Diversity poses no threat to democracy. What does imperil democracy are demagogues who deprive minorities of rights and claim that vesting themselves with extraordinary powers is vital to guarding the ethnic majority against the purported predations of minorities and immigrants. Virtually everywhere such demagogues have gained the upper hand. Moreover, they have claimed superiority as patriots and protectors of the nation. Democracy’s liberal defenders have often neglected the power of nationalism, regarding it as an unsavory atavism. If they are to successfully defend democracy in multiethnic societies, liberals must stop conflating nationalism with nativism and ethnonationalism, seize the flag, and arm themselves with emotionally compelling national-democratic narratives that appeal more widely than the biased tales spun by the illiberal foes of free government.
Diversity poses no threat to democracy. From Ghana to the United States and Estonia to Brazil, free government has thrived in multiethnic polities, and backsliding toward authoritarianism has occurred in both monoethnic and plural societies. What does threaten democracy are demagogues who deprive minorities of rights and claim that vesting themselves with extraordinary powers is vital to guarding the ethnic majority against the purported predations of minorities and immigrants.
Virtually everywhere that autocrats and would-be autocrats have gained the upper hand in the twenty-first century, they have recognized that politics is in part a contest to capture the flag, and they have invariably claimed superiority as patriots and protectors of the nation. By contrast, democracy’s liberal defenders have often neglected the power of nationalism. Many have conflated it with ethnonationalism and sometimes regard nationalism of any type as an unsavory atavism.
But nationalism’s power endures. The challenge for democrats, therefore, is to arm themselves with an inclusive, emotionally compelling national-democratic narrative that overmatches the narrow ethnonational tales spun by the illiberal foes of free government.
It might seem that the power of national attachment is diminishing under the forces of modernization. But, as Gina Gustavsson and David Miller have written, while “globalization and international migration have connected people across national boundaries” as never before, the share of Westerners professing to feel “very close” or “close” to their countries actually grew between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s.1 The most recent wave of the World Values Survey reveals the trend to be global: 91 percent of Germans, 94 percent of Poles, 91 percent of Filipinos, 85 percent of Japanese, and 83 percent of Turks claimed to feel “very close” or “close” to their countries.2
Some current-day liberals regard nationalism as a pernicious force, best left to democracy’s antagonists. But in a study of 24 European countries, Julian Erhardt and colleagues found that identification with one’s country was linked to higher support for democracy and lower support for authoritarian alternatives.3 In a study of the Netherlands and the United States, Gina Gustavsson and Ludvig Stendahl found that “scoring high on national pride is remarkably strongly and robustly related to higher levels of political trust.”4 National identification may also strengthen intercommunal trust in ethnically plural societies. Based on a field experiment in Malawi, Amanda Lea Robinson reported that exposing people to symbols such as the national flag, national currency, and national anthem “reduce[d] the degree to which coethnicity dictates interpersonal trust, ultimately breaking the link between ethnic diversity and low levels of interpersonal trust.”5 Volha Charnysh, Christopher Lucas, and Prerna Singh found that when Indian Hindus were prompted to think about their national identity, they were more likely to be generous toward Indian Muslims.6
Still, in a 2020 essay in these pages on the causes of democracy’s doldrums in Eastern Europe, Jarosław Kuisz and Karolina Wigura noted, “Unfortunately, for many liberals the mere word nation provokes suspicion.” According to the authors, that aversion has become a political liability, since “it seems that patriotism is a cultural element that is in demand in today’s societies.” Absent parties that tie liberalism to the national flag, “the empty ideological space [has been] occupied largely by populists who packed it with a reactive dislike of the West, supplemented by a xenophobia-tinged promise of well-being for the national community.”7
Liberal suspicion of nationalism may arise in part from a failure to distinguish between ethnonationalism and what may be called whole-country nationalism, which includes all members of the polity and may be essential to popularizing liberal aims. Liberals may fear that even whole-country nationalism will offend minority groups that are vital members of their electoral coalitions. A spate of data, however, suggests that such concerns are unfounded. In the 2020 American National Election Studies survey, four-fifths of African Americans said that their ethnic identity was “extremely” or “very important” to them, compared with just a fifth of whites. But 72 percent of African Americans — versus 64 percent of whites — also said that their American identity was “extremely” or “very important” to them. Similarly, in a 2021 Pew survey, 95 percent of Indian Muslims said that they were “very proud” to be Indian.8
Also underlying liberals’ reservations may be a pessimism born of having overestimated the popularity of ethnonationalism. Surveys show that Democrats in the United States have an exaggerated perception of just how racist and Islamophobic their Republican compatriots are, and that such misperceptions are far more acute among the better educated.9 Such erroneous assessments might lead left-leaning elites to underestimate the potential popular resonance of vigorously inclusive, anti-ethnonational nationalist messages.
