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May 13 - May 16, 2024
Typically, these leaders are nationalists and cultural conservatives, with little tolerance for minorities, dissent or the interests of foreigners. At home, they claim to be standing up for the common man against the ‘globalist’ elites. Overseas, they posture as the embodiment of their nations. Everywhere they go, they encourage a cult of personality.
The Age of the Strongman began with Vladimir Putin’s accession to power in Russia in 2000.
This international pattern underlines a central theme of this book: the strongman style is not confined to authoritarian systems. It is now also common among elected politicians in democracies. A strongman leader operating in a democracy, such as Donald Trump, faces institutional constraints that do not inhibit the likes of Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin.
The rise of strongman leaders across the world has fundamentally changed world politics. We are now in the midst of the most sustained global assault on liberal democratic values since the 1930s.
In 1945, there were just twelve democracies in the world. In the year 2002, that figure had risen to ninety-two, exceeding the number of autocracies for the first time ever.
A Chinese attack on Taiwan would throw the world economy into turmoil, since some 90 per cent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors are manufactured on the island by a single company (TSMC).
This book will attempt to answer three central questions about the Age of the Strongman. When did the strongman tendency take hold? What are its main characteristics? And why did it happen?
Russia and Turkey are both big countries with economies large enough to qualify for membership of the G20. But they are no longer superpowers. So the moment at which the Age of the Strongman became truly entrenched as a global phenomenon is best pinpointed to 2012: the year that Xi Jinping took power in China.
This tendency for Western commentators to initially mistake strongman leaders for liberal reformers is something of a pattern. When Erdogan first came to power in Turkey, he was described in the New York Times as ‘an Islamic politician who favors democratic pluralism’.
Then there are politicians who operate in democracies but who display contempt for democratic norms and who seem intent on eroding them: Trump, Orbán, Modi and Bolsonaro are at this end of the spectrum.
Age of the Strongman describes the rise of a new generation and type of nationalist and populist leader, linked by their contempt for liberalism and their embrace of new methods of authoritarian rule.
Here was an American president willing to say: we also lie, we also kill, our media is fake, our elections are rigged, our courts are dishonest. As the historian of China Rana Mitter puts it: ‘The anti-liberal discourse is helpful for China since it makes it easier to suggest that there is no fundamental difference between an authoritarian state and a democratic one … that it is a question of degree, not type.’14
There are four cross-cutting characteristics that are common to the strongman style: the creation of a cult of personality; contempt for the rule of law; the claim to represent the real people against the elites (otherwise known as populism); and a politics driven by fear and nationalism.
In the West, judicial independence has often been the first target of the new generation of strongman leaders. One of the earliest moves of the Hungarian and Polish governments, led by Viktor Orbán and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, was to change their countries’ constitutional arrangements to bring the courts under their control.
For a strongman leader, the law is not something to be obeyed: it is a political weapon to be used against opponents.
Trump lacked these arbitrary powers but clearly hankered after them. In the 2016 presidential election, he and his surrogates led chants of ‘Lock her up’ aimed at Hillary Clinton.
The anti-democratic nature of Trump’s politics became clear when he attempted to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. A rejection of democracy is implicit in the logic of strongman politics. As Erdogan once put it: ‘Democracy is like a tram that you ride, until you get to your destination.’
Populism, in turn, is closely linked to a style of political argument known as ‘simplism’.19 This is the idea that there are simple solutions for complex problems that are being frustrated by nefarious forces. Sometimes these solutions are so simple that they can be summarised in just three words – ‘Get Brexit Done’, ‘Build the Wall’.
The political bases of strongman leaders are often strikingly similar. In country after country, they have campaigned against urban elites and made their pitch to people living in small towns and the countryside.
American electorate on educational lines, losing heavily among college graduates but winning almost 80 per cent of the votes of non-college-educated white men. Little wonder that he remarked in 2016: ‘I love the poorly educated.’
strongman leadership can be accounted for by a lack of education or even stupidity. But, in the Western economies, the ‘poorly educated’ are most likely to have seen their wages stagnate and their standards of living decline in recent decades. Under those circumstances, it is very tempting to opt for an anti-system candidate.
This brings us to the final element of the strongman style of politics – nostalgic nationalism.
It is also relatively new. In Britain and the US, until recently, the most successful politicians were forward-looking. Bill Clinton spoke of building a ‘bridge to the twenty-first century’.
