It Can Happen Here

Jake Whitney / The Progressive

In his new book, The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century, Moisés Naím contends that authoritarian power is on the rise globally, and he admonishes citizens to recognize and confront it.

The premise is striking given that it contradicts the central argument of his 2013 work, The End of Power, in which Naím posited that globalization and mass access to information (among other factors) had caused centralized power around the world to “decay.”

In that earlier book, Naím said power had become easier to acquire but harder to retain. He now notes that the times have quickly changed.

“A backlash was inevitable,” Naím explains. Leaders who were “determined to gain and wield unlimited power deployed old and new tactics to protect their power from the forces that weaken and constrain it.” In 2020, Naím says, 4.3 billion people—more than half of the world’s population—lived in countries under regimes that were autocratic or headed that way.

In building his argument, Naím dubs these “old and new tactics” the “3 Ps”: populism, polarization, and post-truth. He points to a wide swath of global leaders, from rich and poor countries alike and from all over the political spectrum, as “3P autocrats,” and he skillfully details how they’ve embraced authoritarian measures.

Naím points to obvious figures such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez (Naím is Venezuelan), as well as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson, India’s Narendra Modi, Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and “Donald Trump, of course.”

The Revenge of Power is an unnerving read. Naím traces how many of these leaders attained power through apparently democratic means only to set out to dismantle democracy once in power—which, in Trump’s case, is an effort still underway. While Naím strays from his central premise a bit when discussing anti-trust law and the surveillance economy (crucial topics, to be sure, but not as relevant to this discussion), the book serves as a forceful wake-up call to anyone who thinks a dictatorship can’t happen here.

Naím begins his first chapter with four instances of world leaders attempting to thwart constitutional checks on their power. After recounting initiatives by leaders in Poland, India, and Bolivia to unconstitutionally extend their terms of office or crack down on critical media, Naím turns to the United States. He cites Trump’s 2019 announcement that he would ignore all subpoenas related to his attempted shakedown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—and his demand that administration officials refuse to cooperate with Congress—as akin to the instances in the aforementioned countries.

Naím describes how Trump closely followed, and in some ways helped to shape, the modern autocrat’s playbook. He shows how the post-truth era uses the freedoms of democracy to undermine it; the free flow of information allows for the purveyors of post-truth to overwhelm citizens with so much false data that the truth can no longer be discerned.

“The result is a sort of journalistic dysfunction that makes bad information systematically drive out the good,” he writes. He recounts instance after instance of rightwing media and bot armies successfully pushing hair-brained conspiracy theories, impugning experts, and parroting Trump’s Big Lie.

In a particularly insightful section, Naím takes us through precursors to post-truth, such as failed Soviet “active measures” campaigns, to bolster his point that post-truth relies on modern technology to be truly dangerous. And here, he argues, is where Trump and contemporary Republicans have broken new ground.

One comes away from The Revenge of Power not just accepting that autocracy “could happen here” but believing that it has already started.