How Popular Is Ethnonationalism?
Gains at the polls by ethnonational parties — most recently, in the 2023 Dutch parliamentary elections and the 2024 elections for the EU Parliament — often prompt a flood of grim headlines warning that nativism and bigotry are soaring and democracy is on the ropes. But does escalating hostility to ethnic and cultural pluralism explain far-right gains, and are electorates turning against democracy?
In 2015 alone, Germany admitted almost a million migrants, mostly refugees from Syria. Sweden admitted 160,000 refugees — the per capita equivalent of the United States taking in five-million people. As of 2020, just over a quarter of Sweden’s inhabitants were foreign born, marking an overnight transformation of the country’s cultural and ethnic makeup. In the Netherlands, the native-born Dutch population fell from 83 to 75 percent between 2000 and 2022. It would be hard to imagine immigration not becoming a contentious issue in such countries. Indeed, opposition to extraordinarily open immigration policies may have spurred the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), Sweden Democrats, and Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV).
Perhaps the bigger story is how light a threat such ethnonational parties have posed to democracy in countries of mass migration — at least to date. In Germany’s 2017 federal elections, the AfD garnered 13 percent of the vote; in 2021, its share fell to 10 percent. In the 2024 EU elections, the party won 16 percent. The AfD has yet to be included in national government. The Sweden Democrats won 18 percent in the 2018 parliamentary elections, 21 percent in 2022, and 13 percent in the 2024 EU elections. It serves as the “confidence-and-supply” party (that is, it is required to back the governing coalition on no-confidence and budget votes) in a right-center government composed of prodemocratic parties, while the opposition Social Democrats remain Sweden’s most popular party. In the Netherlands, the PVV won 11 percent in the 2021 parliamentary elections, surged to 24 percent in 2023, and then fell back to 17 percent in the 2024 EU elections. The party now serves in a coalition government with largely prodemocratic right-center partners that is headed by a nonpartisan prime minister rather than the PVV’s hard-right leader, Geert Wilders.
Further evidence of the limits of nativist sentiment can be found in the European Social Survey (ESS), which asks whether respondents believe that immigrants enrich or undermine their country’s cultural life. As the Figure shows, the share offering neutral to very positive views has been high and stable in most countries where ethnonationalists have made gains. In some cases, such as Sweden in 2018 and the Netherlands in 2023, vote totals for ethnonationalists actually exceeded negative assessments of immigrants’ influence. These data suggest that something other than a loathing of new arrivals and ethnic diversity may be driving support for ethnonational parties.
Notions of national identity, moreover, may be growing more inclusive. Between 2016 and 2020, for example, the percentage of respondents in a cross-national survey who considered being born in a country as “very/somewhat important for being truly [survey nationality]” fell from 34 to 25 percent in Germany, from 47 to 32 percent in France, from 56 to 31 percent in the United Kingdom, and from 55 to 35 percent in the United States. Substantial declines were also evident in the share of respondents who regarded “being a Christian” as important to being truly a member of the nation.10
How can these data be reconciled with rising vote totals for ethnonational parties in some elections? In 2023, the number of unauthorized border crossings in EU countries reached their highest point since 2017 and stood at three times their 2020 levels. This trend helps to explain why, in 2024, about two-thirds of EU citizens registered dissatisfaction with the migration policies of both the EU and their own governments. What is more, overwhelming majorities favor prioritizing national interests over moral obligations in immigration policy.11
Yet concern for national interests and discontent over unlawful immigration does not equate to nativism or racism. When the More in Common survey asked French respondents in 2024, “When it comes to migration policy, what is most important to you,” 48 percent answered “that we have control over who can and cannot come to France”; 21 percent said “that we improve hosting conditions for migrants in France”; and just 28 percent answered “that we reduce the total number of migrants coming to France.” Furthermore, 59 percent said they were “concerned about the increase in racism and discrimination against immigrants in France.” In Spain, 65 percent of respondents said they were concerned about rising racism and discrimination against immigrants in their country, and 55 percent agreed that “Spain should legalise the situation of immigrants already in the country so that they can work legally”; 35 percent opposed such a policy. When asked if their government “could better control who crosses our borders would you be open to Spain accepting a higher number of migrants and refugees,” 64 percent said yes, versus 23 percent who answered no.12
Anytime a substantial vote share goes to an illiberal right-wing party in a country with a history of fascist rule, such as the AfD in Germany, or to one that flirts with fascist slogans, as the Sweden Democrats do, it raises cause for concern.
