Death by a Thousand Cuts: Neuropolitics, Thymos, and the Slow Demise of Democracy [2 ed.] 9783111327839, 9783111327792

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Matt Qvortrup Death by a Thousand Cuts

Democracy in Times of Upheaval

Series Editor Matt Qvortrup, Coventry University

Volume 1

Matt Qvortrup

Death by a Thousand Cuts Neuropolitics, Thymos, and the Slow Demise of Democracy 2nd Edition

ISBN 978-3-11-132779-2 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-132783-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-132805-8 ISSN 2701-147X e-ISSN 2701-1488 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023941431 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Just_Super / iStock / Getty Images Plus Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Meiner Muse gewidmet

“The land of truth is surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason ¹ “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” Ecclesiastes 1:9²

The word in Chinese is Lingchi. The literal meaning is slicing. But it became known as death by a thousand cuts – a form of torture-cum-execution widely practised under the Liao dynasty (916 – 1125 CE). But in modern parlance it has become synonymous with a slow, almost imperceptible demise ….

About the Author and Series Editor Matt Qvortrup is Professor of Political Science at Coventry University and an adjunct Professor of Constitutional Law at the Australian National University. A political scientist, his research centers on the tension between political actors being driven by emotion and driven by rational argument. Author of many books on referendums and democracy, the new edition of Qvortrup’s Death by a Thousand Cuts (DeGruyter 2023) pioneers interdisciplinary research in Neuropolitics and shows how political debates can be analysed using insights from fMRI-scans, history, and philosophy. Matt was the Editor-in-Chief of European Political Science Review 2016 – 2024.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111327839-001

Foreword to the Second Edition After the first edition of this book was published the world has moved on. What seemed to be a somewhat theoretical prospect of the demise of democracy has grown more acute. The illegal invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin showed that dictatorships can be outwardly aggressive – just like in the period between the two world wars. That China has made moves towards Taiwan to bolster the failures of Xi’s policies back home, has added to this. However, much as these developments have added empirical aspects to a depressing development, it also prompted a rethink. The question is, and remains, why do people succumb to the lure of dictatorship when clearly this is based on irrational arguments? To be sure, there can be intellectual justifications for transferring all powers to a Leviathan, as Thomas Hobbes suggested in one of the most impressive books ever written about politics. But very few dictators (certainly none I have come across) are Hobbesian apologists. Rather, the factors that cause individuals to embrace autocracy are often nothing to do with reasoning but a lack thereof. Throughout my life I have been inspired by Hobbes. Having studied human biology in my youth before becoming a political scientist, I wanted to emulate the English thinker by using the most advanced scientific explanation as part of a political and philosophical argument for improving society. For this reason, I returned to my original love, namely neuroscience (and neuropolitics, as I call it) and I was astonished to find that the advances in this discipline can teach us many things about why individuals act irrationally. Thus, while this is a second edition and not a new book, the revised text updates the historical sections. Like the first edition, the book shows that democratic breakdowns are rarely dramatic events, such as General Pinochet’s violent coup in Chile, or Generalissimo Franco’s overthrow of the Spanish Republic, but rather a gradual, almost imperceptible, process. In the first edition a chapter was devoted to the psychology of dictators. This section is drastically expanded in the second edition to include studies in neuroscience and ‘neuropolitics’ that show that those who espouse more authoritarian government use the part of the brain that we share evolutionarily with rats and cats. Thus, the second edition of the book marks a radical and new departure in political science, which combines philosophy, history, and neuropsychology to show how, when, and why democracies disappear. Democracies die when people get angry. This was the theory proposed by Plato. He introduced the concept of Thymos – the resentment that causes people to vote for demagogues – to explain the breakdown in democracies through https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111327839-002

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times. In the new edition it is shown – for the first time – how this theory fits with modern neuroscience. The second edition thus shows that hate-speech and anger associated with the rise of demagogues can be detected in the human brain. When certain individuals are exposed to extremist propaganda they use an older part of the brain – the limbic system – which we share with rats, cats, and bats. Conversely, when we engage in rational political debate, we use the parts of the cerebrum that we alone among primates have evolved. What is even more interesting that these ideas not only are related to the ideas developed by ancient philosophers but that they also can be backed up by the Irish philosopher and politician Edmund Burke’s (1729 – 1797) theory of the “sublime” as that which can “cause terror”.¹ These neuroscientific illustrations add a new dimension to the book. But the overall thesis is – as in the first edition – that complacency is the greatest danger for the survival of government by the people. Recently democratically elected politicians have used crises as a pretext for dismantling democracy. They follow a pattern we have seen in all democracies since the dawn of civilisation. The methods used by Octavian in the dying days of the Roman Republic were almost identical to those used by Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán in 2020. And, sadly, there are no signs that the current malaise will go away. Death by a Thousand Cuts adds substance to a much-discussed topic: the threat to democracy. While there are many topics to be covered, it is hoped that this new edition, at least in outlines, will provide a new perspective, historical context, and even neurological evidence, that will help readers who are concerned about the longevity of democracy to better understand why democracy is in danger of collapsing. ANU College of Law, Canberra, Australia 9 February 2023

Foreword to the First Edition It is the 4th of November 2020, and it is five o’clock in the morning. On the radio they report President Donald Trump’s claim that the Democrats “have stolen” the election. I am en route to the BBC Studio in London to talk about the US Presidential Election. I have been asked to find historical parallels. The only one I can think of is Spain in 1936. Back then, General Franco, claimed that the election of that year was, yes, ‘stolen’. The claim was ludicrous, but it started the Spanish Civil War… People are frightened. Vanea rings me from Cleveland. “Can I come and live with you?” she asks. But her question is not a romantic proposition, but a plea coming from a place of fear, “As an African American woman I can’t stay”. I ask the cabdriver to change the channel. “Is Absolute Radio any good?” he asks in an Indian accent. “Yes, that would do”, I mumble. The station plays ‘Peace Frog’ by The Doors Blood in the streets, in the town of New Haven Blood stains the roofs and the palm trees of Venice

I have just finished a book manuscript and I am reviewing it as I drive through the empty streets of the British capital. When I started the book, I was a bit sceptical and in my heart of hearts I was not seriously worried. This morning was not so sure …. Matt Qvortrup, in a back of a minicab, on Regent Street in Central London, 4 November 2020

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111327839-003

Contents Introduction 1 Methodological Considerations

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Chapter 1: The Theories of Democratic Breakdown 21 A Note on Terminology

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Chapter 2: Thymos and Amygdala: Neuropsychology and the Lure of Demagogues 23 25 The Psychology of the Demagogue Chapter 3: Dictators 1919 – 1945 39 From Taishō Democracy to Taisei Autocracy Popular Dictatorships 43 The Totalitarians 45 50 National Socialism The Old-Fashioned Dictatorships 52

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60 Chapter 4: Dictators During the Cold War The West 67 Failed Democracies 69 Cry for Argentina 71 73 Brazil: Not Order and Progress Interlude: Promises of Democracy not Fulfilled Excursus: France 75 Relapsed Democracies 76 Towards a New World … 83

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Chapter 5: Dictatorships and Demagogues after the Fall of the Berlin 84 Wall Chapter 6: How Demagogues Get Elected – and Abuse Democracy The Breakdown of Democracy in Peru. 99 The Authoritarian Personality 101 Chapter Seven: The Courts, the Press, and the Dictators Who Neuters the Guardians? 112

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Chapter 8: What is the Track-Record of Autocratic Regimes? 122 Is Dictatorship Efficient? The Cost of Kleptocracy 123 Silencing the Wisdom of the Crowds 125 Emergency Powers? 127 128 Why Democracy Works The Theory of the Democratic Feedback Loop 130 134 Concluding Postscript Can these theories still account for the rise of tyranny? The gradual take-over of power is nothing if not cunning Are there things that can be done? 144 Epilogue to the Second Edition Epilogue to the first edition Notes

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Index

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147 149

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136 141

Introduction This book has a long and non-linear history. It began when – it was in 2018 – I was invited to give The James Walston Memorial Lecture, at the American University Rome, an institution at which I was then a professor. The lecture later became the basis for a radio programme I presented for BBC Radio 4 entitled How to Kill a Democracy. ¹ Following that, several people asked me if I really believed that democracies were in danger of collapsing. While I had cited historical examples, there were a number of cases that did not fit the bill. For this reason, and to keep an open mind, I decided to revisit the subject and to look once again at the historical record of democratic failures. Of course, history is full of democratic breakdowns, and we cannot cover them all. Without attempting to be comprehensive most lists would probably include, how Antiphon in ancient Athens established the short-lived oligarchy The Four Hundred in 411 BC, how Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon – a nondescript creek in Northern Italy – marched on Rome, appealed to the people, and declared himself dictator in 49 BC – and how he himself was overthrown on the Ides of March 44 BC.² Other systems of more of less republican government were disestablished by no less illustrious historical figures, like Oliver Cromwell (who forcibly removed the so-called Rump Parliament on 20 April 1653), and Napoleon Bonaparte, who overthrew the Five-member Directorate, and shortly thereafter instituted a dictatorship in 1799. To add to the fuller list, one would perhaps add how President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (the nephew of the emperor) dissolved the National Assembly, made himself the sole ruler of the country, and then restored the empire after a dubious plebiscite. Of course, there were a fair number of coups that merely changed one set of autocratic rulers for others. Some of these were colourful and with an aura of mystique about them. For example, when Isabella of France overthrew her husband Edward II, to make way for her lover Roger Mortimer (an English nobleman) in 1327. And, when – under not dissimilar circumstances – Catherine the Great – rather unceremoniously – deposed her husband Peter III Fyodorovich in a swift but not entirely bloodless coup d’état of July 1762. (He died in captivity and his wife’s supporters claimed it was due to drunkenness!) But, of course, there were also situations when autocracies gave way to democracies. Those with a keen interest in history will undoubtedly cite how, in 509 BC Brutus (no relation to the man who killed Julius Caesar) overthrew King Tarquinius and established the Roman Republic, how the Athenian Cleisthenes (with https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111327839-004

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Introduction

friendly help from Sparta) deposed the tyrant Hippias in 510, and how, under not dissimilar circumstances, William of Orange, a Dutch prince disposed James II and reinstated a kind of republican system of governance in what later became known – somewhat inaccurately – as The Glorious Revolution of 1688. In reality, this was an example of a humanitarian intervention in what was then a failed state. But all these cases took place before the political system we know as ‘democracy’ was properly established. To be sure, there are similarities and parallels, but the circumstances were very different. To be able to draw parallels we must treat like with like, and for this reason we will focus mainly on the period after the First World War, though with occasional detours further back. Much as these coups or other overthrows of democracy took place many years (or even centuries and millennia) ago, there are certain things that seem to recur. Many coups, whether the ones in ancient Athens and Rome, or more recently, were often instigated by individuals who claimed to speak on behalf of the people. Several of these – so it will be argued – appealed to a sense of hurt pride among the citizens, which created that indignation that the philosopher Plato called Thymos. One of the arguments in the book is that the breakdown of republics (and indeed many other political events) was a result of this feeling of outrage. Those who rebel against democratically elected leaders – whether military personnel or individuals who support a demagogue – are often animated by this feeling of Thymos. This feeling, it will be argued – can also be understood in the light of Edmund Burke’s preceptive theory of the sublime as that dangerous thing that draws us near and fascinates us – even if it has the ability to destroy us, “a passion which always produced delight when it does not come too close”.³ But, in addition to this, the book also presents a sociobiological interpretation based on recent advances in neuropolitics. To be more precise, the book shows that Thymos can be explained by reference to the activation of the limbic system in the brain, and that this happens at the expense of activation of the parts of the brain whose activation is associated with cognition and reasoning.⁴ For example, we know that under normal circumstances, individuals who are facing a rational choice – for example choosing between two candidates – utilise the so-called Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex and Anterior Cingulate Cortex (these, if you wonder are, respectively, the front part of the underside of the brain and the frontal part of the brain at the bottom of the central sulcus, the broad fissure that divides the two hemispheres (see Figure 1).⁵ Another argument made in the book is that democracies more often than not broke down gradually, hence the title ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’. And finally, the book makes the claim that demagogues and dictators often share characteristics which have been remarkably similar throughout the ages.

Introduction

Anterior cingulate cortex

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Figure 1: Location of the Anterior Cingulate Cortex, which is associated with hard choices.

In Chapter 1 we outline the theories of democratic breakdown as they have been developed and proposed by comparative political scientists, historians, political theorists, and occasionally by philosophers and even by perceptive writers of fiction. The chapter also includes a short note on methodology. Following this we venture into the territory of the personality of dictators. Chapter 2 thus looks at the psychology and psychopathology of dictators and despots, first through the lens of political theorists and literary writers, and then through the eyes of psychologists and psychiatrists. In this chapter we contrast the often – to use the technical term – ‘malignant narcissistic’ personalities described in the psychological research of Freud and Erich Fromm with real life dictators and eccentrics like Vladimir Putin, Papa Doc Duvalier – but also with leaders in democratic systems who displays the symptoms that we find among despots. But above all, this chapter draws on recent insights into neuropolitics, which identifies centres in that brain that get activated when certain individuals are exposed to irrational hate speech and other related issues.⁶ As alluded to above, when we feel under threat the part of the brain known as the amygdala gets activated. This is a part of the brain that is evolutionarily old. It is appropriate that we have a centre for flight and fight, but it is for these purposes only. We would not have survived long as a species without this ability. But we have long come down the trees, and we are no longer exposed to the dangers on the savannah that our prehistoric ancestors faced. In the meantime, we have evolved speech and reason. But when prompted we, as it were, revert back to form. And sometimes our amygdala gets activated by things that ought not to cause fear. This is where neuroscience meets political science. It goes like this: When people are exposed to demagogues, so the research shows, we use these parts of the brain and not the higher functions, the ones we have evolved to use, namely the prefrontal cortex. All this provides a scientific

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explanation of why and when we (or some of us) are tempted to support demagogues. Chapters 3 – 5 turn to the history of the breakdown of democracies in the 20th and the 21st century. Divided into three parts, the chapters deal with, respectively, the period between the great wars (1919 – 1939), the post-war period (1945 – 1989), and lastly in Chapter 5 the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These chapters serve as empirical illustrations to the theories outlined earlier in the book but can be read independently as simple historical narratives. Following the historical chapters, the book turns to three thematic case studies. In Chapter 6, we analyse one aspect of the mechanics of democratic breakdown, namely the role of populism, the apparent craving for ‘a strong man’, the tendency to be sucked into the ‘cult of personality’, and the selective perception of those who follow demagogues. And in the subsequent Chapter 7, we look at how demagogues once in power engineer the courts and take over the media to consolidate power. In Chapter 8, the focus shifts. So far, we have merely looked at how democracies break down. But apart from remarks in Chapters 3 – 5 we have not looked at the track-record of tyrannies. The argument – among the likes of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin – is that they need powers to get things done. But, as the chapter shows, the success of dictatorships is difficult to find. Generally, they fare poorly on all indicators. The chapter analyses why dictators are unsuccessful and identifies factors such as the need to bribe allies, and the failure to get trustworthy information as advisors fear the consequences of speaking truth to power. The chapter also looks at how more democracy – through referendums and other forms of direct participation – might make representative democracies even more efficient than they are now. This line of argument is continued in the concluding chapter where a case is made for a, in the true sense of the word. ‘populist’ corrective to demagogues.

Methodological Considerations This book is written largely from a qualitative perspective. While this author has previously written books using a more positivist approach, this one is based more on what Max Weber called a Verstehen approach. The subtitle to the great German writer’s posthumous Economy and Society was “Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie”.⁷ By this he meant an approach to studying politics that draws on a number of different sources and relies on a whole array of approaches. The English word for this is usually translated as ‘interpretative’. This is slightly misleading. The word is better rendered as ‘understanding’, in the sense of appreciating something

Methodological Considerations

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with empathy. Notwithstanding the use of neuroscience, the book will, in large measure, draw on insights that are more akin to those of the humanities than those of the natural sciences, though we will also draw on explanations from the social sciences, in particular political science, psychology, and sociology, just like the German master himself did. Max Weber was an undogmatic scholar. He too, appreciated that this approach has its pros as well as its cons. The interpretative explanation can contribute more than the purely observational explanation of the natural sciences, but these benefits come with costs, namely that the conclusions we draw have a more hypothetical and fragmentary character than those yielded by scientific explanations.⁸

However, in this revised edition, these considerations are complemented by neuropolitical and sociobiological explanations. Needless to say, this is not the last word on this subject. This book is an essay – in the true French sense of the word (Essai = ‘trial’, ‘trying’). As in the original Essais by Michel de Montaigne from 1580,⁹ this book is in part a meandering collection of thoughts, observations, analyses, and occasional whimsical descendants of these. Some have been very critical of this approach. Dr Samuel Johnson, the 18thcentury English critic, for example, dismissed this literary form as “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece”.¹⁰ Hopefully this is not the reader’s impression of the present book. It is in a positive sense an exploratory attempt to understand (sic!) an important phenomenon. It is not a deductive argument à la Descartes,¹¹ still less a stringent exposition à la Spinoza’s ordine geometrico demonstrata, ‘using the geometric method’,¹² but a number of different perspectives written to provide an impression of the phenomenon of demagogues and the demise of democracy. In the late 1990s two scholars espousing a rational choice – and positivist – approach to political science believed that “the transformation of the study of politics from storytelling to anecdote swapping, first to thick description and history writing, then to systematic measurement, and more recently to explanation, constitutes a significant movement along the scientific trajectory”.¹³ This book, while it acknowledges that such methods are sometimes useful and certainly interesting, rather calls for a movement in the opposite direction. For as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz once noted, the quest for statistical patterns often fails to unearth the truly significant aspects of social relations and “bleach human behavior of the very properties that interest us before we even begin to examine [them]”.¹⁴ This is a book about the breakdown of democracies with a special focus on the past century. As such, it is perched between historiography and political science.

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Introduction

What we want to understand is the situations when people willingly give up their democratic rights, but also when they unwillingly were forced to do so. But the book is not merely aimed at understanding the past. Rather the goal is to discern causes, effects, and possibly even patterns of a particular phenomenon, namely autocracy or dictatorship, and how this system comes into being. In a famous analysis, Sir Isaiah Berlin observed that the interest in history stems “not from interest in the past as such, but from a desire to penetrate to first causes, to understand how and why things happen as they do and not otherwise”.¹⁵ Political scientists – especially those of a quantitative persuasion – often seek to identify recurrent patterns. There is, needless to say, a place for this type of analysis – indeed this author has written a whole book using this approach!¹⁶ – but this method has to be complemented by nuanced observations of the idiosyncratic details, in other words be balanced by eine verstehende Soziologie. Some factors fall through the cracks of quantitative analysis. Hence, we need other approaches. Political science is always in the process of being written and no perspective closes the debate. As Benjamin Disraeli once said about public policies, there is no “finally and forever, which would satisfy this and perhaps the succeeding generation”.¹⁷ The same is true for political history. All endeavours are complemented by subsequent discoveries and inevitably shaped by the different interests of different epochs. History, of course, is about many things. In the words of Michael Oakeshott (1901 – 1990), its object of analysis ranges from “the fortuitous, the causal, the similar, the correlative, the analogous and the contingent”.¹⁸ We want to include all of this, but we have a particular interest in understanding the causes of subsequent developments. Giambatista Vico (1668 – 1744), the Italian philosopher of history, was an early and eloquent exponent of this view when opining, “The useful historians are not those who give general descriptions of facts and explain them by reference to general conditions but those who go into the greatest detail and reveal the particular cause and effect”.¹⁹ The aim of this book is to understand the particular, the idiosyncratic, and the specific historical events and through this arrive at more general explanations which are supported by philosophical, and even neuroscientific, approaches. Of course, this is fraught with difficulty. Adam Smith, the great Scottish economist who was also a professor of moral philosophy, once wrote a critique of the ‘man of the system’, the scholars who believed that politics could be studies as were it but inorganic matter. This “man [or woman] of the system” Seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that

Methodological Considerations

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the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it.²⁰

Of course, some are sceptical of this narrative approach. Good research, according to a much-quoted text, should “make a specific contribution to an identifiable scholarly literature by increasing our collective ability to construct verified scientific explanations of some aspect of the world”.²¹ And, the same writers went on to say that it is the goal of “scientific research” to make “causal inferences on the basis of empirical information”.²² This book is not opposed to this. It acknowledges, appreciates, and even applauds this aim, but this cannot be done if we limit ourselves to a blinkered approach. Rather we can, indeed, we ought to, follow an approach that allows us to draw on what C. Wright Mills in the 1950s called the ‘Sociological Imagination’. This stands as the ideal for social science research, or at least the most fruitful approach for the study of dictatorship and how this type of political system comes about. Wright Mills’ words deserve to be quoted in full: Whether the point of interest is a great power state or a minor literary mood, a family, a prison, a creed – these are the kinds of questions the best social analysts have asked. They are the intellectual pivots of classic studies of man in society – and they are the questions inevitably raised by any mind possessing the sociological imagination. For that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another – from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self and to see the relations between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to know the social and historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which he has his quality and his being.²³

The present book and the pages that follow is an attempt to follow the lead of Wright Mills and put this ideal of the ‘sociological imagination’ into practice in a study of the origins, causes, and effects of autocratic government.

Chapter 1: The Theories of Democratic Breakdown First then, it is clear that if we know how the causes by which constitutions are destroyed do we also know the causes by which they are preserved. Aristotle¹

Democracies, Karl Popper noticed, are countries, the “governments of which we can get rid without bloodshed”. The philosopher went on to observe that in these, “the social institutions provide means by which the rulers may be dismissed [peacefully], and the social traditions ensure that these institutions will not be easily destroyed by those who are in power”.² The question in this book is if the currently existing democracies have ‘social traditions’ that are strong enough to withstand those who may want to destroy them. To answer this question the book looks at histories of earlier democratic breakdowns to answer the question: when is democracy in danger of withering away? One of the most conspicuous facts about demagogues is that they often have supporters who follow them without hint of criticism and believe that these individuals have an almost supernatural ability to ‘make their countries great’. This is nothing new. In fact, one of the earliest sociological analyses, written at the beginning of the 20th century, focused on this. In his famous book Economics and Society, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864 – 1920), wondered why people obey orders and accept that others rule over them. In traditional societies – under feudalism and in certain tribes – the reason was tradition. One group of people, say, the elders or the chiefs, had always ruled, and people living in these societies, just accepted traditions, “by virtue of the sanctity of age-old rules and powers”.³ But as societies became more modern, they also tended to become more rational, based on expert-knowledge and technology. Increasingly, decisions by governments were based on legal rules, which themselves were established by “those elevated to authority”. It became “fundamentally domination through knowledge”.⁴ This society is characterised by ‘the rule of law’, and by rational arguments which were ultimately based on scientific or rationalised expertise. Weber himself was one of the experts. Trained as a lawyer, and a full professor at a distinguished university, he was not a man of the people. And, yet he was aware that the purely rational-bureaucratic state could appear stale, and he accepted that in “bureaucratic organisations, the holders of power … have a tendency to make use [of their knowledge] to increase their power still further”.⁵ It was under these circumstances that a third type of rule could emerge. Sometimes the people, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111327839-005

Chapter 1: The Theories of Democratic Breakdown

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or more commonly a segment of them, place their trust in, what Weber called, “Ein charismatischer Führer” – “a charismatic leader”. Readers who do not speak German might misinterpret this term. The noun ‘Führer’, in English (and other languages) has become synonymous with the Third Reich. That, however, is not the case. In German the word, while used by the Nazis, has no such connotations and means simply ‘leader’. Yet, Weber’s Charismatiker (to use a synonym) was an extraordinary personality; someone who for sometimes irrational reasons was able to spellbind and mesmerise his followers. This charismatic leader was not necessarily an extraordinary individual, “What is alone important is how the individual is … regarded by those subjects to charismatic authority, by his ‘followers’ and ‘disciples’”. In part, people would follow this individual because he – in their eyes – had performed a miracle, but that was not, said Weber, the essential matter. Rather, for those who choose to follow a charismatic individual, the reason for the devotion stems from “the conception that it is the duty of those subject to charismatic authority to recognise its genuineness and act accordingly”. And, he went on, “psychologically this recognition is a matter of complete personal devotion, arising out of enthusiasm, or of fear and hope”.⁶ There are more than superficial similarities between this portrait of the ‘charismatic’ leader and modern-day leaders like Trump. The followers of the 45th President of the United States too were in many cases, at least, driven by ‘personal devotion’, which was motivated out of ‘enthusiasm’ (like at his rallies), and ‘fear’ (of losing livelihood and status), and the ‘hope’ that this extraordinary leader will use his magic powers to save them. One might consider Weber as prescient when he wrote that, for the followers of the charismatic leaders, Charismatic domination means a rejection of all ties to any external order in favor of the exclusive genuine mentality of the prophet and hero. Hence, its attitude is revolutionary and transvalues everything; it makes a sovereign break with all traditional or rational norms.⁷

But, in fact, he was just writing about leaders, who shared the same traits that always characterise these politicians. The followers of Lenin in Weber’s day were rather similar to those who put their trust in Brazilian ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, Turkey’s president Erdoğan, and Donald Trump. From the outside, this devotion to the charismatic leader could and would appear irrational, especially when contrasted to the rational-bureaucratic state where everything is “bound to intellectually analysable rules”.⁸ For those who see it as their duty to follow the charismatic leader, the virtue of his leadership (and it tends to be a man) is that his “authority is specifically irrational in the

