Article
from Foreign Affairs
The
Dictator’s New Playbook
Why
Democracy Is Losing the Fight
By Moisés Naim
Around the world, from the
richest countries to the poorest, a dangerous new crop of leaders has sprung
up. Unlike their totalitarian counterparts, these populists entered office through
elections, but they show decidedly undemocratic proclivities. They propagate
lies that become articles of faith among their followers. They sell themselves
as noble and pure champions of the people, fighting against corrupt and greedy
elites. They defy any constraints on their power and concentrate it in their
own hands, launching frontal attacks on the institutions that sustain
constitutional democracy, stacking the judiciary and the legislature, declaring
war on the press, and scrapping laws that check their authority.
The new autocrats include
current leaders such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban,
India’s Narendra Modi, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Philippines’
Rodrigo Duterte, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The label also applies to leaders who are no longer in power, such as the late
Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Austria’s Sebastian Kurz, and, yes, the United
States’ Donald Trump. All reengineered the old dictator’s playbook to enhance
their ability to impose their will on others. Despite the enormous national,
cultural, institutional, and ideological differences among their countries, the
new autocrats’ approaches are uncannily similar. Bolsonaro and López Obrador,
for example, could not be more different ideologically or more similar in their
strategies to grab and retain power.
Turkey, home to early
civilizations and once the cradle of empires, and the United States, the
modern, mighty superpower, are lands of stark contrasts. Yet both Erdogan and
Trump waged unrelenting campaigns against the institutions that might hem them
in. Kurz, the debonair former Austrian chancellor, who dressed in finely
tailored suits, seemed nothing at all as a leader like Duterte, the brawling
Philippine leader, yet both launched vigorous and calculated offensives to
distort their countries’ public spheres until, politically, up was down and
down was up.
In essence, this cohort uses
populism, capitalizes on polarization, and revels in post-truth politics to
undermine democratic norms and amass power, preferably for life. These
techniques are not new; in fact, they have always been part of the struggle for
power. But the ways they are being combined and deployed worldwide today are
unprecedented. Many of the new autocrats have successfully co-opted the free
press in their respective countries, in some cases by having their business
cronies snap up media properties. The explosion of information and media online,
moreover, has created opportunities for deception, manipulation, and control
that simply didn’t exist as recently as a decade ago. Declining trust in the
traditional institutions that once served as gatekeepers to the public sphere
has vastly lowered the reputational costs of bald-faced lying. And the
globalization of polarization has created new opportunities for alliances with
leaders who are using similar wedge issues in other countries. The result is a
crisis in the sustainability of democratic government on a scale not seen since
the rise of fascists across Europe in the 1930s.
PLAYING TO THE
CHEAP SEATS
A commonality in the new breed
of autocrats is how they portray themselves as embodying the will of the
people, championing their cause against a corrupt elite. Populists work to
collapse all political controversies into this “noble people” versus “venal
elite” dichotomy, explaining any and every problem as the direct consequence of
a dastardly plan by a small but all-powerful group harboring contempt for a
pure but powerless people whom it exploits. Of course, if that is the case,
what the people need is a messianic savior, a champion able to stand up to that
voracious elite, to bring it to heel on behalf of the people.
It is a common mistake to treat
populism as an ideology. It is better understood as a technique for seeking
power that is compatible with a nearly limitless range of specific ideologies.
Virtually any obstacle to autocratic rule can be characterized as another trick
of the corrupt elite, and virtually any move to concentrate and amass power in
the hands of the populist ruler can be justified as necessary to defeat the
rich and powerful and protect the people. Populism’s adaptability is its
strength: it can be deployed anywhere, because in the hands of the power
hungry, resentment against the elite can be mobilized everywhere, especially in
the many countries where economic inequality has spiked.
Polarization follows naturally
from populism. Once the basic opposition between the noble people and the
corrupt elite has been put at the center of political life, the priority
becomes to sharpen the opposition between them. Marxists would call this
“heightening the contradictions.” Polarization strategies aim to sweep away the
possibility of a middle ground between political rivals, depicting compromise
as betrayal and seeking to amplify and exploit any opening for discord.
