The age of the bullies, and their enablers

Taking a Ryanair flight recently, I witnessed one of those ritual humiliations that have come to characterise travel by so-called budget airlines.

A bunch of passengers had turned up at the departure gate with bags that, for one reason or another, failed to meet Ryanair’s arbitrary and ever-changing carry-on limits.

Some, naturally, were chancers; other seemed genuinely caught out – little surprise, given that buying a ticket from these airlines’ meticulously designed websites is like trying to navigate a minefield.

All the offenders were duly threatened with fines that exceeded the fare I had paid for my flight ticket. Some paid up. Others, in time-honoured fashion, began furtively stuffing items into their coats and down their trousers.

One wonders if the days of the budget airline poacher’s jacket are about to return.

This sort of performance used to be a regular feature of budget airline flights out of London’s Stansted airport, where no boarding was complete without one or two (and often more) passengers being reduced to tears by the gate agents.

My pet theory is that it is meant as a kind of reverse psychology: whereas normal companies try to win a reputation for good service, the likes of Ryanair instead inflict ritual punishment on their customers in order to instil the idea that they really have to earn those low prices.

In effect, they are being told, the suffering is not regrettable – it is inevitable, indeed affirming.

It is remarkable how willing people are to accept this kind of treatment – and even endorse it.

We now see something like it being played out on the national and international stage, where the stakes are far higher than at the boarding gate.

In Slovakia, the government is now in the business of sending militarised SWAT teams to raid music clubs (but it’s OK: they’re in “Vallostan” [trans: Bratislava] and (horrors!) “English is often the first language spoken there”), shilling for homicidal policemen (but it’s OK: the man that the police officer beat to death was homeless and a "recidivist"), and attacking schoolchildren for performing a light-hearted skit (but it’s OK: they were guilty of “generational ageism”).

At the Central European Forum, a gathering of the well-read and the well-meaning in Bratislava and Trnava in mid November, speaker after speaker struggled to explain why voters in rich democracies (including Slovakia) seem so enamoured of such vile people and messages.

(As you might possibly have heard, American voters recently re-elected a convicted fraudster as president, one who has duly set about appointing other fraudsters to run his government: a vaccine denialist to run the health department; a priapic white supremacist “madman” to run the defence department; a Putin-friendly homophobe to oversee America’s vast intelligence apparatus. The sex trafficker he originally wanted to lead the justice department has withdrawn his name, only to be replaced by an election denier.)

Israeli legal scholar Eli Salzberger suggested that, in part, people’s opinions have been distorted by the grievance-filled echo chambers of social media. He called on his audience of students to engage in a reinvigorated, in-person effort to explain why liberal democracy is worth saving.

But the clear implication that an educated elite need only explain the facts to ordinary people for them to wise up almost writes its own conspiratorial Facebook post.

Journalist and Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash counselled hundreds of forum attendees to embrace what he dubbed “the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will” – a rigorous examination of “what did we do wrong?” along with a strong dose of courageous self-confidence.

Wise advice, but again the “we” there is telling. The presence of a guiding hand is assumed, one that the populists will leap to exploit with talk of a “deep state” and arrogant overlords.

As the threadbare explanations for populism first wheeled out in 2016 were being rehashed, a disturbing possibility was slowly dawning.

These voters, who are educated, connected and comfortable beyond the dreams of 1990s America and – especially – 1990s Slovakia, are not, for the most part, affected by actual material want. Could it be that they are choosing these vindictive loudmouths not in spite of their obnoxiousness – but because of it?

Unfortunately, we humans, when given permission, quite like to witness suffering – and sometimes to inflict it. As we saw in the twentieth century, far too few will stand up when this happens.

As Jeff Sharlet, a particularly sharp observer of contemporary American culture and the Trump phenomenon, has observed, most Americans might not want fascism, but the majority will probably accept it. Given that some very popular politicians in Slovakia actively celebrate their own country’s totalitarian past, there seems little reason to doubt that Slovakia is any different.

If you can’t stop people from believing hateful things, the next best thing is to stop us from acting on our most repellent urges – or, at the very least, not to encourage us.

Sadly, even this limited goal often proves too much to ask.

If the Washington Post and LA Times’ pre-election decisions to pull their endorsements of Kamala Harris were not craven enough, the sight of Trump’s loudest critics among the ranks of America’s supposedly independent journalists scurrying to Florida to kiss his ring post-victory certainly is.

Here in Slovakia, we witness the bewildering decision by state broadcaster STVR to platform – on the public holiday celebrating the Fight for Freedom and Democracy, of all days – a self-avowed Putin fan who was recently awarded a state honour (from occupied Crimea!) for his gleeful defence of Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine.

In parliament, at least six opposition MPs voted earlier this month to make Smer MP Richard Glück, one of Prime Minister Robert Fico’s more violent henchmen – he is famous for punching former premier Igor Matovič in the face, and for mocking women who have suffered sexual assault – chairman of parliament’s military and security committee, which among other things oversees the work of the police.

It is telling that no one from the opposition would admit to having voted for Glück (their anonymity is ensured by the outrageous affront to democracy that is parliament’s use of secret ballots, which allows elected representatives to cut dirty deals with little risk of being held accountable; witness every vote for general prosecutor in recent years).

Reporting by the Sme daily suggests that most, if not all, of the pro-Glück opposition MPs were from the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH). They reportedly claimed that their votes were in fact a “chivalrous gesture” – but their moral cowardice was revealed by the fact that none of them would take credit for it.

Veteran KDH MP František Mikloško – who, thanks to his role as an opponent of the communist regime in the 1980s, is often cited as some sort of moral authority – refused to answer a question about how he had voted, rejecting it as “absurd”. He angrily noted that the vote was secret and added “it is beyond us to investigate here”, rather begging the question of who he thinks is supposed to investigate his own secret vote.

The bullies practice discipline; is it too much to ask democrats to do the same?

Fortunately, not everyone will stand for this sort of thing, and a little backbone can go a long way.

Back at the airport gate, a group of passengers who had been cleared to board noticed what the Ryanair staff were up to, especially when they chose to target a couple of younger passengers. Older passengers refused to proceed to the plane, instead forming a Greek (in this case, Bulgarian) chorus of mostly middle-aged women to harangue the gate agents.

As soon as the screaming and shouting threatened to delay the plane’s departure, any pretence of made-up “rules” evaporated, and the remaining passengers were hurriedly waved through.