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sense of being foreign to all rules”.⁹ Hence all rational arguments fall on deaf ears, and the charismatic ruler is always given the benefit of the doubt by his followers and viewed with incomprehension by his opponents. When he has not performed miracles, or just not delivered, there is always an excuse, and the reason is always conspiracies against him. Hence those who follow a charismatic leader – whether a religious prophet or in this case a politician – seek affirmation. And hence they select information that is congruent with their previously established perceptions. In the words of a recent study, “populist voters self-select media content that actively articulates the divide between the ‘innocent’ people and ‘culprit’ others”.¹⁰ To ignore this appeal – and to be blind to the rather uninspiring system of a rational bureaucratic state governed by experts – is something established democratic politicians (and those who endorse this system) do at their peril. To understand why countries, fall prey to demagogues, and sometimes go on to become dictatorships, we need to appreciate and empathise with followers who bring wouldbe tyrants to power. This does not mean that we have to agree with them, let alone concede to their demands. Empathy, it has been said, is the ability to step into someone else’s shoes and then step out again.¹¹ If we just say that those who follow a charismatic leader are unintelligent, if you do as Hillary Clinton, who publicly stated that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”, then you are likely to miss the point and suffer the consequences. And, justifiably so! But why is it that some people feel tempted to follow a charismatic leader? Weber hinted at the answer by saying that they do so out of “enthusiasm” or of “despair and hope”. But he did not elaborate. Others who have written about demagogues and despots, have answered this question. And the recurrent theme is hurt pride. Like today, many coups and overthrows of democracy, whether the ones in ancient Athens and Rome, or more recently, like in the past century, were often instigated by individuals who claimed to speak on behalf of the people. The breakdown of democracies – or, as they used to be called, republics – is not a novel subject of inquiry. The great minds who have pondered the issue range from Plato to Hannah Arendt, and in between the likes of Aristotle, Alexander Hamilton, and Karl Marx, to name but a few. Many of them were not optimistic. “Democracies”, wrote James Madison in ‘Federalist Paper No. 10’, “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention”, and he later went on, “they have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths”.¹² Whether the process was slow or fast, was generally contentious. Some – and the Fourth President of the United States was one of them – believed that the process was swift, and that republics would soon fall prey

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to demagogues. Madison would have been pleasantly surprised that the American republic has lasted close to 250 years. James Madison was a keen scholar, and he was well-versed in the classic theories of earlier democracies. One of them was developed by Aristotle – the onetime tutor to Alexander the Great (356 – 327 BC). Citing examples of how democracy had been brought down in Rhodes, and of how Thrasymachus had brought down popular government in Cyme (present-day Kimy in Greece), the ancient Macedonian philosopher concluded that breakdowns of democracies were caused by “the insolence of the demagogues”, and that “the largest number of the tyrants of early days have risen from being leaders of the people”.¹³ One of the things that writers – philosophers as well as political scientists – focused on when writing about these populist demagogues was that they appealed to a particular segment of society, namely those who felt they were left out and somehow forgotten by the so-called elites. Hannah Arendt found, in line with contemporary social scientists, that the ones who vote for demagogues tend to be the ones who come from “apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention”.¹⁴ That those who supported Brexit and voted for Donald Trump in 2016 fit the bill may not go unnoticed, but it is premature to draw conclusions about this yet.¹⁵ One cannot equate the past with the present, but the similarity is striking. But, perhaps more importantly, she went on to say, “What convinces the masses are not facts, not even invented facts”.¹⁶ But the problem in dictatorships – and in societies that are governed by demagogues who may become tyrants – is that the leaders of these states wilfully distort facts, create confusion, and thrive on the uncertainty thereby created. Some scholars using quantitative methods have even found evidence that voters cherish what they call “the authentic appeal of the lying demagogue”.¹⁷ Democracy cannot exist in such societies. At least not in the long run. For these systems of government are based on “the forceless force of the better argument”, as the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has called it.¹⁸ The idea is that we all through rational debate, facts, and evidence, test propositions, we then vote for parties whose ideas win approval in the court of public opinion. These parties’ policies are then implemented by elected representatives.¹⁹ Their policies, in turn, are tested in the real world. Come election time two to five years later, there is a debate about whether the government’s policies have worked. And, if the discussion reveals that the government has not done a good job, then it is booted out by the voters. Democracy is a system where you can change the government without violence but by voting. It has been widely believed that the barrier to progress was knowledge. W. E. B. Du Bois, the great African American writer, believed that “the ultimate evil was

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stupidity”, and that, “the cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation”.²⁰ Yet, in many ways, it seems that the opposite is true in the cases when countries have succumbed to dictatorships. In fact, it could be argued that it was too much rationality and knowledge that often led to a backlash against representative democracy and parliamentarianism. It would seem self-evident that everyone would aspire to live in a society ruled in accordance with critical rationalism, the best available evidence, in a word, facts. Yet, surprisingly, this is often not the case. Frequently, as we shall see in the chapters below, the demagogues are attractive to their political base because they defy this logic of rationality; because they appeal to a defiant irrationality which has a perverse attraction to their followers. Maybe this failure to appreciate the nature of dictatorship, so to speak from the inside, from the minds of those who follow the dictator, has something to do with methodology and the techniques used by those who study demagogues and tyranny. Maybe the techniques of social science, economics, and the like, do not capture the feeling and the emotions that give rise to demagogue driven tyrannies. The “experiences of philosophy, of art, and of history itself … are modes of experience in which a truth is communicated that cannot be verified by the methodological means proper to science”, wrote the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer.²¹ Later in this book. We shall see how demagogues – perhaps unwittingly – have used the theories of Burke’s aesthetic theory to great effect. But it is not just recently that ‘the arts’ have appreciated and understood the things that escape rational minds. Indeed, there are novelists and philosophers who seem to have captured this. One of them was the 19th-century Russian novelist Feodor Dostoevsky (another as we shall see below, was William Shakespeare in the 16th century). The former was as prescient as he was perceptive when he excoriated utilitarian rationalists who believed that one day, “new economic relations will be established, all ready-made, also calculated with mathematical precision, so that all possible questions will disappear in a single instant, simply because all possible answers will have been provided”.²² In other words, “all human actions, it goes without saying, will then be tabulated according to laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms … and everything will be accurately calculated and specified so that there’ll be no more actions or adventures left on earth”.²³ Yet, exactly when this happened, Dostoevsky predicted that there would be a backlash. The main character in the Russian writer’s Notes from the Underground, said that he, [Would not be] surprised in the least if suddenly, for no reason at all, in the midst of this future universal rationalism, some gentleman with an offensive, rather retrograde and derisive expression on his face were to stand up, put his hands on his hips, and declare to us all: ‘how

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about it gentlemen, what if we knock over rationalism with one swift kick for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to hell, so that once again we can live in accordance with our own stupid will?’²⁴

Maybe the British Conservative politician who said that “people in this country have had enough of experts”, was expressing exactly this sentiment, and was “this gentleman”?²⁵ Dostoevsky too was writing in the midst of a nationalist craze – in casu the Danish-German war over “that ridiculous Schleswig-Holstein”. The demagogues he was thinking about were “Napoleon the great and the present one”, the latter being Bonaparte’s less than impressive nephew, who (after a coup) ruled France in the 1850s and 60s. But these are but perceptions not theories. Might there be a reason for this apparent obstinacy? Plato, the Greek philosopher who lived from 428 to 348 BC believed that he had found the answer, for the problem was as well-known in the dying decades of Athenian democracy as it is in contemporary societies. According to the philosopher, pride prompts people into defying logic and following a demagogue. Plato used the word Thymos to represent the vanity and self-pride in individuals which may lure them to listen to someone who claims to represent them. As Socrates rhetorically asked, “when anyone thinks he is wronged, does he not instantly boil and chafe, and enlist himself on the side of what he thinks to be justice?”²⁶ While there is a part of the soul that “reasons”, there is another part “which loves, hungers and thirsts”, and which is “the ally of all indulgences and pleasures”.²⁷ In Plato’s interpretation such cases of hurt pride caused “individuals who were thirsty not to drink”,²⁸ especially when they were convinced by a demagogue that he was representing justice; and was a spokesperson for them. In the words of a more recent writer, Thymos drives people, “to rage if others don’t recognise their worth. Sometimes it even causes them to kill over a trifle if they feel disrespected”.²⁹ What is remarkable about this approach is that it is very close to the theories that have recently been developed within the emerging sub-discipline of neuropolitics. Since the early 2000s we have been able to look at what happens inside our heads when we think. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI scans (which measure changing blood flow to brain cells) we can now see which parts of the brain get activated, when we engage in various activities, like shopping, thinking about sex, and feeling remorse.³⁰ This perspective has also entered into the realm of political analysis – finally putting the ‘science’ in political science. Of course, fMRI isn’t useful for studying

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the breakdown in real time; there’s no way to scan people’s brains at the moment they storm the palace. But we can design experiments that observe how people who are lured by the rhetoric of demagogues reach to undemocratic statements. Research has indicated that certain individuals’ political attitudes are associated with neural activity in the so-called amygdala, an evolutionarily old part of the brain (the one we share with cats and rats). When we feel threatened, we revert back to relying on this part of the brain, and we temporarily stop thinking rationally. Biologically speaking, it is this tendency to rely on the amygdala that accounts for our tendency to – occasionally – support dictators and demagogues.³¹ We shall return to this explanation at greater length in Chapter 2. To sum up, when we revert to the amygdala we are, in effect, relying on Thymos Plato meets neuropolitics. Neuroscientists are clear that we need the amygdala. It served a function in prehistory to be alert and fearful, and to know when to fight off beasts, “fear is central in the evolution of the mammalian brain”, as three evolutionary neuroscientists wrote.³² Likewise, and in a similar way, Thymos can be a wonderful thing if it is channelled towards higher things. In one of his earlier dialogues, Plato suggested that this spiritness “glorifies the achievements of the past and … teaches them to future generations”.³³ But (and this was Plato’s point) it can become destructive if citizens are animated by blind Thymos, and follow a demagogue out of spite and anger. In these situations, Plato, through his mouthpiece Socrates, concluded, Thymos would degenerate into a craze. The reason for this was that “madness can provide relief from the greatest plagues of trouble”.³⁴ It seems difficult to understand that a proud people – one animated by Thymos – would be tempted to follow a would-be-tyrant, and the fact is that they often fail to recognise this. Most demagogues do not set out to disestablish democracy. Those who become despots set out to be the champion of the people. In many cases, however, they gradually, little by little, disestablish democracy through the process of death by a thousand cuts. Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of the American Republic who had carefully studied the ancient philosophers and the histories of the earliest republics, was one of the most eloquent observers to note that, “A dangerous ambition … lurks behind the spurious mask of zeal for the rights of the people … History will teach us … that of those men who have overturned liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by playing obsequious court to the people, commencing as demagogues and ending tyrants”.³⁵ So, the fall of democracies then, tend to occur when a people’s pride is hurt, and when they turn to someone – ‘a strong man’ who can restore their Thymos – but who inevitably encroaches upon the power that rightfully belongs to the people, and he becomes an autocrat.

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Why did this feeling of inferiority emerge? What caused Thymos? Plato had not answered this question. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great philosopher of popular sovereignty, who lived in the 18th century provided an explanation. To understand why people were feeling let down and humiliated, it is necessary to understand his theory of human nature as it is in modern societies, driven by ambition and capitalist competition. The Swiss-born Rousseau fundamentally lamented how the natural sympathy (pitié) and the self-preservation or self-love (l’amour de soi), which had existed in the state of nature, had given way to vanity. Vanity, or as Rousseau called it, amour-propre, was “a relative, factitious feeling, born in society, which leads each individual to regard himself more highly than any other, which inspires in men all the evils they cause to each other”.³⁶ He decried how, “this universal desire for reputation, honours and privilege […] made men competitors and rivals, and […] how it every day causes failures, successes, and catastrophes of every kind by having so many aspirants compete in the same contest”.³⁷ What Rousseau was essentially describing was the economic system that leaves some people behind, and which places emphasis on vanity and status symbols at the expense of true values such as compassion, piety, and love. That this system has not worked was evident for him. It is perhaps even more evident today in the once prosperous industrial areas, like in the proverbial “Allentown [Pennsylvania], [where] they’re closing all the factories down”, as Billy Joel sang in the early 1980s.³⁸ All this caused resentment back then. And it still does. The result is hurt pride, as well as economic hardship. But it is the former more than the latter that has political consequences. For Rousseau – as for Plato – the feeling of inferiority, could lead to “the transformation of legitimate into arbitrary power [if ] ambitious leaders took advantage of this situation”.³⁹ Citizens, he feared, would allow themselves to be “oppressed”, because they were “impelled by blind ambition, and fixed their eyes below rather than above themselves, and agree to wear chains in order, in turn, to impose chains on others”.⁴⁰ This sociology of relative deprivation, for example, might explain why some poor white Americans vote for a demagogue, in order that they can continue to have an advantage vis-à-vis African Americans and Latinos.⁴¹ Rousseau understood the reasons why many voters felt alienated, ignored, and he had real sympathy for those who, in modern parlance, were ‘left behind’. But he wanted the people to take power back, to take back control. He did not want them to hand it on to a tyrant. Yet, the opposite has happened, the ones who felt humiliated turned to a demagogue, exactly as Rousseau feared.

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But it need not be like that. The aforementioned Max Weber (1864 – 1920) who coined the term ‘Charismatic leader’, was surprisingly equivocal about these larger-than-life figures. The German sociologist had a certain appreciation of the antirationalism that was expressed by Dostoevsky, and which gave rise to Thymos. He acknowledged that the faceless bureaucrats claiming expertise needed to be countered, and he saw a role for a charismatic leader as a countervailing force. Weber lamented the “disenchantment of the world”, in a way that was reminiscent of the sentiments of romantic poets like Keats and Byron – and some religious folks from the Midwest in the 21st century. In his essay “Science as Vocation”, he wrote in an echo of the Notes from the Underground, which we cited before, The increased intellectualisation and rationalisation do not mean a general increase in our understanding of the conditions that confronts us in daily lives. It rather means something else, namely a notion or a belief that we always could gain this understanding if we wanted, that there is – in principle – no hidden or inexplicable forces, and that we can master everything through calculation. But this notion implies that all magical powers have lost their power and mystique. You no longer need … to resort to magic to appeal to or worship the spirits. Today we just rely on calculations. This is what intellectualisation means.⁴²

This was not a cheerful prospect, as Weber spelled out in his Sociology of the State. His lament deserves to be quoted in full as it, in its own way, sums up the feeling of disenchantment (in German entzauberung) that was felt by those who felt left out. The rational bureaucracies and the state dominated by experts, Weber wrote, Is a machine of petrified spirit. This gives it the power to force people to serve it. … It is in the process of developing a mighty oppressive apparatus that the people will have to obey, just like the vassals had to obey the lord in feudal times …This will happen if they make the rationalised bureaucracy into their highest and only source of power, and if they allow this machine of expertise to determine how society will develop. [Admittedly] this is without any comparison superior to other forms of organisation … but when confronted with the juggernaut of intellectualisation, we are forced to address the question of the political organisation of the future. We thus have to ask ourselves, 1) How is it possible to rescue those traces of individuality and free will that remain? And, 2) How is it possible to secure checks on this mighty power when the march of rationalisation and bureaucratic rule [by experts] is seemingly inevitable?⁴³

Weber – his reservations about demagogues notwithstanding – believed that a charismatic leader under certain circumstances could provide this counterweight– like the British Prime Minister Gladstone in the Victorian era, who was able to appeal to the people and reverse the tendency toward bureaucratisation. In a bureaucratic rational state, the leaders, would be “politicians without a calling”; well-educated individuals without deep beliefs, but who had studied politics

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at university and who were fascinated by the ‘game’, and not driven by beliefs or indignation. What was necessary was to have politicians who had “the inner charismatic qualities that make a leader”. To withstand the unfettered rule of those who merely think of politics as a rational business, it was thus necessary to have – as in the British system in the 19th century – “a plebiscitarian” politician someone who “stands above Parliament and brings the masses behind him”.⁴⁴ But as the observant reader is sure to point out, Gladstone was a democratically elected politician. And one who for all his charisma lost elections. And, while Weber – rightly – saw the need for a countervailing force to stem the tide of the disenchantment of the world, he too was cognisant that “political demagoguery can lead to striking misuses”.⁴⁵ A strong case can be made for acknowledging emotions, and for the view that, in the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume’s words, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”.⁴⁶ But note, ‘reason’ played a role. Irrationalism was not an alternative for Hume, nor was it for Weber. Both of them, albeit in different ways, merely acknowledged that we need to pay heed to emotions and that we cannot live of rationality alone. So, although we should never lose sight of the dangers of too much rule by experts, and the benefits of charismatic leaders, these need to be kept in check, and we must always be alert to when they undermine democracy, especially if they do it inconspicuously, discretely, and, so to speak, under the proverbial radar. And, what is interesting, is that dictatorships generally don’t look like the stereotype of top-down rule, an oppressive police force, labour-camps, and single party rule. Dictators are more cunning than that. Thus, “most autocracies in the world today allow for multiparty elections. The exceptions – such as China and Saudi Arabia – are few”, two political scientists have written.⁴⁷ And this is not just a finding that is true today. There are several examples of this in the classic history. After Octavius (he later called himself Augustus) had taken over as princeps (note he did not call himself chief, emperor, or king!) in the year 27 BC, he did not abolish the Senate, let alone all the other institutions of what we might call Roman ‘democracy’. Many of the rules and institutions stayed the same. Indeed, it could even be argued that the first of the emperors – on the face of it – strengthened popular government. The Roman historian Suetonius (AD 70 – 130), observed in The Twelve Caesars how the ruler – superficially – democratised the Roman state, “by granting city councillors of the colonies the right to vote”, and even how “ballots were placed and sealed in containers and counted at Rome on polling day”.⁴⁸ Counted, of course, by Augustus’ people! Stalin, some 2,000 years later, reportedly noted that, “’Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything”. The Soviet tyrant’s observa-

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tion may be apocryphal (we have no proof that he actually uttered these words). That does not detract from their accuracy, let alone their empirical veracity. And the first Roman emperor knew this. In fact, the playbook of dictatorship is rarely one of the abolitions of all institutions of popular government. It is a common strategy of autocrats to maintain the façade of government by the people. To take but one other example, the Mexican statesman Porfirio Díaz, who led the revolt against the French imposed regime in the 1860s, claimed to be a democrat and maintained a façade of liberal democracy while he was ruthlessly repressing civil society and public revolts.⁴⁹ So, the Roman emperor basically was merely one of the first to follow a now well-worn script. Augustus expertly and with great cunning, was able to placate the people, play to their vanity and short-term desires, and in the process dismantle democracy. As a more critical historian of the same vintage, namely Tacitus (AD 56 – 117), noted, “He [Augustus] seduced the army with bonuses, and his cheap food policy was successful bait for civilians. Indeed, he attracted everybody’s goodwill by the enjoyable gift of peace”.⁵⁰ So far so good, but then, Tacitus added his punchline, “he gradually pushed ahead and absorbed the functions of the senate, the officials and even the law”.⁵¹ The Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who eulogised the ancient Romans, learned some of his tricks from the emperor. “If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, people don’t really notice”, he reportedly said.⁵² Like Augustus, Il Duce also went for the slow, step-by-step, dismantling of democracy.⁵³ So, the argument in this book is that many things have stayed the same; that democracies die – not in violent coups or with the military declaring martial law – but most often when a demagogue appeals to the vanity of the people, and once he has seduced them, claims all power for himself. But clearly there are examples of governments that have fallen as a result of a violent overthrow of popular elected governments. The Spanish dictatorship instigated by Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja in 1923 was explicitly established to end old politics. Even the self-proclaimed ‘liberal’ philosopher José Ortega y Gasset declared, “The alpha and omega of the task that the military Directory has imposed is to make an end of the old politics. The purpose is so excellent, that there is no room for objections. The old politics must be ended”.⁵⁴ Yet even the Spanish dictator in the 1920s was not completely dismissive of the people. He claimed to represent the citizens. The American magazine Foreign Affairs duly reported the following after the coup d’état, General Primo de Rivera announced that within a few weeks he expected the Spanish people to designate capable citizens to whom the duties of administration might be confided. General

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elections were to be held forthwith, and the electors, unfettered by allegiance to any political group, were to pronounce their will. It was not his intention to undermine the Constitution.⁵⁵

Though the report went on to notice that “[the] responsibilities in all branches of government, civil, military and judicial, were to be strictly exacted”.⁵⁶ Rivera even held a plebiscite in September 1926, to show that he was supported by la gente española. Needless to say, he won.⁵⁷ So far, we have looked mainly at personality factors, charisma and such like. But in recent years, political scientists have been focused on the more structural factors that – at least in part – determine the fate of political systems. Thus, a popular argument is that democracies die as a result of institutional factors. The approach is similar to that advanced by the writers of the Federalist Papers in the late 18th century, but in its new form it is known as New Institutionalism.⁵⁸ Karl Marx might be better known for his economic determinism; his insistence (in his theoretical writings) that, “the economic structure of society, [is] the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure”.⁵⁹ But when writing about actual politics, Marx was much more of an institutionalist, and found that the political institutions were responsible for the fall of democratic regimes. At the time Napoleon III had been elected president but he faced a hostile Congress. He was a controversial figure, and often ridiculed. While even opponents recognised the indisputable greatness of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 – 1821),⁶⁰ his nephew was a bit of a joke. Victor Hugo, the author of Les Miserables, always called him Napoléon le petit. ⁶¹ After a failed coup, and sojourn as a playboy in London, Louis Napoleon had returned to France, where he was elected president. But the political system was gridlocked. ‘The little Napoleon’ could not get his legislation through. As time was running out, the term-limited executive seized power in a coup in August 1851. The circumstances were very much like those of 1799, when his uncle had overthrown the Republic at the end of the previous century. Karl Marx, a radical young journalist at the time, famously (and scornfully) observed that, “all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice … the first time as tragedy the second time as farce”.⁶² But the German revolutionary’s analysis of the cause of coup were more important and insightful. In the same book Marx wrote, While the votes of France are split up among the seven hundred and fifty members of the National Assembly, they are here [in the case of the President] concentrated on a single individual. While each separate representative of the people represents only this or that party or dunghill … he [the President] is the elect of the nation … He possesses a sort of divine right; he is President by the grace of the people.⁶³

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The institutionalist theory that democracies break down when there is a clash between a directly elected president and a directly elected assembly, was first advanced by Marx. But he was not the only one to subscribe to it. John Stuart Mill, the English Utilitarian philosopher, liberal fire brand, and onetime Member of Parliament, was onto the same idea. Mill too believed that the “deadlock” resulting from a “quarrel breaking out between a President and an Assembly”, would lead to a coup d’état being attempted”.⁶⁴ This theory was later revived in the 20th century by scholars who especially studied Latin American countries. In a seminal work, Juan J. Linz – a Spanish émigré in America – found that democracies collapse in presidential systems, because the democratically elected president falls out with the equally legitimately elected parliament. As both have democratic legitimacy, their interests will clash, and typically – so Linz (and Karl Marx) – the president qua being the wielder of executive power – will dissolve parliament, often with the help of the army, which he legally controls as the Commander-in-Chief. As Linz wrote in an article that succinctly summarised his theory, But what is most striking is that in a presidential system, the legislators, especially when they represent cohesive, disciplined, parties that offer clear ideological and political alternatives, can also claim democratic legitimacy. This claim is thrown into high relief when a majority of the legislature represents a political option opposed to the one the president represents. Under such circumstances, who has the stronger claim to speak on behalf of the people: the president or the legislative majority that opposes his policies? Since both derive their power from the votes of the people in a free competition among well-defined alternatives, a conflict is always possible and at times may erupt dramatically.⁶⁵

This theory may at first sight appear to be at odds with the explanation favoured by the more philosophical observers, the ones who like Plato (and Alexander Hamilton) believe that democracies die as a result of a deadly combination of Thymos and demagogues. Yet, that is not necessarily the case. The president who is at odds with parliament might be appealing to the people because these feel that the elected representatives disrespect them. There are plenty of cases that confirm the theory proposed by Linz (and Marx and Mill). For example, in the late 1990s, Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, clashed with Congress, he too called a plebiscite on a new constitution – in contravention of the existing rules – and was granted the powers he was seeking. Chávez – like Louis Napoleon – was a politician who previously had launched an unsuccessful coup d’état, and who later came back and won an election. He had no choice but to get things done, or so he said. He suspended the constitution called a ‘constituent assembly’ to draft a new and more democratic system of government. This system, you’d not be surprised to note vastly strengthened his powers.

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Like Napoleon III in the 1850s, Chávez could do so because he had the support of the people. His golpe was supported by a majority of the voters in a plebiscite, just like in France 150 years before. It is thus easy to see examples of the pattern repeating itself. The problem, however, is that not all breakdowns of democracy follow the same patterns. Some are military coups (as in Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s), others are instigated by foreign powers, and yet others are the result of a slow but gradual process – and often one that only belatedly is recognised as being a threat to democratic government. Much depend upon history. There are, as we shall see shortly, a number of differing types of democratic breakdown. As Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz, have written, “In the first decades after the Second World War, democracies were for the most part destroyed by military coups; 64 per cent died in this way. But since the beginning of the 1990s, democracies have been undermined by gradual, piecemeal, erosion of democratic norms by elected leaders”.⁶⁶ The latter, I argue, is the norm. What follows in this book, then, is an analysis of the ways in which democracies break down. We analyse how it happens, which common denominators we can find between the breakdowns through history. It is the hypothesis that democracies through history have died in a slow process, and that this has often happened when demagogues have appealed to the people, but this is only a conjecture, the evidence in the real world might suggest something else entirely. The only way to find out is to look at the empirical facts.

A Note on Terminology But before we turn to the process, we need to agree on the concepts we use. And this is easier said than done. This book is mainly interested in situations when a demagogue seizes power in a democracy. But there are many other forms of democratic breakdown. Overall, a coup is when there are, “illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive”.⁶⁷ Yet, there are also instances when a politician who is already in power declares an emergency and assumes power him- or herself, like Napoleon III did in 1951. If we were to include the latter, we might use the Spanish Pronunciamiento which covers all instances when anyone illegally seizes power. Others prefer the term Putsch, a Swiss German term named after a minority of the military who sought to depose the liberal regime in the Swiss city of Zürich in 1839 or what the Spanish call El cuartelazo (from cuartel ‘quarter’ or ‘barracks’), when specific military garrisons revolt against the government.

