Entering The Age Of Dictators

How we’re sleepwalking into the abyss of global-local dictatorship.

Sifting through global political news it is hard to underrate the alarm bells going off. Judging by the recent work of several Pulitzer Prize-winners, it looks like we’re stumbling into a new era — one in which upholding democracy is no longer something we all strive for, not even in the West.

Even though history does not literally repeat itself, it has a way of popping up the same characters in new guises. Most of us will think of a dictator as the ones we are used to seeing in the movies — an ill-tempered man, often in military uniform, shouting and gesturing a lot and ordering the killing of innocents left and right. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum notes in her recent article The Autocrats Are Winning in The Atlantic magazine, this image is outdated in the 21st century. She says the following:

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.

Interesting to note here is that her article appeared more than a month before autocrat President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of Kazakhstan asked Russia to intervene in his country when all hell broke loose — which has proven her point exactly. Applebaum builds her story around a few of the more well-known autocrats, like Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, and the influence of supreme autocrats Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China on many other autocracies. And there are a lot of them — more and more actually.

As of 2020, out of the 195 countries on our planet, there are 52 nations with a dictator or authoritarian regime ruling the country. German research shows that the number of people living under a dictatorship rose from 2.3 billion in 2003 to 3.3 billion in 2017. This report further warned that growing restrictions on citizens’ rights and legal standards were an acute problem in democracies. The number of countries classified as having exemplary standards of free and fair elections had dropped from one in six in 2006 to one in fourteen in 2017.

As Applebaum notes, if the 20th century was the story of the victory of democracy over fascism, communism, and nationalism, the 21st century is, so far, the story of the reverse.

Hallmarks of Fascism

If we are to adjust our view of what a modern dictatorship looks like, what should we be on the lookout for? If you read Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, you can check the hallmarks of fascist politics for the usual suspect countries, like Russia or China (considering it to be quite a stretch to call today’s China a communist country rather than a fascist country). What’s new in recent years, is that you can check them for some democracies as well.

A run of the fascist hallmark checklist against the politics of Donald Trump is easier than its outcome is desirable. The ‘Again’ in MAGA has ‘creating a mythic past’ written all over it. What that era was exactly, is sometimes hinted at, but rarely discussed. I don’t think I need to explain anti-intellectualism or the unreality — where conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate. With the right-wing extremists like the Proud Boys at the front, the idea of a racist hierarchy is never far away. Add to that the anti-woke sentiments that Trump and his cronies often cry and you’ve got your victimhood covered. Trump and his supporters never fail to mention how much they love law and order, until it concerns their behavior, of course. And last but not least of the hallmarks as described by Stanley, the sexual anxiety around Trump is everpresent — women in general and anyone fitting LGBTQIAP+ are a direct threat to the traditional patriarchal hierarchy.

You can run this checklist against any random radical right-wing politician in Europe and find yourself checking off almost every facet without too much effort, from the Netherlands’ Thierry Baudet to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, from France’s Éric Zemmour to Italy’s Matteo Salvini. There’s no denying that what only a few decades ago was considered a faux-pas, has now become mainstream rightwing politics.

The New Domino Effect

During the second half of the previous century, the democracies of the West were terrified of the supposed growing influence of communists in the world. From Asia to the Americas, wars and covert wars were fought to halt the communist autocracies from gaining ground and democracies falling over one by one — the so-called domino effect. Somehow, these sorts of fears are not as present today, with arguably even more risks of democracies falling over into rightwing autocracies.

As the authors of How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt say in their opening words of their 2019 book: “Is our democracy in danger? It is a question we never thought we’d be asking.” It seems we’ve lulled ourselves into believing that democracy is maintenance-free — a Perpetuum mobile that ensures our enduring freedom. If only.

Rude Wake-up Call

We all saw — with mouths wide open — what happened on January 6, 2021, when America’s political faith was tested to the bone by fanatical Trump devotees, led by rightwing extremists like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. According to Pulitzer Prize-winner Barton Gellman of The Atlantic, January 6 was just practice. From that fateful day onward, the hardcore Trump fanatics have been working hard to undermine the political system from within this time around.

