THE REVENGE OF POWER

A distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sounds an alarm about the worldwide rise of authoritarian leaders.

After arguing in The End of Power that global institutions are finding it harder to win respect, Naím, the former editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, makes a good case that leaders who gain power increasingly use autocratic strategies he calls the 3Ps: “populism, polarization, and post-truth.” His thesis isn’t new, but what sets his work apart from books like Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth is its unusually comprehensive armada of facts about the international drift over the past two decades toward authoritarian leaders, whether old-style dictators like Kim Jong Un or nominally elected presidents like Vladimir Putin. The pandemic has posed unprecedented openings for power grabs: Xi Jinping cracked down on ethnic Uyghurs in China, Viktor Orbán shut down Parliament in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte was granted near-unlimited emergency powers in the Philippines, and other countries have seen similarly repressive moves. In one of many startling but well-documented examples, Naím notes that a European Union report found that Russia used social media bots “to try to worsen the crisis the pandemic would generate for its adversaries in Europe,” typically by undermining confidence in democracies’ emergency response. Other tactics used for years by Russia—along with North Korea, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia—include the creation of GONGOs, government-operated fake NGOs, to thwart the work of democracies. Naím’s solutions to the new authoritarianism tend toward blue-sky visions, and his repeated use of the term “3P autocrats” is perhaps too clever for his urgent message (as in the Disney-fied chapter title “The 3P Autocrats Go Global”). But his book offers a chilling confirmation of a trend many readers will have sensed instinctively: A growing number of countries have achieved or are moving toward “outright kakistocracy: rule by the very worst a society has to offer.”

An authoritative and intelligent portrait of the global spread of authoritarianism and its dangers.