Autocracy is nothing new, but it has a post-modern version, replete with the following characteristics:
(1) The trappings of a democracy (“elections”, institutional “checks and balances”, multi-“party” system, “media”);
(2) Affiliation with a global network of authoritarian regimes which cross-promote the members’s agendas and interests; and
(3) Vehement and hateful rejection of the values of liberal-democracy and the left, especially pluralism, sexual, gender, and social freedoms, free speech, and the peaceful transition of power.
But the historical fact is that it is American coercive meddling that has created or restored autocracy as an alternative political and geopolitical organizing principle and value system. Suffice it to mention South Vietnam taken over by the Communist North, Russia after Yeltsin, and Afghanistan, now again in the hands of the Taliban.
Seemingly incapable of learning from its mistakes, the USA is currently repeating the same self-defeating pattern in Israel, Venezulea, and a host of other polities.
Autocrats perceive democracy and Western decadence as symptoms of incurable and inexorable effeteness. With narcissism on the rise, such vulnerabilities are widely derided and decried in populist movements. Strong men are touted as the panacea to all the ills of the failed progressive project.
Autocracy is highly performative. It fits in well with Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle” and the leverages the emergence of social media, conspiracism, and fake news.
I am reminded of this quote:
“I came here to see a country, but what I find is a theater … In appearances, everything happens as it does everywhere else. There is no difference except in the very foundation of things.”
(de Custine, writing about Russia in the mid-19th century)
Four decades ago, the Polish-American-Jewish author Jerzy Kosinski, wrote (or maybe compiled) the book “Being There”. It describes the election to the presidency of the United States of a simpleton, a gardener, whose vapid and trite pronouncements are taken to be sagacious and penetrating insights into human affairs. The “Being There Syndrome” is now manifest throughout the world: from Russia (Putin) to the United States (Obama, Trump).
Given a high enough level of frustration, triggered by recurrent, endemic, and systemic failures in all spheres of policy, even the most resilient democracy develops a predilection to “strong men”, leaders whose self-confidence, sangfroid, and apparent omniscience all but “guarantee” a change of course for the better.
These are usually people with a thin resume in politics, having accomplished little prior to their ascendance. They appear to have erupted on the scene from nowhere. They are received as providential messiahs precisely because they are unencumbered with a discernible past and, thus, are ostensibly unburdened by prior affiliations and commitments to the establishment (the “swamp”). Their only duty is to a nebulous and shape-shifting horizon. They are a-historical: they have no history and they are above history.
Indeed, it is precisely this apparent lack of a biography that qualifies these leaders to represent and bring about a fantastic and grandiose future. They act as a blank screen upon which the multitudes project their own traits, wishes, personal biographies, needs, and yearnings.
The more these leaders deviate from their initial promises and the more they fail, the dearer they are to the hearts of their constituents: like them, their new-chosen leader is struggling, coping, trying, and failing and, like them, he has his shortcomings and vices. This affinity is endearing and captivating. It helps to form a shared psychosis (follies-a-plusieurs) between ruler and people and fosters the emergence of a hagiography.
The propensity to elevate narcissistic or even psychopathic personalities to power is most pronounced in countries that lack a democratic tradition (such as China, Russia, Hungary, or the nations that inhabit the territories that once belonged to Byzantium or the Ottoman Empire).
Cultures and civilizations which frown upon individualism and have a collectivist tradition, prefer to install “strong collective leaderships” rather than “strong men”.
Yet, all these polities maintain a theatre of democracy, or a theatre of “democratically-reached consensus” (Putin calls it: “sovereign democracy”). Such charades are devoid of essence and proper function and are replete and concurrent with a personality cult or the adoration of the party in power and its network of benevolent and venal patronage.
In most developing countries and nations in transition, “democracy” is an empty word. Granted, the hallmarks of democracy are there: candidate lists, parties, election propaganda, a plurality of media, and voting. But its quiddity is absent.
