More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 22 - December 28, 2024
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.
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.
Russia should aim “to create a new world order.” That goal is widely shared. Shored up by the technologies and tactics they copy from one another, by their common economic interests, and above all by their determination not to give up power, the autocracies believe that they are winning. That belief—where it came from, why it persists, how the democratic world originally helped consolidate it, and how we can now defeat it—is the subject of this book.
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.
“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.
Even as Western political leaders spoke about “democracy” and “rule of law” in Russia, Western companies and financial institutions were helping build autocracy and lawlessness, and not only in Russia.
The globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.
How does a rogue state survive under sanctions? New sources of funding can help: drug trafficking, illegal mining, extortion, kidnapping, gasoline smuggling.
An influx of kleptocratic cash can also empower regimes to become more autocratic and repressive themselves.
To prevent the democratic wave then sweeping across Western Europe from spreading to the East, China’s leaders set out to eliminate not just the people but the ideas that had motivated the protests: the rule of law, the separation of powers, the right to freedom of speech and assembly, and all the principles that they described as “spiritual pollution” coming from the democratic world.
Still, the democratic world’s use of spyware and surveillance does help the autocracies justify their own abuse of these technologies.
If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those ideas have to be poisoned. That requires not just surveillance, and not merely a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan, a narrative that damages the idea of democracy, wherever it is being used, anywhere in the world.
Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, because there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade people to mind their own business, stay out of politics, and never hope for a democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.
This manipulation of the strong emotions about gay rights and feminism has been widely copied throughout the autocratic world.
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. Autocrats have an enormous incentive to spread that hopelessness and cynicism, not only in their own countries, but around the world.
autocratic information operations exaggerate the divisions and anger that are normal in politics. They pay or promote the most extreme voices, hoping to make them more extreme, and perhaps more violent; they hope to encourage people to question the state, to doubt authority, and eventually to question democracy itself.
In seeking to create chaos, these new propagandists, like their leaders, will reach for whatever ideology, whatever technology, and whatever emotions might be useful. The vehicles of disruption can be right-wing, left-wing, separatist, or nationalist, even taking the form of medical conspiracies or moral panic. Only the purpose never changes: Autocracy, Inc., hopes to rewrite the rules of the international system itself.
In practice, this means that China has led the charge to remove the language of human rights and democracy from international institutions. “For the CCP to attain the moral legitimacy, respect, and recognition it needs for leadership of a new world order,” writes the legal scholar and China expert Andréa Worden, “it must remove the threat of Western universal human rights.”
Nevertheless, the Chinese work extremely hard—tellingly hard—to insert such language into UN documents. If mutual respect, win-win cooperation, and sovereignty prevail, then there is no role for human rights advocates, international commissions of inquiry, or any public criticism of Chinese policy in Tibet, Hong Kong, or Xinjiang at all. The UN’s already limited ability to investigate UN member states will be curtailed further.
While China seeks to change the way diplomats and bureaucrats talk inside the UN, Russia has mostly focused its efforts on changing the popular conversation around the world.
If 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.
The sheer quantity of contradictory material was also meant, again, to convince people that the truth was impossible to know. But something else was at stake as well. The White Helmets created feelings of solidarity, humanity, and hope. To win the war, Russia and Iran needed ordinary Syrians to feel despair and apathy, and the rest of the world to feel helpless. They succeeded.
A world in which autocracies work together to stay in power, work together to promote their system, and work together to damage democracies is not some distant dystopia. That world is the one we are living in right now.
Sharp was a pragmatist, not a dreamer. He opposed the use of violence not merely on moral grounds but because it is an ineffective means of fighting a dictatorship: “By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority.”
They should systematically consolidate the opposition, fight fear and apathy, persuade people to demonstrate their resistance to the regime, and rob the regime’s leaders of their legitimacy. The goal is to take power, but to do so peacefully.
Havel believed that if everyone were forced to choose, and if everybody were forced to confront propaganda with reality, then sooner or later the falsehoods promulgated by the regime would be exposed.
Creating bonds between different classes and across different geographies is not just a matter of activism. It also requires an idea or a set of ideas large enough to overcome class and social divisions.
But they were defeated because the Chinese authorities had also been studying the kinds of tactics proposed by Sharp and Havel. They had thought hard about how to mock and undermine symbolic acts; how to smear and discredit charismatic leaders; how to use social media to spread false rumors and conspiracy theories; how to isolate and alienate people; how to break links between different social groups and social classes; how to eliminate influential exiles; and above all, how to turn the language of human rights, freedom, and democracy into evidence of treason and betrayal. The rest of
...more
But modern autocratic regimes go one step further, for they need to smear not just their opponents but their ideas. To do so, they often frame their language—words like “democracy,” “justice,” “rule of law”—not as evidence of a genuine, popular, organic desire for change but as evidence of “treason,” “foreign links,” and of course foreign money.
Mawarire had discovered something that many other autocratic governments have now learned: smear campaigns work.
This is why modern autocrats usually prefer to avoid murder. A martyr can inspire a political movement, while a successful smear campaign can destroy one.
The more sophisticated autocracies now prepare the legal as well as the propaganda basis for these campaigns in advance, creating traps designed to catch democracy activists even before they gain credibility or popularity.
Most of these measures serve as a false nod to the rule of law, helping justify what comes next, which is often not a political accusation but a false allegation of corruption.
Corruption accusations against dissidents also deflect attention away from the corruption of the ruling party.
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.
The most sophisticated modern smear campaigns have one additional purpose: they encourage new forms of mass participation.
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.
A form of public despair will often follow the crushing of an opposition movement, especially if violence has been used. People will mourn the dead and wounded. They will feel bitter because they have lost hope. After that they will be angry. They will be angry because the situation is worse, because their hopes have been dashed, and because their leaders have disappointed them.
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.
López, the Venezuelan opposition leader, began by reminding everyone in the room that although autocrats work together to keep one another in power, there is “no alliance of those of us who are fighting for freedom.”
The autocracies keep track of one another’s defeats and victories, timing their own moves to create maximum chaos. In the autumn of 2023, both the European Union and the U.S. Congress found themselves unable to send aid to Ukraine because minorities with deep Russian ties, led respectively by Viktor Orbán in Hungary and by a handful of MAGA Republicans in Congress, many acting under the instructions of Donald Trump, blocked the majority and delayed the aid.
This multifaceted, interconnected, self-reinforcing polycrisis was not coordinated by a single mastermind, and it is not evidence of a secret conspiracy. Instead, these episodes, taken together, demonstrate how different autocracies have extended their influence across different political, economic, military, and informational spheres. They also show how much damage they can do when they opportunistically work together toward their common goal: damaging democracies and democratic values, inside their own countries and around the world.
Because autocratic alliances are largely transactional, they can shift and change, and often do.
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.
Powerful people benefit from the existing system, want to keep it in place, and have deep connections across the political spectrum.
For all those reasons, no single politician, party, or country can reform this system alone. Instead, an international coalition will have to change the laws, end secretive practices, and restore transparency to the international financial system.