Polarization warps the
relationship between followers and their leaders. In a healthy democracy,
citizens can support or oppose a given leader on a certain issue without
necessarily feeling the need to support him or her on every issue. But when
politics become deeply polarized, a populist leader redefines what it means to
agree. As the representative of the people in the fight against the elite, the
populist leader maintains the right to decide which views define membership in
the true citizenry. That is why so many populist leaders manage to extract from
their followers complete and unconditional loyalty to all their views—even
those that contradict the ones they espoused the day before. Thus, the
Brazilians who support Bolsonaro unquestioningly back their president both when
he claims that there is no corruption in his government at all and when he
claims that the corruption in his government is not his fault, because he
doesn’t know about it.
The defenders of democracy
have failed to counter the poisonous power of post-truth deceit.
Populism and polarization are
old political tactics. Charismatic leaders dating back to Julius Caesar and
Charlemagne built cults of personality. And fostering an idealized public image
necessarily requires lying. But the post-truthism that the new autocrats are so
apt at employing goes far beyond fibbing: it denies the existence of a
verifiable reality. Post-truthism is not chiefly about getting lies accepted as
truths but about muddying the waters to the point that it becomes difficult to
discern the difference between truth and falsehood. Autocrats constantly
spewing lies and half-truths get their followers to accept that things are true
entirely because they have said them. The truth of an utterance is therefore
independent from its correspondence with reality and derives instead from the
identity of the person saying it.
There is a deep nihilism
involved in a post-truth philosophy. Seemingly absurd ideas come to be regarded
as gospel. In Bolivia, President Evo Morales got millions of his followers to
accept as an article of faith that presidential term limits amounted to a
fundamental human rights violation. In the Philippines, Duterte built support
for extrajudicial killings by relentlessly portraying concern for human rights
as an affectation of a corrupt elite. And Trump, of course, persuaded countless
supporters that assaulting the U.S. Capitol to derail the certification of
election results constituted a brave stand in favor of election integrity.
Such absurdities become
accepted by autocrats’ followers because their psychological relationship to
the leader is distorted by the prism of identity. These are the politics of
fandom: the supporters of an autocrat are much like the fans of a sports team
who put their emotional identification with the club at the center of their
sense of who they are. The melding of an individual’s identity with the identity
of the leader explains why it is often hopeless to try to reason with the
followers of politicians such as Morales, Duterte, or Trump. When one’s
identity is built on identification with a leader, any criticism of that leader
feels like a personal attack on oneself.
Here it is worth
considering the tactics of Chávez, in particular his
famously long-winded Venezuelan television show, Aló Presidente, which aired
weekly for most of his tenure in office. In it, the president ranged broadly,
zipping back and forth between telling stories, spouting political diatribes,
singing songs from his childhood, phoning Fidel Castro, broadcasting from
Moscow, and fulminating against enemies real and imagined. But at its core, the
theme of the show was always the same: empathy. In each episode, Chávez would
chat, one-on-one, with a few of his supporters, asking about their lives, their
aspirations, and their problems, and always, always feeling their pain. If
Trump liked to play a mogul on TV, Chávez liked to play Oprah.
Chávez’s performances could be
spellbinding. He would decry the rising price of chicken and then, teary-eyed,
hug a woman over her trouble finding the money for school supplies for her
children. He would sit and listen carefully as people described their problems,
learning their names and asking them questions to draw out the details of their
situation. It was during these moments of personally bonding with his
followers, more than during his ideological tirades, that Chávez shifted the
basis of allegiance to him from the political realm to the realm of primary
identification. Such moments turned followers into fans, fans who in time would
coalesce into a political tribe: people who crafted an identity out of their
shared devotion to “El Comandante.”
The adulation audiences
showered on their star was the raw material Chávez turned into power, which he
then used to dismantle the checks and balances at the heart of Venezuela’s
constitution. I grew up in Venezuela, and the experience of seeing Chávez
transform his fame into power and his power into celebrity marked me. So when
Trump’s circus engulfed U.S. politics in 2016, I watched with a horror suffused
with déjà vu. The histrionics, the easy answers, the furious denunciations by a
nebulous elite that woke up to the danger far too late—I had seen this movie
before. In Spanish.
