It can be said that Turkey has caught in a spiral of authoritarianism approximately since the winter of 2012. In this spiral, an authoritarian step elicits reactions of those who are affected by it and these reactions in turn pave the way for a new and more authoritarian step. This dialectic process sports authoritarian steps that are increasingly frequent and comprehensive.

It can be argued that the first step taken toward the spiral of authoritarianism in the winter of 2012 when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was Prime Minister then, addressed the chairmen of provincial organizations of his party and said that one of the goals of the government was to “raise generations of pious people.” This declaration of intention was certainly incompatible with liberal democratic principles and the main agenda item in the summer of 2012 was abortion. The spring of 2013 saw several legal restrictions on the consumption and sale of alcohol.

The common characteristic of these policy moves was the appearance that they were taken with the intention of imposing and reinforcing a specific understanding of morality using the state’s facilities. According to this impression, the government is using these policies to create a more conservative and more Islamic society and mobilize public facilities and authorities. Of course, this clearly violates the fundamental principles of a liberal democratic political system. In a liberal democratic political system, the state maintains an equal distance to all types of lifestyles. It does not discriminate among diverse lifestyles. In short, this is the principle of the neutrality of the state.

At this point, I must note that I am not suggesting that before the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) came to power, the state was neutral in face of diverse lifestyles and the political system was liberal and democratic and that the country moved away from that system starting in 2012. Even before the AK Party’s coming to power, the state was not impartial and sought to shape the society according the Kemalist official ideology. With its practices until 2012, the AK Party largely purged the official ideology system, which it dubbed as the tutelage regime. However, the AK Party’s above-mentioned moves have raised concerns that it now tries to replace the lifestyle which was previously imposed by the tutelary regime with another lifestyle it finds acceptable.

I believe these concerns have played a major role when the municipal authorities and the police harshly responded the environmentalists who were protesting the rebuilding of the historic Artillery Barracks in the Gezi Park of Taksim, Istanbul, this trigger a widespread social reaction, which later evolved into general anti-government protests and spread to the entire country. Of course, some protesters were guided by the rage of losing the hegemonic positions they had in the past, not by rights-centered concerns.

The government opted to use security forces to respond these mass reactions which were partly attributable to its misguided practices. The use of security forces in controlling protests is certainly justified particularly for ensuring security of life and property of individuals. However, suppressing protests solely with a security-oriented approach and without taking remedial measures and tackling with their causes is like throwing a blanket on fire. You may get the impression that you have taken the fire under control. But the fire will continue to burn beneath the blanket.

Since the summer of 2013, the government hasn’t changed its polarizing trend regarding the “lifestyle fault line.” In November 2013, another debate started regarding the houses where boys and girls stay together without out of wedlock and this was another brick in the wall. The steps the government has taken as part of its crackdown on the “parallel structure” –a veiled reference to members of the Hizmet movement inspired by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen– in the wake of the graft and bribery scandals that went public on December 17, 2013 have raised concerns of liberal, leftist and conservative democrats to the extent that these steps have enabled the government to subordinate the judiciary to the executive. Finally, the government’s attitude regarding the attacks by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) against Kobani, Syria, sparked mass reactions by the Kurds in Turkey, paving the way for the incidents of October 6-8.

In response to these developments, the government chose to pass the Domestic Security Bill. This security-oriented approach, which vests the security forces with extensive powers and authorities in a manner unacceptable in any liberal democratic regime, may mean pouring gasoline on the fire burning beneath the blanket. The social incidents ad protests which may remain confined to small pockets may grow out of proportion and become massive in reaction to the interventions made by the security forces with reliance on their expanded powers and authorities. Of course, this will in turn provoke increased use of coercion, dragging the country deeper into the spiral of authoritarianism.

In my opinion, to get out of this spiral, we need freedom-oriented policies which are based on individual rights and which tolerate diverse lifestyles, not the security-oriented ones which expand the powers and authorities of security forces and which rely on state’s coercive power. These freedom-oriented policies can defuse the tensions along the social fault lies of secularism vs. religiosity, Turkishness vs. Kurdishness, and Sunnism vs. Alevism, and build islands of social peace.