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

by Anne Applebaum

Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation.

Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc.

Autocracy, Inc., offers its members not only money and security but also something less tangible: impunity.

The conviction, common among the most committed autocrats, that the outside world cannot touch them—that the views of other nations don’t matter and that no court of public opinion will ever judge them—is relatively recent.

Today, the members of Autocracy, Inc., no longer care if they or their countries are criticized or by whom.

Their primary goal is to stay in power, and to do so, they are willing to destabilize their neighbors, destroy the lives of ordinary people, or—following in the footsteps of their predecessors—even send hundreds of thousands of their citizens to their deaths.

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.

Autocracy is a political system, a way of structuring society, a means of organizing power. It is not a genetic trait. Particular cultures, languages, or religions do not necessarily produce it. No nation is condemned forever to autocracy, just as no nation is guaranteed democracy.

“From the beginning, Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal…who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.”

Putin’s Russia was not an old-fashioned totalitarian state, isolated and autarkic. Nor was it a poor dictatorship, wholly dependent on foreign donors. Instead, it represented something new: a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leaders.

Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie; it’s to make people fear the liar.

This tactic, the so-called “fire hose of falsehoods” produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you can never know? If you can’t understand what is going on around you, then you are not going to join a great movement for democracy, or follow a truth-telling leader, or listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you will avoid politics altogether.

Groups like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are sometimes dismissed as more talk than substance—an annual excuse for a photo op. But they represent something real. Though not every leader who joins these meetings is an autocrat—the BRICS group in particular does not have a unified political position—many want to use these institutions to help spread the same kind of unfettered power they enjoy at home around the world.

the old system was designed to inculcate the “rule of law,” these new institutions are meant to promote “rule by law”—the belief that “law” is whatever the current autocrat or ruling party leader says it is, whether inside Iran, Cuba, or anywhere else in the world. And just as the old system of universal rights had implications for the real behavior of nations, this new one does too.

“It’s just incredible, the machinery of trolls who come out of the woodwork.” And it’s not just trolling they fear. 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.

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. American and European intermediaries—lawyers, bankers, accountants, real estate agents, and public relations and “reputation management” advisers—make these kinds of transactions possible. Their work is legal. We have made it so. We can just as easily make it illegal. All of it.

Reform of these platforms is a vast topic, with implications that range well beyond foreign policy, and the resistance even to a civilized discussion of social media regulation is enormous. The platforms are among the wealthiest and most influential companies in the world and, like the companies that benefit from money laundering, they lobby against change; so do many politicians, especially on the far right, who find the current system amenable.