POWER AT ANY PRICE
The spread of this new kind of
autocracy around the world amounts to a new kind of challenge for the world’s
democracies. Whereas the tragic events that marked much of the twentieth
century revealed the threats that democracy faced from the outside—fascism,
Nazism, communism—the threats in the twenty-first century are coming from
inside the house. The new breed of autocrats corrode democracy by taking part
in democratic politics and then hollowing them out until only an empty shell
remains.
The new autocrats can do this
because they have neither an interest in nor a need for a coherent ideology.
Their agenda is to obtain and keep power at any cost. The result is quite
different from the political movements that characterized the twentieth
century. Fascists and communists challenged democracy based on all-encompassing
alternative systems of belief that may have been morally abhorrent but were, at
least, internally consistent. Today’s autocrats don’t bother with any of that.
Instead of proposing an alternative ideology, they adopt the phraseology of the
ideology they are seeking to supplant, debasing it in the process.
Rather than do away with
elections altogether, the new pseudo-dictators hold pseudo-elections. That is,
they hold events that mimic the appearance of a democratic election but that
lack the essential elements of free and fair competition through the ballot
box. In Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega did not abolish elections; he merely
jailed all his main opponents in the months preceding the election of 2021. In
Hungary, parliamentary districts were manipulated to severely underrepresent
areas opposed to Orban. And in the United States, Republicans and, to a lesser
extent, Democrats have turbocharged the venerable old gerrymander with
sophisticated election-mapping software that will make an increasing share of
congressional districts noncompetitive.
Democracies are at a
disadvantage when it comes to combating this new breed of autocrats.
Not only are elections debased
in this way, but the rule of law is also reliably drained of meaning through
the use of pseudo-law. New laws are drafted in ways designed to apply to just
one case—invariably undoing a constraint on the power of the leader. Examples
abound: in 2001, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi helped change the
rules on conflict of interest to exempt his own media ventures; in 2008, Putin evaded term limits by concocting
a job swap with his prime minister.
These autocrats hound
independent judges off the bench, intimidate them into silence, or render them
powerless through court packing. Tribunals continue to hand down rulings that
punctiliously observe all the conventions of normal legal procedure but that
have predetermined outcomes based on political grounds. The biggest prize, of
course, is the supreme court. Controlling it changes the game. In 2015, a group
of Venezuelan legal scholars published an analysis showing that from 2005 to
2013, Chávez’s handpicked supreme court handed down 45,474 rulings, and in
every case, it sided with the executive branch. The Duma, the lower house of
Russia’s parliament, has exhibited a similar pattern in its dealings with
Putin. No law that threatens his power or interests has been passed in two
decades.
Soon, the public sphere is
falsified, as well. Twentieth-century autocrats jailed dissenting voices and
sent censors into newsrooms. Old-style dictators still behave that way today.
The more recent breed of autocrats, however, often seek the same results but
through less visible—and more democratic-looking—means. Rather than shut down
newspapers and TV networks, they fine them into financial unsustainability or
send ostensible private investors (who are in fact government cronies) to buy
them outright. Orban’s allies, for example, have bought up and consolidated
hundreds of private Hungarian news outlets. For anyone outside a very small,
politically savvy circle of observers, it was easy to miss. But the media
content gradually changed until it became difficult to distinguish the
reporting from the regime’s propaganda. Similar developments have taken place
in Egypt, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Montenegro, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland,
Russia, Serbia, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, and Venezuela, among other
countries.
Over time, a pseudo-press
arises, maintaining all the conventions and outward trappings of independent
journalism but none of its substance. The combination of pseudo-elections,
pseudo-law, and a pseudo-press yields pseudo-democracy: a system of government
that mimics democracy in order to subvert it.