Such concern, however, should not overshadow the robustness of democracy and openness to the rapid creation of multiethnic societies in countries that were until recently defined in part by their ethnic homogeneity.
The United Kingdom, where the white British portion of the population fell from 96 percent in 1981 to 77 percent four decades later, provides another example. While many observers have attributed Brexit to anti-immigrant sentiment, fewer than a quarter of the British thought that immigrants had negatively affected their country’s culture at the time of the referendum’s passage in 2016. Some analysts have found that the most effective pro-Brexit messages had nothing to do with immigration or race.13
The two major European countries where democracy has eroded — Hungary and Poland — are largely monoethnic societies. The global downturn in democracy arguably began in 2010, when Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party established a lock on the Hungarian government. In Poland, the illiberal Law and Justice party, led by Jarosław Kaczyński, won control in 2015 and renewed its mandate four years later.
Yet multiethnicity — or rather the prospect of it — has been a source of contention in these countries, where illiberal politicians warn of the ruin they claim immigrants could bring. On the eve of the 2015 election that would mark the beginning of Law and Justice’s eight-year run, Kaczyński warned of a secret government plot to bring in a hundred-thousand refugees from the Middle East who carried “very dangerous diseases long absent from Europe,” including “all sorts of parasites and protozoa, which . . . while not dangerous in the organisms of these people, could be dangerous here.”14 Similarly, Orbán said in a 2018 speech:
We must state that we do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed: We do not want our own color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others. We do not want this. We do not want that at all. We do not want to be a diverse country. We want to be how we became 1100 years ago here in the Carpathian Basin.15
Those valiant visions of fending off parasites in Poland and returning to caves in Hungary no doubt appeal to some audiences. But do they explain the success of these politicians at the polls, and will such fear mongering continue to work in the future?
At the time of Orbán’s 2010 takeover, 69 percent of Hungarians expressed neutral to very positive attitudes toward immigrants. They became less favorable under Orbán, who has made protecting Hungary’s cultural and racial purity a hallmark of his administration. Poles, for their part, are among the most pro-immigrant Europeans. In 2014, just a year before Law and Justice rose to power, four-fifths of Poles registered neutral to very favorable feelings toward immigrants. That number declined by just a few percentage points in 2018, the year before Kaczy´nski’s party repeated its strong performance. The scope of Poles’ generosity toward refugees from war-ravished Ukraine — eight-million refugees have been admitted since Russia’s invasion in 2022 — knows no parallel in recent European history. Most of Europe shares the Poles’ sentiments. In the spring 2024 Eurobarometer survey, 83 percent of respondents from EU member countries supported welcoming people fleeing the war in Ukraine.16
There are lessons for liberal leaders in these numbers, which suggest that legal immigration and fair treatment of immigrants are widely embraced, while uncontrolled immigration is roundly rejected. Prodigious, society-transforming waves such as those that Germany and Sweden experienced in the mid-2010s can create a sense that governments are incapable of, or even disinterested in, applying controls that privilege national welfare. Jack Goldstone finds that it is such surges — rather than steady, robust levels of legal migration — that typically yield gains for far-right parties. When migration becomes more orderly and regular, support for ethnonationalists often subsides.17 When left and center politicians and opinion leaders fail to draw a hard distinction between licit and illicit migration, moreover, ethnonationalist parties can make inroads even where substantial majorities consider lawful immigration more of an asset than a threat. Avoiding unsustainable upsurges in new arrivals and scrupulously enforcing the law might enable liberal parties to fight ethnonationalists more effectively.