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But the problem with these definitions is that they don’t account for situations when democracies die gradually, that is situations when demagogues usurp powers. We want to look at countries that were democracies and which – later – became governed by dictators. Some researchers, above all Ronald Wintrobe, an economist studying dictatorships, have sought to make a distinction between different types of autocrats. He distinguishes between, what he calls, tin pots, tyrants, totalitarians, and timocrats.⁶⁸ According to this definition: 1. Totalitarian regimes combine high repression with a capacity to generate loyalty (for example Nazi Germany where a surprisingly high number of people were loyal to the regime)⁶⁹; 2. Under tyranny, the regime stays in power through high repression alone and loyalty is low (Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is a good example); 3. A tinpot regime is low on both counts (as in the case of Papa Doc Duvalier’s Haiti), while; 4. A timocracy implies that loyalty is high even at low levels of repression (an example could be Frederick the Great’s supposedly benevolent dictatorship, though examples are not easy to find). This is a useful typology, and it will consequently loosely be used in the following, though the term dictator will be used as a catch-all phrase for these different types of autocratic rule. However, as this is an essay, the author begs the reader to accept that some of the different words are used interchangeably as this makes the text more readable. And, after all, the intention is for readers to enjoy reading this book, even if the subject is sometimes a sober and even scary one!

Chapter 2: Thymos and Amygdala: Neuropsychology and the Lure of Demagogues There are two distinct questions of psychological nature that must be addressed when we try to understand the logic of autocracy. They are these: Why do people support demagogues? And what is it in the dictator’s mind that make them so hellbent on winning control? We begin with the former. As alluded to in the previous chapter, we can learn a lot about the causes of democratic backsliding by reading neurobiology. And in many ways, these theories are more helpful than the existing explanations by economists and sociologists. Social scientists used to focus on rational actions and have based the breakdown of democratic regimes on uprisings or rebellions. In the early 1970s, one sociologist hypothesized that the reason was poverty, or ‘relative deprivation’.¹ Political scientists and economists, using sophisticated mathematical models, also tried to explain rebellion, but found it hard to come up with a rational explanation. Very few people, the maths showed, had any personal incentive to risk life and limb for the rather abstract benefits of overthrowing a government. From a rational point of view, rebellions seem pointless. A political scientist even coined the phrase ‘the paradox of rebellion’.² But in recent years we have made great advances in understanding what goes on in the brain when we think politically. The biology of radical politics is no exception. Enter neuroscience. As noted in the previous chapter fMRI-Scans have allowed us to see what happens in the brain when we are exposed to various stimuli. This perspective has also entered into the realm of political analysis of democratic breakdown. Of course, fMRI isn’t useful for studying democratic backsliding in real time; there’s no way to scan people’s brains at the moment they erect barricades in the streets. But we can design experiments that observe how people who share insurrectionist views react to statements or images of their opponents. Presenting such subjects with statements about vulnerable minority groups – the groups that demagogues often single out for hate – during some brain scan studies, researchers could literally see what happened in would-be insurrectionists’ brains. For example, when neurologist Giovanna Zamboni and colleagues conducted such an experiment a little over a decade ago, they found that a part of the brain known as the ventral striatum, which is associated with the limbic system https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111327839-006

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(of which the amygdala is also a part), was activated when individuals who were identified by psychological tests as ‘radicals’ were exposed to hate-speech statements or other intolerant assertions about other groups or minorities.³ That the ventral striatum was activated is remarkable. This part of the brain is one of the oldest, in evolutionary terms. It is what makes animals respond positively to simple rewards in social situations and to negative stimuli in dangerous moments, such as fear that they might be attacked. The ventral striatum is linked with the amygdala, the aforementioned fight-and-flight centre in the brain. When people hear statements about – or see images of – groups or individuals that they fear, the brain reacts as if it is attacked. In contrast, study subjects who based on personality tests were identified as ‘moderate’ or ‘conservative’ used the part of the brain that only humans have fully evolved,⁴ such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for planning and working memory and associated with listening, speaking, and reasoning. In another study, young people with the far-right views often associated with support for demagogues showed greater activation of the amygdala, indicating that they were less likely to reflect on political statements and more likely to revert to fight-or-flight mode.⁵ Before we go on and look further at this research, it is worth relating these findings to more general political theory. This book is not an original study into brain research, but rather (like Hobbes’ Leviathan) an exercise in using science to elucidate and understand political dynamics. That we feel fear and reach irra-

Figure 2. fMRI image of the brain with the amygdala encircled Source: Tiago A. Sanchez, Izabela Mocaiber, Fatima S. Erthal, Mateus Joffily, Eliane Volchan, Mirtes G. Pereira, Draulio B. de Araujo, and Leticia Oliveira (2015). Amygdala responses to unpleasant pictures are influenced by task demands and positive affect trait. Frontiers in human neuroscience 9, 107.

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tionality can be understood in a biological perspective, but what is interesting is that these findings also resonate with classic political philosophy. In a perceptive analysis, Edmund Burke wrote that “despotic governments … are founded upon the passions of fear”.⁶ In his classic study, the aesthetic theorist (and later politician) had introduced the concept of the ‘sublime’, which is the object that fills us with astonishment and fear. We are, Burke argued, attracted to the dictator because we admire what can destroy us – at least when studied at a distance. But, more fundamentally, we are lured by the demagogue because he (it is usually a man!) is able to appeal to fear, and because “no passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear”.⁷ Without claiming complete congruence, these perspectives are rather close to those of recent neuroscience. One of the most interesting parts of this body of research shows that generally, brains respond differently to politics than to policy. Scans show that when people talk about politics – as in the rough and tumble partisan struggle – the fight-and-flight amygdala gets activated. But when people are exposed to questions about policy, they use the more advanced parts of the brain. In Giovanna Zamboni and colleagues’ fMRI study they also found that the dorsolateral frontal cortex – if you wonder, it is on the top-side of the brain – lit up in people exposed to arguments about economic policy.⁸ So, it’s not all doom and gloom. The lessons from neuropolitics show that we have the capacity to use the prefrontal cortex (the part associated with reasoning) but that we are often lured by fear to rely on the limbic system. The demagogues utilise (and abuse) this tendency. What we can do to counter it is a subject we shall return to in Chapter 8.

The Psychology of the Demagogue In Charlie Chaplin’s still watchable The Great Dictator, the autocrat Adenoid Hynkel is portrayed as a vainglorious buffoon, who believes himself to be a universal genius, who is a composer, a painter, a philosopher – and, of course, a tyrant. It is doubtful whether Chaplin engaged in a detailed study of the psychology of tyranny. He didn’t need to. Artists – if they are great – have an intuitive sense, which they can transmit to works of art without spelling them out. And the English comedian captured a sense of what characterises the tyrant, the dictator, even the demagogue who has started his descent into autocratic rule. Hynkel, in many ways, was not unlike Russian President Vladimir Putin. In May 2019, the Russian strongman scored eight goals in an ice hockey match – with very little opposition from the professional players, we might add. And the pop group Poyushchie vmeste topped the charts – in Russia – with the upbeat tech-

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no-pop track ‘Takogo kak Putin’ – ‘A man like Putin’ – in which the two leggy beauties sang that “their boyfriends were dumb”, and that they “needed a new man”, who – somewhat improbably – “must be like Putin”,⁹ that is, a diminutive, balding man, in his late sixties. It seems that dictators have an innate craving for recognition. Social psychologists have found that dictators as a common trait have a “greatly exaggerated sense of their own importance” and are “preoccupied with their own achievements and abilities”.¹⁰ Chaplin’s fictional portrait, as well as the real-world example of Putin, certainly fits the psychological description, as do historical examples. Nero, as portrayed in the Roman historian Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars, did not excel at sport like Putin, but fancied himself as a great musician, and a virtuoso on the lyre. In Greek cities, “which regularly sponsored musical contests … adopted the practice of sending him every available prize for lyre playing”.¹¹ Though it was clear from the chronicler’s account that not all enjoyed the emperor’s musical talent, “No one was allowed to leave the theatre during his recitals, however pressing the reason, and the gates were kept barred”.¹² Not all dictators are alike, and it is difficult to draw general conclusions. Still, before we look at the breakdown of democracies, we need to identify the common denominators that characterise their personalities and their behaviour. Throughout history, many different disciplines (psychology, sociology, political science, and history) as well as writers and filmmakers, and even philosophers have sought to find these common traits. The philosopher Plato (429 – 349 BC), noted, en passant, that dictators “had been trained up from early years and under the eye of a parsimonious father who respected only the money-making appetites”.¹³ Many of these could-be tyrants had what sociologist Theodor Adorno and colleagues, in the mid-20th century, called “an authoritarian personality”, that is, they have often been characterised by a condemning attitude to individuals who don’t adhere to conventional values, toughness, and intolerance.¹⁴ Once again, it is almost banal to find examples, and, in any case, we shall return to the particular cases in Chapters 3 – 5, and look in detail at Adorno’s theory in Chapter 6. Much as social psychologists and others have elaborated on the ancient theories, there is not much to say about dictatorships and their emergence that was not foreshadowed by Plato. Not, it should be said, because the Athenian philosopher was a divine oracle, but because it seems, that human behaviour is similar under analogous circumstances. “Whenever there are demagogues in democracies there will be appeals to the people, and whenever an agitator is able to seduce the people”, near identical things happen. Julius Caesar (100 – 44 BC), played on populism. “Securing the good-

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will of the people”, as Suetonius writes, the well-to-do patrician appealed to the ordinary man in a way that was strikingly similar to colleagues in the 21st century.¹⁵ And the same authoritative source tells us that Caesar only began his putsch when he realised that he “had insufficient means to carry out his grandiose schemes or give the people all they had been encouraged to expect on his return”. Not for the first time, nor for the last, “he chose to throw everything into confusion”. That he did all this to avoid a trial, that he knew that his opponents “had sworn to impeach him”, only puts his actions into sharp relief.¹⁶ Maybe, Donald Trump had read classics after all. Once a would-be tyrant had received the support of the people, he would, Plato suggested, begin to concentrate power in his own hands. And Julius Caesar duly did this. But being the self-proclaimed champion of the masses, he would do so quietly, not by a fanfare, to “keep his authority, he must put people quietly out of the way”, the philosopher observed.¹⁷ In short, death by a hundred cuts. Caesar, did not proclaim himself dictator, he just instituted a small change, “and in large measure maintained the constitution as it was, but with the slight change namely that half the magistrates should be popularly elected and half nominated by himself”, as the historian Suetonius poignantly observed.¹⁸ Julius Caesar, according to the same historian, “was not particularly honest in money matters”. That is to put it very diplomatically. He was indebted, and the same biographer writes that Caesar’s political career in large measure was an attempt to overcome his enormous personal debt. Once in power, he “collected larger quantities of gold than he could handle”.¹⁹ Modern writers call this kleptocracy and have noticed how autocrats – like Julius Caesar and Vladimir Putin – enrich themselves by syphoning off public money into their own private bank accounts.²⁰ There is clearly a private profit incentive behind this. But there might also be a psychological explanation. In recent social psychology, it has been observed that dictators – and demagogues – have a sometimes pathological tendency to only focus on their own interests, often at the expense of others. This is evident not only in 21st-century rulers who (as we shall see below) become filthy rich when they have assumed powers. For example, Viktor Orbán, who while chipping away at Hungary’s democracy, has become “not only the most powerful but also the richest man in Hungary”.²¹ Again, the pattern is not new. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic saint and theologian who also wrote perceptively about politics in the 13th century, found that it was a “characteristic of tyranny to order everything to the personal satisfaction of the ruler at the expense of the community”.²² Both Plato and Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) – for reasons they could never quite adequately explain – still maintained that despite the shortcomings of authoritarian rule, and the danger that it would fall prey to corruption by despots,

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non-democratic forms of government were preferable to rule of the people. Other writers, who wrote about the personality of dictators were not convinced. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) above all stands as the evangelist of democracy. He favoured this type of government because, modern society had given rise to a degenerated selfish vanity that sought self-aggrandisement. And this was nowhere more apparent than among the rulers who had usurped power through illegitimate means. The problem in modern society, as Rousseau wrote in in the little-known play Narcissus, was narcissism, something that later would be the basis of psychological theories of the personality of dictators. The Swiss-born philosopher, as we saw in the previous chapter, introduced the concept of amour-propre,²³ or vanity to explain this. This sentiment, he believed, was particularly pronounced among autocrats once they assumed power. Hence, while Plato and St Thomas could believe in the benevolent despot or the enlightened ruler, things were different in modern society, Rousseau argued, because the rulers above all were driven by vainglorious amour-propre. The philosophers sought to distil the essence of dictatorships. Artists and writers, by contrast, have endeavoured to describe the personality of the tyrant through acute observations. Shakespeare is a particular example of a perceptive writer who did exactly that. The Bard might be best known for Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, but most of his plays were about politics, and for the bard, living and writing in the 16th century, that meant despots and autocrats. Some of the more familiar ones include Macbeth who shows that impatience that is so often characteristic of despots, who find that “Boundless intemperance in nature is a tyranny”.²⁴ But unlike the real-world tyrants, some of Shakespeare’s villainous autocrats had a certain sense of introspection which would be foreign to the dictators that we see today. Richard III, the story about a power-hungry tyrant who stops at nothing, is candid about is wickedness and his narcissism, Richard loves Richard; That is, I and I. Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.²⁵

Such candid self-perception is not characteristic of the real word demagogues and dictators of the 21st century, and perhaps not even before. “Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh”, says Richard III in realisation of his mortal sins, cruelty, and human failings.²⁶ Vladimir Putin is unlikely to have taken the same attitude. It seems the Russian strongman is oblivious to any personal faults. As his biographer reported,

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On one occasion, when Putin and [Sergei] Pugachev [a rich oligarch and member of Putin’s inner circle] attended a service on Forgiveness Sunday, the last Sunday before Orthodox Lent, Pugachev told Putin to prostrate himself in front of the Priest, and ask for forgiveness. ‘He [Putin] looked at me in astonishment, “Why should I?” he asks … “I am the president of the Russian Federation. Why should I ask for forgiveness?”’²⁷

Yet, the dictators that inspired the Bard, may not be that different from the ones that exist today. Richard III was a play, and Shakespeare needed to engage the audience, even when this was at the expense of the actual conduct of dictators. So, what were the actual dictators like in the 16th century? And do they share similarities with their present-day colleagues? The friar Girolamo Savonarola, who briefly ruled Florence after the Medicis had been deposed, painted a portrait of the tyrants in his Treatise on the Government of Florence The tyrant terrifies his subjects. Spying balefully on the world from his strongly fortified palace, as sensitive to approaching prey or predators as a spider delicately balanced on the centre of his web, he dominates the life of all around him. He takes credit for the achievements of nobler men who spend their substance on civic projects, like churches and other fine buildings. Entertaining ambassadors of foreign powers at his own table, he makes decisions that affect the wellbeing of all his subjects without consulting anyone except his favourites. He turns his entire state into a machine for his own profit and that of a few friends. He does not shrink from robbing wealthy men of their possessions or pure young women of their virtue. All threats to his sole authority he resists with absolute ferocity.²⁸

Savonarola’s words could have applied to other rulers than the Borgias and the Medicis in his day, and perhaps ring truer than Shakespeare’s fictional account. Admittedly, the idealistic Florentine cleric (who later fell from grace and was burned at the stake) was writing about a renaissance micro-state, but some of the words could equally apply to 20th- and 21st-century rulers, whether the ones that are democratically elected, or whether they have assumed power by other means. Donald Trump seemed to consult few ‘except his favourites’ and any sign of threat to his reign is resisted with – if not ‘absolute ferocity’ – then at least with an angry tweet. And while he may not directly be “robbing pure young women of their virtue”, his self-confessed preference to “grabbing them by the p****” is not all that different. Of course, the 45th President of the United States was not a dictator, he lost an election, and was forced to step down – albeit grudgingly. But his personality traits are strikingly similar to those of ancient tyrants and autocrats. While one cannot say that the presence of rulers with such characteristics are certain to lead to tyranny, it is a warning sign that shows that institutions must be particularly strong to withhold an assault.

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So, without drawing anachronistic comparisons and conclusions, there is much in Savonarola’s account that sounds familiar. Other strongmen – Putin, Erdoğan, and China’s President Xi Jinping, to name but three – are similarly “delicately balanced on the centre of [their] webs” and “dominate the life of all around”. But what is it that make them tick, and what is it that distinguish these dictators from other politicians? Dictators, it needs to be pointed out, do not have the same personality. Some of them were accomplished administrators who got things done. Julius Caesar might have followed some of the same patterns when he gained power as did Mussolini, for example. But his personality type was not pathological. Yes, he did have a high opinion of himself, but he was also someone who went to great lengths to level with his soldiers. He rode into battle with them and addressed them as ‘comrades’ to signal that he – improbable though it seems – was on their level. Also, Caesar was known for meticulous preparation. He could have invaded Britannia the first time around, but he needed more facts, more information, and more intel, and hence he waited until he was able to launch an invasion that would cost the least lives. Caesar was a warmonger, and someone who arguably carried out a genocide in Gaul, but he was not a psychopath in the psychiatric sense of the word.²⁹ The same cannot be said of many of the demagogues – past and present. As many a democracy has broken down after demagogues have undermined them from within it is necessary to look at the psychological and personal traits that characterise them. So far, we have merely looked at the common personae of tyrants and dictators as described in various disciplines of the humanities. But the accounts by philosophers, historical chroniclers, playwrights, and so on, are somewhat unstructured and impressionistic. There is nothing inherently problematic with that. Different disciplines have different and complementary perspectives on the subject, but sometimes it is useful to have more scientific theories, even if these are not as stringent as the natural sciences. Perhaps not surprisingly, psychology is one of the disciplines that has dealt most systematically with the personality traits of tyrants and other authoritarian rulers. For the most part the conclusions of this discipline corroborate the findings of philosophers, historians, and fiction writers but do so with different means. There was understandable hype when Dr Mary L. Trump, the niece of the former president, published Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man in 2020. With a sense for good business, that her uncle would have appreciated in any contestant on The Apprentice (Trump’s reality TV-show), Dr Trump (a clinical psychologist) sold a over a million copies in the first week after its publication.³⁰ In the book, the then president was subjected to the critical eye of the clinician, who noted that “Donald experienced the ‘not enough’

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in the loss of connection to his mother at a crucial developmental stage”. Trump’s mother had been absent due to illness and, wrote the niece, “the resulting personality traits that resulted [were] narcissism, bullying, and grandiosity”.³¹ The psychologist also believed that “Donald may also meet some of the criteria for dependent personality disorder”, and went on to suggest that the man who calls himself ‘very smart’, “may have a long undiagnosed learning disability”.³² Though as Dr Trump herself would admit, “Donald’s pathology is so complex and his behaviours so inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he would never sit for”.³³ Admittedly, Dr Trump was not a neutral observer. She openly admitted having an axe to grind with the now former president – he took away her health coverage, and he was reportedly cruel to her father Fred Trump Jr, who died of alcoholism. Of course, Trump never became a dictator, it is merely that he seems to have shared some of the characteristics of individuals who go on to become tyrants and autocrats. The 45th President lost the election in 2020 and was forced to step down after a democratic process – albeit one he never fully recognised. The latter, his sense of denial, is perhaps yet another ‘proof’ of his mental state. After all, narcissists have a distorted sense of reality. As another clinical psychologist written, most narcissists believe their own lies, Narcissists live and die by their own version of the truth. Is it the truth if reality has been distorted? A narcissist believes it is. Extreme cognitive distortions and rigid unconscious defence mechanisms change a person’s perception of an experience. Paramount distortions and defences are typically employed by a person with a narcissistic personality disorder; both alter reality in order to make it more palpable for a fragile ego.³⁴

From a scientific point of view Mary Trump’s research was hardly path-breaking. It was competent and professional, if a bit sensationalist. From a scholarly point of view, it was based on over a century of research into the psychological profile of dictators and authoritarians. The general agreement in this research, as it was pioneered by psychoanalysts like Erich Fromm, and before that Sigmund Freud himself, was that the dictators – like above all Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini – were narcissists. In his case studies, Sigmund Freud found that children were naturally self-centred and placed themselves above everyone else. Thus, in his case notes, the father of psychoanalysis, wrote that we, “can detect an element of megalomania in most other forms of paranoid disorder, and continued that, “we are justified in assuming that this megalomania [as narcissism was called then] is essentially of an infantile nature, and that, as development proceeds, it is sacrificed to social considerations”.³⁵ In other words, as people grow up, they are forced by social conditions

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and conventions to be more considerate. This view is shared by psychiatrists writing over a century later. Frederick Burkle writes Adolescence uniquely welcomes in healthy challenges to the narcissistic hold of childhood. Either certain emotional and cognitive growth phases are successfully completed during adolescence, or there is great risk for perpetuation of childlike and early-adolescent demands within an adult’s personality.³⁶

It is only the ones who are stunted in their mental development that develop Narcissistic Personality Disorder. According to a pioneering study, Erich Fromm (one of the members of the Frankfurt School of Sociology), described the narcissist in terms that are clearly recognisable in the writing of later psychologists like Mary Trump. He wrote Narcissism is an orientation in which all one’s interest and passion are directed to one’s own person: one’s body, mind, feelings, interests, and so forth. […] For the narcissistic person, only he and what concerns him are fully real; what is outside, what concerns others, is real only in a superficial sense of perception; that is to say, it is real for one’s senses and for one’s intellect. But it is not real in a deeper sense, for our feeling or understanding. He is, in fact, aware only of what is outside, inasmuch as it affects him.³⁷

Again, it is not difficult to see how this portrait fits the bill of many present-day dictators, or their colleagues of earlier epochs. However, Fromm, always a conscientious and fair-minded scholar, was clear that there could be a kind of ‘benign narcissism’. Sigmund Freud, who wrote extensively on the subject, even felt it was desirable to have a modicum of it, and found that “the narcissistic type … [is] especially suited … to take on the role of leaders and to … impress others as being ‘personalities’”.³⁸ Like a charismatic leader in Weber’s sociology (see Chapter 1) there was a place for individuals who had a high opinion of themselves, though only as long as they were within bounds of sanity, and societal convention. Writers of leadership psychology take the same view. An article in Harvard Business Review opined, Throughout history, narcissists have always emerged to inspire people and to shape the future. When military, religious, and political arenas dominated society, it was figures such as Napoléon Bonaparte, Mahatma Gandhi, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt who determined the social agenda. But from time to time, when business became the engine of social change, it, too, generated its share of narcissistic leaders. That was true at the beginning of this century, when men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford exploited new technologies and restructured American industry.³⁹

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A modicum of self-importance could be channelled to something good. And, up to a point, such a sense could even be healthy. Thus, it is possible to take pride in one’s own work without suffering from a mental condition. So, what is the big deal, then? Well, to begin with, what characterises this type of benign ‘narcissism’, as Fromm called it, is that it is directed towards concrete things that the individual has achieved or produced, and not just towards an individual who describes him or herself as a genius.⁴⁰ What Fromm warned against was the disorder he named ‘malignant narcissism’, where The object of narcissism is not anything the person does or produces, but something he has; for instance, his body, his looks, his health, his wealth, etc. The malignant nature of this type of narcissism lies in the fact that it lacks the corrective element which we find in the benign form. If I am ‘great’ because of some quality I have, and not because of something I achieve, I do not need to be related to anybody or anything.⁴¹

In the psychology of Erich Fromm, the characteristics were presented in a more eloquent form. Practising psychologists need practical tools, and hence they have outlined a list of symptoms. According to the American Psychiatric Association the typical malignant narcissist would: ‒ Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance; ‒ Have a sense of entitlement and require constant, excessive admiration; ‒ Expect to be recognised as superior even without achievements that warrant it; ‒ Exaggerate achievements and talents; ‒ Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty, or the perfect mate; ‒ Believe they are superior and can only associate with equally special people; ‒ Monopolize conversations and belittle or look down on people they perceive as inferior; ‒ Expect special favours and unquestioning compliance with their expectations; ‒ Take advantage of others to get what they want; ‒ Have an inability or unwillingness to recognise the needs and feelings of others; ‒ Be envious of others and believe others envy them; ‒ Behave in an arrogant or haughty manner, coming across as conceited, boastful, and pretentious; ‒ Insist on having the best of everything – for instance, the best car or office.⁴² It is not difficult to see how this diagnosis fits with the behaviour of several of the world’s dictators. True, most politicians have to be steely, determined, and even

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Machiavellian cynicism to succeed in the game, and narcissism is always a matter of degree. But Freud also pointed out that there was a difference between being egotistical and narcissistic. The former was, we could say, a kind of self-preservation – what the philosopher Rousseau would have called amour de soi, as opposed to the afore-mentioned amour-propre. But unlike ‘normal’ politicians, dictators often have a mean streak, and a sense of enjoying other people’s humiliation. It is rare to have access to actual clinical psychological assessments of political leaders. One of the rare examples is a dossier on Rodrigo Duterte, the current president of the Philippines, and a politician who – rather like Donald Trump – has been accused of authoritarian tendencies and a more or less deliberate attempt to gradually undermine democracy.⁴³ Reading the report by Dr Natividad Dayan, written as part of the divorce proceedings between Mr Duterte and his erstwhile wife, the psychologist described Duterte as, “a highly [and] impulsive individual who has difficulty controlling his urges and emotions”. It was also noted that he was suffering from an “antisocial narcissistic personality disorder” and was someone whose behaviour was characterised by “gross indifference, insensitivity and self-centeredness” and “grandiose sense of self-entitlement and manipulative behaviours”.⁴⁴ The portrait, as will be seen, is almost a mirror image of the clinical symptoms described by the American Psychiatric Association, especially when the clinician added that Duterte had a “pervasive tendency to demean, humiliate others and violate their rights and feelings”,⁴⁵ and was “unable to reflect on the consequences of his actions”. When looking closer at the actual dictators – and not the ones who were able to maintain a modicum of superficial democratic legitimacy – one finds even stronger signs of malignant narcissism. This has recently led a psychologist to conclude Whatever the title (Tyrant, Dictator, Autocrat, Despot, King, Oppressor, President, or Fascist) or how they came to power, their developmental gaps through childhood and adolescence are similar, some more violent and abusive than others. Their narcissism drives the common playbook of oppression and fear with identical tactics, human right’s abuses, and declarations that they are not bound by laws of their country.⁴⁶

A student of 20th-century despots wrote Mao [was] a man who worshipped himself, adored himself, would take every credit for every achievement but blame others for his failures; Stalin was someone who wanted people to be obedient instruments of his will, with no convictions of their own; [Haitian dictator] Duvalier

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portrayed himself as the personification of God, exclaiming of himself ‘the word was made flesh’.⁴⁷

