John stepped out of the conversation about Hong Kong and asked me what I’d learned in reporting this book about how different authoritarian regimes acted. He was looking for some germ of insight that could be of use. I did my best to give him a brief summary. I described to him how they all made similar efforts to swallow institutions and lubricate their efforts with corruption. How they try to make politics so futile or toxic that people just succumb to apathy, like John’s taxi driver. How Putin makes examples of people—killing or poisoning the occasional opposition figure as a message to
...more