The democratic principles and institutions are being consistently hollowed out and rendered mock by election fraud, exclusionary policies, cronyism, corruption, intimidation, and collusion with Western interests, both commercial and political.
The new “democracies” are thinly-disguised and criminalized plutocracies (recall the Russian oligarchs), authoritarian regimes (Central Asia and the Caucasus), or puppeteered heterarchies (Macedonia, Iran, Bosnia, and Iraq, to mention recent examples).
The new “democracies” suffer from many of the same ills that afflict their veteran role models: murky campaign finances; corrupt revolving doors between state administration and private enterprise; endemic corruption, nepotism, and cronyism; self-censoring media; socially, economically, and politically excluded minorities; and so on.
This malaise threatens the foundations of even the likes of the United States and France.
Many nations have chosen prosperity over democracy. Yes, the denizens of these realms can’t speak their mind or protest or criticize or even joke lest they be arrested or worse – but, in exchange for giving up these trivial freedoms, they have food on the table, they are fully employed, they receive ample health care and proper education, they save and spend to their hearts’ content.
In return for all these Confucian worldly and intangible goods (popularity of the leadership which yields political stability; prosperity; security; prestige abroad; authority at home; a renewed sense of nationalism, collective and community), the citizens of these countries forgo the right to be able to criticize the regime or change it once every four years. Many insist that they have struck a good bargain – not a Faustian one.
The only threat to most autocracies is the inter-generational transmission of power in an environment increasingly more suffused with pathological narcissism and psychopathy.
By definition, leaders are authority figures and, as such, stand in for one’s father, especially in patriarchal and traditionalist societies. Old-school psychoanalysts would tell you that such substitution is bound to provoke one’s latent Oedipal complex and proclivity for patricide, whether actual (in the form of an assassination) or symbolic (in the form of dissent and disdainful criticism).
Young, emerging leaders more often than not treat their predecessors this way: as hated parent-figures. This is especially true when the new or young leader’s childhood has been marked by the traumas wrought on by an absent, or an abusive father, as is much more common nowadays than ever.
This pernicious undercurrent often mixes unsettlingly with virulent envy, the outcome of deep-seated feelings of inferiority and insecurity.
The less self-regulated the new or young leader’s sense of self-worth, the more s/he resorts to narcissistic defenses and the more s/he compulsively seeks narcissistic supply (attention, adulation) to buttress his/her precariously-balanced personality.
Narcissism is frequently tinged with sadism and passive-aggressive behaviors: taunting the older or previous leader, publicly humiliating him or her, thus showing him/her “who is boss”.
The more successful the new or young leader is at defeating or subjugating his predecessors, the more it supports his belief in his own omnipotence, omniscience, and cosmic-messianic sense of mission.
Every manner of psychological defense mechanism is provoked in the young leader: denial (of the inappropriateness, impudence, and immorality of his actions); devaluation (of the older leadership, thus justifying their mistreatment); displacement (scapegoating the previous leaders for one’s own predicament and failures); fantasy (evading reality by constructing elaborate grandiose narratives and confabulations); idealization (of the nation, for instance, or of one’s own coterie or political party); omnipotence; projection (attributing to the former leaders one’s own faults, frailties, and shortcomings); projective identification (provoking the older leaders into action that is unseemly or against their best interests); rationalization and intellectualization (of one’s misconduct and misdeeds); splitting (casting the older, erstwhile leaders as evil, corrupt, and incompetent while attributing to oneself all the positive traits).
The end result of such a clash is often a civil war or at the very least decimating civil unrest. This is the endpoint of most autocracies, too.
Alas, the Youth of today are opting out of the political and social game and the public square. They are not participating in the life of collective, not even as rebels. They merely seek to sabotage the established order via avoidance, virtue signaling and self-aggrandizing morality plays, withdrawal, and passive-aggressive resistance. They constitute a new phenomenon: the avoidant revolutionaries.
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