That dictators and demagogues share these characteristics is almost self-evident. But it is also clear from the list that these personality traits are not common in the general population. In so far as you can measure personal characteristics, it is estimated that one per cent of any given population shares these traits. That is the same percentage as the prevalence of schizophrenia.⁴⁸ So, are demagogues clinically mad? Such emotive epithets are easy to bandy about but difficult to test. Almost inevitably we are biased, and do not analyse the rulers objectively. We tend to be influenced by our prejudices, and sometimes we draw simplistic conclusions. Certainly, there are dictators that seem remarkably stable and who would pass a psychological test without difficulty. According to a memo prepared by the CIA, Moammar Qaddafi, the late dictator of Libya, was certainly an eccentric. Nevertheless, the Agency’s assessment was sober Despite popular belief to the contrary, Qaddafi is not psychotic, and for the most part is in contact with reality … Qaddafi is judged to suffer from a severe personality disturbance – a ‘borderline personality disorder’ … Under severe stress, he is subject to bizarre behavior when his judgment may be faulty.⁴⁹

So, we have to be careful not to tar all despots, demagogues, and dictators with the same brush. Still, too many characteristics are recurrent for it to be a coincidence, and spotting some provide useful warning signs that are helpful if we want to save a democracy from going under. So far, we have looked mainly at the abstract characteristics. But what are the real life examples like? It seems that dictators – whether of the totalitarian assortment or the tinpot variety – are a peculiar type of people. More often than not they are eccentric, sometimes even comically so – though, admittedly, it is not very amusing for those at the receiving end of their foibles. We all know about Hitler’s violent temper (the 2004 film Der Untergang, which was based on eyewitness accounts, is a good example⁵⁰). And the behaviours of the likes of Stalin and Mussolini are almost equally well-known. But what about the lesser ones, the dictators who rule smaller countries? A few examples will suffice. Here we go! Saparmurat Niyazov, the dictator of Turkmenistan from 1990 to 2006, demanded that all public servants learned his book Ruhnama (‘The Book of the Soul’). The book was declared to be equal to the Quran, and no one could get a driver’s licence

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unless they could recite it chapter and verse. The Turkmen autocrat also banned make-up, gold teeth, and lip syncing at concerts. Another, perhaps equally, bizarre – but brutal – dictator was Haitian dictator François Duvalier. Though trained as a medical doctor – he even earned a degree from the University of Michigan – ‘Papa Doc’ (as he was known) had views that were very far from those of most Ivy-league trained physicians. He suspected that a former ally-turned-rival had turned into a black dog. Duvalier consequently ordered the killing of all black canines. When his foe was eventually found, and executed, the dictator kept his head for voodoo. Papa Doc had form on this. At least he said so. He claimed that he controlled Lee Harvey Oswald with voodoo and ordered him to kill John F. Kennedy. And many of us thought the murder of JFK was still unresolved. With such awesome powers, it was perhaps not surprising that school children in his impoverished country had to recite a customised version of the Lord’s Prayer: Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for life, hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations. Thy will be done in Port-au-Prince as it is in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and forgive not the trespasses of those anti-patriots who daily spit upon our country.⁵¹

These eccentric examples of megalomaniac self-perception are not entirely confined to rulers in fully oppressive regimes such as Turkmenistan or Haiti. Donald Trump, tweeted in January 2018 that he was not just “smart, but genius … and a very stable genius at that!” The man who later recommended bleach as a cure for COVID19, spoke about his “natural ability” as a scientist and how doctors had – reportedly – been surprised by his knowledge about human biology.⁵² But the difference, at least at the time of writing, is that the now former American president was not all powerful, and is not able to directly dictate the policy agenda, let alone be in control of the electoral process. When studying dictators (and demagogues) we need to understand what makes them tick, and what characterises their behaviour. We may all have heard stories of Emperor Caligula, who elevated his horse to the Senate. In fact, Suetonius, who reported the story, was less definite about Invictus, the tyrant’s beloved stallion, and merely wrote that “consulatum quoque traditur destinasse” (“and it is also said that he planned to make him consul”). Whether ennobled or not the steed was certainly well taken care of, “besides a stall of marble, a manger of ivory, purple blankets and a collar of precious stones, … this horse [was given] a house, a troop of slaves and furniture”.⁵³ No wonder the

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Roman historian described the emperor’s state as “ad insamiami”– in English ‘madness’. Such bizarre behaviour is characteristic of dictators who are unhinged by institutional barriers and checks and balances. To a degree, institutions can thus prevent individuals from acting in such ways. We shall get back to that later. But to start with, it is useful to look at how despots and demagogues have been described throughout the ages, and then to compare them to the present-day crop of authoritarian politicians. For if the latter behave in roughly similar ways, then we know that we have to be on alert. That dictators take advantage of others to achieve their own ends is not just the main characteristic in Shakespeare’s Richard III, but also in the behaviours of actual tyrants, and those who aspire to absolute power. It is almost banal to cite examples of how Stalin outmanoeuvred even his erstwhile supporter, the writer and politician Nikolai Bukharin when it became opportune, and had him executed after a show trial. But that the same personality trait is found in leaders who have not made it as far down the path of dictatorship is perhaps even more interesting – and disturbing. President Erdoğan of Turkey might not have executed opponents, but he unceremoniously dropped his ally – former Prime Minister – Ahmet Davutoglu, when he no longer had any use for him. But the question is if we learn very much from merely labelling politicians who have these characteristics. To say, that a politician is selfish, self-obsessed, and even has disregard for others is hardly saying anything new. Indeed, some political scientists regard Machiavelli’s doctrines and various versions of so-called Rational Choice Theory as being the starting point of any political analysis. Politics is a practical and cynical business where leaders have to act strategically. Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister 1957– 1963 was hardly psychopathic, let alone narcistic as commonly defined. Yet, by the standards of the American Psychiatric Association was willing to sacrifice other people – albeit without bloodshed as he did when he purged the cabinet in the Night of the Long Knives, sacking eight cabinet ministers. And, yet there is a difference. Macmillan was never possessed with anything remotely close to “Malignant narcissism”.⁵⁴ For the Conservative Prime Minister in the early 1960s, the reshuffle was not born out of vindictiveness, still less a sadistic pleasure of seeing others humiliated. By contrast, the oft-told story of how Vladimir Putin let his dog into a summit with Angela Merkel to intimidate her, is a clear sign of someone who took pleasure in showing his power with little regard for the substance of the negotiations. Erich Fromm’s description of the narcissistic personality disorder is disturbingly accurate. It would be no exaggeration that Putin, “has no love, no compas-

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sion, no rational, objective judgment. The narcissistic person has built an invisible wall around himself. He is everything, the world is nothing. Or rather: He is the world”.⁵⁵

Chapter 3: Dictators 1919 – 1945 A State that is once destroyed cannot be restored; a man that is once killed cannot be resurrected Sun Tzu, The Art of War ¹

“The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty”. President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration in April 1917 before the Joint-Houses of Congress was optimistic.² It raised hopes. And, as it turned out, unrealistic ones at that. Countries with little – or in most cases zero – experience of republican government held free elections for multi-party parliaments and drew up constitutions enshrining the principles of the rule of law, female suffrage, and proportional voting systems. There was a palpable move from Realpolitik to Rechtstaat; an unmistakeable sense that the future was qualitatively different from the past; that henceforth all politics would rest upon the consent of the governed. The near universal optimism was, in some ways, similar to the hopefulness that followed in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall seventy years later. While no one in 1919 explicitly wrote that the world had reached the “end of history”, let alone that “Western liberal democracy” was “the final form of human government”,³ as a brilliant scholar (somewhat prematurely) did at the end of the Cold War. There was a sense that a corner had been turned and that well-designed political and legal institutions could transform backward monarchies into prosperous republics. After all, this had been ‘the war to end all wars’, and it had been won by the democratic forces. But the optimism that characterised the period seventy years later was not universally shared. And yet, it was not all the same. The slaughter in the trenches in Flanders showed that people were willing to go to great lengths to murder each other. Sigmund Freud added Thanatos – death drive – to his theory of psychology, as the socalled ‘sublimation’ of Libido no longer seemed to account for human behaviour.⁴ And in the humanities, many revised the optimism that this had been the endpoint of history and the beginning of a new utopian internationalism. Especially within theology there was a sense of Kulturpessimismus, as the experience of the “world war shook cultural confidence in human progress”,⁵ and this gradually spread to the emerging discipline of International Relations, where it became the dominant strand after the Second World War. Yet, politics is not driven by writers and critics. For the time being politicians were optimistic, and none more so than President Wilson. Yet, the republican exuhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783111327839-007

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berance of his Fourteen Points, soon gave way to nationalism, xenophobia, and an anti-democratic backlash. The 1920s, and the decade after, were characterised by a ‘clash of civilisations’ as Hungary, Poland, Japan, and other countries went through various stages of ‘democratic backsliding’.⁶ As a result, “the 1930s was the decade of the dictators”;⁷ strongmen with self-bestowed titles of Führer, Duce, Conducâtor, or Caudillo blamed minorities (rarely real and mostly imagined!) for the people’s woes, promised to get rid of the ‘elites’; drenare la palude – or “drain the swamp” to use Mussolini’s words⁸ – which were later appropriated by an American politician. Maybe all this could have been foreseen. Certainly, the world wasn’t quite safe for democracy. For despite the enthusiasm after the War, the democratic spirit came with a caveat. The bureaucratic and bourgeois elites were not convinced, nor were the landowners – and the still largely rural populations were more interested in land-reform than in political theory. The defenders of pluralist democracy were urban: liberal elites and parts of the socialist movement. And this unity was so-so, as some workers’ parties considered elective democracy as “a snare, an instrument of government trickery”⁹ – to use the words of Friedrich Engels, from a generation before. And even among supporters there were sceptics. The idea that all men – and, indeed, women – were created equal was not a political reality at the time. While American women were granted the right to vote with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, in the United Kingdom the Representation of the People Act 1918 was earlier. But it was also less extensive than the American Act. It only granted to females over thirty the right to vote. and even this was fiercely opposed by many in the Conservative Party – and beyond. Indeed, the often (and unfairly) lauded Winston Churchill opposed female suffrage and sought to prevent its introduction by proposing a referendum on the matter. In France, in 1919, the Senate vetoed a Bill to enfranchise women which had been passed by the Chamber of Deputies and continued to resist the enfranchisement of le deuxième sexe. (In total the upper house vetoed a similar proposal five times, before Charles de Gaulle granted French women the vote after the end of the Second World War). It was not only in capitalist countries in the West that democracy was restricted. In the 1920s most of the world was still ruled by empires with vast colonies of disenfranchised subjects; the only countries that were allowed to become something approaching democracies were European countries – many of which were small and ethnically divided, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, the end of the Great War was a watershed. Before 1914, the only actual democratic countries were Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, Britain, the Low Countries, the Scandinavian nations, and Switzerland. True, there were

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elements of popular government in Japan, Germany, and even China. All three countries formally allowed different parties to contest elections – at least for a while. This did not last. It is not often acknowledged that Japan was a comparatively democratic country at the beginning of the 20th century. A democratic system was gradually extended in the country from 1896, and this process of Taishō Democracy (named after the emperor 1913 – 1926) gathered pace in the following years. At the end of the period the franchise had been extended from three to twelve million (virtually the entire male population).¹⁰ In Germany there had been universal suffrage since 1867, which enabled even socialists to be elected to the Bundestag. Indeed, even a critic like Friedrich Engels conceded that the workers had “used the franchise in a way which has paid them a thousand-fold and has served as a model to the workers of all countries”.¹¹ And yet, it was still Der Kaiser who appointed the government and the German Reich did not meet the minimal definition that a democracy exists when “the government can be dismissed by a majority vote”,¹² at least not until the very end of the Great War. Even in China there had been a movement towards government by the people from the end of the 19th century. The philosopher Liang Qichao translated the works of Rousseau and Locke, and inspired a circle of intellectuals and mandarins to contemplate the introduction of a British style constitutional monarchy.¹³ However, the movement was interrupted in 1898, when the reform-minded Emperor Guangxu’s attempt to introduce elements of democracy came to an abrupt end when the Empress Dowager Cixi (Empress Xiaoqin Cixi Duanyou Kangyi) deposed him in a coup. Upon the death of the Empress, the pendulum once again swung in the direction of democracy. The Revolution of 1911 overthrew the Qing Dynasty, and adopted a provisional constitution based on the French system of government, with a separation of powers, free elections, and an independent judiciary. The elections for the legislative assembly in late 1912, did not go to plan. Song Jiaoren, the victorious candidate for the post as Prime Minister was assassinated before he took up his post in 1913. The system was effectively stillborn. Soon rival parliaments in different parts of the country claimed to have the power to govern the ancient nation. A decade later, China returned to one-party rule by the Guomindang Party. While Europe (and Japan) were going through the early stages of democratic excitement – the party was already over in China. Things were not much different in Japan.

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From Taishō Democracy to Taisei Autocracy The country had become a constitutional monarchy with regular multi-party elections and the rule of law in the early 1920s – though the process had started as early as 1912, when the new emperor Taishō succeeded his more conservative father Meiji in that year. The sickly and soft-spoken monarch allowed the political system to become more pluralistic and even appointed Hara Takashi, a commoner, to become Prime Minister when his party commanded a majority in the Diet, the legislature. But Taishō Democracy, as the epoch became known, was also characterised by setbacks and challenges. Rising inflation and the assassination of Prime Minister Hara in 1921 shook the system. And yet by the mid-1920s, there was a certain sense of guarded optimism, “We instituted constitutional government before the people were prepared for it”, concluded the contemporary writer Yoshino Sakuzo, “as a result there have been many failures … Still, it is impossible to reverse course and return to the old absolutism, so there is nothing for us to do but cheerfully take the road of reform and progress”.¹⁴ But it was not ‘impossible’. The assessment was premature, social unrest, fear of Communism, but not economic recession, led to the adoption of severely restrictive Chian Iji Hō law in 1925. This suppressed freedom of expression – especially for the socialist left. The Liberals and Socialists had not expected the relatively modestly worded document to be used in such a draconian way. The reformers had left the Meiji Constitution broadly intact. On paper the system of government was modelled on Prussia under the Kaiser. In practice, this had been different during the period of Taishō Democracy. Times had changed, the military was not content with playing second fiddle and the courts were willing to tolerate, if not outright encourage, the crackdowns on civil liberties. Without a written constitution and formal democratic institutions to go with it, Japanese democracy was vulnerable. The Ministry of Home Affairs – or Jichishō – began arresting activists on the left and even the centre of politics. In total over 30,000 intellectuals and activists were arrested. Again, due process was followed, and nothing was against the law. Gradually, almost imperceptibly whatever was left of Japanese democracy withered away.¹⁵ After the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi in 1932, power effectively shifted into the hands of the Military. And yet – like in Poland and Hungary (as we shall see shortly) – there were still multi-party elections. However, in practice Japan had become a strongly nationalist autocratic state, where elections were won by nationalist parties – and with no role to play for liberal or socialist groups. This notwithstanding, it was only on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbour that

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Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe succeeded in creating a single-party government, with his Taisei Yokusankai as the only permitted political organisation.

Popular Dictatorships Meanwhile in Europe (and North America), the end of the First World War gave birth to a new paradigm in politics; that the people – at least in principle – were the ultimate sovereign. Now, it was formally recognised, “that”, as English jurist Albert Venn Dicey put it, “a law depends at bottom for its enactment on the consent of the nation as represented by its electors”.¹⁶ This view was not merely confined to countries with traditions for parliamentary government, let alone to those who regarded themselves as liberals and constitutionalists. Carl Schmitt, the German lawyer who went on to become Hitler’s Kronjurist, declared, that the will of the people, was “the single type of state justification that may be generally acknowledged today as valid”.¹⁷ For the first time in history, these musings by theoreticians were backed up by statistical facts; in the United Kingdom, for example, the number of electors almost tripled from eight to 22 million from 1883 to 1918. And in Germany, from fourteen million in 1912 to 36 million by the end of the War. The new-found enthusiasm was not limited to western Europe. Even, Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, who had seized power in October in Russia in 1917 by overthrowing the at least partially elected Provisional Government, was clear that the Soviets “cannot tolerate a fraud of democracy if we call ourselves ‘democrats’”.¹⁸ On the face of it, the number of new democracies was staggering. Eight new republics grew out of the ruins of the Habsburg and Tsarist empires: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, from the former and Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania from the latter. Poland – which had been divided by Prussia, Austria, and Russia since 1794 – regained its hard-fought independence as a democratic state in 1918. Bulgaria held reasonably free elections in 1919. And, these states were soon to be joined by the Irish Free State in 1922, Turkey in 1923, and Greece in 1924. The Zeitgeist was on the side of various forms of parliamentary government with multi-party systems, written constitutions, and the rule of law. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. Spain was one of them. The country had experienced a short summer of democracy at the beginning of the 1870s. This episode in pluralism was inaugurated by a ‘glorious revolution’ (La Gloriosa – also called la Septembrina) – in 1868 when Queen Isabella II was deposed. But the Sexenio Democrático (1868 – 1874)– as the six years of democracy was called – was short. A coup by the military deposed the democratic regime, and an-

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other Pronunciamiento (as overthrows of governments are called in Spanish) led to the restoration of the monarchy. Formally, the new system was a constitutional monarchy like the one in Britain. There was a two-party system, but the elections were rigged. Devised by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, a noted intellectual with a reactionary bent, the El Turno Pacífico ensured that the Conservatives and the Liberals took turns in power. This – nominally democratic system – was overthrown in 1923, when General Miguel Primo de Rivera and conservative elites suspended El turnismo (as the system was more commonly called) in 1923. Democracy was restored in 1931 after the death of el dictador, as Primo had called himself. This was not to last, as we shall see below. The same pattern was followed in Portugal, where constitutional democracy had been established following the 5 October 1910 revolution, which in reality was a coup d’état by the Partido Republicano Português. This deposed King Manuel II of Portugal (known as O Desventurado ‘the unfortunate one’. Afonso Costa, the leader of the Democratic Party, had attempted to modernise the constitution. As Prime Minister, he made some successful reforms, such as legalisation of divorce, civil registering of marriages, leases of property, a reorganisation of the judiciary, legislation to compensate work-place injury, and a lifting of the censorship of the press. But he soon faced a backlash, especially as his anti-clericalism was unpopular among the conservative elites, in the Church, and in the military. The constitutional system broke down when it was replaced by a series of military dictatorships from the middle of the second decade of the 20th century. The most decisive was led by Sidónio Pais. An historian described him as, “a slender, handsome, courteous man of early middle age, extremely attractive to women and appealing to much of the public at large”.¹⁹ Whether accurate or not, Pais was a charismatic general who was opposed to the anti-clericalism of the liberal politicians like Costa. He set about to establish a system that in some ways predated the totalitarian systems that later emerged in Germany, Spain, and Russia. He was one of the first leaders to develop a cult of personality. He was widely liked. For this reason, his assassination in 1918, was a shock to the nation. As a historian has written His personality combined attractive social qualities and strength of character. A contemporary observer described him as ‘half prince, half condottiere,’ and a member of his shortlived parliament in 1918 explained his public attractiveness by suggesting that he possessed ‘spiritual mimetism,’ an ability to mimic faithfully several current traits and images. His versatility was extraordinary, but what distinguished him in contemporary Portuguese politics was his readiness to discuss difficult issues openly and to admit in public that he was capable of making mistakes.²⁰

Officially, the 1911 constitution was still in force. But the system was breaking down. It finally gave way to the equally inappropriately named Second Republic

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in 1926. This did not last long. In 1933, António de Oliveira Salazar, an economist who had served as finance minister, transformed the system into a Ditadura Nacional, which persisted until 1974 (see Chapter 4). In the early 1920s the dictatorships were exceptions. They were soon to become the norm. In the 1930s, the democratic mood music had changed from major to minor, from a joyous waltz to a subdued requiem. Less than a handful of the new democracies were left. At the outbreak of the Second World War only Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and Finland could meaningfully be described as having pluralist political systems. Finland provided a rare example of how responsible democratic parties (in this case the Social Democrats and the Agrarians) collaborated and saw off the threat from the far-right Lapua Movement, which had attempted a violent coup in 1932.²¹ The trajectories of democratic breakdown differed in important respects – some fell as a result of coups d’état by the armed forces (for example Poland), others as a result of civil wars (Spain), and in yet in other cases the ruling head of state suspended democracy, as in the case of King Carol II’s autogolpe – or self-coup – in Romania in 1938. But many countries descended slowly but steadily into ever more repressive forms of authoritarianism (for example, Bulgaria, Latvia and, as we have seen, Japan). When chronicling the autocratic recession that followed the democratic boom, one invariably compares incommensurable cases. There was a world of difference between the relatively mild autocracies of the Baltic states and the tyrannies in Germany and the Soviet Union. At the risk of oversimplifying, one can distinguish between totalitarians (Hitler and Stalin), military dictatorships (Franco in Spain) and façade-democracies – dictatorships that masqueraded as democracies (such as Hungary, Poland, Austria, and the Baltic Countries). In the latter, democratic government was undermined, gradually, almost imperceptibly, and often from within.

The Totalitarians Russia was perhaps the prime example that the world was not ‘safe for democracy’. For starters, Lenin, had no time for checks and balances or the constitutional safeguard associated with constitutional democracies. He claimed that he wanted to create a new form of democracy, as he put it in The State and the Revolution. This was based on “the organisation of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of crushing the oppressors”. And it would, in Lenin’s words result in

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An immense expansion of democracy, which, for the first time, becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the rich … and suppression by force, i. e. exclusion from democracy, for the exploiters and oppressors of the people – this is the change which democracy undergoes during the ‘transition’ from capitalism to communism.²²

Marx and Engels had held that the first step in the revolution was “to win the battle of democracy”.²³ And Karl Marx had believed that “universal suffrage would be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation”.²⁴ Lenin, we know, was far from being a softie. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) was a socialist and not unsympathetic to the Soviets at first. Yet, his encounter with the Bolshevik leader made him change his mind. His portrait of Lenin, perhaps, gives us a glimpse of the man: When I met him, I had much less impression of a great man than I had expected; my most vivid impressions were of bigotry … When I put a question to him about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited poorer peasants against richer ones, ‘and soon they hanged them from the nearest tree, ha, ha, ha’. His guffaw at the thought of the massacre made my blood run cold.²⁵

Whether this impression is accurate or not, Lenin was a pragmatist. After the revolution, it soon became clear that the Bolsheviks had a rather different idea of government by the people than the one espoused by politicians at the time – and even by the authors of The Communist Manifesto. According to Soviet doctrine, the voters should elect leading Communists, or as Lenin called them the “vanguard of the proletariat”, who were “capable of assuming power and of leading the whole people to socialism”.²⁶ For the Bolshevik leader, democracy did not mean free, fair, and competitive elections but a one-party state with one list approved by the Communists. Lenin made short shift with Social Democrats in West European countries and declared that they used words like “pure democracy” and “democracy” in general “for the purpose of deceiving the people and concealing from them the bourgeois character of present-day democracy”.²⁷ Undoubtedly, opportunism played a part. The word Bolshevik derives from the Russian word for ‘greater in number’. But Lenin’s party did not appeal to a great many Russians. The Communists came a distant second to Víktor Chernóv’s Socialist Revolutionary Party in the Constituent Assembly elections in December 1917 (they polled a paltry 25 per cent against their opponents who won 58 per cent). But this had no practical impact. Being in control of the armed forces, the Bolsheviks disbanded the body after only one day in January 1918, and they felt democratically justified in doing so. Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, a deputy who went on the be

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the first finance minister of the USSR – in a speech approved by Lenin – dismissed critics who called the take-over undemocratic, “How can you”, he asked rhetorically, “appeal to such a concept as the will of the whole people? For a Marxist ‘the people’ is an inconceivable notion: the people does not act as a single unit. The people as a unit is a mere fiction, and this fiction is needed by the ruling classes … You belong to one world, with the cadets and the bourgeoisie, and we to the other, with the peasants and the workers”.²⁸ As is evident, democracy – in the sense of free and fair elections – had been disbanded even before it had been implemented in Russia. Like in several of the Soviet successor states seventy years later, the Russians at the beginning of the 20th century, experienced only the briefest of democratic interludes before the country sank into totalitarianism. There was no meaningful sense of popular control over the levers of government, no popular government, and no checks on power. Though the fiction was maintained, Stalin held regular elections and declared that his 1936 basic law – complete with human rights, freedom of the press, and universal suffrage – was, in the words of the Dictator himself, “The most democratic of all constitutions in the world; Never in the history of the world have there been such really free and really democratic elections – never! History knows no other example like it … our universal elections will be carried out as the freest elections and the most democratic compared with elections in any other country in the world”.²⁹ That Stalin said this, at the height of the terror when literally millions were perishing in the Gulag – was a tragic irony – and a fact denounced as fake news by the Soviet tyrant, and brushed aside by the English fellow-travellers Sidney and Beatrice Webb, with the dismissive comment that the “world at large puts a bad construction on everything” in the Soviet Union.³⁰ We now know that the Webbs were naïve, and that the critics were right. And, yet, in many ways the Soviet Union (alongside Nazi Germany) was an anomaly; an atypical example of the norm in the period between the two wars. Lenin – and his successors – were steeped in the conviction that they were acting in accordance with Karl Marx’s “law of motion of modern society”.³¹ The violence after the Revolution, and the exceptional measures during the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, was only aimed at – in Marx’s infamous words – “lessening the birthpangs”³² in the process of bringing history to its natural fruition. And those who failed to see this were – in Lenin’s view – merely ignorant; “The party”, he declared, “is the vanguard of a class, and its duty is to lead the masses and not merely to reflect the average political level of the masses”.³³ The Communists were generally unsuccessful. As the historian A. J. P. Taylor laconically observed, “revolutions were made in the name of the proletariat, not by it, and usually in countries where the proletariat hardly exists”.³⁴

