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However fantastical or hypocritical they may be, corruption allegations also deepen the natural cynicism that autocracies cultivate in their citizens, reinforcing the public’s conviction that all politics is dirty, including opposition politics, and that all politicians, even dissident politicians, should be treated with suspicion.
Anyone who had ever been bribed into obedience might have felt a kind of reassurance: See, they are in it for the money too, like me.
At the height of the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, workplaces and schools were encouraged to identify class enemies and conduct struggle sessions, during which the enemies were accused of real or imagined thought crimes, humiliated, and sometimes beaten and tortured by their colleagues and classmates. But Maoist struggle sessions took place in a single room. The internet now makes it possible for anyone to join, even anonymously.
The Venezuelan government set up a system to transfer small amounts of money to people who retweet or repost government propaganda. The Saudi government has deployed thousands of real and fake Twitter accounts to attack its enemies. Known as the “army of flies,” these swarms include both government-run accounts and enthusiastic volunteers.
The sense of power and connection that people once got from joining crowds can now be experienced at home, at a laptop, or on a phone, behind closed doors.
Other friends told López that when they wrote or posted in his defense online, they were overwhelmed: “It’s just incredible, the machinery of trolls who come out of the woodwork.”
In Venezuela—as in Zimbabwe, Russia, Iran, or China—the regime can also use financial investigations, pressure on spouses and employers, low-level threats, or even real violence, not just against opponents, but against their supporters, friends, and family.
Technologies built in Silicon Valley and public relations tactics invented on Madison Avenue long ago meshed with dictatorial behavior to create coordinated online harassment campaigns that are widely used not just by amateur online activists, and not just in “cancellation” campaigns or online pile-ons, but by democratically elected governments and leaders around the world.
The president’s online trolls—some clearly professional, others probably spontaneous volunteers—took the attacks further.
There is not—at least not as of this writing—an example of the contemporary American federal government using all the instruments of the state—legal, judicial, financial—in combination with a modern, online hate campaign to target one of the president’s personal enemies.
If he ever succeeds in directing federal courts and law enforcement at his enemies, in combination with a mass trolling campaign, then the blending of the autocratic and democratic worlds will be complete.
No, he argued, we are not an opposition; we are an option, a better option: “We should adopt positive language. We are not victims.”
Masih Alinejad, the Iranian activist whose social media campaign persuaded thousands of Iranian women to discard their veils, said she thought that “if we make them hear us and understand us,” the combined forces of democracy activists could shape debate in Washington and Silicon Valley: “We are not just fighting for our own people. We are fighting for democracy everywhere, even in the West.”
A narrative promoting “Ukraine fatigue” spread across the internet, pushed by Russian proxies and Chinese media in multiple languages.
By the spring of 2024, Chinese hackers were discovered to be burrowing deep into the computers and data storage of the British parliament and its members.
As I’ve written, some autocracies—the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Vietnam—seek cooperation with the democratic world, don’t want to upend the UN Charter, and still see the advantages of international law. Some democracies—Turkey, Israel, Hungary, India, the Philippines—have elected leaders who are more inclined to break conventions on human rights than to uphold them.
For all these reasons, the democracies of North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, together with the leaders of the democratic opposition in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and other autocratic states, should think about the struggle for freedom not as a competition with specific autocratic states, and certainly not as “war with China,” but as a war against autocratic behaviors, wherever they are found: in Russia, in China, in Europe, in the United States.
A Russian, Angolan, or Chinese oligarch can own a house in London, an estate on the Mediterranean, a company in Delaware, and a trust in South Dakota without ever having to reveal ownership to tax authorities anywhere.
Their work is legal. We have made it so. We can just as easily make it illegal.
Anonymous transactions can move through different bank accounts in different countries in a matter of seconds, while anyone seeking to follow the money and understand what happened may need years to find out.
Just as the democratic world once built an international anticommunist alliance, so can the United States and its allies build an international anticorruption alliance, organized around the idea of transparency, accountability, and fairness, enhanced by the creative thinking found in the autocratic diasporas as well as the democracies themselves.
