A Review of Autocracy, Inc.

Those of us living in the West whose lives took shape in the immediate post-World War II world are being forced to recognize that we took a great deal for granted. Rule of law, humanitarian principles, international cooperation, and norms of honesty and rectitude in leadership might not have been observed by all leaders, but leaders who did not observe them paid a price.  We derived a sense of meaning from the aspiration that these values and practices would be adopted more and more broadly and that they would make way for a growth in fairness, resource-sharing, and well-being. We naively believed that our political future would be a matter of tidying up the picture in a world that was on the right track.

Now we find that instead of an inevitable climb to the mountaintop of inclusive governments and social betterment, a turn to authoritarianism has captured at least a third of countries on the planet.

Current autocrats, Anne Applebaum tells us, follow a new model.  Dictators of old were authoritarian personalities who emerged from politics or the military and seized hold of the state through control of the police and the army.  When we think of communist or fascist regimes, their authoritarian leaders acted in the name of an ideological vision touted to bring a better life for their citizens.

The authoritarians we see now are not a single individual but networks of kleptocrats taking control of countries with no appeal to a better future or improvement of the life of their citizens. Self-service is the be all and end all and this can be openly stated at no cost. Past autocrats believed they needed to disguise their questionable policies behind a veneer of apparent good behavior.  Note, for example, the way the Soviet Union orchestrated the trappings of democracy by holding elections, even though the world knew full well that participatory politics was not part of the life of the USSR.  

Now authoritarians pursue their policies in the glare of daylight, thumbing their noses at the notion that they will be stopped in their tracks. They assist each other, materially, practically, and psychologically, each helping to normalize the behavior of the others. They make use of cutting-edge technology and in many cases have found common cause with the techo-corporate world. 

Applebaum has the credentials to help us follow the ugly trail of these regimes.  A Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Applebaum was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years, and has written for a host of other highly regarded magazines and newspapers.  She is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic. Among her books are three about the Soviet Union: Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, 2017;  Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, 2012; and Gulag: A History, 2004, a series of works that have prepared her well to study authoritarianism in the twenty-first century.

A mark of these regimes is the tactic of destabilization.  They do not have inhibitions about seeing their country become a failed state.  They do not believe they will pay a price for this. Neither do they feel constraints when it comes to brutality. All this makes it hard to interpret the gameplan, beyond sowing disharmony, criticism, and undermining anyone who has not signed on to the crony club.

In normal cases such leaders would lose free elections.  But what we are seeing is that even charismatic opponents have difficulty challenging them, because the authoritarian is not just one ethically compromised individual but a world conglomerate. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a bugle call for this new world order. Russia pulled in Belarus, China, and Iran in its Ukraine venture, as part of a common exercise in mutual self-aggrandizement. Serbia, Venezuela, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Angola, Turkey, Myanmar, and over thirty others countries have autocratic regimes of a similar stripe. 

If there is a core idea that binds these governments together, it is the destruction of “liberal” norms that get in the way of their self-serving regimes.

Those of us who are confused about the meaning of the word “liberal” could be forgiven, given that it has become one more political football in our current public exchanges. When associated with license to do whatever one chooses, it is an easy target for those concerned about the decline of an acknowledged underlying moral order. When associated with “neo-liberalism,” the word conjures up a global free market that operates with no concern about wealth sharing or the negative impacts of capitalism.  “Liberal norms” are elements of government that guarantee freedom from tyranny. They include the assumption that the legal system must operate above politics, that courts are independent, that rights of free speech and assembly will be guaranteed, that journalism is and must be independent. These assumptions were written into the founding documents of the United States and have operated as reference points for many new democracies.  History tells us of the struggle to ensure that liberal norms get applied equally to all, but the principles themselves have persisted as beacons for the society we are trying to build.

Anne Applebaum fearlessly demonstrates that democratic countries have been, and continue to be, complicit in the emergence of Autocracy, Inc., by allowing a non-transparent global financial system to grow over recent decades. 

She flags an important moment for the inception of all this with Europe’s decision in 1970 to purchase Russian gas. Europeans were blinded, she claims, by the idea that trade could normalize relations, somewhat along the lines of the impact of the Schuman Plan on Western Europe in the early 1950s.  In the 1990s the West brought China into the World Trade Organization, again believing that an open economic border would be good for politics.  

These deals did not alter the politics of the authoritarian regimes that benefitted from them. Instead they helped western countries get used to operating by a double standard – doing business with illiberal regimes while at the same time claiming to stand for the norms of democracy and rule of law.

Nor has technology, with its enhanced possibilities for communication, increased global understanding or advanced ideas that promote individual freedom and well-being.  

China banned Facebook in 2009 and Instagram in 2014. It has developed sophisticated tracking systems, controlling Uigurs by requiring apps on phones that track “ideological viruses,” in other words, forbidden messages.  These apps can track a person’s location, purchases, and various kinds of unusual behavior including staying offline altogether.  

The fierce opposition China’s strict covid lockdown produced showed that the Chinese population can be easily radicalized, which has led China to adopt much more aggressive endeavors to scotch democracy anywhere in the world. 

Millions of security cameras are already in use in China and soon China’s data collection system will efficiently predict political resistance. China’s “Safe City” technology systems have been sold to Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, Serbia, S. Africa and Turkey. Facial recognition technology is being used widely in Singapore and Zimbabwe. 

Pegasus mobile phone software, developed by Israeli security, tracks journalists, activists and political opponents in Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, India, Bahrain and Greece.

Of course democracies can use these forms of surveillance in what we might call “legitimate” ways, for example to track criminals, but this would easily open the way to using them against political opponents. Using such technologies for anything opens the way to abusing them. China exports these technologies precisely, Applebaum claims, to get the world inured to them so that China can use them more easily at home. 

Autocracy, Inc. does not try to offer its citizens a hope for a better world, even insincerely.  These governments recognize that that approach backfired in the Soviet Union because people could see that the reality was different from the promises. Empty promises make the citizenry dissatisfied. Instead, Autocracy Inc. pursues policies that make people cynical and passive so that they will stay out of politics.

Russian media push the idea of the decline of Western countries using words like degeneracy and hypocrisy. They depict Europe as chaotic and frightening, with the goal of preventing Russians from identifying with Europe.  They find common cause with those in the US who accept the notion of Russia as a white Christian state, and who applaud Russia’s criticism of feminism and gay rights. Russia thus portrays itself as leading a campaign of strong states against weak and chaotic democracies.

No longer must Russia emulate the USSR in producing fake evidence to cover for lies.  Now the Russian government’s lying is blatant.  Russia depicts Ukrainians as Nazis, and NATO as the culprit forcing Russia to attack Ukraine.

Autocracies cooperate with each others’ media, helping to spread disinformation.  Conspiracy theories about Western public health initiatives spread in Africa. Agents of Autocracy Inc. register domain names that look like real domains, then post on Facebook and Twitter. They spread fake NATO press releases and social media posts that ostensibly come from Americans who oppose US support of the war in Ukraine. All this helped undermine Biden’s efforts to create a coalition and win over public opinion in the war against Russia in Ukraine.

Applebaum points out that citizens’ actions to oppose authoritarian regimes, inspired by Gandhi and King and picked up by the Otpur students in Serbia in 1999, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, and the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014, have become much more difficult now, because Autocracy, Inc. has learned how to use social media to discredit opposition forces.