How Do You Spot An Authoritarian?

How dangerous leaders amass power

Hello there,

Hope you enjoyed my recent piece on the Indian economy.

2024 is going to be one hell of a test for democracies.

As everyone watches the action while chewing their nails off, we must ask ourselves: “How do we spot an authoritarian leader? What do they really do?”.

The first step to warding off a threat is to be able to identify it.

Demagogues aren’t this cute

To answer these questions, I read the work of political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt for some illuminating answers.

So let’s unpack the authoritarian playbook, the step-wise tactics they follow to amass power (with a nice football analogy to make sense of the entire process):

Buy Out The Referees

• The first step for a potential authoritarian (referred to as AU to save my fingers) is to buy out or eliminate all the referees who act as a check on their power: supreme court judges, tax authorities, you name it.
  

• Those who resist bribery and refuse to come to the AUs side are coerced via other ways- blackmail, for instance. These people can be filmed engaging in illicit activities (it is not too hard to find a gentleman indulging in prostitution or drugs…or both) and use that as leverage to win them over.
  

• AUs also resort to a practice called court packing, where they fill the Supreme Court with judges who happen to be in their pay, such that it’s easy to have a court majority for any ruling that you want passed. Hungarian PM Viktor Orban is an expert at such dark arts and has successfully filled the court with loyalists.

Weaken The Opposition

• Once you’ve un-leveled the playing field, it’s time to turn things up a few notches and eliminate the star players of the opposition to weaken them beyond repair. This means bringing down their most important political players, businessmen, media outlets, artists, and intellectuals.
  

• The Turkish government ensured that one of their biggest media houses (that also, unfortunately, supported the opposition) was slapped with a $2 Billion tax evasion lawsuit. This ensured that the group went bankrupt and was effectively silenced.
  

• Legendary sci-fi writer Jorge Luis Borges was fired from his library position and moved to poultry farming when he criticized the existing regime and couldn’t find work for months. Artists in Venezuela saw all of their music tours getting canceled when they spoke against government violence. This has the chilling effect of silencing any dissenting voices who were planning to speak out against the government.
  
  

Change The Rules Of The Game

• By consolidating power, an AU can change the rules of democracy to further the consolidation- sometimes in ways that sound legal, and sometimes by taking advantage of crises.
  

• Southern American states in the 20th Century changed the ballot rules and introduced 2 new requirements for voting: payment of a poll tax and a literacy test. While this may sound okay on the surface, it was a sick move aimed at disenfranchising black voters, who’d naturally get restricted. The result? Black voter turnout fell from 60-90% across the states to <10%! So they were never able to vote and fell into the hands of the same folks who’d held them as slaves.
  

• Crises are the perfect time for a would-be AU to expand executive power. 9/11 was used by President Bush to pass the Patriot Act, giving them the power to engage in mass surveillance: an assault on the citizens’ privacy and civil liberties. Without a national emergency, it’d have been impossible to pass such an act. But in times of fear and paranoia, people are much more willing to give up their freedoms and deem such acts as favorable, which AUs cleverly take advantage of.

Using these 3 strategies, authoritarians can covertly amass unprecedented levels of power and portend a dark future for any country.

Faced with such a leader, opposition parties must work to transcend their differences and unite to prevent any such leader from coming to power. But that requires not just a long-term view that transcends personal interests, but an active collaboration between adversaries for the common good.

Any student of history would tell you that such cooperation is a tall order- but not that it’s impossible. Parties in France and Austria have shown us that such things can be executed.

So let’s hope we enter a new world order with fewer strongmen and more strong men.

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Thanks for tuning in! If you enjoyed this, you’d also love reading:

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• The Clash Of Civilizations

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