Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

by Anne Applebaum

This is the core of the problem: the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy will always appeal to some of their own citizens. To stay in power they must undermine those ideas, wherever they are found.

Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.

Eventually they reappeared, but only for some. When I was in Caracas in 2020, I saw hard-currency stores where people with access to dollars could buy Cheerios or Heinz ketchup. Meanwhile, people without dollars faced hunger and malnutrition if not outright starvation. The Catholic charity Caritas estimated in 2019 that 78 percent of Venezuelans ate less than they used to, and 41 percent went whole days without eating. Doctors in Venezuelan hospitals faced pressure not to list malnutrition as either a cause of illness or a cause of death. Susana Raffalli, a renowned expert on food security, told me that she had witnessed an extraordinary scene in one hospital: the parents of a child who had died from starvation tried to give Raffalli the corpse, because they were afraid that state officials would take it away and hide it. She also visited a rural region where children left school at midday to hunt for birds or iguanas to cook and eat for lunch.