For a brief period in world history, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and unchallenged. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the big economic and political questions appeared settled. In economics, the answer was free markets. In politics, the answer was democracy. In geopolitics, America was now the sole superpower.
The financial crisis of 2008, combined with the Iraq war and the continuing rapid rise of China, also punctured the idea that the Western dominance would stretch long into the future.
As a former banker with Goldman Sachs, Bannon himself had personally profited from the ‘globalism’ that he was now busy denouncing.
The destruction of traditional industries, on which whole regions had depended, created a yearning for a leader who promised to bring back the prosperity and stability of a bygone era.
Some thoughtful observers now even question whether democracy itself can withstand the pressures of racial rivalries and group competition. As Barack Obama put it in 2020: ‘America is the first real experiment in building a large multiethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don’t know yet if that can hold
When I asked Konstantin Malofeev, one of the ideologues of Putinism, what he regarded as the essence of Western liberalism, he replied: ‘No borders between countries and no distinction between men and women.’
A personal connection between a strongman leader and his disciples is crucial for the establishment of a cult of personality and Twitter is the ideal medium for creating this.
While traditional media are meant to ask whether a story is true or false, Facebook asks its users if they ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ a posting: the appeal is to emotion and loyalty, rather than to reason.
China is now the world’s largest manufacturer, the largest exporter, the largest market for vehicles and smartphones, and the largest producer of greenhouse gases.
Asian nationalism is driven by rising expectations; the West’s nationalism is driven by disappointed hopes.
In his first year in office, he moved immediately to rein in independent sources of power, to assert the central authority of the state and to use warfare to bolster his own personal position – all actions that were to become trademarks of Putinism.
Key images were placed in the Russian media and around the world: Putin on horseback, Putin practising judo, Putin arm-wrestling or strolling bare-chested by the side of a river in Siberia. These images attracted plenty
the goal was to ensure that ‘Putin corresponds ideally to the Hollywood image of a saviour-hero’.
If you mention the brutal behaviour of Russian forces in Chechnya or Syria in Moscow, you will always have the Iraq war thrown back in your face.
Crucially, for Putin the West’s promotion of democracy posed a direct threat to his own political and personal survival. In 2004 and 2005, pro-democracy ‘colour revolutions’ broke out in many of the states of the former Soviet Union – including Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. If demonstrators in Independence Square in Kiev could bring down an autocratic government in Ukraine, what was to stop the same happening in Red Square?
The shock of the Iraq war and the colour revolutions were the recent experiences that underpinned Putin’s
Jraq war one factor thaT pushed putin
The ease with which the Crimean campaign was won in 2014 may have lured him into a dangerous miscalculation in 2022. Russia’s plans for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine were based on the idea that, once again, the Ukrainian armed forces would put up no real resistance.
Putin insisted that Ukraine was a failed state led astray by scheming foreigners. The West, he suggested, was playing a ‘dangerous geopolitical game’ and was intent on using Ukraine as a ‘springboard against Russia’. It was this kind of argument that laid the groundwork for Putin to portray an attack on Ukraine as a necessary act of self-defence.
By contrast, a definitive Russian failure in Ukraine would damage the mystique of Putin and the strongman model that he represents.
Ukrainian war will determine strongman models future to an extent
But intervention in Syria and the battle to control the Black Sea brought Putin into potential conflict with another regional strongman, who is also intent on rebuilding the glories of his country’s imperial past: Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Western opinion-formers were on the hunt for ‘moderate’ Muslim leaders, who could reconcile Islam with democracy and the West. Erdogan looked like the man they were searching for.
while Erdogan was much more religiously devout than Turkey’s traditionally secular leaders, he had embraced capitalism and risen through democratic politics.
Can we trust
Germany’s interior minister, argued that if Turkey joined the EU, it would ‘show the world that it is possible for Muslims and the West to live together on the basis of the values of the Enlightenment’.
On his release he formed and led a new breakaway Islamist party, Justice and Development (known by its Turkish initials, AKP), which won the Turkish general elections of 2002.
He was always an islamist...should have never trusted him
Some of his early actions in office also appeared to justify the hope that he would be a democrat and a reformer. As well as pressing ahead with Turkey’s application to the EU, his government passed legislation strengthening minority rights and judicial independence and abolishing the death penalty.
Lol
As mayor of Istanbul in 1996, he had remarked, ‘Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination. And then you step off.’