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It wasn’t entirely correct. But pretty much. There was a failed Communist uprising in Estonia in 1924 and two sporadic uprisings in Germany immediately after the war. But the ultra-short-lived Soviet Republic in Bavaria in April 1919 and the Spartacus Uprising in Berlin were hardly worthy of notice. The two would have been long forgotten had it not been for the death of Rosa Luxemburg who died as a martyr for socialism at the hands of right-wing thugs with the tacit blessing of moderate socialist president Friedrich Ebert. In reality revolts were not mass uprisings, let alone anything like the awakening of class consciousness. Rather they were orchestrated by a small clique of intellectuals with little practical knowledge of politics. Only one other European country turned Marxist-Leninist, and, in this case, only for the briefest of time. That country was Hungary. It was more by accident than by deliberate design. The Chrysanthemum Revolution, an uprising against the Austrian overlords led by the Social Democrat Mihály Károlyi, was intended to inaugurate a democratic constitution. But it did not. After a mere 144 days, the Hungarian People’s Republic, was overthrown by Béla Kun. A former investigative journalist with a fierce temper (he took part in several duels), Kun was not a natural politician – Leon Trotsky “considered him a fool”.³⁵ However well intentioned, his attempt to turn Hungary into a socialist utopia failed in a spectacular fashion. Attempts to create a more equal distribution of goods and of sharing of wealth failed because there was precious little wealth to share in the war-torn and bankrupt country. But also, because, the Communists had given very little thought to the practical policies of communism, let alone to the implementation of these. Karl Marx himself had hardly touched upon the subject and had only uttered scattered remarks in which he romanticized a “communist society, where”, people would “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner”.³⁶ Hunger for the many, and persecutions of the few, was the tangible outcome of the Magyar revolution –as it was to be for the Russians in the Soviet Union. There was little time to ‘criticise’, and instead of ‘dinner’ there was starvation. And yet, there has occasionally been something of a mystique about the shortlived Hungarian Soviet Republic – at least on the political left.³⁷ The main reason is that the history books are not always written by the victors – or their sympathisers. Some of the Hungarian revolutionaries were fortunate to have literary friends among the educated – and occasionally naïve – bourgeois intelligentsia in Western Europe. The cultural commissar of the Hungarian Soviet Republic was the mild-mannered Marxist theorist Georgy Lukács, a poster-boy for the student revolt in the 1960s, who had a cameo-role in Thomas Mann’s novel Magic Mountain under

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the name Napha. This gave the Hungarian revolution a seemingly human face. In reality, the Kun regime was a reign of terror – with hundreds of executions.³⁸ Comrade Kun’s Soviet Republic was even more short-lived than its predecessor. It lasted a mere 133 days. In July 1920, the Communist government was overthrown by Miklós Horthy, a former admiral in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who established a conservative and nationalist dictatorship, which nominally held multi-party elections – though only after a brutal purge of communists after the ‘whites’ came to power. Hungary descended into tyranny. There is a tendency to look for the spectacular, to parallels between Mussolini’s rise to power and the challenges to democratic states in later decades. Such comparisons are almost invariably inaccurate as they fail to acknowledge the many idiosyncratic factors that also played a role in the rise of the strongmen. Nevertheless, a number of causes are remarkably – and disturbingly – similar to the autocrats that vied for power a century later: the most important of them being the stealthy way democracy was dismantled; the way the fascists used the existing rules of the game to establish a dictatorship. Benito Mussolini’s famous March on Rome in 1922 (the future dictator, himself, took the train!) was not a revolution, but it convinced the feeble Victor Emmanuel III to appoint the Fascist leader as head of a coalition government. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to blame the politicians of yesteryear for spectacular mistakes that brought Il Duce to power. That is unfair. There was reason to be concerned at the time. Anarchy, the danger of a Bolshevik revolution, and general social unrest combined to create the proverbial perfect storm. Add to this higher food prices at the end of the war and frequent changes of government (there were three different administrations between May 1921 and October 1922), and it is not surprising that the Biennio Rosso (1919 – 1921) – the ‘Two Red Years’ – caused democratic politicians to seek out any measures that could quieten things down. Admittedly, Mussolini was an eccentric – and a slightly comical figure – but at least he was not a communist. Within a coalition government, Signore Mussolini would be reined in. Antonio Salandra (Prime Minister 1914 – 1916) and even the veteran liberal Giovanni Giolitti (five times Prime Minister) believed the Fascist leader could save democracy. We now know they were gravely mistaken. Once in power, Mussolini wasted little time. He was granted powers to rule by decree and secured parliamentary support for a new electoral law that gave a premium to the party that won the largest number of seats. And all this was done by the book. The Legge Acerbo – ‘The Acerbo law’ – named after Giacomo Acerbo, the politician who introduced it, gave the Fascists an electoral advantage, even though they did not command majority support in the country. At the elections in 1924 – held immediately after the passage of the Acerbo Law – the Fascists and their

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allies won an absolute majority. While there was widespread violence and intimidation Mussolini had secured powers by following democratic procedure and the rule of law.³⁹ “If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time nobody notices”, said Il Duce.⁴⁰ His gradual approach worked. Within a decade all opposition was quashed, and the Fascists were in total control; una morta causata da mille tagli – death by a thousand cuts Italian style. The same pattern was followed in Germany a few years later – and in several countries a century after Mussolini had pioneered the tactic of subtly dismantling democratic government.

National Socialism It has been commonplace among some, perhaps above all the more sensationalist media, to compare current leaders with Adolf Hitler.⁴¹ This is fanciful, historically inaccurate, and an insult to the many who perished in the concentration camps during the dark years of National Socialism 1933 – 1945. Hitler’s regime was sui generis in almost every way. In his book Hitler’s First Hundred Days, the historian Peter Fritzsche, pointed out how terror, violence, and intimidation was part and parcel of the Nazis strategy for consolidating power.⁴² It is, superficially, easy to see how this strategy was repeated elsewhere by politicians who – when facing electoral defeat – sought to play of the fear of anarchy in places from Portland, Oregon to the Philippines. There have been many attempts to see parallels between Hitler’s rise to power and subsequent threats to democracy. Hitler, like Mussolini, did not win a majority of the votes in an election. But it wasn’t far off. Having failed miserably in attempts in the late 1920s, “On 30 January 1933 Hitler became chancellor of Germany. It was the result not so much of an electoral process as a series of backroom sordid political transactions in which Hindenburg [the president and a war hero] played a leading role”, a historian has summed up the Austrian-born former corporal’s rise to the top.⁴³ Yet, Hitler was relatively popular. The Nazis had made significant gains in the July elections of 1932, when his National Socialists had in fact been the largest party with 37 per cent. When these elections were inconclusive, another poll was held in November of the same year. This time the NSDAP suffered a slight setback and only won 33 per cent, but still ahead of the Social Democrats on 21, and the Communist Party (KPD) on 14 per cent. The Catholic centre party, or Deutsche Zentrumspartei, which potentially could have formed a coalition with the Social Democrats only won 11 per cent. Hence a majority coalition of the moderate parties was an impossibility. Germany was a case of what political scientist Giovanni

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Sartori later called polarised pluralism, with the extremist parties performing well, and a weak centre.⁴⁴ In many ways it was a perfect storm, mixed with contingent factors, and the steely determination and cunning of the underestimated Hitler. President Hindenburg loathed Kurt von Schleicher, who had served as a Chancellor, and who wanted to make a comeback. The Prussian politician was, the president believed (with some justification), an opportunist and a careerist. He had engineered the downfall of the conservative interim chancellor Franz von Papen in December 1932, and had installed himself in a caretaker role, but without a clear majority behind him.⁴⁵ Schleicher was a power-politician. And someone who was willing to get his hands dirty. He negotiated behind the scenes and had even contemplated giving Hitler the role as Chancellor. His opportunism did not endear him to the aging president. Hindenburg recognised Schleicher’s political talent – and despised his Machiavellianism. But the old man also underestimated Hitler (and especially his cabal). Consequently, the leader of the National Socialists was appointed to head the government.⁴⁶ The National Socialists did not waste any time consolidating power. They had appealed to the collective humiliation of the German people, and had used Thymos to hoodwink many Germans into accepting their ways. Less than a month later, a fire conveniently broke out in the Reichstag, the German Parliament. The Nazis blamed Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist. While a court found that Lubbe had acted alone, the National Socialists, in what can be seen as a classic false flag operation, used the fire as a pretext for introducing martial law. It was later proven that the Dutchman was innocent. But this was much later, and at that time it was too late. “Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet” reads a famous line by Carl Schmitt, the noted legal theorist (and member of the Nazi-Party).⁴⁷ Loosely translated, “the sovereign is he who decided on martial law”. Formally, this was Hindenburg’s prerogative. In reality, the ‘sovereign’ was Hitler. The Chancellor forced Hindenburg to declare a state of exception. The rest is the saddest history of mankind, the Nazi regime. Hitler had succeeded in becoming a de facto dictator less than two months after he had become Chancellor. Martial law allowed him – legally – to round up communists and other oppositional leaders. Hindenburg was still President, but the old man was powerless. When he died in 1934 Hitler – after a rigged plebiscite – assumed all powers and was officially declared as Führer. It is always tempting to look for patterns; to fear that other leaders use minor (or major) acts of terrorism as a pretext for introducing martial law. Such moves must be resisted. The case of Hitler is in many ways Sonderfall – an exception. Hit-

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ler was the result of a perfect storm, a combination of a particularly bad case of national humiliation, an unprecedented economic crisis, and a diabolical (and cunning) politician. The Roman writer and orator Cicero, who died at the hands of a violent mob directed by a tyrant, wrote that out of the frenzy of a dying democracy, the people are apt to elect a dictator; “some bold and depraved man, who shamelessly [targets] those who have deserved well of the State”. The great intellectuals, the likes of the writer Thomas Mann, and of course Jewish philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Edmund Husserl were among those who suffered. Cicero predicted that such a man “is also surrounded by armed men”.⁴⁸ Hitler certainly was the latter, the Nazi Party’s Storm Troopers (SA Sturmabteilung) and Security Forces (SS Schutzstaffel) “outnumbered the German army more than four to one … And for several years, conservative elites at various levels of the Reich had played a dangerous game: they generally looked the other way as the Nazis beat down the more hated Communists”.⁴⁹ Again, it is tempting, to see echoes of this in the riots in certain American cities in the period 2016 – 2020, but the level of violence was on another and completely different scale during the early 1930s. There are parallels but the two cases cannot in fairness be compared with each other.

The Old-Fashioned Dictatorships Often, during the interwar period (and indeed, later), demagogues kept the façade of popular government – at least for a time, though in the end this too was disbanded, and the autocrat became a tyrant. That this happened in Italy was not exceptional for the epoch. It was just better known and more documented that Mussolini gradually undermined democracy. But the same script was followed elsewhere too. In Lithuania, Anatas Smetona (the strongman from 1926 to 1939) initially maintained a façade of democracy, and only abandoned this pretence after all opposition had been eliminated. The same was the case in Hungary after the fall of Bela Kun. Democratic institutions were restored. It was in name only. Horthy (though he declined to serve as president), was de facto in total control. After the elections in 1920 were won by a coalition of the National Smallholders and Agricultural Labourer’s Party and the Christian National Union Party, the two parties agreed to merge, and promptly changed the electoral system to ensure that they won the election two years later.⁵⁰ The same procedure, as it happens, was followed in the early 21st century by the country’s far-right strongman Viktor Orbán, who also gerrymandered the electoral system to give himself all but total control.⁵¹

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The new electoral system enabled István Bethlen – one of Horthy’s loyal servants – to govern as prime minister. When Horthy lost faith in the Transylvanianborn politician, he was replaced by the aristocratic Gyula Károlyi who soon gave way to Gyula Gömbös – two men whose greatest quality was their unquestioning loyalty to the ruler. The Unity Party won all the elections between 1920 and 1939. Hungary retained the “outer trappings of a pluralist system but in practice depended more heavily than ever on the army and big landowners rather than the mobilised masses”.⁵² And, of course, by this time, Hungary was not the only country where democratic government was – or rather became – a sham. While Hungary had hardly experienced republican government at all, the same was not true in Poland, where the newly re-established country held parliamentary elections with universal suffrage in January 1920. Women were given the vote, and Rzeczpospolita Polska – ‘the Polish Republic’) seemed almost at the vanguard of history. The elections, however, did not herald the advent of a well-functioning democracy. As it happens, the man who brought democracy to Poland also took it way. His name was Józef Piłsudski. A war hero and former socialist radical, he had been the leader of the Socialist Party (PPS) and fought bravely for his country’s freedom – including by beating the Russians. Yet, his success as an election campaigner was nothing like his military prowess. His party came a distant third in the first elections to the Sejm, the new parliament of Poland. For a while, he gracefully retired from frontline politics. The newly elected Sejm adopted a model constitution, which even forbade religious discrimination and abolished royal titles in 1921. But constitutions alone do not create democracies. Social turmoil and a volatile political system made it impossible to enact the reforms necessary to stabilize the economy and to resolve the deep ethnic and social conflicts in the country. Piłsudski grew increasingly impatient. On 10 May 1926, he declared in an interview with Kurier Poranny that he was “ready to fight the evil” of Sejmocracy. The following day, he led a coup and marched on the capital. The newly installed government refused to bow to his demands. After a day of tension and high drama, Piłsudski met President Stanisław Wojciechowski on the middle of the Poniatowski Bridge in what resembled a high-noon stand-off. The president was confident that a solution could be found. At the time, Piłsudski only controlled Warsaw. But both sides refused to budge, and sporadic fighting broke out. The fighting was shortlived. Piłsudski – somewhat like Charles de Gaulle in France in 1958 – was more than a skilled military tactician. He was also an astute politician. And, as such, he could count on the support of the Polish Socialist Party. PPS declared its support for the coup and called for a general strike. This paralysed the communications system and effectively undermined the democraticly elected government.

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Like Horthy in Hungary (and Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland 90 years later⁵³), Piłsudski did not take up a formal position. Nor did he disband democracy. Indeed, the coup was – so he stated – aimed at making the country more democratic. The aim was merely Sanacja, a moral and political ‘clean-up’. Soon after the coup, there were elections, in which the so-called Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government won a plurality of the vote. The election was held in accordance with formal rules, but the media were dominated by Sanacja supporters and some opposition lists and candidates were declared invalid by supposedly neutral government institutions. Little by little, and very gradually, the Polish system of government descended into increasingly authoritarian rule; “in September 1930, Piłsudski dissolved parliament and ordered the imprisonment of many opposition deputies, who later were sentenced to prison”.⁵⁴ By 1930, the democratic hopes that had been so prominent at the beginning of the decade had all but faded. Thus, democracies suffering economic downturns and paralysed by polarised party-systems, tended to die a slow death. In some countries the process was almost seamless and a result of clever, or devious, abuse of institutional mechanisms and dubious (but legal) constitutional provisions, rather than through violent coups. But the period between the two World Wars was also characterised by military or civilian coups. Unlike in the early 21st century (see Chapter 5), when the majority of autocratic states were established through formal legal procedure, the democracies in the interwar period were often overthrown by a putsch. These were then followed by the ‘formal’ restoration of democracy – though always in a way that invariably led to control by a small elite. To be sure, not all attempts succeeded. As is inevitably the case, there were a fair number of failed coup attempts (for example in Albania in 1922). But many, many more were successful. Once again, there was a pattern. Nearly everywhere, proportional electoral systems led to a proliferation of political parties with divergent ideologies. This made governing nigh on impossible. This would have been destabilising even at the best of times. But these were not good times economically. Hyperinflation and mass unemployment demanded political action – the very thing the political systems were incapable of delivering. Faced with insurmountable problems, selfselected elites took matters in their own hands. Thus, democratic breakdowns were not fundamentally antidemocratic. Even the most dictatorial claimed some kind of democratic legitimacy. On the occasion of one of his four plebiscites, Hitler wrote that he was, “steeped in the conviction that the authority of the state proceeds from the people and must be ratified by them in a free and secret referendum”.⁵⁵

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History does not allow for sweeping generalisations, and there were certainly tyrants who professed to espouse absolutism – Francisco Franco was an example. Yet, even the self-styled Caudillo used (unsubstantiated electoral fraud) as the justification for his uprising against the Republic. In many, indeed, in most cases, the putsch was seen as new beginning, a clearing – what Germans call a Befreiungsschlag. And some of these, while legally dubious, were undertaken with genuinely democratic aims. Thus, the Greek revolt against King Constantine I (one of five violent coups in the interwar years) was a result of the disastrous war with Turkey (1920 – 1922) and directed against the aristocratic elite. Headed by Colonel Nikolaos Plastiras, a decorated war hero, known as the ‘Black Knight’, he claimed to act in the interest of – and was in large measure supported by – the people. To be sure the coup was illegal and unconstitutional, but at least it was carried out in the spirit of democracy – and it was undertaken to bring down an undemocratic regime. Perhaps reflecting the spirit of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, in the 1920s, many coups were precursors to a return to popularly elected governments – at least on paper. But in most cases the revolutions – if this word is appropriate – heralded a period of thinly disguised dictatorship. There was often a pattern; an overthrow of power followed by elections and then a period of façade democracy, where the dominant party (and their allies) always win control of the legislature and gradually push through increasingly discriminatory measures. For example, in Bulgaria, the overthrow of Aleksandar Stamboliyski’s Agrarian National Union in 1923 was followed by parliamentary elections three years later. None of the countries returned to full democracy. Democratic breakdown was – at least during this era – a one-way street. In total there were, seven coups in the 1920 in Europe. In the following decade, this jumped to nineteen. And this is not counting countries where democratically elected governments gradually undermined democracy through constitutional means – such as Austria. In the 1920s, all but one of the breakdowns of democracy were inaugurated by a military coup or an autogolpe, with Italy being the odd one out. In the 1930s, there was only one exception to the rule: Nazi Germany. Just like Mussolini, Hitler followed legal and constitutional procedure – albeit with considerable help from paramilitary groups who were given free rein by the regime. It is an open question if anyone can be compared to Herr Hitler.⁵⁶ Often the Führer’s fatherland is seen as a victim of Nazi Germany. This is understandable but somewhat inaccurate. Austria was not a democracy after 1930, and it is questionable if this epithet can even be used about the regime that existed in the 1920s.

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The First Republic of Austria – or Republik Österreich – was brief. The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy at the end of the First World War inaugurated the enthusiasm with which we are now familiar. Great minds joined the government – including the noted economist Joseph Schumpeter (who served as finance minister). After a brief period under the Social Democrat Karl Renner, who introduced a number of social reforms, including unemployment insurance, paid holidays, the eight-hour workday, and regulations on the working conditions of miners, bakers, women, and children. State aid was also provided for the disabled, together with health insurance for public employees. Further, legislation was enacted that provided for collective bargaining and the mediation of disputes.⁵⁷ While the Social Democrats were instrumental in enacting these reforms, the party suffered electoral setbacks, and soon the First Republic was dominated by the Christian Social Party (Christlichsoziale Partei) and their conservative allies. This gradually led to a breakdown of democratic norms. The Chancellor, Ignaz Seipelan, an ordained Catholic Priest, established close ties with far-right groups such as Heimwehr, which – albeit on a smaller scale – used the same tactics as the SA and SS in Germany. Matters came to a head in the July Revolt of 1927, which was used as a pretext for introducing increasingly draconian security legislation. The philosopher Karl Popper – who was later to excoriate dictatorships in The Open Society and Its Enemies and other books – was prescient, and wrote, “I began to expect the worst: that the democratic bastions of Central Europe would fall, and that a totalitarian Germany would start another war”.⁵⁸ The revolt, little by little, and almost imperceptibly paved the way for the dictatorship that was inaugurated in 1933. If any breakdown of popular government can be compared to later democratic failures, it is that of Austria. The situation was not exceptional – as in Germany. There was a polarised political culture, no willingness to compromise, and nationalist extremists who were willing to use force. The fall of the First Austrian Republic was the work of Engelbert Dollfuß. In a mocking comparison with the great 19th-century stateman Prince von Metternich, the diminutive Dollfuß was known as Millimetternich (he was a mere 4′ 11″). Small in stature he may have been, but this did not prevent him from finally seizing power and establishing an autocratic system modelled on Italy in 1933. In following year, Dollfuß established his ‘Patriotric Front’ (Vaterländische Front), which combined Catholicism with right-wing ideology. But Dollfuß underestimated his enemies abroad. As a Catholic he was opposed to all talk of a union with Germany. The Germans were mainly Protestants, and Dollfuß feared – with good reason – that Austrian Catholics would become a minority in a united Austro-German Reich dominated by Lutheran Protestants. Some Nazis in Austria opposed his policies of anti-Anschluss (anti-unification). And Doll-

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fuß employed tough measures to subdue them. It was in the context of this that the Dollfuß cabinet approved a new constitution, which abolished freedom of the press, and established a one party system and created a total state monopoly on employer–employee relations. His opponents reacted with fury and organised a coup d’état. It failed but Dollfuß himself was murdered. His successor Kurt Schuschnigg continued the policy for the next four years. But, he was unable to withstand the pressure from the larger neighbour in the north. In early 1938 he met with Hitler to smooth things out. Hitler forced his erstwhile compatriot to sign an agreement that de facto gave Germany power over Austria. Schuschnigg was in a bind. Still a dictator, he made a bold move. He met with leaders of the Social Democratic Party and offered that their party would be legalised in return for their support. This deal was to have been approved by a referendum. Hitler was furious. He demanded that Schuschnigg resign. When he refused, the president, his name was Wilhelm Miklas, dismissed him. Formally, the president was a ceremonial figurehead with no powers, but Miklas (a former headmaster of a small-town school) had often been willing to bend over backwards to please strong leaders. This time was no exception. He had assented to Dollfuß’s ‘self-elimination of Parliament’ (in German: Selbstausschaltung des Parlaments) for which there was very little legal basis, and when presented with Hitler’s fury, he assented to the demands once again.⁵⁹ A few days later, Hitler’s army invaded Austria and Schuschnigg was placed under house arrest and was later transferred to a concentration camp. Even dictators have to choose their friends carefully. The situation in Austria was spectacular but not exceptional. In the following year, there was a successful coup in Estonia in 1934, after which the country became a one-party state governed by Konstantin Päts’ party Samaaliit (it translates as the Patriotic League), and in the same year Kārlis Ulmanis, a mild mannered agronomist who had once run a dairy in Texas, seized power, interned hundreds of social democrats, and ruled by decree until the Soviet invasion in 1939. At this stage, coups were taking place with increasing frequency. The dismantling of democracy in the Baltic states was followed in quick succession by – and the final break-down of – anything resembling democracy in Bulgaria and Greece. In the former, Zveno, a group within the army, overthrew the Popular Bloc government, and banned all political parties without further ado. In Greece, once the cradle of democracy, the modern equivalent of this system was not much in evidence. General Georgios Kondylis – who, paradoxically, had helped overthrow the dictatorship in 1926 – forced Prime Minister Pangagis Tsaldaris to resign, then cajoled President Alexandros Zaimis to name him as head of government, before Kondylis deposed the head of state and named himself antivasileís – or regent. However – and perhaps in a nod to the country’s historic traditions – the coup was legitimised

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by a plebiscite. The vote was anything but free and fair, if one is to trust the reportage in Time Magazine, “All Greek elections are conducted with terrorist methods and the latest plebiscite was no exception”, reported the paper before describing how those who dared voting against Kondylis were beaten up. Not surprisingly, over 97 per cent of the voters supported the coup in 1935.⁶⁰ Yet, despite this, the elections the following year appeared – at first – to have been democratic. Kondylis had hoped to emulate Mussolini’s regime in Italy, where the king was a mere puppet. However, King George – whose return Kondylis had secured – was not content with playing second fiddle. The two men quarrelled and Kondylis decided to resign. In the election held the following year, General Kondylis’ Popular Radical Union, only gained about 20 per cent of the votes, and fell well short of Eleftherios Venizelos’ Liberal Party. The political situation was once again deadlocked. The king appointed Ioannis Metaxas, a former army officer who openly eulogised authoritarian regimes. A year later, Metaxas seized power and instituted an autocratic regime. One of the books banned by his government was Plato’s Republic. ⁶¹ At this stage, all but one of the southern European states had fallen to autocrats with more or less overt fascist leanings. In Spain, democracy had been restored in 1931. It happened at the worst possible of times. The centre-left governments, headed by Niceto Alcalá-Zamora and Manuel Azaña, were weighed down by massive public debt, a world economic crisis, and a fractious political system. Things did not get better when the centre-right Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA) won the most seats in 1933 but was unable to form a government. Instead, the party was initially content to support the centrist Alejandro Lerroux García. The new government reversed many of the reforms passed by the previous leftist government. Massive protests ensued – and were suppressed by the military –in particular, by one Francisco Franco. CEDA leader Gil Robles increasingly extolled what he saw as virtues of Hitler’s regime. After a series of scandals, a new election was called. Popular Front won 267 deputies – the Right only 132. The result seemed impressive. In reality it was due to the electoral system. The Left had won by less than one per cent of the vote. The Right spearheaded by Franco claimed there was electoral fraud. This was baseless, but in this case it led to a civil war. The novelist, George Orwell, who fought in that conflict summed up the situation of the petrified partisanship that prevailed in Homage to Catalonia with the words “in such circumstances there can be no argument; the necessary minimum of agreement cannot be reached”.⁶² There were, of course, also breakdowns of democracy in other parts of the world. In 1930 there were successful coups in Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Peru. In the following year there was a successful coup in El Salvador,

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and a year after that there was a military coup in Chile, when Juan Esteban Montero created the short-lived República Socialista de Chile (it was replaced by democratic government the following year). But Europe was still dominant. At the end of the 1930s, democracies were the exception. They only existed in Scandinavia, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the Low Countries, France, Britain, USA, and Canada. The rest of the world was dominated by dictators. Even in democracies, there were many prominent individuals, not least businessmen who praised autocratic government. For example, Lord Rothermere – the proprietor of the Daily Mail – made no secret of his admiration for Hitler. After the 1930 German federal election, in which the Nazis won 107 out of 577 seats, the newspaperman wrote in the Daily Mail that the Nazis “represent the birth of Germany as a nation”. At this time Hitler’s party was still relatively small. A bit like AfD in the 21st century. And Hitler made no secret of his hatred of Jews in Mein Kampf. ⁶³ The world was emphatically not safe for democracy! Economic turmoil, substantial debt, high unemployment, and hyperinflation combined with fractious parties and rapidly changing governing coalitions led to escalating political violence and attempted coups by the right (and in a few cases also the left in the 1920 and 1930s). This all but killed democracy – and led to the bloodiest war in human history.