There is no doubt about who will run for president for the GOP in 2024, it will be Donald Trump. According to Gellman, the Republicans have learned from their mistakes in the 2020 presidential elections. In Gellman’s words:

They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify, and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

The 2022 midterm elections will be an even bigger test for American democracy than January 6 already was. Polls are showing that the Republicans will take back the House and the Senate, which puts them firmly in the driver’s seat of counting the electoral votes. Come 2024, Trump will have no problem whatsoever taking absolute control of the United States.

This chain of events sounds awfully familiar if you’re aware of the rise to power of one Adolf Hitler. In 1923, he and his rightwing gang of thugs tried their hand at a coup in Southern Germany, the so-called ‘Hitlerputsch’. It failed miserably and even landed him in jail. Not even ten years later, in 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor fully legally, having worked his way through the democratic German political system. Very shortly after that, the Weimar Republic became Nazi Germany — a full-blown dictatorship. Same characters, different guises. Trump won’t probably even see the inside of a jail cell, and he won’t have to wait almost ten years.

Holding Their Breaths

As of yet, the equilibrium of global power is still intact — albeit by a thread. The military and economical weight of the United States is still big enough to keep the world’s dictators from doing exactly what they want, whenever they want. If it weren’t for the power of the US, Putin would simply have waltzed into Ukraine and Xi would have swept Taiwan under the mainland rug by now. Too hasty a military action will have possible dire consequences for the autocrats and they know it. Both Putin and Xi are not people who like taking too big a risk, or so it seems. Until very recently it looked like they were holding their breaths until the US collapses — either into smaller introverted states or into one of their fold of fellow autocracies.

Once The US Goes…

In 1998, Russian professor Igor Panarin famously — or notoriously, you pick — predicted the collapse of the United States into smaller countries. In 2021, an astounding number of actual American voters at least somewhat agree that it’s time to split their country — 40 to 50 percent actually.

When — not if — Trump wins his second term, the United States will be divided as it hasn’t been since the Civil War. Whatever happens next is a guess as good as any, but it won’t be nice. Whether there will be secessions, civil unrest, war, or a straightforward dictatorship remains to be seen, but democracy as we know it will be over, that much is clear for many. Even the often carefully worded Canadians are preparing for the collapse of their neighbors.

Once the American military might is not hovering over the world’s dictators’ decisions anymore, they are free to act as they please. Invading Ukraine will take a mere hand gesture from Putin, and it won’t take more than a nudge from Xi to take Taiwan. And when these autocrats can act with impunity, who’s to stop the smaller kingpins around the globe from grabbing land and power? Under the supervision of supreme dictators Putin and Xi, much of the world could be divided between them. A global-local network of dictatorships would be the spine-chilling result. According to Simon Shuster of Time Magazine, Putin has already been working steadily for years now to build himself an empire of rogue states.

Until Very Recently

Two paragraphs back, I mentioned Putin and Xi holding their breaths before the collapse of the US, until very recently. Since a few weeks ago, the situation on the Ukrainian border changed the rules of that game. Putin seems to have taken a liking to play poker on a global scale. As I write this, tension is rising to unknown heights. Earlier this week, US Ambassador to the OSCE Michael Carpenter told reporters that the “drumbeat of war is sounding loud”. Ukrainian intelligence says Russia has all but completed their build-up of forces near the border, and senior US officials say Moscow could attack at “any point”.

It’s almost as if Putin already decided to jump down the rabbit hole. Does he consider the chances of Western, American-led intervention as so low as to ignore the possible consequences, or does he have an ace up his sleeve? We’ll find out in the coming weeks, probably.

What’s The Outlook?

One thing is for sure, we would never have the type of situation on the Ukrainian border if the dictators of the world wouldn’t feel so super confident about their rise to power. Not unlike the build-up to the Great War, in which the nations of Europe sleepwalked into a conflict that grew into the first world war, we have been stumbling into this age of dictators. Opportunistic as they are, the autocrats will likely keep their alliances alive for as long as it suits them. That might mean relative peacefulness on the borders — until they smell an opportunity to grab more power, more land, more wealth. The situation inside the borders of dictatorships, however, we can be pretty sure of. If history teaches us anything, then it bodes nothing well for the people living under the absolute command of unchecked whimsical despots.