Offering narratives that associate controlled immigration with national strength and well-being can empower anti-ethnonational forces as well. In his study of how German reformers guided their compatriots from a monoethnic mindset and legal definition of citizenship to multiethnic ones, Şener Aktürk found that “the discourse that eventually triumphed, ‘Germany as a country of immigration,’ was a discourse of new national grandeur through demographic, economic, and societal expansion.” The momentous 1999 reform that enabled non–ethnic Germans to become citizens “was presented as a means to revive Germany and to attract the best and the brightest brains.”18
In a recent survey experiment involving more than twenty-thousand people across nineteen European countries, Justin Gest found that framing immigration as a way to strengthen the nation in the face of declining fertility rates increased support for more open immigration policies and bolstered resistance to far-right “replacement theory” narratives. Gest’s findings are particularly noteworthy since the treatment group in the study was told both that birth rates in their country were “significantly below the level needed to maintain the native population,” and that their country would need to accept “significantly more immigrants from countries outside of Europe with higher birth rates, such as Muslim-majority and African countries” to arrest demographic decline. Respondents who were told that immigration was vital to the nation’s endurance came to see it less as a threat to “replace” the nation and more as a way to “replenish” it.19
Fighting Ethnonationalism, Safeguarding Democracy
In fact, when democracy’s defenders propound a potent liberal nationalism, they can defeat ethnonationalism and safeguard free government. Poland’s recent experience provides a vivid example. The centrist Civic Platform party’s Donald Tusk, who served as prime minister of Poland (2007–14) and then president of the European Council (2014–19), has been an inveterate foe of illiberalism. In 2021, he again took charge of his party, which leads the opposition to Law and Justice. Tusk long exhibited an allergy to nationalism, which he instinctively identified with ethnonationalism and Euroskepticism.20 But his and other Polish liberals’ skepticism about nationalism left the flag in the hands of Law and Justice, which cast itself as the defender of Poland’s distinctiveness and greatness.
Tusk finally set aside his reservations in the campaign for the October 2023 parliamentary elections. In mass demonstrations before the vote, Tusk stood side-by-side on a stage with Lech Wałęsa, the man who felled Poland’s communist regime in part by tying democracy to national symbols. As the Guardian reported, “A large part of Tusk’s campaign has been about reclaiming the language of patriotism for the opposition, leading to the red-and-white hearts that have become a symbol of the campaign. On Sunday, thousands in attendance at the rally were waving red-and-white Polish flags.”21 Indeed, while earlier demonstrations had often featured at least as many EU flags as Polish ones, in the massive gatherings leading up to the 2023 election, the dark-blue EU banners were swallowed up in a sea of red and white.
What is more, Tusk largely left the wrangling over policies behind and ran instead on saving democracy. He focused on Law and Justice’s betrayal of Poland’s impressive antiauthoritarian heritage, and he relentlessly framed the fight as a showdown between liberal light and illiberal darkness. Law and Justice, meanwhile, tried to tilt the playing field by holding a referendum alongside the parliamentary vote. One question asked: “Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, in accordance with the forced relocation mechanism imposed by European bureaucracy?”22
This time, such stunts did not work. The economy was performing respectably, but Law and Justice’s vote share fell from 44 percent in 2019 to 37 percent in 2023. Civic Platform and its coalition partners won control of both houses of parliament, ending Law and Justice’s eight-year reign of disinformation and bigotry and paving the way for another Tusk term as prime minister.
In Estonia, Kaja Kallas, head of the center-right Reform Party, became prime minister in 2021. Her ringing calls for Western resolve in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as her tough-minded assessments of Vladimir Putin’s intentions, have raised her own and her country’s international profile. In Estonia’s 2023 parliamentary elections, Kallas faced a challenge from Martin Helme and his Estonian Conservative People’s Party (EKRE). Helme first gained public notoriety in 2013, when he proclaimed, “Our immigration policy should have one simple rule: If you’re black, go back. As simple as that.”23
Kallas, in contrast, offered Estonians a potent narrative of their nation as a rising leader in defending democracy. In a characteristic statement during the campaign, she declared: “Estonia is an equal among equals at the table, and I think it is crucial that, after 30 years we have reached the point where our say [in the EU] is worth just as much as that of France or Germany.”24 Arguing that Helme and the EKRE threatened Estonia’s free government and international status, Kallas emerged with an expanded plurality and assembled a majority coalition that locked the EKRE and two other rightist parties out of government. Kallas stated that the election showed that liberal values were Estonian values and that her country had solidified its position as a European leader.
Tapping and cultivating liberal, whole-country nationalism also helped to propel Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s return to the Brazilian presidency in 2022. His victory over incumbent Jair Bolsonaro arrested the gravest threat to democracy in Brazil since the end of military rule in the 1980s. Bolsonaro, whose virtually all-white cabinet scarcely resembled a nation in which just 43 percent of the population identifies as white, encouraged agribusiness and mining interests to burn through the Amazon rainforest and displace indigenous inhabitants during his presidency. In 2018, he outpolled racial-justice–minded Fernando Haddad of Lula’s Workers’ Party, even among Brazilians of color, but he faced a more formidable opponent in 2022.
