The Authoritarian Rainbow

There are many ways in which the subversion of democracy can play out.

It’s not your father’s authoritarianism. Not yet, anyway.

Broadly speaking, Old Authoritarianism dealt in absolutes. Political parties are outlawed. Elections are cancelled. Protestors are arrested. Or shot.

Iran is old school in the modern world. Election results are never in doubt. Protests are not always met with lethal rounds, but during the 2022 demonstrations sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the Morality Police, officers aimed for the eyes when they fired their rubber bullets. That way, secret police could patrol emergency rooms looking for eye injury patients to take away. Partially blind people will presumably be marked for decades to come.

But New Authoritarianism eschews such crude tactics. Instead, it recognizes that the complexities of the modern state are kind of like computer code: the millions of lines of laws and regulations provide countless opportunities to introduce malware that allows you to take control of the operating system.

New Authoritarianism lives inside the shell of democracy like Zombie-Ant Fungus inside its host. Democracy still functions, but does it? Autocrats of this stripe live in the light gray of possible electoral defeat. But the malware generally works, so far.

Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Duterte, Bukele, Bolsonaro, maybe Trump are all New Authoritarians. But the differences between them illustrate the many ways that our democratic future can go sideways.

There are two dimensions to authoritarianism that capture these differences: tolerance of dissent, and tolerance of electoral risk.

At the extreme, intolerance for dissent is evidenced in violent suppression of opposition groups or figures. Intolerance in the electoral sphere involves banning elections, banning political parties, or cancelling elections.

A classical totalitarian system typically scores at the extreme on both; liberal democracy is the opposite poles.

In the middle is a cluster of positions that characterize the leaders above.

Vladimir Putin is the closest to classical dictatorship. He is willing to kill dissidents in audaciously public ways. He is willing to bomb breakaway republics, and former Soviet holdings, into submission. And ever since his successor Dmitri Medvedev became his predecessor as president, I don’t think the outcome of any national election has really been up for grabs.

Viktor Orbán is not just tolerant but perhaps even welcoming of dissent; with the provinces locked up, he passes laws like a recent one outlawing the Pride Parade, among other things, knowing that it will provoke a reaction in liberal Budapest, and knowing that he can provoke a counterreaction that helps maintain his electoral lock on the 8 million voters outside the city. Because Orbán has a low tolerance of electoral risk, he has been able to afford a high tolerance of dissent. Dissent works to his advantage.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is arguably the opposite (though honestly, the distinction muddies easily). Türkiye is slightly more than nominally a democracy – it is historically a multiparty parliamentary system, and the Varieties of Democracy Project have characterized it as a “hybrid regime” with democratic elements. But Erdoğan, who took power slowly as Prime Minister in 2003 and President in 2016, oversaw the erosion of the deeply ingrained secularism that was championed by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, who founded the modern nation out of the Ottoman Empire. Factions of the military staged a coup in July 2016, citing corruption as well as the turn towards Islamism under Erdoğan. The coup was put down, and attributed with no apparent irony to the violent Islamist Gülen movement. Erdoğan instituted a purge of opponents, while also consolidating power, more or less transforming the political system from a parliamentary to a presidential system that is now often referred to as an “electoral autocracy.”

Rodrigo Duterte, now occupying a jail cell in The Hague, is an outlier. The Philippines are not a perfect democracy, but they are a resolute one. Even though the son of the hated dictator Ferdinand Marcos is now the president, a function of the dominance of dynastic political elites, it is hard to imagine the country, where memories of the “people power revolution” are fresh, tolerating an overt subversion of democracy. While judging the country only “partly free.” Freedom House notes that the country “hosts a vibrant political landscape, and elections are free from overt restrictions.”

Duterte won elections as a populist, and showed no sign of hostility to the electoral system per se. But he murdered people with zeal. His aggressive and overly literal “war on drugs” had guns blazing in poor neighborhoods, providing cover for both corruption and the killing and intimidation of opponents. In 2017, the World Organisation Against Torture had documented the killing of more than 50 human rights defenders, “mostly peasants or indigenous persons,” since Durterte took office a year before, He is, arguably, democracy’s mass murderer. Though they remain arguably self-governing, it is hard to see Filipinos as truly free in a system where they can be killed, on purpose or in the crossfire, with impunity.

Where will Donald Trump land in the cornucopia of ways to undermine democracy?

He has always aspired to something like the Duterte model, beating his opponents into submission while genuinely winning the electoral popularity contest. Trump admires brutality. “Beat the hell out of ‘em,” he exhorted supporters at rallies, promising to pay the legal bills of anyone committing assault and battery against protestors. He wanted troops to shoot Black Lives Matter protestors in the legs, and somehow convinced the Defense Department to use tear gas and boots on the ground to clear the way for a photo op.

But this will not work, even if Trump did have the nerve to order live fire on crowds. Violent suppression of dissent will engender a broader backlash. It is worth remembering that Bull Connor effectively doomed Jim Crow when he let the police dogs loose.

Electoral risk is the more promising axis for consolidating an American authoritarianism. And through gerrymandering, accusations of voter fraud and the Big Lie, Republicans have made steady progress on this for years.

But more than intolerance of electoral risk, it may be that tolerance of dissent, Orbán style, is Trump’s ace in the hole. Everything that delights his supporters enrages his opponents, and the fury of “the libs” delights them even more. Trump is incompetent at many things, and seems unable to follow the logical implications in terms of policy, but he is good at playing groups against each other, and ginning up outrage to energize the base.

Defending democracy on both axes requires a careful approach to dissent. We need to articulate an opposition to Trumpism that peels off rather than galvanizes his support. Red meat will be thrown. We cannot ignore it, since monstrous injustices will likely result. But we cannot focus on those things to the exclusion of other issues that are less divisive.

There will be many. The impact of cuts under the budget bill are a start – when medical care systems start to fail, the anger that results can be harnessed in reassessing the legacy of Trump and the Right. The urgent need for FEMA will dawn on many in their worst moments. The gutting of basic government services will create yawning human need, and needs are receptive to promises of change.

If Trumpism fizzles, it will be because you can’t sustain authoritarianism on outrage alone. You really do need the trains to run on time.