Chapter 4: Dictators During the Cold War The rising masses demand a direct and expeditious democracy that the old ways can no longer offer them. Juan Perón¹

The era from the Second World War until the Fall of the Berlin Wall is conventionally known as the Cold War. It was a period of bipolarity, when, respectively, the Soviet Union and the United States were locked in constant conflict. This situation made the period rather unique. And yet, sometimes there are recurrent patterns that rhyme across the ages. In some ways, the Cold War Era was a magnified version of the situation in ancient Greece during the time of the Peloponnesian War (431 – 404 BC). Back then, the democratic Athens fought autocratic Sparta.² In many ways the comparison is appropriate, even if the scale was much smaller. Sparta was the unrivalled superpower of the Peloponnesian League, and all the other members of this alliance were oligarchies opposed to democracy. In a similar fashion, the Soviet Union was the undisputed leader of the Eastern Bloc, a group of countries that all had non-democratic regimes. The difference was that during the Cold War, as opposed to the ancient Greek conflict, the battles were exclusively fought by proxy. But in some ways the similarities are more important that the differences. One of the resemblances was that the two sides were willing to sacrifice principles for long-term interests. During the Cold War, not all America’s allies were democracies. Far from it. Just think of the likes of Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, for example. The Delian League, like American alliances with non-communist countries during the period after 1945, was likewise an amalgam of states not all of which were democratic. The aim of the alliance led by Athens was to contain (and if possible) reduce the power of Sparta.³ This meant that Athens – on occasion – would carry out atrocities and act in a way that was unbecoming for a city-state that would later be eulogised for its benevolent system of republican government. We often hear Pericles’ famous funeral oration, which is still worth quoting. He said, We are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. … We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111327839-008

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of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality … advancement in public life falls to reputations for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit … our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters … at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger.⁴

This could stand as a manifesto to many a liberal or left-leaning political party in the 21st century. But Pericles also added that the Athenians’ “military training is in many respects superior to that of our adversaries”. And it was. And they used it in a way that was not entirely consistent with the lofty ideals. Perhaps a bit like Barack Obama – another idealist – who used less than ethical extra-judicial killings of foreigners by drone attacks.⁵ While not unknown to specialists, the story is less often told of how the Athenians, for strategic purposes, invaded the small island of Melos in the summer of 416 BC and demanded that they pay tribute or face annihilation. This is an important corrective to the rosy view of ancient Athens. When the Melians chose the latter, all men were killed, and women and children were enslaved. The Athenians were pragmatic and cold-hearted. Their spokesperson, according to the historian Thucydides, was frank that they would not “trouble you with spurious pretences”. “Right”, he went on, “is only a question of equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.⁶ This pragmatic – some would say cynical approach – in the case of Athens was very similar to the one pursued by the United States after the Second World War. The strategy followed in Vietnam, for example the infamous My Lai Massacre, in March 1968, in which over 400 innocent civilians were gunned down,⁷ is an obvious parallel that is very unbecoming for the ‘leader of the free world’. Indeed, in some ways the dictatorships in the Western camp were crueller than the Communist ones, at least as far as torture was concerned. Measured by human rights violations, both. As Ron Wintrobe has noted, “measuring the frequency of the use of torture and … the number of political prisoners taken … military regimes and traditional monarchies [allied with the USA] used torture more frequently than totalitarian (Marxist) governments”.⁸ Thus, occasionally democrats have justified atrocities and outright evil for the sake of the greater good. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, an American scholar who went on to become US Ambassador to the United Nations, was shockingly open about the double standards, but nevertheless defended America’s decision to side with the nastiest of tyrants as long as these were not communists. In an article in Commentary she took President Jimmy Carter to task for failing to prevent revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua.⁹ Not, she pointed out, because these countries were democracies. Indeed, they were not. Both “nations were led by men who had not been selected

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by free elections, who recognized no duty to submit themselves to searching tests of popular acceptability”.¹⁰ Yet, they still needed to be supported lest they should fall under the dominance of the Soviet Union, she argued. Unlike the likes of the Neo-cons twenty years later – under President George W. Bush – Kirkpatrick was openly critical of American efforts to impose democracy upon countries faced with communist (or other totalitarian threats). She found that, The American effort to impose liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent internal opposition not only failed, but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy–regimes, moreover [these states were], hostile to American interests and policies.¹¹

So, while she did not espouse the antics of autocrats, Kirkpatrick, held out the prospect that these could one day – after a gradual process – become democracies. As she wrote, [While there] is no instance of a revolutionary ‘socialist’ or Communist society being democratized, right-wing autocracies do sometimes evolve into democracies – given time, propitious economic, social, and political circumstances, talented leaders, and a strong indigenous demand for representative government. Something of the kind is in progress on the Iberian Peninsula and the first steps have been taken in Brazil. Something similar could conceivably have also occurred in Iran and Nicaragua if contestation and participation had been more gradually expanded.

While Kirkpatrick wrote towards the end of the Cold War, her views were similar to those adopted by American administrations (of both colours) throughout the era. The period after 1945, in short, was not a high point for democratization, but rather one when the fall of democracies was often tolerated by western powers for strategic purposes. That was not the intention in the halcyon days after the defeat of Hitler and his allies. The victorious powers of the Second World War established the United Nations, with its lofty commitments to democracy. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights – which was drafted by a committee whose members included a representative from the Soviet Union¹² – openly declared that “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives”.¹³ The Americans and their allies liked to pretend that they were democratic, though the results were sometimes farcical. For example, on 24 October 1955 Jean Baptiste Ngô Đình Diệm, the first president of South Vietnam, hailed the result of the plebiscite the day before. The vote in which the people “took such an

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enthusiastic part,” he argued, “constitutes an approval of the policies pursued”.¹⁴ This ‘approval’ was echoed by the US government, “The Department of State is gratified that according to reports the referendum was conducted in such an orderly and efficient manner and that the people of Viet-Nam have made their choice unmistakably clear”.¹⁵ The result was indeed ‘clear’, but mistaken: 600,000 voters supported Diệm, even though the registered number of electors was 450,000.¹⁶ Differently put, the plebiscite question had an endorsement level of 133 per cent! The American and their allies were not alone in this. Their crimes against democracy were lesser than those perpetrated by the totalitarians in Communist China and Russia, though they were offences, nevertheless. We need to be critical of everyone who commits sins. That said, the crimes committed against democracy, fundamental rights, and basic human decency were on another scale in Communist countries. One is tempted to quote line from the award-winning movie Triangle of Sadness, “Communism is only possible in heaven where they don’t need it, and in hell where they already have it”.¹⁷ But what is interesting, is that the lip service paid to the values of democracy, pluralism, and human rights, was also evident in Communist states. The democracies that broke down, or rather were overthrown, in the Soviet-dominated countries of Eastern Europe followed the same script, and perhaps none more so than East Germany – the inappropriately named German Democratic Republic. Run by Walter Ulbricht, the son of a carpenter from the south-eastern city of Leipzig, the Communist apparatchik, who had no formal education apart from a stint at the International Lenin School, Moscow, in the 1920s,¹⁸ was a good student of his master and idol Josef Stalin. In 1936, the Soviet Tyrant (as we saw in the previous chapter) had drafted what on paper was the most democratic constitution in the world, but which, in brutal reality, was anything but. Taking a leaf from the Stalinist playbook, Ulbricht’s simple motto for transforming East Germany into a Communist state was as simple as it was cynical, “It must look democratic, but we must control everything”. ‘Comrade’ Ulbricht was a crafty and cunning operator and he know full well that not everybody was committed to what Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, had called Partiya Diktaturi Proletariata – in English ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. Ulbricht’s Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands lost the election in the then still unified Berlin in 1946.¹⁹ His first task was to overturn this result. This did not deter him. It merely made him change his tactic. Unruffled and true to his stratagem that the new Communist state should look like a constitutional democracy, but in reality be governed by the iron will of the Marxist-Leninist regime, Ulbricht forced the Social Democrats (SPD) to merge with the Communist Party and created the Socialist Unity Party (SED). The Social Democrats not surprisingly resisted the move and held an internal party referendum on the plan. Despite intim-

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idation by the occupying Soviet forces a full 82 per cent of the SPD members voted against the merger of the two parties.²⁰ To no avail. Ulbricht, with support from Stalin, forced through the merger. Yet, despite the hostile takeover of the Social Democratic Party, the SED failed to win an overall majority in the regional elections. Ulbricht changed tactic. After that all elections were tightly controlled, unfree, and unfair.²¹ Though formally there were many parties; liberal conservative and even nationalist ones – they never won, and always received pre-determined share of the votes – never more than 5 per cent. The demise of anything resembling democracy followed a broadly similar pattern in other Central and East European countries. In most cases the leaders of the Communist Parties were less than charismatic apparatchiks, not unlike Ulbricht in East Germany. These were not leaders who were particularly psychopathic, nor did they appeal to Thymos. They just had powerful support from the Kremlin. With the inevitable variations that characterise human affairs, the pattern was often very much the same in all for the countries under domination by Moscow. In Hungary, Mátyás Rákosi, a veteran from the short-lived Béla Kun government (see Chapter 3), followed the Ulbricht script and gradually undermined the democratic political parties, though formally from within a pluralist structure. However, whereas Ulbricht used the threat of brute force, Rákosi was slightly more subtle. Playing a divide and conquer tactic, he bragged that he had undermined the opposition parties by “cutting them off like slices of salami”.²² Little by little, the opposition was eliminated until they were inconsequential and weak. Initially, the Communists were in an unfavourable position, at least vis-à-vis the electorate and the population in general. The prime minister immediately after the Second World War was Zoltán Tildy of the Független Kisgazdapárt. Trained as a Protestant clergyman, he had spent time in Belfast in his youth, and he had been critical of the Horthy regime during the 1930s. An opponent of Hitler, Tildy had impeccable credentials. But this mattered little to the Communists. His Small-Holders Party (as it is called in English), had won a majority in the 1945 election. But the occupation by the Soviet Union forced the centrist politician out, though he was given the largely ceremonial role of President. Officially, the Communists still tolerated a democratic coalition government headed by Ferenc Nagy, another centrist from the Small Holders’ Party. But it soon became clear that he too was too liberal for the Communists’ liking. Having successfully divided the opposition, the liberal prime minister was removed, and the Communists won the following elections under circumstances that no one believed were fair. Democracies rarely die by a single blow. Packing the courts and

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using (or abusing) the formal rules to convict opponents on trumped-up charges is a favoured tactic among would-be tyrants. It was alleged that President Zoltán Tildy’s son had been involved in corruption. Not illegal political activity, just straight up crime. And the liberal president had to step down. The following year, the Socialist Party was forced to merge with the Communists to form Magyar Dolgozók Pártja, MDP, in English the Hungarian Workers Party. If any country followed the tactic of ‘death by a thousand cuts’, it was Rákosi. That the same tactic at the time of writing is being arguably used by Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán is telling. (We shall return to this in the next chapter). Czechoslovakia was – as we have seen in the previous chapter – one of the few (if not the only) country in Central and Eastern Europe that could genuinely be described as democratic between the World Wars. During the Second World War, the Czechoslovakian Communist Party (KSČ) had an impeccable record of co-operating with non-communist parties. At a time when practically all other Communist parties were Stalinist in both theory and practice, Klement Gottwald, Secretary General of the KSČ, sounded a democratic note. At least initially. He publicly stated, that “in spite of the favourable situation, the next goal is not soviets and socialism, but rather carrying out a really thorough democratic national revolution”.²³ This seems to have appealed to the voters. KSČ won an impressive 38 per cent of the votes in the 1946 elections. By comparison in the first post-war elections their comrades in Hungary only won a paltry 22 per cent. But Gottwald’s party was still short of a majority. The Communists made the most of the situation. Klement Gottwald became Prime Minister, and alongside the Minister of the Interior, Václav Nosek, gradually began to purge non-communist civil servants and appointed Communists and fellow-travellers to prominent positions in the police. The President, Edvard Beneš was not himself a Communist. But he was weak and ineffectual. He had served as head of state until the Munich Agreement (in which Chamberlain infamously acceded to Hitler’s demands). While he gained friends as the head of the Czechoslovakian government in exile, the former diplomat was no match for a Communist Party bent on imposing total control. Beneš should have known better. He still believed in stalling tactics, and only too late did he realise that his appeasement policy towards Gottwald was hollowing out of the once liberal democracy. When the non-communist ministers threatened to resign, the President hesitated. In 1948 the Communists took full control of the state. Though once again, not by a killer blow, but by forcing the legislative assembly to accede to Communist rule. Formally speaking, democracy in Czechoslovakia was killed by a majority vote of a democratically elected parliament (like in Austria in 1934, when Dollfuß’s Austrofascists used the same script). Though, in actual fact, in Czechoslovakia democracy was also killed by a combination of compla-

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cency among the democratic politicians and a driven Communist leadership with Soviet support. The slow and meticulous procedure by the latter meant that the people were not aware of the extend of the democratic breakdown before it was too late. In Poland, a non-democratic state before the Second World War, the Władysław Gomułka, a metal worker who had spent time in the Soviet Union, was installed as puppet leader for the Soviets. Yes, there were elections in 1947, but only after the forced merger of the non-bourgeois parties (following the model pioneered by Ulbricht). The inappropriately named Blok Demokratyczny (Democratic bloc) won a majority in an election that was characterised by violence by Communist gangs (rather in the style of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany), and the non-communist Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe never stood a chance. The election result was manufactured. Communism was instituted through electoral fraud, and with the backing of the Kremlin.²⁴ It would be tiresome and tedious to go through the list of countries in Eastern and Central Europe that succumbed to Communist dictatorships. And, in any case, in all of them the pattern was the same; a relatively weak Communist Party – in none of the countries did they enjoy majority support – gained power through dirty-tricks, intimidation, forced mergers with other parties, and in all cases, the new regime was headed by a pliant – and uncharismatic – Stalinist. There were no demagogues among the Communist leaders who gained power after the Second World War. Not, partly for that reason, did these Stalinist leaders appeal to the hurt pride of the people. Thymos played no part in the Communist take-overs of countries in the Eastern Bloc. By any measure, these dictatorships conformed to the totalitarian model first pioneered in the 1930s. These systems were, in Hannah Arendt’s seminal definition, characterised by “the permanent domination of each single individual in each and every sphere of life”.²⁵ Though, admittedly, not all Communist states were equally skilled in controlling every aspect of life. In a famous analysis, Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, distinguished between ‘Totalitarian Dictatorship’ and ‘Autocracies’.²⁶ The latter were generally dictatorships which did not aim to control every aspect of life, and which included ‘tyrants’ like Idi Amin and tinpot dictators who did “not disturb the traditional way of life”, and were content merely to “collect the fruits of monopolizing political power”.²⁷ How did these gain power, and did the seizure follow the same pattern as the one we saw in Eastern Europe at the same time, the demise of democracy in the 20s and 30s, or was there a completely different pattern entirely? It should be said at the outset, that almost all of the countries that were democracies in the West remained so during the Cold War. Apart from some dithering in France during the end of the 4th Republic (see below), democracies like Can-

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ada, Denmark, Britain, and the Netherlands, to name but four, were never ever close to succumbing to dictatorship after the defeat of Hitler.

The West According to Samuel Huntington there were only eleven democracies in 1944. (The countries were Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United States, Chile).²⁸ Of these only Chile succumbed to dictatorship in the following thirty years. In a way, it could, therefore, be argued that the period after the Second World War was a success as many more countries – especially in the West – became democratic. By 1960 the number had grown to 36, twenty years later the count stood at 40, and by 1990 the figure stood at 57, and with an upward trend.²⁹ According to Huntington, democracies were rather narrowly defined (places where the governing party had lost the election and returned to power after a spell in opposition). But using the more statistical definition used by Polity IV we get a different picture. Polity IV measures of the levels of democratization ranging from −10 to +10. Measure by this yardstick, there were more countries that were, if not perfect, then at least imperfect, democracies. A total of 33 countries had positive scores on the Polity IV Index, and 31 were at zero or below on the Index at the end of the Second World War Which were these democratic countries and which of them succumbed to dictatorships? And, when they did, what were the causes, and even the common denominators? Some other countries were in transition and became democracies, for example Japan, West Germany, and Italy. Other made the transition and then later succumbed to becoming autocracies. Table 1: Polity IV Scores for Democracies and Non-Democracies after the Second World War Country

Year

Polity IV Score

Argentina Haiti Hungary Italy Poland Romania Yemen North Germany East Germany West Japan

1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946

−88 −88 −88 −88 −88 −88 −88 −66 −66 −66

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Table 1: Polity IV Scores for Democracies and Non-Democracies after the Second World War (Continued) Country

Year

Polity IV Score

Afghanistan Bhutan Jordan Saudi Arabia Albania Dominican Republic Ethiopia Mongolia Paraguay Portugal USSR Nicaragua El Salvador Spain Yugoslavia Bulgaria Liberia Mexico Oman Bolivia China Iraq Honduras Nepal Panama Thailand Venezuela Ecuador Iran Uruguay Egypt Chile Indonesia Lebanon Peru Philippines Cuba South Africa Colombia Guatemala Syria Brazil

1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946

−10 −10 −10 −10 −9 −9 −9 −9 −9 −9 −9 −8 −8 −7 −7 −6 −6 −6 −6 −5 −5 −4 −3 −3 −3 −3 −3 −1 −1 0 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 4 5 5 5 7

Failed Democracies

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Table 1: Polity IV Scores for Democracies and Non-Democracies after the Second World War (Continued) Country

Year

Polity IV Score

Turkey Greece Ireland Australia Austria Belgium Canada Costa Rica Czechoslovakia Denmark Finland France Luxembourg New Zealand Norway Netherlands Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States

1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946 1946

7 8 8 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10

Of the countries that were full dictatorships only two became democratic in the first twenty years after 1945. The two countries were Spain and Portugal in the 1970s, and both have (as we shall see) remained within the fold of polyarchies after the transition.

Failed Democracies As the list above shows, in 1946 there were 17 democracies that scored a perfect of 10. Of these, only Czechoslovakia succumbed to dictatorship. However, of the 15 ‘imperfect’ democracies all but one (Ireland) degenerated into dictatorship during the first twenty years after the Second World War.³⁰ South Africa, with its Apartheid can be left out, but are there common denominators that link the other countries? Two countries stand out, Lebanon and Chile. The latter country is often seen as almost paradigmatic for the period. The long-established pluralist system in the country (duopoly of the Partido Radical and the more conservative Partido Demócrata Cristiano) was cemented until the election of the Socialist Salvador Allende to

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the Presidency in 1970. Without gaining a majority, Allende with 36.2 per cent of the votes, only won 1.3 per cent more votes than his conservative rival Jorge Alessandri. Yet, the non-socialist parties had gained a majority in both the Senate and in the Chamber of Deputies in 1969, and in 1973, after yet another parliamentary defeat, Allende had been impeached – but did not leave office.³¹ At the very last, Allende was acting illegally. On the face of it this was a classic example of the dual legitimacy thesis, which Juan Linz has described as the main cause of democratic breakdown. Moreover, as this author has written, In presidential systems an executive with considerable constitutional powers – generally including full control of the composition of the cabinet and administration – is directly elected by the people for a fixed term and is independent of parliamentary votes of confidence. He is not only the holder of executive power but also the symbolic head of state and can be removed between elections only by the drastic step of impeachment. In practice, as the history of the United States shows, presidential systems may be more or less dependent on the cooperation of the legislature; the balance between executive and legislative power in such systems can thus vary considerably. Two things about presidential government stand out. The first is the president’s strong claim to democratic, even plebiscitarian, legitimacy; the second is his fixed term in office.³²

It was with this as a pretext that the army intervened. Allende himself was killed, though it is widely believed that he committed suicide and was not shot by the military.³³ While the coup was unconstitutional, it was hardly surprising that matters came to a head. Allende’s so-called Chilean Way to socialism (La vía chilena al socialismo) involved the nationalisation of US Copper mines with limited compensation.³⁴ This made it almost inevitable that the USA supported the coup instigated by General Pinochet. But is it the Chilean experience, with gun fights and the army shelling the presidential palace that is the archetypal example of a fall of a democracy? Not exactly, in many cases the façade of democracy was maintained. But in reality, countries like Mexico, South Korea, and the Philippines were ruled by autocrats. In most of these countries, the fall of democracy was a result of American support for a coup d’état and in very few of the cases, it was Thymos, let alone a narcissistic leader, though the latter is not true for all the countries. For example, though it might be difficult to understand today, a dictator like Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines was a charismatic leader, who was able to appeal to the Thymos of his people by promising to make the Philippines “great again”.³⁵ and then begin gradually to undermine democracy through a slow process. What is disturbing about the Philippines was that, at the time, “Democracy in the Philippines seemed far more complete and deeply rooted than in India, Malaysia, Colombia, and Venezuela. The press was freer than elsewhere. Two parties regularly alternated in office. There were no political prisoners or other human rights

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abuses”.³⁶ And yet, when faced with term-limits, Marcos gradually began to undermine democracy, in part by using nationalistic arguments rather than addressing the problems of slower economic growth. Giving a blow-by-blow account of the developments in each country would be as tedious as it would be pointless. Yet, political science is an empirical discipline, albeit one which contrasts facts with theories and models. To theorize about the fall of democracies, we need facts. Hence an overview of some of the countries provides us with data based on which we can test propositions.

Cry for Argentina Peronism has achieved an almost iconic status. Much of this is due to musicals such as Evita, which inevitably give a distorted image of the large Latin American country. Once again, a bit of background is useful. Argentina had been governed by conservatives until the second decade of the 20th century, when the Radical Civic Union (Unión Cívica Radical) a member of the Socialist International. The party was headed by a radical former local administrator with the impressive name of Juan Hipólito del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Yrigoyen. Juan Yrigoyen had taken part in the failed revolutions of, respectively, 1893 and 1905. After these had resulted in failure, he followed a peaceful path to power, which had become the norm for many revisionist social democrats in Europe at the time. The first step was to gradually convince the ruling elites of the necessity of political reform. The strategy was met with some hostility among radicals, but the gradual approach paid off. To placate the revolutionaries, the franchise was widened. The conservative president Roque Sáenz Peña, though he had himself been elected in a fraudulent contest in 1910, realised that the situation was untenable. He sponsored the so-called Law 8871 – later known as Ley Sáenz Peña – which extended the franchise to include women, and made the vote secret and compulsory for all males over the age of eighteen. The legislative change led to an overwhelming victory for Yrigoyen and the Radicals in the 1916 election, and the following fifteen years were dominated by overdue progressive social reforms, such as the right to strike and a minimum wage. The period is often described as La Etapa Radical. Yet, the period was anything but stable.³⁷ It was ended by a military coup organised by General José Félix Uriburu, which inaugurated the repression of the ‘infamous decade’ (Década Infame), which lasted until the democratic revolution of 1943. That Argentina was a democracy at the end of the Second World War was not a result of a long and sustained

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period of pluralist rule. Rather the fall of the military regime was due to another military coup organised by – among others – Juan Domingo Perón. Briefly moved aside by fellow army officers, Perón, like a modern-day Julius Caesar, appealed to the displaced. Not just through speeches and addresses on the radio but also through behind the scenes contacts. A shrewd operator and an opportunist he made contact with the left, especially with the trade union Confederación General del Trabajo de la República Argentina (CGT). Branding himself as a man of the people and appealing to the emotional pride of the workers who felt left behind, he easily won the 1946 presidential election. His was the example of a man who was charismatic and could appeal to Thymos. Building a cult of personality with his glamorous younger wife, Evita (her of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina fame), Perón pursued centre-left policies, like introducing universal health care. Perón was an effective communicator. Together with Evita (they married in 1944) they presented the image of a socially progressive couple. Evita does not seem to have been interested in politics prior to her marriage to Juan. But she was dispatched to give speeches, one of which famously stated the clear message of social justice that, “It is not philanthropy, nor is it charity … It is not even social welfare; to me, it is strict justice … I do nothing but return to the poor what the rest of us owe them, because we had taken it away from them unjustly”.³⁸ Unlike other populists who mostly paid lip service to such ideals, the policies were put into practice in Argentina. It largely worked. The left behind were better off as real wages average increased by just over 30 per cent from 1945 to 1949 by about 35 per cent from 1945 to 1955.³⁹ There can be no denying that Perón was an exceptionally gifted politician, albeit not one who was particularly democratic His success as a social reformer came at a cost to civil liberties. Perón did not tolerate dissent. He was skilful in appealing to the anger and resentment of Los Descamisados (‘the shirtless ones’), but he did so at the expense of the liberal middle-classes. Many were jailed, and he oversaw the drafting of a new constitution that allowed him to stand again. Like authoritarian populists in the 21st century, Perón dismissed critics.⁴⁰ The election of 1951 was neither free nor fair, and subsequently Perón followed the script of further curtailing civil liberties and free speech. For example, the oppositional newspaper La Prensa was nationalised in 1951. However, Perón perhaps grew complacent. Social mores in Argentina were rather more conservative than he perceived. The Catholic Church did not take kindly to legalisation on divorce and prostitution. As the economy deteriorated, the military seized power and Perón went into exile. The coup was sanctioned by the Americans, or rather Washington did not come to his rescue. The military government did not solve the problems. Perón cultivated his image while in exile, and built a personality cult around his late wife (Evita had

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died in 1952). Yet, when he finally returned to power – after his second coming he was anything but a successful politician. Formally Perón was banned from the contest, but his stand-in, Héctor José Cámpora, won the election and paved the way for Perón’s formal return to the presidency in 1973. This was not a fortuitous time for a comeback. The quadrupling of oil prices following the Yom Kippur War, and the economic downturn thereafter made life difficult for a spendthrift populist. Further, Perón had lost his personal touch. He was increasingly under the influence of his personal advisor José López Rega, who – with the aging president’s blessing – formed an anti-communist death squad Alianza Anticomunista Argentina. Perón’s health was failing, and when he died in 1974, he was replaced by his third wife Isabel Perón. Thirty-five years his junior, the former dancer who had left school after grade five, became president – and was known as La Presidente. Her rule was characterised by a gradual erosion of civil liberties – and personal enrichment. Isabel was the first woman to be a president of a nation. But her legacy was, to say the least, controversial, “It is generally agreed that Isabel Perón’s performance as top executive was poor. When she was deposed [by the military in 1976] the country was on the brink of disaster”,⁴¹ though it should be said, the dictatorship that followed was equally inept economically, and had a comparatively poorer record on human rights.⁴²

