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by
Moisés Naím
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August 5 - August 5, 2022
As Roderick Hart argued in Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen, Trump tapped into the public’s feelings along four powerful axes.7 His persona connected with their feelings of being ignored, of being trapped, of being under siege, and he tapped into their overall weariness about politics.
What we didn’t grasp was that as power degraded in its traditional domain, it was finding new ways to regroup elsewhere in new forms. Aspiring autocrats were responding to a changed landscape with changed strategies.
with perfect aplomb. Nobody did it better. In America, campaign professionals had long since grasped that you can persuade people to vote you into power with the same techniques that get them to buy this brand of canned tuna and not that one.
All around the world, outrageous public personas are becoming the new normal.
What’s new is the extent to which people look at politics first and foremost as spectacle, as a battle where celebrities face off with each other in an antagonistic contest for supremacy.
Polarization, in this sense, is less about issues and policies and much more about raw, visceral identity.
it. People no longer vote their values, much less their interests. Today, people vote their identities.
This is profound.
it ended in Venezuela. One of the longest democracies in the Americas became a brutal dictatorship, and one of the world’s wealthiest countries became one of the poorest.
Debate, forbearance, compromise, tolerance, and a willingness to accept the legitimacy of an adversary’s bid for power are the kinds of instincts that need to be widely shared in a political culture if democracy is to survive. But in an age of politics as entertainment, these values continually lose space to their opposites: invectives, demonization of opponents, maximalism, and intolerance.
Celebrity and stealth are the yin and yang of the 3P autocrats.
Celebrity breaks down the usual working of accountability mechanisms. It breaks down expectations about the correct ways to behave in power, multiplying the force of pseudolaw.
Or, in fewer words: power takes its revenge by embracing spectacle, even as it goes underground.
Populism, polarization, and post-truth are strategies. But it takes something more concrete than organizing principles and grand strategies to make this new approach to power work. For that, today’s autocrats need tools—specific psychological, communicational, technological, legal, electoral, financial, and organizational techniques to assert their power and shield themselves from the forces that constrain them.
The Power of Money Money is power and power is money.
Putin quickly realized that step one in establishing lasting control of the state would be to bring the oligarchs to heel.
In his book Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy, Anders Aslund explains how Putin, a former KGB agent, relied on his community of spies and secret-service operatives to do precisely that.1 From 2000 to 2003, Putin took pains to make the new pecking order clear: the rich could remain rich, could become much richer still, but only if they got clear on their political priorities.
The Trump presidency was an institutional slaughterhouse of Washington’s sacred cows.
From appointing obvious industry cronies to regulate the industries they used to represent (right up to the extreme of appointing a coal lobbyist to head the Environmental Protection Agency), openly siding with America’s dictatorial adversaries above his own intelligence services, defending torch-wielding neo-Nazi protesters at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas, and refusing to commit to accepting the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, no rules seemed to be protected from the president’s transgressions.
Norm-breaking becomes an instrument of polarization, the second broad strategy in the 3Ps recipe.
Duterte built his reputation as mayor of Davao City on his barely concealed sponsorship of what came to be known as the DDS, the Davao Death Squad. A loose confederation of hit teams run by former soldiers and police officers, the DDS was
given carte blanche to take out social undesirables: street kids, small-time drug dealers, anyone who, in the mayor’s view, was a menace to public order.
Duterte promised violence even as he distanced himself from any specific killing. It was shameless. And it worked.
Populists know there are rich political spoils to be had from satisfying their fans’ thirst for symbolic revenge.
That identification is always both positive (with the leader) and negative (against those the leader defines as the enemy). That’s why identity politics is always
the handmaiden of polarization.19
All too often, aspiring autocrats who have a special knack for wielding identity as a tool for polarization suc...
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Because we’re irresistibly drawn to messages that confirm our preexisting biases and flatter our prejudices. In the hands of populists utterly indifferent to truth and happy to exploit the paradox of trust in the service of polarization, skepticism becomes a tool of devastating effectiveness.