Like Tusk, Lula framed his race as a showdown over democracy, while Bolsonaro threatened to ignore the election results if he did not win. Upon launching his candidacy Lula asserted:
Polarization in Brazil is different now. It is not between two sides, a right and a left. The polarization in Brazil is between fascism and democracy. I represent democracy because I am from a democratic party that has a history of very democratic governance. And Bolsonaro represents fascism. So that is what’s at stake.25
Following a pattern established earlier in his career, which included two terms as president between 2003 and 2010, Lula ceaselessly draped himself in the Brazilian flag. He often sported a tie of green, yellow, and blue, the colors of the flag, and treated those who betrayed the nation’s magnificent multiethnic, democratic heritage as traitors who were unworthy of calling themselves Brazilians.
The night that Lula defeated Bolsonaro, he tweeted an image of his hand, which is missing a finger from an industrial accident he had as a metallurgical worker, stretched over the Brazilian flag. The image was captioned with a single word: Democracia.
As the recent experiences of Poland, Estonia, and Brazil suggest, the winning formula for defending multiethnic democracy does not hinge on compromising with xenophobic would-be autocrats. Instead, it consists of forcefully advancing liberal counternarratives of national achievement to challenge the exclusionary fables offered by ethnonationalists.
While defending immigrants and underprivileged minorities can and often should figure prominently in the programs of liberal democrats, some studies suggest that discourses that privilege ethnic over national identities, fail to celebrate national glory and progress, appear to dismiss calls for rigorous border controls as color-coded nativism, or chide the ethnic majority for failing to recognize its privileged status may reduce support for anti-ethnonational candidates. Such messaging can backfire even with minorities and immigrants, who may feel that progressives from the native-born ethnic majority, however well meaning, regard them more as casualties than as authors of the national story. Narratives that treat the nation as a splendid whole and include a pantheon of justice-seeking heroes from all groups resonate more broadly across the communal spectrum.26
When democracy’s defenders fail to tell a compelling national-democratic story, losses for liberal parties and democracy itself often ensue. Russian liberals’ neglect of nationalism following the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union paved the way for Vladimir Putin, a leader who would eventually tether Russianness to autocratic revival. In Hungary, the motley coalition of liberal, social-democratic, Green, and far-right parties that challenged Fidesz in the 2022 parliamentary elections failed to offer an alluring alternative to Orbán’s national vision, and Fidesz won its first absolute majority since 2010. In Turkey’s 2023 presidential election, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the opposition candidate who ran on promises of sounder economic policies, offered no vision of the nation that could compete with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s narrative, which blends moderate Islamism, tales of revived Ottoman glory, and glittering promises of the dawn of a “Turkish century.”27 Despite raging inflation and his incompetence on the economy, Erdoğan handily won a third presidential term.
The Challenge of India
Yet in no major democracy has a demagogue armed with an alluring national narrative done more to damage democracy than Prime Minister Narendra Modi has done in India. Since his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) captured power in 2014, India has plummeted in global democracy rankings. Modi’s ferocious Islamophobia often captures the attention of outside observers, but he pitches a muscular whole-country nationalism alongside his Hindu nationalism. As New York Times reporter Mujib Mashal observed, Modi “injects a sense of ambition in this country and he paints a narrative of an India that’s on the rise.”28 Modi’s welfare policies may also help to explain how the BJP managed to broaden its popularity beyond its upper-caste Hindu base.
Indian liberals, however, failed to offer a stirring narrative that tied Indianness to democracy, and this too may have helped to pave the way for Modi’s dominance. Prior to and in the decades after independence (1947), the Indian National Congress (INC) and its leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, owned the Indian tricolor. Nehru embedded his passion for free government and minority rights in an inspiring vision of India’s identity and global mission. Over time, however, the message of Nehru’s INC successors came to vacillate between a defensive Hindu nationalism–lite and advocacy of religious minorities and caste quotas that failed to embed the interests of the underprivileged in a narrative that linked Indianness to pluralism and tolerance. Nehru’s great-grandson, Rahul Gandhi, guided his party to decimation in 2014 and 2019 by running uninspiring campaigns and professing his affection for Modi.29
In his magisterial 2020 book, The Battle of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism, and What It Means to Be Indian, INC parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor expressed frustration that his party had forfeited nationalism to the ethnonationalists:
It is one of the astounding features of contemporary Indian politics that the forces who fought and made sacrifices for Indian freedom — today loosely called the liberals — have surrendered the ‘nationalist’ tag to Hindutvavadis [Hindu nationalists] who are descended from elements who either stayed away from the independence struggle or actively collaborated with the British Raj while nationalist heroes were in jail.30
In the campaign for the 2024 parliamentary elections, however, both Modi’s and his opponents’ approaches shifted. The prime minister traded in his dog whistle for a bullhorn. While he had always excluded Muslims from his national story, he now referred to them as “infiltrators” who would seize the country’s wealth if the opposition gained power.31 Modi’s campaign featured the grandiose — some would say grotesque — inauguration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, constructed on the site of a mosque that was razed by Hindu-nationalist mobs in 1992.
