On our minds: The decline of iron-fisted despots, the rise of something, arguably, worse. |
 | | A main shopping street in Istanbul last week. The country experienced a coup attempt in 2016, which was followed by a crackdown.Emrah Gurel/Associated Press |
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But it was not until this week that I understood that dictatorship is changing, too. |
I had been following the bloody crackdown in Myanmar, where the military has killed over 500 people, mostly peaceful protesters, since seizing power in a February coup. |
Curious whether events like this were becoming more common, I crunched some numbers from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, a data collection program on organized violence maintained by Uppsala University in Sweden. The data set tracks, among other things, every large-scale government killing since 1989. |
I was, after years of feeling that the world was eroding around me, shocked by what the numbers showed: These attacks are down. Way down. |
In the 1990s, there were 23 instances of a government killing 500 or more of its own, unarmed citizens. In the 2000s, it happened seven times. In the 2010s, only six. |
Maybe this was a fluke of how I'd defined my search, I thought. But however I measured it, the trend held steady. When checking for all of the incidents with more than 100 killed, I found 80 in the 1990s, 46 in the 2000s and 31 in the 2010s. Episodes with more than 1,000 killed: 14 in the 1990s, five in the 2000s and four in the 2010s. |
Was I looking at the wrong metric? Myanmar's crisis seemed to stem largely from its military style of rule. So I checked the Rulers, Elections, and Irregular Governance data set, overseen by the One Earth Future Foundation, which records political conditions in every country going back decades. And I found the same thing. |
For decades, there had been about a dozen military governments in the world. And, on top of that, another 10 to 20, depending on the year, under partial military rule. But, as the Cold War wound down, that number plummeted. It's been declining ever since. This year, there are only two: Thailand and Myanmar. (Both are true global exceptions, the former for its peculiar pattern of self-reinforcing coups, the latter for reasons I cover in this week's column.) |
It was perplexing. Democracy has been declining steadily for years. Authoritarianism is up. I'd expected to see military rule and government massacres up, too. What could explain this? |
"Today's dictators are getting savvier in how they oppress," said Erica Frantz, a scholar of authoritarianism at Michigan State University. "Repression in the last couple of years has actually gotten worse in dictatorships." |
It helped, Dr. Frantz said, to see the shift in context with "the democratic golden days" of the 1990s and 2000s, when democracy seemed ascendant, even dominant. |
"That was a time of such optimism that there really wasn't even a field of authoritarianism in political science," Dr. Frantz said. She was in graduate school at the time for what, she thought, might as well have been 8-track studies. |
Democracy had become the default, widely demanded by citizens and the international system alike. Dictators didn't disappear. But, with a handful of exceptions (the biggest being China), the single-party states and military juntas and revolutionary regimes did. |
Most were replaced with real democracies or with strongmen: civilians in suits who at least put on a show of being democrats, though the plausibility of their performance varied widely. |
The big turn came with the "color revolutions" — a series of pro-democracy movements, mostly in former Soviet republics, in the mid-2000s — and with the Arab Spring protests of 2011. |
Many of the leaders removed or almost removed in those uprisings were members of that new dominant class of dictator, the faux-democratic strongman. It turned out, they learned in those years, that they were vulnerable. So they adapted. |
"Authoritarian leaders have begun to develop and systematize sophisticated techniques to undermine and thwart nonviolent activists," Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard University political scientist, wrote in 2017. |
Dictators even shared lessons and technologies, Dr. Chenoweth wrote, leading to "joint efforts to develop, systematize and report on techniques and best practices for containing such threats." |
Authoritarianism became less about imposing your will by force, or terrifying citizens into submission, and more about outmaneuvering them. |
Dictators developed cat-and-mouse strategies for frustrating and redirecting popular dissent without crushing it outright. Strategically jailing protest leaders rather than squashing the entire protest. Winning over loyal factions of citizens and elites and marginalizing the disloyal. Whipping up flag-waving nationalism and fear of minorities to justify, even gain real support for, curbs on political rights. Consolidating power when they can, relenting when they must. |
It worked. In her study, Dr. Chenoweth found that, 20 years ago, a vast majority of protest movements calling for systemic change succeeded: 70 percent. But that number has since shrunk to 30 percent. The new authoritarianism is working. |
Part of what makes this version so successful is that, while it is genuinely oppressive, robbing millions of rights and freedoms, it's rarely as dramatic as the old authoritarianism, with its secret police and prison camps and military crackdowns. |
"You go to work, you eat your lunch, you go home to your family," he wrote. "There are schools and businesses, and some people 'make it' through hard work and luck." And "in general," he added, "people are free to complain to one another." |
Americans tend to conceive of democratic uprisings as inevitable based on the belief that people find life under authoritarianism intolerable. People usually prefer democracy, Dr. Pepinsky wrote, "but living in a complicated world in which people care more about more things than just their form of government, it is easy to see that given an orderly society and a functioning economy, democratic politics may become a low priority." |
The only part of Dr. Pepinsky's essay that seems to have aged poorly is the idea that people inevitably prefer democracy. The shift toward authoritarianism has come in many forms but, often, it comes from citizens. In country after country, a decisive subset of voters has expressed that, while rights and freedoms are fine, they would rather privilege things like a strong-fisted leader, enforcing racial hierarchies and overturning elections that their side loses. |
The new authoritarianism, perhaps, plays into that appeal. If democracy ends, Dr. Pepinsky wrote, it will "not end in a bang" but "with a whimper, when the case for supporting it — the case, that is, for everyday democracy — is no longer compelling." |
- For all of the focus on democratic erosion at the top of the American system, state governments have become "laboratories of democratic backsliding," Jacob M. Grumbach, a University of Washington political scientist, finds in a comprehensive and data-driven new study.
- After much of the London subway system shut down in 2014 during a restructuring protest, about 5 percent of commuters who'd found alternative ways to commute to work "stuck with these new routes after the strike was over," a 2015 economics study found. People, the authors concluded, "under-experiment during normal times." It took the strike for them to discover that they preferred walking. What will the pandemic help you discover about living your best life?
- After some of the first Covid-19 cases were reported in the United States, there was an immediate and sharp uptick in Google searches for racist anti-Asian terms and slurs, the economists Runjing Lu and Sophie Yanying Sheng find. Tweets containing those slurs rose as well.
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