A genuine ignoramus can achieve things, politically, that a pretend one just can’t.
Donald Trump’s rejection of expert knowledge had a taste of authenticity, with deep roots in the endless expanses of his ignorance.
Distrust of elites bleeds into distrust of the tools the elite uses to sustain its
power. Soon, hostility extends to intellectual effort of any kind, and to the institutional buttresses of that effort: universities, elite publications, research institutions, think tanks, the entire system of academic credentialing designed to certify expertise. “Burn it all down,” the 3P autocrat says. “It’s a trap. It works against you and your family.”
Fringe communities such as incels and white nationalists are experiencing the profound disempowerment of dashed expectations just as radical new technologies of empowerment have come onto the scene: the internet, of course, but also the broader development of an information society along with an explosion in international trade that brings millions of new products into every market and the availability of much cheaper air travel that enables much more human mobility (at least until a pandemic breaks out).
In Israel, the hard-right Channel 20 gives ample airtime to extreme religious and nationalist views that often echoes with eliminationist themes as solutions to the Palestinian question.
Yet questions remain. Why, amid the sea of views in this new world of unlimited access to every sort of opinion, were authoritarian views so often the ones that seem to win out? Why not transcendentalism, say, or radical vegetarianism? Why did the new media ecosystem pick out the messages of the 3P autocrats as winners? What made these sorts of pitches so devastatingly effective in the information age? Why, in other words, were so many willing to overlook the obvious
signs of authoritarianism in these aspiring leaders’ personas? The question has it backward. The 3P autocrats became popular because of their authoritarianism, not despite it.
An increasingly well-established thread of social scientific research suggests that large numbers of people are predisposed to authoritarian politics.
Similarly, people predisposed to backing autocrats will not
do so unless their environment prompts them in that direction. And what is that prompt? Researchers have converged on an answer: the preeminent trigger able to activate authoritarian predispositions is the perception of threat.
The perception that the world around you is changing in ways you cannot predict or control feels deeply threatening to a sizable subset of any population.
ethnic change polarizes people in just this way, with those predisposed to dislike uncertainty adopting increasingly strident anti-outsider views as a response to ethnic change.5 When coupled with economic circumstances that are precarious or deteriorating, that predisposition to equate change with threat becomes doubly potent.
It found that the more voters were concerned about external threats, the more intolerant they became of otherness and the more supportive they were of Trump’s candidacy.
Meanwhile, novel technologies and media landscapes create opportunities for people who feel threatened to form communities centered on ideas that wouldn’t even have received a public airing a generation ago.
Societies in the grip of anti-politics often find that they can no longer agree on a shared set of objective facts. This is a trend amplified and energized by the third P: post-truth.
We instinctively “get” populism and polarization in a way we don’t get post-truth. Why? First, because we find it hard to differentiate mere untruth from post-truth, which is a fundamentally different concept.
Post-truth in the context of democracies is a new and frightening phenomenon.
It is not about the spread of this lie or that lie but about destroying the possibility of truth in public life.
Post-truth has been defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth.”
Unlike lying, post-truth is not an individual moral failing. It is not a personal fault of a given public figure. It is a feature of the communications infrastructure of politics and power in today’s world.
To philosophers, the slow unraveling of a shared sense of reality had long been seen as a problem of hard-core dictatorships. Much of our thinking about the problem comes in books about Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. Philosopher Hannah Arendt famously argued that “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”5
Today, the consensus among independent Russia experts is that the apartment bombings were orchestrated by the FSB to consolidate Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power. The bombings appear to have been a peculiar hybrid: both a false-flag operation designed to pin the blame for the terrorist attack on an innocent party and a murderous type of active measure, with control of the Russian state at stake. What cannot be disputed is that the wave of nationalist fervor that followed the apartment bombings and Putin’s war on Chechen separatism led to his undisputed control of Russia.