The opposition’s messaging shifted as well. In addition to its felicitous choice of an acronym that spelled INDIA as its name, the INC-led coalition leaned hard on the BJP’s threat to the country’s sacred traditions of democracy and intercommunal tolerance. On the campaign trail, Rahul Gandhi relied on more combative rhetoric than in earlier contests, and his main visual prop was his pocket-sized copy of India’s constitution. He tied the defense of underprivileged groups to guardianship of the constitution and pledged total commitment to both. In what became a standard line in his campaign, Gandhi intoned,
Modi and RSS [the Hindu-nationalist movement on which the BJP is based] want to change the Constitution and snatch the rights and reservations given to the Dalits, backwards and Adivasis. We will sacrifice our lives but not allow any danger to the Constitution.32
To reinvent his party and himself, Gandhi undertook several yatras, or pilgrimages, between 2022 and 2024, traversing more than ten-thousand kilometers, much of the distance on foot. These travels transformed Gandhi’s effete, elitist image. Along the routes, he often ignored warnings about security and was joined spontaneously by countless thousands of ordinary people. Indeed, on his months-long travels over the length and breadth of India, Gandhi seemed to be reclaiming the nation from Modi’s bigoted, megalomaniacal, anticonstitutional vision.
After the first yatra, INC general-secretary for communications Jairam Ramesh, who had walked with Gandhi, remarked that the INC had, over the course of several decades, “ceded the battlefield of ideas and ideologies to the BJP and vanished from the political discourse,” adding that after the long absence, Congress was finally again “setting the narrative in India.”33 At the end of Gandhi’s final yatra, which wrapped up as Indians headed to the polls in May 2024, Ramesh declared: “Congress is the party of Indian constitutionalism and Indian nationalism.”34
Facing a stalwart, self-assured opposition in possession of a revived national story, the BJP saw its seat share in the 543-seat Lok Sabha (the lower house of India’s Parliament) fall from 303 to just 240, forcing it to rely on coalition partners to form a government. The most dramatic reversals came in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and formerly a BJP stronghold, where the party’s seat total fell from 62 to 33 and INDIA emerged with 37 seats. The district of Faizabad, which includes the site of the Ram temple, was among those that flipped to the opposition.
Economic dissatisfaction probably played some role in the election’s outcome. But the economy was growing at a white-hot 7 percent at the time of the election, and Modi’s aptitude for paving roads and building public toilets — and prodigiously claiming credit for these public-works programs — remained undiminished. By all appearances, the opposition’s messaging on the nation and democracy played a significant role in one of the greatest blows against ethnonational authoritarianism since the onset of the global democratic recession in the 2010s.
