Today's Dictators Are Different, Rely More On Demagoguery Than Secret Police But Just As Dangerous
Last edited Mon Aug 24, 2020, 11:50 AM - Edit history (2)
'What Makes Today’s Dictators Different.' They rely more on demagoguery than secret police—but they’re just as dangerous. By Colin Woodard, Magazine, Washington Monthy, July-Aug, 2020. - Excerpts, Ed.:
There was a time, not so long ago, when the “smart people” believed that we’d moved past history, that liberal democracies were destined to spread across the planet, that we lived in a unipolar world with the U.S. as the benevolent hegemon, spreading the fruits of globalism far and wide. Now liberal democracies are in retreat, damaged from within by racial supremacists & authoritarian demagogues, & challenged on the world stage by autocrats, dictators, strongmen, & murderous kings. The Chinese Communist Party leads the world’s rising superpower while countries that threw off Soviet Communism have embraced tyrants, from Budapest to Moscow. Three decades after the end of the Cold War, Western democracy hasn’t won over the world, its opponents have. Its survival even in the U.S. & U.K. is no longer assured.
Many writers have asked how we got here & how the liberal democratic dream—to approach as near to universal freedom as possible via power sharing, representative government, & respect for civil liberties—might be saved. An important aspect of this is to understand the enemy, & scholars have identified it in different ways. Fareed Zakaria, 23 years ago warned of the rise of illiberal democracies, countries where the public elects & supports movements that promise to trample the rights of unpopular political, ethnic, or religious minorities, as well as the constitutional limits on their own power. Months before Trump was elected to the White House, Princeton's Jan-Werner Müller created a taxonomy of what he called “populists,” the illiberal forces that claim that “only some of the people are really the people,” & that traitorous elites have betrayed those real Hungarians, Germans, Americans, Turks, & Britons.
- Keane warns: "Despotism could be the future of democracy if people don’t wake up & confront the threat. New despotisms include despots themselves, wealthy govt. officials & business leaders who channel the nation’s wealth into their families. Courts, govt. agencies, legislators, universities, & private businesses are also involved. They use the law to protect themselves while criminalizing opponents’ activities. They use media- & social media mob- to harass & intimidate dissenters. Adversaries are demoted or fired. Thugs beat journalists, political candidates, or entrepreneurs or they are arrested on false charges. It's a challenge to power-sharing democracy unseen since the 1930s. The slower pace of their rise has lulled those still living in liberal democracies into a false sense of security, at least until the 2016 election." -
John Keane, professor of politics at the Univ. of Sydney & the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, has taken up the baton with a more dire & sweeping assessment. Today’s authoritarians, he argues, will prove more durable than the dictatorships that preceded them because they are backed by a broad, genuinely supportive middle-class base. This makes them much more formidable competitors to liberal states. - And we’re sleepwalking in the face of their dangers. - Keane doesn’t use the term despotism by accident. It is usually understood to mean absolute rule by a single individual. Although this is not at all how he describes the “new despotisms" - he believes the situation is too dire for more anodyne terms like hybrid regimes, authoritarianism, or autocracy; something with more shock value is in order. “The word ‘despotism’ still has a powerful ethical sting in its tail,” he explains. “Its practical effect is to underscore the universal dangers of arbitrary power.”
The “new despotisms” of the book’s title are eclectic, ranging from China’s one-party capitalism & Viktor Orbán’s now literally dictatorial regime in Hungary to the Saudi monarchy, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, & semi-theocratic Iran. Keane includes Belarus, the Central Asian former Soviet republics, the United Arab Emirates, Cambodia, & Singapore. All these regimes have essential traits in common, he argues, characteristics that make them more resilient & dangerous than the tinpot dictatorships & totalitarian states that came before. They are “pseudo-democratic” governments “led by rulers skilled in the arts of manipulating & meddling with people’s lives, marshalling their support, & winning their conformity.” Rather than a barracked society ruled by fear like East Germany or Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, they are genuinely supported by a wide swath of the middle class persuaded to trade civil liberties for peace, quiet, & comfort. They have charmed & seduced the majority of their citizenry into tolerating or even cheering on the repression of the rest.
For the U.S., our national survival is at stake. Support for illiberal, ethno-nationalist authoritarianism that is Trumpism varies greatly across regions as noted by Trump's abdication of duty in the face of the pandemic leaving states & regions to fend for themselves. We’re much more like Yugoslavia than we realize. If we lurch further toward despotism, our federation may not survive...
More, https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2020/what-makes-todays-dictators-different/
- Author Colin Woodard, a longtime foreign correspondent, is the author of 5 books, including American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America and American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good.
- John Keane on the "Fate of Democracy" | RSA Events, Jun 4, 2020
Governments and states start to look and behave differently in times of crisis. Political theorist John Keane reflects on what our current challenges may reveal about the nature of an anti-democratic trend he observes taking hold across the world, and what it will take to uphold and strengthen the ideals and practices of power-sharing democracy.
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