All systems of morality begin with a description of what philosophers call “the moral subject,” for identifying the moral subject is a prerequisite for coming to a view about how society should be organized and how the benefits and burdens of social cooperation should be organized and distributed. Without a conception of the moral subject, it is simply impossible to make arguments about what political morality may require, because the framework within which moral argument can take place is missing. Without such a framework, one cannot know what counts as a moral argument and what does not, or how much weight to give one moral argument against another.
According to John Rawls, the preeminent liberal political philosopher of the twentieth century, the relevant moral subject is the individual. Liberalism therefore begins with a conception of the person. Under that conception, individuals are said to possess “two moral powers.” The first is a capacity to have a sense of justice that guides them when engaging in social cooperation; the second is a capacity to form and pursue a conception of the personal good, an idea of what ends one, as an individual, should pursue. From this starting point, Rawls and other liberal political philosophers then build their respective conceptions of liberalism as a system of political morality. Of course, the details of these conceptions may differ from one liberal political philosopher to another. But given that they share a common starting point, they are all going to be about facilitating fair terms of social cooperation between individuals and ensuring that every individual is able to pursue any reasonable conception of their personal good free from interference by others.
One way of looking at this is to say that under illiberal theories of political morality, the individual is not an autonomous moral end in itself, but rather a component of a larger fundamental organic unit. It is only this larger unit and other similarly composed but competing fundamental organic units that can harbor and pursue moral ends. While thought of as a nontechnical term by liberals, as including everyone within certain geographic boundaries, or all citizens, or at least all those legally entitled to vote, this is not how “the people” are conceived of by illiberals. To the contrary, to be part of the natural, organic unity that conceives of itself as “a people” in the illiberal worldview, one must share the “correct” objective attributes, like race, ethnicity, religion, and so on, as well as the correct ideological views. Indeed, all members of the relevant community are conceived of as identical in all relevant respects. Those who are not are, by definition, outsiders, whom we might tolerate as guests if they respect their place and we feel generous. But if they become troublesome, they forfeit whatever grace they may enjoy as second-class citizens and become an outright enemy, whose existence is intolerable and whose activities if not presence must be suppressed.
Given this conception of the moral subject, Trumpists and other illiberal ideologues see the people, the state, and the leader, like the Holy Trinity, as conceptually one. The liberal idea that a political community contains a plurality of reasonable views is ruled out from the get-go. The concept of reasonable dissent is therefore incoherent. By definition, all dissenters put themselves outside the community, and all outsiders who are “inside the wire” pose an existential, cancerous threat to that community. Hence the speed and seemingly disproportional (to liberal eyes) amount of rhetorical and real extra-judicial force deployed against such people.
But thinking of antidemocratic notions as built into illiberalism is a mistake, resulting from a misunderstanding of both democracy and illiberalism. For while democracy is designed to give effect to “the will of the people,” there is nothing in the concept of democracy that tells us who “the people” are. And depending on how one answers this question, one can arrive at some very different modes of political organization indeed. The more restrictive one’s conception of the people, the more plurality poses a threat to democracy rather than constituting a basic social fact that democracy is there to manage.
Given a restrictive conception of the people and the view that the leader, the state, and the people, are one, elections are unnecessary—a leader is not selected through something as pedestrian as this. Rather, his identity becomes manifest, much like that of a prophet or religious figure. Any leader so identified necessarily embodies the will of the people—nothing more is required for the leader to know what his people want him to do. Mediating bodies like a legislature simply get in the way of putting the people’s plans in motion.
Not only does this mean the leader is to have unfettered power in an illiberal state, it also means that it is each person’s responsibility in such a state to “work towards the leader.” After all, everyone is of one mind about everything of importance if one is of the people; thus no one should need specific orders.
Indeed, in an illiberal community, status is the most important feature of the individual, not rights, and power is a signifier of status. People are identical within the community, but not equal. Every human interaction is a contest to see who can dominate whom. And the strong, the powerful, the rich, and the beautiful are by their nature entitled to subservience from beings of lesser worth, even though all may be members of the people.
Analytical Fascism: What Stares Back When One Stares Into the De-enlightenment. Mark R. Reiff, UC Davis.