means as well as those who desire to do so. But the bigger concern is that some, very powerful leaders already see the end of democracy as being a foregone conclusion: China’s President Xi Jinping, for example, cautioned President Biden after his election that democracies are on
the decline and that one day “autocracies will run the world.”3
Given such results, and after all the efforts undertaken by liberal democracies across time to counter this very thing happening, one needs to ask if the framework is of value anymore? A number of theorists no longer think so.
For example, Adam Gopnik recently reviewed new two books on authoritarianism for The New Yorker, both of which suggest today’s autocrats are different and thus need to be understood differently. The first was Moises Naim’s book, The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century. The premise of that book, Gopnik argued, is that today’s autocrats are different because they have “come to power and used the tools of our time – social media, television, the society of spectacle – to promote one-man rule and the suppression of dissent.”4 The second was Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman’s book, Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. The premise of that book, Gopnik argued, is that older tyrants could best be described as “fear dictators” who cancelled or rigged events to produce certain favorable outcomes or sent people to the gulags, whereas newer tyrants can best be described as “spin dictators” who combine “an authoritarian core with a civil surface” to marginalize opposition rather than outlaw them, who “put constraints on Google” rather than start a gulag, in effect deploying “more limited power that allows space for unthreatening dissent without allowing real opposition.”5
Gopnik rightly finds the arguments of both books to be less than satisfying. From what they present, it seems reasonable to conclude the opposite, that there is nothing new and tyrants simply use the tools available to them
to seek and retain power. And given what he
has learned, it appears Gopnik can’t push his own conclusion much further. His claim is that “if there is something that distinguishes modern dictators from the general depressing run of gangster strongmen in human history, it’s that they make their way through the specific negation of liberal principles and institutions.”6 The same could be said of all previous tyrannical regimes.
For these reasons, Anne Applebaum, a writer for The Atlantic, provides a more interesting twist on the subject. Applebaum writes:
Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources — the troll farms that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another — and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil
of America.7
Authoritarianism serves as a convenient category in which to place governments that liberal democracies find threatening to their geopolitical standing and way of life.
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