The election also exposed what may be an essential vulnerability of authoritarian ethnonationalism: hyperpersonalization and the hubris it invariably breeds. While liberals such as Tusk, Kallas, Lula, and Rahul Gandhi never make politics all about themselves, illiberal leaders typically do. Modi’s superciliousness reached new heights — or, rather, lows — during the campaign, when he suggested that he might not be an ordinary “biological” being but rather a special entity sent by God. He alienated even leaders of the RSS, who were said to have regarded Modi’s personality cult as an electoral liability and disapproved of Modi placing himself above Hindu-nationalist ideology.35 Modi’s world of fawning minions and media might also have blinded him to an enduring fundamental in the Indian national psyche: the belief that “respecting all religions is very important to being truly Indian,” which 84 percent of respondents (including 85 percent of Hindus and 78 percent of Muslims) professed in a 2021 Pew survey.36
Fear, resentment, and personal insecurity are often what makes one an ethnonationalist and an authoritarian in the first place, and the would-be autocrat’s power often depends not on internal fortitude — or even overwhelming public support for his ideas — but on bluster and the reluctance of others to take him on. Adolph Hitler’s days were filled with self-pitying tantrums and emotional collapses, and his pathologies shone forth in his hysterical speeches about the terrible wrongs he had supposedly suffered. Putin’s bottomless sense of victimhood drives his approach to the world. In meetings with his foreign counterparts, he rails for hours against imagined slights. His September 2022 speech to the Russian elite announcing the “annexation” of four Ukrainian provinces was 37 minutes and 24 seconds of sniveling about purported Western plots to deprive Russia of its due. Modi so fears criticism or even challenging questions that he never holds press conferences or unchoreographed interviews.37
A Winning Message
Exploiting these vulnerabilities by unmasking the authoritarian ethnonationalists’ smallness and weakness — and not just their malevolence and intolerance — can help democrats to cast themselves as stronger than their opponents. Practically everywhere they have gained ascendency, democracy’s polarizing assailants have “owned” the liberals by casting themselves as stronger and more decisive. Their aim has been to make liberals — and democracy itself — look feeble and irresolute by comparison, and therefore unequal to safeguarding the nation and tackling its most formidable problems.38 Lula and Tusk fought back and won in 2022 and 2023, respectively, in part by demonstrating indomitability and contempt for their illiberal opponents. In 2024, Rahul Gandhi projected an image of fortitude that was largely missing from his far less successful 2014 and 2019 campaigns.
Seizing the flag from the ethnonationalists is also a vital component of a winning message. In recent decades, many liberals have failed to appreciate the persistent power of nationalism — an error that democracy’s foes have rarely made. Some democrats, especially on the left, have also grown squeamish about nationalism, conflating it with ethnonationalism or associating it with hubris and belligerence.
But vast majorities everywhere are grateful for and proud of their citizenship, and they seek leaders who make them feel great about their country. By failing to harness popular enthusiasm for the nation and demonstrate their superior patriotism, liberals start with one strike against them in their competition for hearts and votes. That reality was never lost on leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Jawaharlal Nehru, Martin Luther King Jr., and Lech Wałęsa, who embedded their defense of democracy and tolerance in exuberant narratives of national grandeur, exceptionalism, and excellence.39 Attuned to their opponents’ vulnerabilities, armed with compelling national-democratic narratives, and free from gloomy misconceptions about the supposed triumph of ethnonationalism and democracy’s inexorable eclipse, forceful liberal leaders can readily demonstrate the fundamental compatibility of ethnic pluralism and free government.
NOTES
1. Gina Gustavsson and David Miller, “Introduction: Why Liberal Nationalism Today?,” in Gina Gustavsson and David Miller, eds., Liberal Nationalism and Its Critics: Normative and Empirical Questions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 5.
2. World Values Survey, G257.
3. Julian Erhardt, Steffen Wamsler, and Markus Freitag, “National Identity Between Democracy and Autocracy: A Comparative Analysis of 24 Countries,” European Political Science Review 13 (February 2021): 59–76.
4. Gina Gustavsson and Ludvig Stendahl, “National Identity, a Blessing or a Curse? The Divergent Links from National Attachment, Pride, and Chauvinism to Social and Political Trust,” European Political Science Review 12 (November 2020): 465.
5. Amanda Lea Robinson, “Nationalism and Ethnic-Based Trust: Evidence from an African Border Region,” Comparative Political Studies 49 (December 2016): 1844.
6. Volha Charnysh, Christopher Lucas, and Prerna Singh, “The Ties That Bind: National Identity Salience and Pro-Social Behavior Toward the Ethnic Other,” Comparative Political Studies 48 (March 2015): 267–300.
7. Jarosław Kuisz and Karolina Wigura, “The Pushback Against Populism: Reclaiming the Politics of Emotion,” Journal of Democracy 31 (April 2020): 51–52.
8. Jack Citrin, Morris Levy, and Matthew Wright, Immigration in the Court of Public Opinion (New York: Polity, 2023); and Pew Research Center, “Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation,” 29 June 2021.
9. Daniel Yudkin, Stephen Hawkins, and Tim Dixon, The Perception Gap: How False Impressions Are Pulling America Apart (New York: More in Common, 2019).
10. Laura Silver et al., Pew Research Center, “Views About National Identity Becoming More Inclusive in U.S., Western Europe,” 5 May 2021.
11. Kali Robinson, Diana Roy, and Sabine Baumgartner, “Europe’s Migration Dilemma,” Council on Foreign Relations, 31 May 2024; Eurobarometer Data Annex, “Use Your Vote: Countdown to the 2024 European Election,” Spring 2024; and More in Common, “Europe Votes: The Road to the European Elections,” March 2024.
