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March 5 - March 10, 2025
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.
Polling done across the U.S.S.R. in 1989 found no deep, atavistic longing for a dictatorship. On the contrary, nine out of ten people said it was important for citizens to “express themselves freely.” They acted on this belief: in the late 1980s, people in the Soviet Union argued about everything. I can remember little knots of people gathered in public parks, arguing and debating. Everyone felt that something momentous was happening, and some believed it would be good.
“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.”
These were the true beneficiaries of this system: the oligarchs whose fortunes depended on their political connections.
To stay in power, modern autocrats need to be able to take money and hide it without being bothered by political institutions that encourage transparency, accountability, or public debate. The money, in turn, helps them shore up the instruments of repression.
He was betting that corrupt officials would prove more malleable than clean ones, and he was right.
Like Putin, Chávez slowly broke democratic institutions in Venezuela—the press, the courts, the civil service, various ombudsmen—even while proclaiming his belief in democracy.
Starvation and malnutrition, the Cubans had learned, could be political tools too.
If no parallel scandal has ever unfolded in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, that’s because there are no legislative committees or free media that could play the same role.
As more countries adopt these systems, the ethical and moral objections will fade.
even in a state where surveillance seems total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can always radicalize people.
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.
But many of the propagandists of Autocracy, Inc., have learned from the mistakes of the twentieth century. They don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and they don’t inspire them to build a better 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:
By picking a fight over gay rights, he was able to consolidate his supporters at home while neutralizing foreign criticisms of his regime.
In Putin’s Russia, Assad’s Syria, or Maduro’s Venezuela, politicians and television personalities often play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But when they are exposed, they don’t bother to offer counterarguments.
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.
China doesn’t separate propaganda, censorship, diplomacy, and media into separate compartments or think about them as separate activities, whether inside or outside China.
RT, like PressTV, Telesur, and even China’s CGTN, is rather a showcase, a production facility, and a source of video clips that can be spread by the social media network, and indeed human network, that Russians and others have constructed for that purpose.
Instead of money laundering, this is information laundering.
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.
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.
The red, they say it’s for the blood, the blood that was shed to secure freedom for me and I’m so thankful for that. I just don’t know that if they were here—they that shed the blood—and saw the way this country is, would they demand their blood be brought back?
they simply did not believe anyone could be so idealistic, or perhaps so naive, as to put themselves in danger for “democracy” or for “patriotism.” You will do it just because you love this country? Impossible.
When a state apparatus combines the prosecution service, the courts, the police, state-controlled media, and social media in order to frame someone in a particular way—to tell a particular story about their life and their beliefs, to accuse them of treason, fraud, or crime, and sometimes to arrest or torture them as a result of those fake accusations—some fragment of odium always attaches itself to the victim.
Modern dictators have learned that the mass violence of the twentieth century is no longer necessary: targeted violence is often enough to keep ordinary people away from politics altogether, convincing them that it’s a contest they can never win.
A martyr can inspire a political movement, while a successful smear campaign can destroy one.
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.
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.
Already, they understood that one nation’s freedom can often depend on the strength of freedom in others.
Western and especially American students of foreign policy often look at the world as a series of separate issues—eastern Europe, the Middle East, the South China Sea—each requiring a different cadre of experts or specialists. But that isn’t how autocracies see the world.
Because autocratic alliances are largely transactional, they can shift and change, and often do.
Our old models never acknowledged the truth that many people desire disinformation. They are attracted by conspiracy theories and will not necessarily seek out reliable news at all.
No democratic government should ever assume that arguments for democracy or for the rule of law are somehow obvious or self-evident. Authoritarian narratives are designed to undermine the innate appeal of those ideas, to characterize dictatorship as stable and democracy as chaotic. Democratic media, civic organizations, and politicians need to argue back and make the case for transparency, accountability, and liberty—at home and around the world.
Instead, they have focused on winning audiences, building support for their messages by channeling resentment, hatred, and the desire for superiority.
Good information has to help bring positive change. Truth has to be seen to lead to justice.
We no longer live in a world where the very wealthy can do business with autocratic regimes, sometimes promoting the foreign policy goals of those regimes, while at the same time doing business with the American government, or with European governments, and enjoying the status and privileges of citizenship and legal protection in the free markets of the democratic world. It’s time to make them choose.
The campaign for Brexit succeeded by using the metaphor “take back control,” and no wonder: everyone wants more control in a world where events on the other side of the planet can affect jobs and prices in our local towns and villages. But did the removal of Britain from the European Union give the British more power to shape the world? Did it prevent foreign money from shaping U.K. politics? Did it stop refugees from moving from the war zones of the Middle East to Britain? It did not.
There is no liberal world order anymore, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real. But there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do.
