democracy. The Danish legal philosopher Alf Ross (1899-1979) who influenced all legal and political thinking in Scandinavia in the past century, subscribed to the same idea of democracy as having no core or substance in itself. In his view, establishing the popular will in parliament is the essence of democracy and should be respected no matter the outcome.

It is for this reason, Danes have never understood how Germans, having a far more substantial and value-based conception of democracy, would refuse to allow extreme right-wing populists into the government offices if that is what “the people want”. This is close to Loewensteins “democratic fundamentalism” and though some may regard it as more democratic, it would ultimately entail that we give Holocaust deniers an equal platform. Or to the “Putin-Versteher” who currently travel with Putin’s lies of “wanting peace in Ukraine” while shells are destroying schools and infrastructure. In the coverage of the American election, election-result-deniers, as well as those who say that there was no real coup on January 6^th, are already enjoying free running pass as “Bothsideism” dictates that these are just “views” – like all others.

The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama recently made very clear that the situation is unsustainable and that we need to call out the media and pundits who contribute to downplaying and thereby legitimizing nondemocratic actors who benefit from the populism inflicted “bothsideism”. We are long past the point where we should treat all “views” equally if we want to save democracy. Does that then make us activists instead of scholars? Activists for democracy and the rule of law? Hopefully yes. I wonder if the Ukrainian soldier fighting for freedom in the trenches wouldn’t agree.