It is like a news item from the early 20th century: an autocratic prime minister shot by a poet in some remote Mitteleuropean town. But the more we consider the assassination attempt on Robert Fico, Slovakia’s strongman, the more contemporary it looks.
Fico himself is a creature of the modern age, a former communist apparatchik who rose to power by railing against economic liberalism and who, more recently, took to engaging in Trumpian culture wars. The murder attempt is a product of those culture wars, which see every political difference catastrophized.
When the Slovak Republic was born on Jan. 1, 1993, political assassinations were thought to be a thing of the past. The partition of Czechoslovakia had been amicable, and Slovakia, historically the poorer partner, began a rapid rise toward Western European living standards.
That is what countries did back then. They moved, however fitfully and patchily, toward the kind of society that people in North America and Western Europe took for granted. On every measure, the world in the 1990s became more peaceful, more democratic, and more law-based. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.
What changed? Why, after seven decades of steady advance, did liberal democracy begin to retreat after 2012? Why did a country like Slovakia, a textbook exemplar of the benefits of globalization and democratization, elect a Putinite with thinly veiled authoritarian tendencies?
And why are other countries doing the same? Even in the United States, taboos against threatening the division of powers and refusing to acknowledge democratic election results have weakened perilously.
There are three possible explanations for what has gone wrong. First, the global financial crisis delegitimized the market system. Low- and median-income families were hit by taxes in order to bail out wealthy bankers and bondholders. For the first and only time in history, an essentially Marxist critique of the capitalist system seemed vindicated. The rich really did use state power to hang on to their wealth. Voters have not forgotten.
Second, there has been an unprecedented increase in global migration, a völkerwanderung enabled by advances in technology. The spread of smartphones allows people to transfer information and credit, so making feasible journeys that their grandparents could not have contemplated.
Rapid demographic change is unsettling. We are a territorial species and, when people move without permission into what we regard as our space, we react. Slovakia is no exception. Excluding Ukrainian refugees, the country saw a nine-fold increase in illegal immigration last year. “God alone knows how many of them are terrorists or how many have infectious diseases,” declared Fico during the Trump-flavored election campaign that saw him returned to office.
Smartphones bring us to the third explanation. Put simply, screens have addled our minds, shortened our attention spans, placed us in political silos, and made us grumpier. Jonathan Haidt has written a compelling book called The Anxious Generation, which shows how smartphones have left young people more frightened, more credulous, more unhappy, and more stupid. Starting in 2012, in every developed country, the mental health of young people deteriorated, self-harm and suicide rates increased, and test scores fell. No other explanation fits the timeline.
Haidt’s interest is in children under the age of 16, whose minds are more plastic and therefore more vulnerable. But why assume that adults are immune? We can all see the way screen addiction has made people less interested in nuance, readier to reason backward from their preferred conclusions, and more prone to conspiracy theories. I don’t believe the demented and largely fact-free arguments over the 2020 election would have taken off in an earlier age.
“Wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. After he wrote those words, people became steadily better informed, as literacy spread, the price of printing fell and, in time, the internet arrived.
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But might we have reached saturation point? More words are being written and read than ever before, but we are becoming lazier about applying the filters of plausibility, consistency, and common sense. Like our pre-literate and pre-Enlightenment ancestors, we have taken to assuming that those who disagree with us are simply bad people.
When Putin and Xi talk, as they did at their summit this week, of replacing the Western world order, they have cause to be confident. That order, the liberal order that became ascendant from the 18th century and dominant after 1945, depends on a habit of mind that we are losing. In the world that succeeds it, political assassinations will be the least of our worries.