12. More in Common, “Europe Votes.”
13. Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 159–60.
14. Jan Cienski, “Migrants Carry ‘Parasites and Protozoa,’ Warns Polish Opposition Leader,” Politico Europe, 14 October 2015.
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16. European Union, “Standard Eurobarometer 101 — Spring 2024,” https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3216.
17. Jack A. Goldstone, “Migration: A Way Forward for the World’s Future,” Wilson Quarterly (forthcoming Fall 2024).
18. Şener Aktürk, Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 112.
19. Justin Gest, “The One Reason America’s Population Isn’t About to Start Shrinking,” CNN, 9 May 2024.
20. Henry Foy, “Lunch with the FT: Donald Tusk,” Financial Times, 28 November 2014.
21. Shaun Walker, “Opposition Leader Donald Tusk Cheered by Crowds at Warsaw Election Rally,” Guardian, 1 October 2023.
22. Andrew Higgins, “Centrist Parties Poised to Oust Poland’s Nationalist Government,” New York Times, 15 October 2023.
23. “Conservative Politician: If You’re Black, Go Back,” ERR.ee, 29 May 2013.
24. Andres Kuusk, “Kaja Kallas: Estonia Is Now Regarded as an Equal at the EU Table,” EER.ee, 11 January 2023.
25. “Brazil’s 2022 Presidential Vote Will Be Between ‘Fascism and Democracy,’ Ex-Leader Lula Says,” Euronews, 9 July 2021.
26. Rachel Lienesch, “Testing the Limits of White Democrats’ Support for Progressive Racial Messaging,” unpubl. paper, 12 September 2022; Nyla R. Branscombe, Michael T. Schmitt, and Kristin Schiffhauer, “Racial Attitudes in Response to Thoughts of White Privilege,” European Journal of Social Psychology 37 (March–April 2007): 203–15; and Morris Levy and Dowell Myers, “Racial Projections in Perspective: Public Reactions to Narratives about Rising Diversity,” Perspectives on Politics 19 (December 2021): 1147–64.
27. Jason Farago, “How Erdogan Reoriented Turkish Culture to Maintain His Power,” New York Times, 25 May 2023.
28. Mujib Mashal and Shawn Paik, “How Modi Courted India’s Youth,” New York Times, 4 June 2024.
29. “‘I Genuinely Feel Love for Modi’: Rahul Gandhi on Why He Hugged the PM,” Hindustan Times, 13 March 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaiWs4pIpbw.
30. Shashi Tharoor, The Battle of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism, and What It Means to Be Indian (New Delhi: Aleph, 2020), 225.
31. “‘Spreading Hate and Venom’: Ex-BJP Allies, Opp Parties Flay PM Modi’s Remarks on Muslims,” Indian Express, 23 April 2024.
32. Sanjay K. Jha, “‘We, the People’: Opposition Campaign Forces BJP to Speak on India’s Constitution,” The Wire, 8 May 2024.
33. Hannah Ellis-Petersen, “Rahul Gandhi’s Yatra: How a 2,200-Mile March Revitalised India’s Ailing Opposition,” Guardian, 27 January 2023.
34. Jha, “‘We, the People.’”
35. Saba Naqvi, “The RSS Sends a Message,” Frontline, 23 June 2024.
36. Pew Research Center, “Religion in India.”
37. Amanda Macias, “Amazing Insight into What U.S. Intelligence Knew About Hitler in 1943,” Business Insider, 21 March 2015; “In Full: Vladimir Putin Officially Annexing Four Ukrainian Regions at Moscow Ceremony,” Telegraph, 30 September 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDdHRGcbffo; Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, “Narendra Modi’s Decade Without Press Conferences,” Diplomat, 29 May 2024.
38. M. Steven Fish with Laila M. Aghaie, Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge (Rivertowns, 2024), 88–171.
39. Frederick Douglass, “Composite Nation,” speech delivered in the Parker Fraternity Course, Boston, 1867, https://www.loc.gov/item/mss1187900406; Martin Luther King, “Speech on the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa,” London, 7 December 1964, https://www.democracynow.org/2019/1/21/mlk_at_90_a_rediscovered_1965; and Lech Wałęsa, “Speech to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe” and remarks in follow-up discussion, 4 February 1992, https://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/Speeches/Speech-XML2HTML-EN.asp?SpeechID=249&a1=0&p2=0#; and Fish, Comeback, 240–322.
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