Postwar party democracy was authoritarian, patriarchal, and corrupt despite nostalgia

Evidence

The golden age of party democracy described by Eribon was, of course, no irenic idyll. In France itself, the Fifth Republic issued from a Gaullist coup d’état that introduced a semipresidential system with patently authoritarian features. Dictatorships ruled Greece, Spain, and Portugal for long stretches of the Cold War. At the height of the Trente Glorieuses, European powers fought bitter counterinsurgencies to forestall the independence of their remaining colonial possessions in Africa. Patriarchal structures dominated domestic life, while women were expected to submit to their male breadwinners. Well into the second half of the twentieth century, Flemish and Italian priests told their congregants how to vote, while party bosses dictated editorials to newspaper editors. The Tangentopoli scandal of the early 1990s exposed Italy’s partitocrazia as flamboyantly corrupt. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 127

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postwar German elections were degraded into mere customer-touting — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2339; Postwar democratic regimes nonetheless rested on party states and empowered workers — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 136