Brazil: Not Order and Progress Brazil was a country that had a remarkable democratic history, something that is often overlooked. At the end of the Second World War Brazil was in many ways destined to remain democratic. At least superficially, the largest Latin American country was in a favourable position. A bit of background is useful. Under the reign of Emperor Pedro II, the constitutional monarchy had been established in 1822, Brazil had relatively democratic elections, which according to country experts were freer and fairer than those conducted in many European countries at the time.⁴³ However, after that things were not quite as rosy. The – on paper – republican system in 1889 was more authoritarian than any previous system of government in the country, and only got worse.⁴⁴ Having sided with the USA during the Second World War, Brazil became a democracy in 1946. The words Ordem e Progresso (‘Order and Progress’) adorn the Brazilian flag, and there was a semblance of this during the presidency of the Social Democrat Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira who was elected in 1956. A medical doctor by training, JK (as he was known), focused on expanding the health care system, and reforming the economy. While inequality grew, so too did the GDP. Things

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seemed stable. In 1960, for the first time in Brazilian history, a democratic president succeeded a freely elected head of state, when Jânio Quadros succeeded JK. But it was not to last. In some ways Quadros fitted the mould of the populist firebrand of earlier (and later) periods. An orator, he pledged to sweep away corruption and after years of increasing inequality, his rhetoric made him popular among the masses He appealed to popular frustration with the government by making his campaign symbol a broom, symbolic of his pledge to “sweep away corruption”. He was also a very charismatic leader who proved adept at gaining the trust of the public. In some ways, his elevation to office fits the classic theories of a people that felt let down and forgotten – as in Plato’s theory of Thymos, combined with a charismatic leader (though, admittedly, not one who was pathologically narcissistic). Having campaigned as a radical, Quadros initially governed as one. He dismissed 20,000 federal employees, ordered all government workers to put in a full seven-hour day and cut government spending by 30 per cent in his first two months in office. But such policies did not endear him to Congress. And, Quadros was not one for seeking compromises. He tendered his resignation in 1961, expecting the request to be denied. But it was not, and Quadros’ Vice President, the leftist João Goulart, expected to assume full powers. However, Congress had other plans and a tussle ensued, which resulted in a compromise, and the establishment of a semi-presidential system, with both a president and a prime minister. When this failed to win approval in a referendum in 1963, Goulart assumed full presidential powers, and immediately used them to enact land reform, expand social rights and a raft of other measures – some of which provoked the USA. The coup on 31 March–1 April 1964 was a classic Golpe de estado, with the military forcing out a constitutionally legitimate politician elected under a fully democratic system. He was – with the American government’s blessing – replaced by Castelo Branco, a Field Marshal. The Brazilian coup conformed to the norm after the Second World War in countries in the US sphere of influence⁴⁵

Interlude: Promises of Democracy not Fulfilled Not all coups were instigated by the USA, of course, and the CIA did not have a finger in every conspiratorial pie at the time. Countries that were officially nonaligned also experienced coups that led to the demise of democracy. One such example was Egypt. The 1923 Constitution inaugurated a period of relative democratic governance. There were ten parliamentary elections between the year of the establishment of

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the constitutional monarchy and the coup in 1952. While in no way ideal, the system was based on a system that had the appearance of the rule of law and with relatively free and fair elections.⁴⁶ The so-called Egyptian revolution of 1952, was in reality a military coup, instigated by soldiers that (rather like Franco and his colleagues in Spain in the 1930s) felt humiliated and betrayed by politicians in a military defeat, in casu, the 1948 War against Israel. Other non-aligned countries followed the same pattern. Indonesia is a case in point, the fall of the so-called ‘Guided Democracy’ in the country took place when General Suharto replaced President Sukarno. Notwithstanding Indonesia’s formal status as a member of the non-aligned movement, the coup in 1967 was coordinated with the CIA, though at this stage the pluralist system was de facto long gone. The parliamentary democracy established in 1950 had been gradually eliminated.⁴⁷ Failure to reach a consensus over the role of Islam, and an economy in free fall, prompted Sukarno to issue a decree that reinstated the provisional 1945 Constitution. In reality the period between 1955 and Suharto’s assumption of power was a period of autocracy.⁴⁸

Excursus: France “Le coup d’Etat Permanent”, was how François Mitterrand described the seizure of power by General de Gaulle in 1958. The phrase might seem exaggerated; sour grapes from a man who was inferior to the great war leader, and who lost to him in democratic elections.⁴⁹ That is not how it was seen at the time. The Great American political sociologist Seymour M. Lipset published his seminal Political Man the year after de Gaulle had come to power. The American scholar did not mince his words. He wrote, “The return of de Gaulle to Power in France following a military coup d’état was accompanied by dire predictions of the rival of fascism as a major ideological movement and raised anew the issue of the character of different kinds of extremist movements”.⁵⁰ That was how it was seen at the time from far-away California. Maybe Lipset was unduly alarmist. Surely, we would say today, President de Gaulle was a democrat, and a man who saved France from the chaos of an unworkable multi-party system. Perhaps, the former General provided stability. But many at the time were willing to – at least in part – side with Mitterrand. Friedrich and Brzezinski, for example, compared de Gaulle to Franco, and wrote that both “Spain and France represented the reassertion of a strong state with an autocrat at the head”. While they admitted that “the Gaullist republic is still a constitutional order”, they qualified this by saying “of sorts”, and went on to say that “the General himself has taken it upon himself to set the constitution aside … thereby demonstrating the trend towards autocracy”.⁵¹

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France was not a model democracy during the 1960s. Polity IV gave France a score of 4 during the 1960s.⁵² This was well short of the top marks given to Adenauer in Germany and Macmillan and Wilson in Britain in the same decade. Yet, comparing the early 5th Republic with Francoist Spain was way off the mark. Spain, at the same time scored −7 and was a dictatorship whereas France was an imperfect democracy.⁵³ What had happened in France? In the 1950s, several coalition governments in France came and went. There were 21 different Prime Ministers between 1947 and 1958. These – mostly centrist politicians – were challenged from the Left by the Communist Party (which at the time was closely aligned with the Soviet Union and from the Right by Pierre Poujade, a demagogue claiming to represent the overlooked. The owner of a stationery store, Poujade, the self-anointed spokesman of the ignored and unpossessed, established his Union de défense des commerçants et artisans (Union for the Defence of Tradesmen and Artisans) in 1953, on a programme for lower taxes and respect for the Nation. The party won 12 per cent of the votes in 1956 by appealing to the indignation of the petit bourgeois. La République Française in the late 1950s, was ripe for a breakdown of democracy. Poujade was a politician who was able to appeal to Thymos. De Gaulle’s take-over, which Lipset described as a coup d’état could have ended democracy but did not. Largely, perhaps, because de Gaulle was not a populist but a politician who was willing to make unpopular decisions that disappointed his core supporters, such as his decision (ratified by referendum) to withdraw from Algeria. There are other reasons why de Gaulle – despite his autocratic tendencies was not a demagogue, let alone a proto-tyrant. In June 1969, his Union pour la défense de la République had won an overwhelming majority in the elections to Assemblée nationale by an electorate that seemed tired of the revolutionary fervour of the student protests of May 1968. President de Gaulle felt confident that he could push through a reform of the Senate and a restructuring of local government. He called a referendum. Only 42 per cent supported the proposal. Without further ado de Gaulle resigned and accepted defeat.⁵⁴ Maybe it is for this reason that he is remembered as a great man by many people in France and beyond?

Relapsed Democracies South Korea was a country in the firing line. Literally. After the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945, the non-communist part of the Korean peninsula lived a precarious existence, with constant threats from Kim Il-Sung’s regime in the north. It all came to a head when the latter’s soldiers crossed the 38th Parallel in June 1950.

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This is not the place for a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the Korean War, which ended in a draw three years later. Nor is it the place for an account of the hermit hereditary communist regime in Pyongyang, rather we shall look at the country in the south. Suffice it to say, that Kim Il-Sung followed the script of Walter Ulbricht and eliminated any semblance of democratic governance by first merging all parties – and then by assuming total control. While South Korea was nominally part of the ‘free world’ after 1945, there was, for most of the period, very little freedom in the country. Having been occupied by Imperial Japan, and before that a de facto Chinese vassal state. The newly minted Republic of Korea did not have any experience of democracy before 1945. This initially changed. There were elections to 1948 South Korean Constitutional Assembly, and subsequent to these, Syngman Rhee – a Korean with a PhD in international relations from Stanford University – won the presidency in a (largely) fair election. But Rhee’s American education did not mean that he pursued a path of pluralism, let alone subscribe to the principles of the ‘consent of the governed’. And, given the threat from North Korea, nor was he under any compulsion from Washington to do so. He ruled by decree and soon assumed dictatorial powers. While South Korea cannot in any way be compared to her neighbour in the north as far as repression is concerned, it is important to note that there were both political prisoners and re-education camps in Rhee’s Korea. This repression continued throughout the 1950s. Yet, at the same time there was a modicum of pluralism and universities were allowed to teach students, in a way that allowed for independent thought. The country, in some ways, was an exemplar of Kirkpatrick’s authoritarian state, one where there was not total control, as in Totalitarian states, but, nevertheless, a place with no real political competition. Syngman Rhee was ‘elected’ three times, but the fourth attempt failed. Sometimes innocuous events spiral out of control and take on a life of their own. When Chough Pyung-ok, the opposition candidate died a month before the presidential election in 1960, protests broke out. These had, initially, little success, but Rhee pushed on regardless. The incumbent vice president Chang Myon, who had been elected in 1956, proved less willing to do Rhee’s bidding, and the old man wanted him out. The president – now in his early 80s – favoured Lee Kipoong of the paradoxically named ‘Liberal Party’ as his favoured vice president. The problem was that the public favoured the more liberal Myon, who was elected. Rhee was not one for following procedure, still less concerned about democratic fairness. All previous electoral contests had been rigged, and there was no reason this would not work again. But the context was different. When Lee Ki Poong won with a margin of almost 80 per cent, it was clear that, “the election results

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were completely fabricated by police headquarters and the ministry of internal affairs”.⁵⁵ Rhee was sanguine about this. He should have been more careful. Protests broke out again, and gathered pace. When hundreds of thousands marched on the Blue House (the president’s official residence), the police opened fire, and killed nearly 200 protesters. Rhee expected that the security services would support him. They did not. When he declared martial law, the police refused to obey orders. Facing an endgame, he resigned, and Lee Ki Poong was instated.⁵⁶ His reign was short. Just one day after assuming power, he was killed by his own son in a murder-suicide. Korea was suddenly a democracy. A new democratic constitution based on parliamentarism was established with Chang Myon elected as prime minister. The Catholic former mayor of Seoul had his proverbial work cut out for him, and knew it. The Second Republic was characterised by a whirlwind of overdue activities. However, the economic reforms did not pay off. The value of the won halved against the dollar.⁵⁷ There was a genuine liberalisation. Many hundreds of thousands joined trade unions. The government was concerned about the neglect of the economy under Rhee. The average income was as low as that of Haiti, and there was an urgent need to feed the people. But there were also old scores to be settled, and pressure – especially from the left – to hold the previous regime to account. This led to many demonstrations, especially by students, a demographic that had been instrumental in bringing down Rhee’s corrupt First Republic. Under pressure high-ranking military and police officers who had aided and abetted the previous regime and a total of up to 40,000 bureaucrats were placed under investigation.⁵⁸ This policy angered the military. And things turned sour for the recently minted democracy. James Madison, as we noted in the Introduction, believed that democracies were destined to be short-lived. This was tragically accurate for the fleeting Second Republic. It lasted a mere eight months. In early May 1961, Park Chung-hee, a military officer overthrew the democratic government. The youngest son of a poor family, Park had idolised Napoleon as a boy, and was determined to follow in the footsteps of the Corsican soldier. He enrolled in the Changchun Military Academy, in present-day China, but then under Japanese occupation.⁵⁹ Despite serving in the Japanese Army, he was able to rise through the ranks of the Korean Army after the Second World War. Having become a general and commander of the Seoul area, Park learned that he too was going to be pensioned off, due to his loyalty to President Rhee. He acted swiftly and overthrew Myon. The Kennedy administration (that had taken office in Washington a few months before) was not impressed, but the citizens of South Korea – so it seemed – welcomed the new regime. And, when Yun Posun, the president of the republic

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(who served in a purely ceremonial role) persuaded the commander of the Eight’s Army to accept the coup, Kennedy’s initial scepticism turned into a shrug. The American president sent an official letter to Park, and the US ambassador to Seoul telling the new ruler not to carry out human rights abuses. And, thus, the coup was a fait accompli. ⁶⁰ Yet, Park’s system was not all dictatorial. At least not to begin with. In the 2000s political scientists coined a phrase Semi-Authoritarian Regimes. A prominent American think tank wrote The post-cold war world has seen the rise of an increasing number of regimes that cannot be easily classified as either authoritarian or democratic, but display some characteristics of each – in short, they are semi-authoritarian regimes. These regimes have adopted some of the formal traits of democracy, such as constitutions providing for the separation of powers and contested presidential and parliamentary elections, and they allow some degree of political freedom to their citizens; nevertheless, they are able to protect themselves from open competition that might threaten the tenure of the incumbents.⁶¹

Coining a new term, and claiming that something is novel, makes for exciting reading, and the researchers at the American think tank were not the first ones to have ‘discovered’ a new type of government. Others have talked about ‘competitive authoritarianism’, as a purportedly new system, under which “formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but … incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents”.⁶² Certainly, such systems exist. And there are many of them at the time of writing, in the early 2020s. (see Chapter 5). It is just that this type of government is anything but novel. Indeed, the regime established by Park following the coup, was in many ways a perfect, nearly ideal typical example of a competitive authoritarian regime. The system was, if anything, the model of what dictatorships have always been from Emperor Augustus through the elective monarchies in the Middle Ages and on to the dictatorships in this and the previous century. That countries have institutions that look democratic but are anything but is not uncommon in a dictatorship. The Nobel Prize winning Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, in 1990 remarked that, “México es la dictadura perfecta”. He had (very unsuccessfully) contested the presidential elections in his native country (see Chapter 5). And now he was on a visit to said country. The long governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was not enamoured by the writer’s description of it being a “perfect dictatorship”. He did not mend his words, as reported in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Vargas Llosa went on to say

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The perfect dictatorship is not communism. It is not the USSR. It is not Fidel Castro. The perfect dictatorship is Mexico. Mexico … it is the masked dictatorship … It has the characteristics of the dictatorship: the permanence, not of a man, but of a party. And of a party that is invariable.⁶³

In Mexico, there were elections, other political parties, a federal structure, just not a fair system. The same was true in South Korea. The so-called Supreme Council for National Reconstruction took power on an interim basis, and redrafted the constitution, and roughly a year later, Park Chunghee narrowly won the first presidential election of the Third Republic when he defeated the incumbent Park Chung-hee in what was billed a democratic poll.⁶⁴ Unlike in North Korea, this was not a case of winning 99.99 percent on an equally astronomical turnout. Park only won just over 46 per cent, against his opponents 45. Likewise, General Park’s newly minted Democratic Republican Party (DRP) only won 35 per cent of the votes in the parliamentary election. South Korea scored a respectable 2 on the Polity IV index during the 1960s, but it was not a regime that met the test that you can unseat the government without violence. Park won reelection in 1967, again with a respectable 51 per cent, but gradually he began to tighten his grip. Shortly after the election he abolished term-limits, and a crack-down against opponents began. Not in a way that was strictly speaking against the letter of the law. Formally opponents were charged under the existing penal code. But Park increasingly used emergency powers – still formally within the Constitution – to jail and in some cases torture opponents. The courts were largely pliant, and they did not rock the proverbial boat. Often, as we shall see later in the book, the courts play an undignified role in the demise of democracies.⁶⁵ All this was justified with reference to the – admittedly real – Communist threat from the North. And many were relaxed about it. After all Park, for all his increasingly authoritarian tendencies, had succeeded in creating a booming economy, a kind of Korean Wirdschaftswunder, and earned the previously dirtpoor country the sobriquet The Tiger Economy. By the time of the 1971 presidential election, Park was in all but total control. It is reported that he spent a staggering 10 per cent of the national budget on a propaganda campaign before the election. The exact figure is impossible to determine.⁶⁶ Suffice it to say that the election was anything but fair. Despite this, Park only got 53 per cent of the vote against his rival Kim Dae-jung’s 46 per cent. This was the last straw. Park instigated a self-coup, which was ratified in a plebiscite the following year, in which Park secured 92 per cent of the votes.⁶⁷ Now reigning as an ‘imperial president’, there were no longer formal limits on his power. His opponent Kim Dae-jung, was kidnapped, and later sentenced to

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death (though the sentence was not commuted).⁶⁸ Kim was to make a return, but we will get to that. The regime was harsh. Torture and kidnappings by the KCIA (the powerful intelligence agency) were rife.⁶⁹ Partly for that reason the growing prosperity could not pacify the students in the larger cities. In 1979, protests again broke out, and President Park responded with the heavy-handed tactics he had previously employed. But the iron-fisted response did not pay off. The president, mindful of his unpopularity, barricaded himself in the presidential palace. He had reasons to be fearful. Indeed, his wife Yuk Young-soo had been assassinated in 1974, but on that occasion Park had escaped unharmed, though he had been the target of the attack. The president now faced a dilemma that tyrants have always encountered: ‘who can you trust’? In a famous essay, the ancient Greek writer Xenophon (431 – 354 BC) offered a rare insight into the paranoid mind of the tyrant, “Indeed, even the plots against despots as often as not are the works of those who profess the deepest affections for him”.⁷⁰ Kim Jae-kyu, the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, was someone personally chosen by Park. But the dictator no longer trusted his security chief. He had – albeit behind the scenes – tried to dismiss him. However, the KCIA was a powerful force, and not one that could be easily controlled by the president In the evening of 26 October 1979, Security Chief Kim Jae-kyu, President Park, and a couple of other officials were having dinner. The situation was grave. The massive demonstrations in the city of Busan were a great concern. Park was angry. He wanted to crush the uprising. Kim, by contrast, argued for a moderate measure. The situation was heated. Another one present, Chief Secretary Kim Gye-won sought to calm things down. Kim Jae-kyu reportedly got up, and left the room, and calm descended. In the adjoining room he met his subordinates, and said, “Today is the day”. He re-entered the room with a semi-automatic Walther PP, a small handgun often used by the police. But the otherwise reliable firearm jammed. Without a moment’s hesitation, Kim pulled Smith & Wesson Model 36 from his other pocket and killed the president.⁷¹ But the assassination was not planned. Kim tried to cover his tracks. He called an ambulance and tried to spin the story. He could have gone back to KCIA HQ where he would have had the support of his staff. But he was not thinking straight. Instead he informed the head of the army, Jeong Seung-hwa. But the top soldier smelled a proverbial rat and did not back Kim. The improvised coup fizzled out. Assassins never do well. Brutus committed suicide when he was defeated in real life. And in Shakespeare’s account he dies with an eloquent line that expresses grief and yet acknowledges that his actions were just, “Farewell, good Strato. Caesar, now be still. I killed not thee with half so good a will”.⁷²

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In Korea, Kim Jae-kyu was lured into the army headquarters, he was arrested, tortured, and unceremoniously executed. We do not know his last words. The murder of Park, like that of Julius Caesar, did not end the dictatorship. After some internal struggles, Park was replaced by another general, Chun Doohwan, who emerged initially as an eminence grise. Power was formally vested in a junta (named Special Committee for National Security Measures). The military regime declared martial law. Parliament, which at this stage was but a rubber stamp, was dissolved, and all political parties were banned. All this was said to be temporary. To prove its democratic credentials, a new constitution was submitted to a plebiscite, where it was approved by a manufactured majority. But, again echoing ancient Rome, the assassination led to violent clashes. One of them was Gwangju Uprising in May 1980, where 126 people died. This was, of course, far fewer than the estimated 10,000 who were killed in China in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989⁷³ – but with the caveat that the world outside Korea barely registered the atrocity. Being in the Western camp helped. Jimmy Carter, who famously championed an ethical foreign policy, was directly supportive of the massacre.⁷⁴ However, the heavy-handed crushing was not easily forgotten. The President Choi Kyu-hah, was forced to resign, and the presidency transferred to Prime Minister Park Chung-hoon on an interim basis, until Chun Doo-hwan could be formally ‘elected’, in a contest that was neither, free, fair, nor legitimate. All this would seem to indicate that the regime had won and that there was no prospect of introducing even a modicum of democracy. Yet, man who had hitherto wielded power from behind the scenes, now emerged as a reluctant reformer. A bit like Yuri Andropov, a former KGB-boss in the Soviet Union roughly at the same time, Chun Doo-hwan realised that dictatorship was no longer tenable, and began a process of liberalisation. He gradually distanced himself from Park and the regime. In January 1985, two leading politicians, Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung established the New Korea Democratic Party (NKDP). The latter had been exiled in the USA after an intervention by Pope John Paul II. Although he was arrested upon his return, his life was no longer in danger. NKDP won more seats than expected in the parliamentary elections of February 1985. After another crisis and student protests in 1987, the military caved in. And the Sixth Republic was established. Kim Dae-jung – sometimes described as the Nelson Mandela of Asia – later was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1998 he was elected to the Presidency. At this time South Korea had become a stable and established democracy.⁷⁵

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Towards a New World … By 1975 there were 21 democracies that scored a perfect 10 on the Polity IV Scale. Not a massive increase in the number of cases – but nor a set-back. There was a tendency towards a thaw towards more pluralistic governments. This was especially the case in Southern Europe where Greece, Spain, and Portugal all joined the ranks of democracies. And in the following decade several other countries followed in the wake of the autocratic regimes in southern Europe. The political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote about the ‘Third Wave of Democratisation’.⁷⁶ He contrasted the situation at the end of the 1980s with that of the First Wave of democratisation (which began in 1820 and which resulted in the enfranchisement of women before it ended in the late 1920s), and the Second Wave immediately after the Second World War (described earlier in this chapter). He noted that “between 1974 and 1990, at least 30 countries made transitions to democracy, just about doubling the number of democratic governments in the world”. It prompted him to ask the question Were these democratizations part of a continuing and ever-expanding ‘global democratic revolution’ that will reach virtually every country in the world? Or did they represent a limited expansion of democracy, involving for the most part its reintroduction into countries that had experienced it in the past?⁷⁷

At the beginning of the 1990s, the former seemed the more plausible outcome, certainly the one favoured by educated opinion. Thirty years on the answer is less certain, and may even veer towards the latter, as we shall see in the next chapter.