CAPOS IN CHARGE
But falsifying democracy is a
means, not an end. The ultimate goal is to turn the state into a profit center
for a new criminalized coterie and to use the proceeds of large-scale
criminality to tighten its grip on power. The new autocrats go well beyond
traditional corruption; they are not merely overseeing a system in which some
criminals inside and outside government furtively enrich themselves. Rather,
they use criminal actions and strategies to further the political and economic
interests of their government at home and abroad.
Criminalized states put the
usual repertoire of a mob boss, such as demands for protection money, overt
intimidation, and back-street beatings, to political ends: silencing opponents,
cowing critics, enforcing complicity, enriching allies, and buying political
support internally and externally. A criminalized state combines traditional
statecraft with the strategies and methods of transnational criminal cartels,
and it deploys this mixture in the service of both domestic political goals and
geopolitical competition. Some cases are infamous, such as the thick morass of
business, intelligence, and political ties between the Trump Organization and
Russian oligarchs and officials that led to Trump’s first impeachment and is
the focus of continuing investigations by various different U.S. agencies. In
Russia, Putin has managed to turn the old Soviet system into a Mafia state in
which a minuscule elite enjoys security and extraordinary wealth and answers to
him alone. Venezuela provides an even more extreme example: in cahoots with the
regime of President Nicolás Maduro, Colombian guerrillas in the jungles of
Venezuela illegally mine gold that is then laundered in Qatar and Turkey,
circumventing U.S. sanctions on financing the Venezuelan regime. This is
organized crime, yes, but it is much more than that; it is organized crime as
statecraft, coordinated by the governments of three separate nation-states.
SLEEPWALKING TOWARD
AUTOCRACY
Democracies are at a
structural disadvantage when it comes to combating the rise of this new breed
of autocrats. Debate, forbearance, compromise, tolerance, and a willingness to
accept the legitimacy of an adversary’s bid for power are necessary for a
functioning democracy. But in the age of politics as entertainment, these
values continually lose space to their opposites, namely, invective,
maximalism, intolerance, fandom, messianism, the demonization of opponents,
and, too often, hate and violence.
The traditional separation of
politics and entertainment imposed its own set of guardrails: formal
institutions (such as laws, legislatures, and courts) and informal norms (of
decorum, the dignity of office, and so on) were highly effective ways of
hemming in power. But norms are unspoken and ill defined, making them
vulnerable. When politicians are just public servants, it is much easier for
the political system to impose restraints on their behavior. The new autocrats’
celebrity status loosens those restraints. Their fans have so much of their own
identities invested in their leaders that they can’t allow them to fail.
Moreover, burgeoning
discontent around much of the globe has created a fertile environment for these
autocrats. This frustration is not limited to those in penury, for it is not
just the poor who are disappointed with their lot in life. Nor is this anger
solely attributable to economic inequality, although inequality, having
acquired unprecedented potency as a source of social conflict, feeds the
feeling of injustice that makes people angry. An important source of anxiety
for those who have their basic needs covered (food, a roof over their heads, some
regular income, health care, safety) is status dissonance: the bitterness that
wells up when people conclude that their economic and social progress is
blocked, and they are stuck on a lower rung than the one they expected to
occupy in society. Status dissonance is amplified by the sense that rather than
coming closer to your rightful place in society, you are falling further and
further below your natural spot in the pecking order.
This experience of status
dissonance ties together the outlooks of widely different people who have
supported aspiring autocrats in very different contexts. The downwardly mobile
schoolteacher in the Philippines, the displaced autoworker in Michigan, the
unemployed university graduate in Moscow, and the struggling construction
worker in Hungary may not have much in common, but they all feel the sting of
disappointment from a life that doesn’t live up to the expectations they had
formed, to the future they had envisioned for themselves and their families.
The story of the twenty-first century so far is of how the disappointed lash
out politically, creating a series of crises that liberal political systems are
ill equipped to process and respond to in a timely way.
More and more, democracies are
not at their best.
Even when they are operating
effectively, the best democratic systems rely on messy compromises that leave
everyone somewhat—but never too—disaffected and dissatisfied. More and more,
however, democracies are not at their best. Instead of involving messy but
workable compromises, they are gripped by perpetual gridlock. Compromises, when
they are found, are sometimes so minimal as to leave all sides seething with
contempt. It is when this happens—when the capacity for problem solving dips
below a critical threshold—that the terrain is ready for autocrats who promise
simple solutions to complex problems.
