THE AGE OF THE STRONGMAN

An examination of the modern rise of authoritarianism.

Vladimir Putin was first to the gate, writes Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times. Taking power in 2000, he set about reversing democratic gains won since the fall of the Soviet Union, crushing political opposition, and sweeping aside institutions obstructing his absolutist rule. Xi Jinping, “clearly nostalgic for some of the Maoist themes of his youth,” followed suit in China. The nub, writes the author, is that neither Russia nor China is a superpower as such—not yet, anyway—meaning that their authoritarian power does not yet extend far beyond their borders. Not so with the U.S. under Donald Trump, who clearly studied Putin and other dictators, trading in all the hallmarks of strongman rule: a disdain for the courts and other democratic institutions, a strongly enforced cult of personality, nationalism and anti-globalism, a base that is uneducated and rural, and the insistence that American greatness is undermined by the machinations of the “deep state” and Jewish financier George Soros. Interestingly, writes Rachman, that notion of the deep state is borrowed from the authoritarian regime in Turkey, while the Soros meme is widespread among rightists and antisemites across the world. Just as interestingly, he observes, the intellectual basis for the new authoritarianism is international, linking enough suspect characters to justify a conspiracy theory: Trump confidant Steve Bannon, say, hangs out with Italian fascists and Putin associates and reads the work of Carl Schmitt, the now-rehabilitated Nazi legal philosopher. “Trump’s defeat in 2020 does not mean that the danger has passed,” writes the author. However, by way of small comfort, he also observes that even the longest-lived authoritarian regimes have shelf lives, hastened by the general incompetence of their leaders in the face of such things as the pandemic.

An illuminating blend of dark warnings about the present and optimism that strongman rule can never prevail in the long term.