Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
Some thoughts (🐻) on Anne Applebaum's latest book Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.
Applebaum's thesis will be unsurprising to anyone with familiarity with her politics or other works: the liberal world order is under threat by authoritarians cooperating together, aiming to protect their own domestic wealth and power from liberal values of lawfulness, transparency, democracy etc. It is not an ideological bloc, like in the Cold War, but marriages of convenience built around revisionism and power seeking.
These authoritarians (exemplified by Russia, China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Iran, as well as elements found within places like Turkey, India, Hungary, Israel, etc) have learnt from the failings of the 20th century totalitarians. They do not offer their citizens propaganda of utopian promises of a better future society, but rather aim to depoliticise them through cynical nihililism. They do not rely on mass encampments or purges, but aim to discredit, humiliate or defame opposition figures. Rather than pursuing true autarky, they aim to use economic integration with liberal democracies to spread their political systems of corruption, cynicism and extraction.
Further, these authoritarians closely co-ordinate and learn from each other. They are building sophisticated webs of black markets (to avoid sanctions or anti-corruption mechanisms), technologically advanced surveillance systems to track dissidents worldwide, and layers of disinformation networks to bombard liberal democracies and subvert their political processes.
Would I recommend it? Autocracy, Inc is not particularly deep or complex, but it does entrench my pre-existing beliefs and provide a number of useful figures and anecdotes to support this. To give an indication, it's definitely written for a mass audience to the point of reminding the reader who Mao, Lenin and Hitler were. At less than 200 pages it is not a particularly large commitment either way. So if you want to reinforce some convictions, or if you are freshly interested what this whole "liberal world order" thing is and how it's being threatened, than it is worth picking up.
Applebaum's prescriptions match the depth of the rest of the book and are fairly standard: it endorses the US government preemptively debunking misinformation (which it has done, exposing a Russian disinformation campaign about health systems in Africa before it kicked off for example. Ukraine false flags are another example). It calls for greater transparency around financial systems and cracking down on tax havens to minimise autocrats ability to subvert liberal economic systems. It calls for greater regulations on social media, but beyond ownership of your own data doesn't have much detail (and I don't find this a particularly compelling concept, but that might require its own post).
The main takeaway from the book for me is a greater fortitude in the need to confront authoritarianism worldwide. I think the "Left" would benefit from acknowledging that many of the world's richest don't appear on the Forbes 500, and that they benefit from the fusion of state and personal power. Gaddafi died arguably significantly richer than Elon Musk is today; Putin is arguably the world's first trillionaire already. These ultra rich are trying to fortify and cement their privilege through remodelling the international system to support their fiefs.
For all their flaws, liberal democratic systems do greatly empower the common person and are a powerful bulwark against oligarchic power. The world's tyrants have democracies in their sights for this very reason. The fight for greater democracy and liberty needs to be transnational, and we need liberal democracies to be proactive and assertive in defending it.