More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Moisés Naím
Read between
August 5 - August 5, 2022
The stakes couldn’t be higher, and nothing is guaranteed. What’s at stake is not just whether democracy will thrive in the twenty-first century but whether it will even survive as the dominant system of government, the default setting in the global village. Freedom’s survival is not guaranteed.
That’s why, in recent years, we have seen the success of a new breed of power-seekers: unconventional leaders who witnessed the decay of traditional power and realized that a radically new approach could open hitherto untapped opportunities. They have arisen all over the world, from the richest countries to the poorest, from the most institutionally sophisticated to the most backward. We have in mind here Donald Trump, of course, but also Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, India’s Narendra Modi, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip
...more
These leaders are adapting to the new landscape, improvising new tactics and reengineering old ones to boost their ability to impose their will on others. Despite the enormous national, cultural, institutional, and ideological differences between the countries where they arise, their playbooks look uncannily similar.
What is this formula? What are its components? And how does it operate in the real world?
To my mind, the formula can be summed up in three words: populism, polarization, and post-truth.
3P autocrats are political leaders who reach power through a reasonably democratic election and then set out to dismantle the checks on executive power through populism, polarization, and post-truth.
As they consolidate their power, they cloak their autocratic plans behind walls of secrecy, bureaucratic obfuscation, pseudolegal subterfuge, manipulation of public opinion, and the repression of critics and adversaries. Once the mask comes off, it’s too late.
populism is best understood as a strategy for gaining and wielding power. Its draw is versatility: populism as a strategy can work in a very wide variety of contexts and be made compatible with virtually any governing ideology or with no ideology at all.
the way populists organize their bids for power. Among them are: Catastrophism.
The criminalization of political rivals.
Using external threats.
Militarization and paramilitarization.
Crumbling national borders.
Denigrating experts.
Populism inhabits a world of belief and gut feeling rather than facts and science.
Attacking media.
Undermining checks and balances.
Messianic delivery.
Once a populist frame is established, the stage is set for the second strategy used to gain and retain power: polarization. Relentlessly demonizing opponents and portraying both long-simmering and newly introduced wedge issues that divide the nation are the divisive strategies that, sadly, often yield great results. It’s an approach that Marxists used to call “sharpening the contradictions”—and its effectiveness is beyond doubt.
Polarization eliminates the possibility of a middle ground, pushing every single person and organization to take sides.
The most peculiarly contemporary aspect of the revenge of power is its final ingredient: post-truth.
Post-truth is not chiefly about getting lies accepted as truths but about muddying the waters to the point where it is difficult to discern the difference between truth and falsehood in the first place.
This concept tries to capture what according to Sean Illing is “the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth”
Erica Frantz of Michigan State University puts it in her 2018 book, Authoritarianism:
What Everyone Needs to Know, today’s autocracies often arise by eating democracy from within, in the same way the larvae of some wasps will eat their host spiders from the inside.16
Stealth, then, is one of the central tactics used by autocrats to concentrate power in an environment where its natural tendency is to disperse. Stealth becomes the necessary adjunct to the 3P framework, a tactical imperative needed to deliver on
aims too shocking to be acknowledged.
3P power is a reaction to the fragmentation and degradation of traditional forms of power.
The challenge 3P autocracy poses to free and democratic societies is existential. There is simply no room for complacency here.
Yet a silent thread runs through them. Each shows a leader picking away, furtively, at strategic safeguards that protect democracy, limit leaders’ options, and guarantee fair competition for power. This is the revenge of power at work.
Although often practiced by self-styled anti-globalists, the revenge of power is itself a thoroughly globalized affair.
Who Will Guard the Guardians?
The most basic problem in designing a government that truly answers to the people it governs is so old it’s best known in its Latin form: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guardians?
The way modern societies do that is through a clever institutional design built into the liberal consensus: an interlocking system of government bodies, each guarding
the others, each ensuring no single one of them can run off with power and use it for private rather than public ends.
Pseudolaw is to real law what pseudoscience is to real science. Just like pseudoscience appropriates the outward forms of science to pervert it, pseudolaw borrows
the look and feel of the rule of law to render law meaningless.
The insidious part is that once 3P autocrats begin to use pseudolaw to entrench themselves in power, their opponents often find it hard to resist the urge to use pseudolegal measures of their own to suppress them when and if they come to power.
Pseudolegality has been a boon to would-be autocrats all over the world. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi cemented its 3P credentials with an incendiary new “citizenship law” that excluded millions of Muslims who had immigrated from neighboring countries decades earlier (the hated “them” in the BJP’s sectarian “us vs. them” narrative) from keeping Indian citizenship.
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu was himself cementing his 3P bona fides with a remarkably similar manufactured controversy: a new “nation-state law” that refused to commit Israel either to legal equality between its citizens or even to democracy, refounding the state in ways that exclude full participation by its Arab minority. Law, once more, is made an appendage of a 3P strategy: a political wedge in the form of a statute.
And this is exactly what he did. At a grand ceremony of the ruling party, United Russia, Putin announced he would be swapping jobs with his long-serving prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, for the 2008–12 term. Immediately after that, Putin and Medvedev would swap again … but not before approving a constitutional reform to extend the president’s term from four years to six. The Putin-Medvedev arrangement was classic pseudolaw: blatantly designed to defeat a constitutional check on the accumulation of power without exactly violating it. Term limits are designed to prevent a ruler from accumulating
...more
But in fine pseudolegal fashion, it shredded the spirit of the rule without quite technically breaking
Elbridge Gerry, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. As governor of Massachusetts between 1810 and 1812, Gerry put together a district map for the state senate that gave a huge electoral advantage to his own party’s candidates.12 Gerrymandering has survived until today and consists of manipulating the borders of a territorial unit in a way that ensures that one’s party has an advantage. This bizarre practice allows representatives to pick their voters rather than the other way around. It is undemocratic, primitive, and untouchable until now.
These departures should make clear that democracy is safe nowhere, not even in the nation that pioneered it in the modern world. When issues of real power come to the fore, politicians’ rhetorical commitment to democracy turns out to be paper-thin.
“When highly committed parties strongly believe in things that they cannot achieve democratically,” argues David Frum, “they don’t give up on their beliefs—they give up on democracy.”14
Gerrymandering is by no means the only kind of 3P shenanigan that flourishes in the richest countries as well as in the poorest. An even more consequential one involves stacking the judiciary with reliable political appointees.
When a major, difficult-to-reverse policy decision is made during a lame-duck session by a government that’s just been voted out of power, it’s a fair bet that democratic norms are under serious strain.
To enable the polarization that is the second pillar of the 3P framework, they make themselves ubiquitous: omnipresent and unavoidable.
More than leaders to their followers, they become stars to their fans.
What’s different now is how closely patterned today’s political cults are on the entertainment values of our age.