This sclerosis can be chalked
up in part to regulatory capture, in which industries, through lobbying and
political contributions, are able to exert enormous influence over the
regulatory agencies supposed to watch over them. This is sometimes seen as a
purely U.S. disease, but it shouldn’t be. In all mature democracies,
well-organized interest groups increasingly own the decision-making processes
in the issue areas of concern to them. It is nearly impossible for the European
Union, for instance, to make significant changes to its agricultural policies
without the approval of European agribusiness. Mining interests
in Australia, telecommunications companies in Canada, and cement firms in Japan
have all perfected the dark arts of regulatory capture, becoming by far the
predominant voices in the policy debates in each of their areas. In the United
States, Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley are not just geographic
locations; they are also home to the headquarters of large companies that have
a tight grip on their regulators. The inability to contain regulatory capture
means that as income inequality deepens, growth itself has become one of those
policies that benefits a few people a lot and many people hardly at all. Hemmed
in by more areas of policy that have been captured by industry interests,
today’s democracies find it increasingly hard to provide adequate responses to
the demands of the voters. Recent evidence is the political upheaval in Chile,
a developing country that had become both economically successful and a stable
democracy. The dashed expectations of an already frustrated middle class fueled
the resentment that built gradually and then boiled over all at once, rocking
the system that had been in place for three decades.
Weaknesses commonly found in
democracies also make it difficult to mount a united front against the new
autocrats. Look, for instance, at how voting structures in the European Union
have prevented it from holding Orban to account or from stopping Hungary from
blocking criticism of China and Russia.
The Trump administration’s frustrations with the challenges and democratic
norms of multilateral diplomacy caused it to withdraw from various
international bodies. In 2018, it pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council,
citing the membership of malefactors such as China, the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, and Venezuela. Yet as Eliot Engel, then a Democratic congressman
from New York, noted, that withdrawal just allowed “the council’s bad actors to
follow their worst impulses unchecked.” The way to strengthen democracy is not
to withdraw from universalist bodies, which are the battlegrounds for
influence, but to forge alliances within them and use them more effectively.
For instance, democracies account for 80 percent of the funding for the World
Health Organization: properly concentrated, such power could have blunted the
effort of China, which contributes only two percent, to distort the
organization’s initial investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
WHAT IS HAPPENING
TO US?
“We do not know what is
happening to us,” the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote in the
disorienting year of 1929, adding, “and that is precisely what is happening to
us.” The plight of democracy today recalls his admonition.
The defenders of democracy
seem caught off balance not just by the blatant criminality of the new
autocrats but also by the onslaught against democratic checks and balances.
Political leaders and policymakers have failed to counter the illiberal,
populist narratives; the polarizing tactics; and the poisonous power of
post-truth deceit. They have not yet put forward a compelling case for liberal
democracy under the rule of law—an institutional arrangement too many young people
have come to see as a quaint throwback with little relevance to contemporary
realities. Worse, disoriented by the multiple layers of dissimulation that
modern autocracy involves, democratic societies have not even fully grasped
that they are in a fight to protect their freedoms. This is a key strategic
advantage for autocratic leaders: they know that they must undermine democracy
to survive, whereas democrats have yet to realize that they need to defeat the
new autocracy if they are to survive.
Fighting back will require
determination and the mobilization of all types of resources—political,
economic, and technological. Those battling on behalf of democratic
institutions will need to fortify checks and balances and pass measures aimed
at fostering fair political competition. Diplomats keen to preserve democracy
will need to push for more effective rules in the international arena to check
the spread of post-truth deception in media new and old.
None of this is possible
without clarity. No problem has ever been solved without first being
identified, and no fight has ever been won without first being waged.
Recognizing the magnitude of the problem is an important first step; action
must follow. If democracies wait until the new autocrats’ endgame is unambiguous,
it will be too late