Chapter 5: Dictatorships and Demagogues after the Fall of the Berlin Wall Checks and balances are a U.S. invention that, for some reason of intellectual mediocrity, Europe decided to adopt and use in European politics Viktor Orbán¹

“So, you went to Oxford, huh?”, my friend Van’ea, did not seem that impressed. “And what did you learn there?” I paused, and mumbled that “I learned that democracies break down when there are clashes between directly elected presidents and legislatures”. It was the late Alfred Stephan, then Gladstone Professor at All Souls College, who imparted this knowledge to me in one of his seminars. “But,” as the venerable and erudite man went on, “this hardly concerns us now. The story from now on, is a different one.” Here he paused for effect, lit a cigar (“they were given to me personally by Fidel Castro”, he would tell us!), and then he would continue “The issue now is not how democracies die, but how dictatorships give way to government by the people.” The 1990s, when I was a graduate student, were halcyon days for those who believed in and championed democracy. Francis Fukuyama’s much ridiculed – and generally misunderstood – article ‘The End of History’ – inspired by G.W.F. Hegel and the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève – had proposed that What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.²

To be sure, the wars in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, showed that history had not quite ended, though Fukuyama had, in fairness, acknowledged this. But the consensus was still that liberal democracy and some form of capitalism was the only show in town. Everybody from Vladivostok through Vienna to Vancouver agreed that free and competitive elections was the only show in town. Even the warring factions in the former Yugoslavia appealed to the will of the people in that ‘anarhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783111327839-009

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chy of referendums’ that led to the demise of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.³ History does not know of precise and definite beginnings. Yes, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was the outward expression of the fall of Soviet Communism. Yet, the democratisation that was called “the third wave of democratisation” by Samuel Huntington (see Chapter 4) was not just about the end of various forms of communism. It also signalled the end of dictatorships in countries that were in the sphere of influence dominated by the United States of America, countries like South Korea, Spain, and Brazil. Of course, it was not all one-way traffic. China – which had seemed to liberalise since the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping had succeeded Mao Zedong, after the latter’s death in 1976 – had crushed a peaceful democracy movement in 1989, but apart from this and outposts like Cuba in the Caribbean and North Korea in Asia, the direction was towards more democracy. The process was driven by many factors. In Europe, the aging death of the two dictators Francisco Franco in Spain and António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal led to democratic reforms in the 1970s. In the case of the latter, there the Estado Novo system continued for four years after the death of the dictator, and was only overthrown when low ranking officers overthrew the dictatorship in a coup d’état in April 1974, which was later given the poetic epithet the Carnation Revolution (in Portuguese Revolução dos Cravos). In Spain, the process was swifter. The death of Franco prompted his trusted advisor Adolfo Suárez to instigate democratic reforms. It is easy to see the architect of the democratic Spain as a turncoat. And, certainly, he had served the authoritarian regime for all his life. But he was nevertheless a man who had the rare courage to speak truth to power. When the aging Caudillo had asked him about the future of the authoritarian regime – by supporters named el Movimento – Suárez bluntly told him that democratic reforms would be necessary.⁴ Franco’s handpicked successor King Juan Carlos concurred, and through a gradual process, Spain too began its transformation to democracia. The process of democratisation in the Soviet Union its satellite states, was likewise prompted by individuals like Yuri Andropov and later Mikhail Gorbachev, who became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985. But this is not to say that the two Communist leaders were examples of ‘the-great-man-theoryof-history’ in practice. Whether the Soviet Union – and the other Communist countries – would have become democracies in the same way (or at all) without these two men, is impossible to answer. The Soviet Union had been remarkably successful economically until the 1970s. A study by the RAND Corporation acknowledged that, “since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union has transformed itself from an undeveloped economy

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into a modern industrial state with a GNP second only to that of the United States”.⁵ The paper went on The annual average growth rate of Soviet GNP since 1928 is 4.2 percent. This clearly qualifies as a sustained growth record. However, there has been a sharp decline over time. In recent decades Soviet GNP growth rates have declined more than half, from 5.7 in the 1950s to 2.0 percent in the early 1980s.⁶

In other words, the success – which in some ways can be compared to that of China since the 1980s – had not continued apace, Until the late 1950s, the main question among Western scholars was when would the Soviet Union catch up with the United States? Today, however, after more than two decades of declining Soviet growth rates, the question instead is whether the present system can support sustained economic growth in the future, or whether it is capable of changing radically enough to assure such growth.⁷

The conclusion reached by Andropov (Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party 1982 – 1984) and his protégé Mikhail Gorbachev, the answer was negative. Radical reforms needed to be implemented to reverse the trend. The Soviet leaders, especially Gorbachev, believed that the key to reform could be found in more openness – even a democratic thaw (Glasnost in Russian) and in economic reforms (Perestroika). But none of these were intended to challenge the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. Rather, in true Soviet style, the justification for the reforms were found in the holy scriptures of communist theology, in casu, in Vladimir Lenin’s New Economic Policies (NEP). Shortly before his death in 1924 Lenin, always a pragmatist – if a sinister and ruthless one at that – embraced market economics as a stopgap to rejuvenate the shattered economy. Gorbachev selectively borrowed from the icon. However, as a contemporary account said This is the Lenin that Gorbachev holds up as a model of the bold, relentlessly creative style that he considers crucial if the Soviet Union is to enter the 21st century with the rest of the modern world. The other is the kinder, gentler Lenin of the later years, the pragmatic Lenin who called for calm, rational problem-solving rather than heady sloganeering, the Lenin who favored the politics of inclusion rather than vitriolic assaults on unseen class enemies.⁸

That Gorbachev wanted to use this – historically inaccurate – image of the tyrant was politically necessary. He was not in a position to inaugurate a full-scale assault on the myth. Not, it seems did he wanted to. Left-wing intellectuals in the West, who were bowled over by the Soviet leader’s indisputable charm, eulogised Gorbachev. The German novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger described the Soviet leader

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as one of “die Helden des Rückzugs” – one of the heroes of the retreat – and cited Carl Von Clausewitz (1780 – 1831) – the great Prussian military theoretician – for having “shown that the retreat is the most difficult of all [military operations]”.⁹ But like military leaders, Gorbachev did not intend to lose the war. His was only a strategic consideration; a retreat in order to gain strength and come back with renewed force and vigour. It failed. The opening towards more democracy was not controllable. And, it turned out, the Communist parties were more unpopular than any of the Soviet leaders (and their allies) had feared. They – like so many autocrats – were fed a steady stream of rosy assessments by advisors who rarely dared telling them the truth. One by one, like a series of proverbial dominoes, the Soviet empire collapsed. The diminished threat from the common communist enemy had implications for regimes in Latin America and to a lesser degree Africa and Asia. Dictatorships in Brazil, Paraguay, and Chile gave way to democracies. Much as the external factors were important, political scientists generally sought explanations elsewhere. It was popular to suggest that countries became democratic because they were developed. This hypothesis has reared its head many times. It was alluded to in Karl Marx’ writings when he predicted that human flourishing and freedom (and hence democracy), only was possible once the material conditions were met. As he wrote in Das Kapital The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus, in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production … Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.¹⁰

The argument Marx wanted to advance was that basic human needs must be met before people are liberated to think about politics – and hence take meaningful part in popular government. The argument is well-known, and probably better known from the theories of the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who wrote a paper about what he called the hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s basic idea – like that of Karl Marx – was that you must satisfy your basics before you move on to consider the higher ones, If all the needs are unsatisfied, and the organism is then dominated by the physiological needs, all other needs may become simply non-existent or be pushed into the background. It is then fair to characterize the whole organism by saying simply that it is hungry, for consciousness is almost completely pre-empted by hunger. All capacities are put into the service

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of hunger-satisfaction, and the organization of these capacities is almost entirely determined by the one purpose of satisfying hunger.¹¹

For as Maslow also continued, “the urge to write poetry, the desire to acquire an automobile, the interest in American history, the desire for a new pair of shoes are, in the extreme case, forgotten or become of secondary importance. For the man who is extremely and dangerously hungry, no other interests exist but food”.¹² While the theory is well-known from different disciplines, it is, in its purest form, mainly associated with the American political sociologist Seymour M. Lipset, who summed up the proposition in the late 1950s Perhaps the most common generalization linking political systems to other aspects of society has been that democracy is related to the state of economic development. The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy … Only in a wealthy society in which relatively few citizens lived at the level of poverty could there be a situation in which the mass of the population could intelligently participate in politics and develop the self-restraint necessary to avoid succumbing to the appeal of irresponsible demagogues.¹³

In other words, once basic needs were met, people had the energy to devote themselves to politics, or so it was argued. In fact, the explanation proposed today is a good deal more sophisticated, and Lipset was no crude determinist, which the extract above also shows. Subsequent to his writings, political scientists Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi argued in the 1990s that while there is no direct relationship between levels of economic development and transitions to democracy “poor democracies sometimes collapse and return to dictatorship, [however] rich democracies never do”.¹⁴ At the time of writing such discussions were almost merely academic. Countries were moving in a democratic direction. In its annual report Freedom in the World 1998, Freedom House stated in the first sentence, “At the start of 1998, there were 81 Free countries in which basic civil liberties and political rights are respected, the largest number on record”.¹⁵ Going into more detail, the executive summary stated, Honduras and El Salvador were new entrants into the ranks of Free countries. Honduras registered significant progress in reforming and strengthening civilian control of the country’s security structures and by reducing the size and influence of the military in political life. El Salvador’s improved status was the result of openly contested, free and fair national legislative and municipal elections. Improvements, too, in rule of law and a better record in the punishment of officials involved in major human rights violations also contributed to Honduras’s improvement. Additionally, significant progress in Liberia and Azerbaijan resulted in both countries exiting from the ranks of the Not Free to the ranks of the Partly Free.¹⁶

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Figure 3. Freedom in the World’s Political Rights and Civil Liberties Ratings between 1972 and 2017 Source: Freedom House. The figure is based on the average ratings on the Democracy Index, which ranges from zero to 100, with the latter being the highest score for a democracy.

As the graph above shows, democracy was on the upturn in the period from 1976 to 2003. After that the tendency has been a bit more uneven, and after 2013 the trend has been downwards, albeit from a much higher level than in the early 1980s. Looking at the list of countries mentioned in the Freedom House report, namely Honduras, El Salvador, Liberia, and Azerbaijan, we find that all but one of these countries have suffered setbacks. We will look at each one in turn. In Honduras the Supreme Court voided the term-limits requirement in the Constitution (Art 239), which allowed President Juan Orlando Hernández to run again in 2017, and to win the election although the Organization of American States (OAS) election observers found that the election was “was characterized by irregularities and deficiencies, with very low technical quality and lacking integrity”.¹⁷

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In 1997, Honduras had scored a respectable 2 on the seven-point scale (the highest being 1). In 2020 the score was 4 – or ‘partly free’. In El Salvador the situation was not much different. The small Latin American country also scored 2 in 1997 but under the increasingly authoritarian reign of President Nayib Bukele, that country too dropped to ‘4’. And, in fact, this score seemed generous, as Bukele in 2020 ordered 1,400 soldiers to enter parliament and coerce the legislators to approve a loan from the United States. Azerbaijan had entered its first years of independence as a ‘Partly Free’ country. This was not to last. Twenty-two years on, all power was concentrated in the hands of Ilham Aliyev, the son of Heydar Aliyev, the country’s first president. Freedom House rated Azerbaijan ‘Seven’ on its index, the same as North Korea and Saudi Arabia. The situation in Liberia was somewhat better. The country had suffered a long civil war and continued its process of democratic consolidation under the presidency of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Indeed, 2017 even saw the first peaceful transfer of power between leaders since 1944 when the former footballer George Weah (he had a stellar career at A.C. Milan!) from the opposition party Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC) defeated the incumbent vice-president Joseph Boakai. These countries are, admittedly, chosen at almost random, and only because they were singled out in the 1997 report. Still, that three out of the four countries suffer setbacks, and in the case of Azerbaijan, even a catastrophic one at that, does not bode well for the progress of democracy. No wonder that the influential magazine Foreign Affairs in 2018 published a special issue with the gloomy question “Is Democracy Dying?”. Not to be left out, the British magazine The Economist followed suit in 2020, when it carried the headline, “How Resilient is Democracy?”. In its editorial the paper summed up the dire situation by stating, “The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the flourish and quality of liberal democracy, but the trend has now gone into reverse. Hungary and Poland are blocking the European Union budget because their governments refuse to bow to the rule of law” and the paper went on to blame the reversal of democracy on populist parties with an authoritarian bent.¹⁸ Is this hyped up? There was (and at the time of writing is) a trend in the direction of more autocratic rule. But could it be that we overstate the gloomy prospects? Some political scientists have called for a more measured response. Thus, Cas Mudde has argued that PRRPs [Right-wing populist parties] have never challenged the bare essence of their democratic systems, this cannot be said of the fundamentals of liberal democracy. The fact that no country was turned into an ‘illiberal democracy’ …, not even when PRRPs were in govern-

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ment, is to be credited to the resilience of coalition parties, civil society and the courts. It is here that European democracies of the late twentieth century differ most strongly from those of the early twentieth century¹⁹

Others have been equally upbeat, if not borderline complacent. Writing in Foreign Affairs a few months after the inauguration of Donald Trump, political scientists Robert Mickey, Steven Levitsky, and Lucan Way, initially sounded a similarly optimistic note Where democratic institutions and the rule of law are well entrenched and civil and opposition forces are robust, as in the United States, abuse is both more difficult to pull off and less consequential than it is in countries such as Russia, Turkey and Venezuela.²⁰

Could it be that some countries that were underdeveloped economically fell back into dictatorships, whereas the developed democracies remained pluralistic polyarchies? Based on Lipset and Przeworski’s theories, it could be that certain countries were not ready to become democracies and did not have the required level of prosperity which is needed to sustain this type of government? The classical counter argument to Lipset and Przeworski is India. This country, without being rich, has been a remarkably stable democracy.²¹ Apart from a brief period in the 1970s when then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi introduced martial law, the country has been governed democratically and has been spared the frequent military coups that have characterised Pakistan.²² And, of course, Indira Gandhi suffered the electoral consequences of her authoritarian interlude, in 1977 when, “In one stroke the Indian electorate brought to an end thirty years of Congress Party rule, eleven years of government under the Prime Ministership of Indira Gandhi, and twenty months of an emergency that had set India on a course of authoritarian government”.²³ The defeat for Gandhi – who later returned to power via the ballot box in January 1980 – proved that India was a country that lived up to Samuel Huntington’s “two turnover test” according to which a country is democratic if it has two consecutive turnovers of power.²⁴ But Indian democracy too has suffered setbacks. Since the election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which returned to government in 2014 The [Narendra] Modi government has indeed sought to undermine each of these three strands of executive accountability. Unlike the assault on democratic norms during India Gandhi’s Emergency in the 1970s, there is no evidence of a direct or full-frontal attack today. The BJP government’s mode of operation has been subtle and incremental, but systemic.²⁵

Perhaps, India is another example of death by a thousand cuts? The author of the paper was cautiously optimistic, “Unlike paradigmatic examples of the recent wave

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of democratic deconsolidation – Poland and Hungary – India’s relatively long experience with democracy has enabled robust, and often successful, opposition to many of these moves.” “And yet,” he went on “many democratic norms and mechanisms have been seriously undermined. The direction of travel is unmistakably towards a ‘guided’ or ‘managed’ democracy which will structurally ensure the political dominance of the ruling party.”²⁶ So, perhaps, is the economics thesis correct after all? It is always possible to find singular examples, but the question is if the thesis generally holds true. And this is no longer the case, certainly if we look at aggregate data. The two political scientists Carles Boix and Susan Stokes have reanalysed the data used by Przeworski and Limongi and found that when divided into different time periods, economic development was an extremely important factor of transition to democracy before 1950. However, this variable only has a small (though statistically significant) effect in the period after 1950.²⁷ But assuming that there is some truth in the theory, could it be that countries like Peru, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka, which have at different times dropped back on the global lists, might be explained by Przeworski and Limongi’s theory? It seems plausible that these countries backsliding to a degree had something to do with deteriorating prosperity and growing inequality.²⁸ But their explanation does not account for the developments in Poland, Hungary, and Turkey. While these countries are not as rich as Norway, Canada, or Japan, they are unmistakably developed. According to the theory, they should not have succumbed to the dark forces of authoritarianism. Moreover, Cas Mudde’s seemingly upbeat assessment was written before the coup in Turkey in 2016, and before the onslaught on democracy in the Philippines under President Duterte, to name but two. The case of Turkey is telling and is an illustrative example of how badly things can go wrong for a democracy. To cite a recent study In Turkey, after a botched coup attempt in July 2016, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan imposed emergency rule and arrested nearly 40,000 civilians, imprisoned hundreds of army officers, opposition party officials, journalists and academics, shuttered hundred of media outlets and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and fired more than a hundred thousand civil servants … A flawed constitutional referendum centralized the power of the presidency, allowed arbitrary prosecutions of human rights activists, and replaced elected mayors with government appointees. As a result, in 2018, Freedom House downgraded their rating of the country from Partly to Not Free.²⁹

Again, Turkey is not Denmark, New Zealand, or the Netherlands, but it is a relatively developed country. The development in the country might be a result of an element of path dependency, after all there were military coups in the country

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in 1960, 1971, and 1980. But this one came after a period when pluralism had become, ‘the only show in town’ to use a term coined by Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz.³⁰ The two political scientists opined in the 1996 that democracy is unlikely to relapse into autocracy when three conditions are met: “Culturally, the overwhelming majority believe that democracy is the best form of government, … Constitutionally, all major actors and organs of the state reflect democratic norms and practices, [and], Behaviourally, no significant groups seek to overthrow the regime of secede from the state”.³¹ Is democracy under threat measured by this yardstick? There are alarming signs that the answer might be affirmative. In the aftermath of the 2020 US Presidential election some of the ‘major actors and organs of the state’, namely the President himself and the leadership in the Senate sowed doubt about their commitment to ‘democratic norms and practices’ but claiming without any hint of evidence that the election was flawed, or even stolen. This was not a new departure for the 45th President of the United States. Indeed, Trump had on several earlier occasion sowed doubt about the electoral process. As reported in the anything by radical or liberal Forbes Magazine In 2016, despite defeating Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, Trump tweeted baseless allegation of ‘millions of FRAUD votes’ and claiming ‘Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.’ … [and in 2018] Trump took aim at Senate elections in Arizona and Florida and a gubernatorial race in Georgia the latter two of which Republicans won – falsely claiming Florida counties ‘miraculously started finding Democrat votes; and Proposing a new election in Arizona because of unexplained ‘electoral corruption.’³²

That these baseless claims were allowed to go unchallenged is a sign that some of the norms underpinning democracy are under threat. And it is no wonder that a poll reported that “Almost no Trump-voters consider Biden the legitimate 2020 election winner”. Only 3 per cent of those who voted for Trump believed the election was fair.³³ There might be few examples of countries that have ‘significant groups’ that actively seek to overthrow democratic rule. In that way, the crisis facing democracy is less acute than in, for example, Spain in the 1930 when the right-wing Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas actively campaigned for overthrowing democracy. But there are several examples of groups that seek to ‘secede from the state’, for example the Scottish National Party and the Junts per Catalunya in Catalonia. Though, it should be stated, neither of the latter two parties harbour ambitions to introduce one-party rule.

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Perhaps the most troubling factor, from the point of view of the survival of democracy, is that there are signs that many ordinary voters are losing faith in democracy. The World Value Surveys which have been carried out since the 1990s, have contained a question where people have to rank the following statement on a four-point scale, “Do you think it is very good, fairly good, fairly bad, or very bad [to have] a strong leader who doesn’t bother with elections?” In the United States, to take but one example, 22 per cent of the Republicans supported a strong man in 1995. In 2017 that figure had grown to 31 per cent.³⁴ In a similar vein, that there was growing dissatisfaction with the performance of democracy has been reported in intergenerational studies. In an article entitled “The Signs of Deconsolidation”, Foa and Mounk wrote, based on survey evidence, American citizens are not just dissatisfied with the performance of particular governments; they are increasingly critical of liberal democracy itself. Among young Americans polled in 2011, for example, a record high of 24 percent stated that democracy is a ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’ way of running the country—a sharp increase both from prior polls and compared to older respondents. Meanwhile, the proportion of Americans expressing approval for ‘army rule’ has risen from 1 in 16 in 1995 to 1 in 6 in the most recent survey.³⁵

This trend, the researchers reported, had continued, “in the United States, 46 percent of respondents in an October 2016 survey reported that they either ‘never had’ or had ‘lost’ faith in U.S. democracy”.³⁶ Some cynics will see this as evidence that America, perhaps as a result of Donald Trump, has grown further away from the ideal expressed by Seymour M. Lipset, that “the politics of democracy are … necessarily the politics of conformity”.³⁷ But there are worrying sign that America is not a sui generis case; that countries that have not succumbed to authoritarian populism also display tendencies towards authoritarianism among large segments of society. Germany under Angela Merkel and France under Emmanuel Macron have been seen as islands of stability in a world of upheaval. Perhaps so at the elite level, but the evidence from surveys suggests something else. In the words of Foa and Mounk In a German survey, [while] a large majority endorsed democracy ‘as an idea,’ … only about half approved of ‘democracy as it works in the Federal Republic of Germany today,’ and more than a fifth endorsed the view that ‘what Germany now needs is a single, strong party that represents the people’.³⁸

The same researchers found the same in France, where

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Two-fifths of respondents in a 2015 survey believed that the country should be put in the hands of ‘an authoritarian government’ free from democratic constraints, while fully twothirds were willing to delegate the task of enacting ‘unpopular but necessary reforms’ to ‘unelected experts.’³⁹

The researchers concluded, “There are strong indicators that the consequences of democratic deconsolidation may turn out to be just as serious in the heartland of liberal democracy as they have been in its periphery”.⁴⁰ These are not encouraging signs. The threat to democracy is not just limited to countries without civic traditions; to places where democracy only recently – incompletely – has taken root. Democracy is also under threat in established polyarchies. Populist parties might provide answers to legitimate concerns about overregulation, austerity politics, and even immigration, even if their espoused policies clash with those of liberals and the centre-left. Such disagreements are part and parcel of democracy, and there is nothing undemocratic about holding views that are Eurosceptic, anti-immigration, or anti-austerity. But what is of concern to democrats is that an increasing number of citizens have lost faith in democracy itself and hanker after an authoritarian leader. Is it unduly pessimistic to cite Max Weber’s famous lament about the future from Politics as Vocation? Was he right when he uttered these lines? “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now”.⁴¹ The answer is yet as yet unknown, but the signs are not encouraging …

Chapter 6: How Demagogues Get Elected – and Abuse Democracy I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and caginess, but those things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men ¹

“¿En qué momento se había jodido el Perú?” – “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?”, asked the protagonist in Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral, a novel about the gradual breakdown of democracy in the Latin American country.² The answer is never clear but after a few years the struggle is over, and the country is living under a dictatorship. In short, democracy suffers death by a thousand cuts not by a single killer blow. But before a ruler gets to that point, he (and it is usually a male!) has to gain power. In the previous chapters we have looked at a number of ways in which dictatorships were established or maintained. We have seen that in many cases, demagogues usurped power by appealing to people who felt downtrodden, ignored, or left behind. Whether this was a result of amour propre, as proposed by Rousseau, a result of the personality of the would-be tyrant, or a deadlock between the President and the Congress– or external forces, some malfunction in the brain, or, more likely, a combination of all these, is a matter we have already looked at. What we have not discussed, so far, in this essay, is the input-side of the equation, the sentiments that lead to the citizens suddenly getting behind the embryonic dictator. The trope of the tyrant is described countless times in literature, from Shakespeare’s plays in the 1500s to Robert Penn Warren’s All the Kings Men in the 20th century. The latter was a thinly disguised portrait of the American populist, the Louisiana Governor Huey Long. In the fictional account, William Stark builds his career on the bullying of other people, fanciful promises, and his extraordinary appeal to fanatical followers.³ What is it that characterises these men? And why do they have such an appeal to the common man? To answer the latter first, it is not incidental that we are using the gendered noun ‘man’. Indeed, public opinion research conclusively “demonstrated that compared to almost all other parties, populist radical right

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(PRR) parties draw more votes from men than from women”.⁴ The explanation is believed, to “be due, in part, to differences in socialisation”.⁵ Others have been less certain as to the causes. Other studies have shown that when looking at the micro level, “women generally do not differ from men in their level of nativism, authoritarianism or discontent with democracy”, though it seems, “that men consider the issues of the radical right to be more salient”.⁶ And, as we have seen in Chapter 2, there are indications that support for demagogues is caused by fear, which to use a neuroscientific explanation is associated with higher activity in the limbic system of the brain, especially in the amygdala. Much of this is associated with polarisation, which demagogues stir up to win votes. A study found that [Images of ] candidates from the opposite party … elicited stronger responses in the bilateral amygdala than candidates for whom participants chose not to vote. This was true regardless of either the participant’s culture or the target’s culture, suggesting that these voting decisions provoked the same neural response cross-culturally.⁷

But more than this. Demagogues also thrive on images of the other, and target minority groups. When exposed to this, fMRI scans found a similar activity in the amygdala, Thus “participants both showed a stronger response to cultural outgroup faces than they did to cultural ingroup faces”.⁸ These studies complement the long tradition of research in sociology and political science that reveals that some citizens sometimes, for social and psychological reasons, occasionally harbour intolerant feelings and prejudices, which make them prone to vote for demagogues with a simplified populist message. In the 1960s, sociologists from the so-called functionalist tradition, stressed that democracies only survive if there is a civic culture, that is if there is preference for, what the ancients called, a mixed constitution. Thus, in The Civic Culture,⁹ Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba distinguished between three types of political culture, ‘participant’, ‘parochial’, and ‘subject’. In the first the citizens would be constantly active, in the second they would be largely blasé about politics, and in the third they would accept the edicts of the central government. Thus, a balance of all three was essential in a democratic state. In the words of the authors, “a stable democracy was one in which, “the parochial and subject orientations modify the intensity of the individual’s political involvement and activity. Political activity is but one part of the citizen’s concerns, and usually not a very important part at that”.¹⁰ Hence, the citizen in the civic culture is “not the active citizen: he is the potentially active citizen”.¹¹ This enables elite decision-making and successful governance. However, elites must nonetheless be

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Kept in check. The citizen’s opposite role, as active and influential enforcer of the responsiveness of elites, is maintained by his strong commitment to the norm of active citizenship and his perception that he can be an influential citizen […] This may be in part myth […] yet the very fact that citizens hold to this myth […] creates a potentiality of citizen influence and activity.¹²

But sometimes people get carried away. They want to be active, they are upset, and yet, they are seduced into thinking that a rabble-rousing leader can speak effectively on their behalf. Hence, they transfer their trust onto this individual. There are studies in neuropolitics that support this. Marta Gozzi and colleagues found that “individuals interested in politics showed greater activation in the amygdala … relative to individuals not interested in politics”. That is, interest in ‘politics’ (as opposed to ‘policy’) tends to lead to extremism and polarisation.¹³ This is one of the (perhaps) rare examples of how sociology, neuroscience, and the arts come together and provide the same explanation – albeit from slightly different angles. This, there have been many examples of this throughout history, and it is a not uncommon theme in literature. Henry VI is not by any measure one of William Shakespeare’s most famous plays. Nor, perhaps, the best constructed. And yet, in it we find characters that would not be out of place in another century. Chronicling a time of upheaval, we find political rivals, in this case the Dukes of, respectively, York and Somerset, who were unwilling to compromise, and who with “belligerent certainty felt by each that his position, and his alone was the possible one”.¹⁴ England was not a democracy in the 15th century. But the kings needed to have support of the people, and the ambitious Duke of York knew this. To test the waters, and to gauge popular support he did two things, he created uncertainty – to wit I will stir up in England some black storm Shall blow ten thousand souls to heaven or hell; And this fell tempest shall not cease to rage Until the golden circuit on my head.¹⁵

The cunning Duke of York does not do the dirty work himself, but has “seduced a headstrong Kentishman/John Cade”.¹⁶ Based on a real person – who led a peasants revolt in the 1450s¹⁷ – the literary character is a populist, who appeals to the people by promising impossible prosperity, through a less than detailed utopian economic programme, in which “all realm shall be common, … [where] there shall be no money, [and] all shall eat and drink on my score”.¹⁸ Cade, is not a stranger to lying with impunity. In a speech, he claims his mother was a “Plantagenet”, a royal house which originated

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from the lands of Anjou in France, though a member of the audience mutters to himself, “I knew her well, she was a midwife”.¹⁹ But the really distinguishing thing about Cade is how he singles out the elite, those who are fortunate at the poor people’s expense. Travelling around and giving speeches to the destitute; those who are left behind, “to the “honest plain-dealing man”, as Shakespeare puts it,²⁰ those who have been betrayed by people by futile learning. As he addresses his opponent, Lord Saye, Cade takes a direct aim at the educated, Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and, contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.²¹

It is clearly a caricature, but it is a common one, and it is not a million miles away from Turkish President Erdoğan’s assault on the educated whom he called ‘terrorists’.²² Cade stirs up a frenzy. He promises, in effect to drain the swamp, and “sweep the court clean of such filth [established elite]”.²³ The crowd egged on by the demagogues tirades, shout “Let’s kill all the lawyers”.²⁴ What is the solution to all this? How can this radical programme be put into action? By government by the people? No, that is not necessary for Cade already has all the solutions. No, the only way to ‘save’ England to give absolute power to Cade. He says I have thought upon it, it shall be so. Away, burn all the records of the realm: My mouth shall be the parliament of England ²⁵

We shall get back to John Cade later, but for the time being, let’s travel five hundred years forward, to the country described by Shakespeare’s contemporary colleague Mario Vargas Lllosa, to Peru in Latin America.

The Breakdown of Democracy in Peru. The economy was in free fall with negative growth. To add to the woes, the terrorist organization Sendero Luminoso, had killed 31,331 people; a number that was still rising.²⁶ It was this misery Fujimori vowed to end. Few disagreed with his diagnosis, that the country was, as Fujimori claimed, “at its most profound crisis in

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its republican history”.²⁷ Yet, it was not entirely clear how the inexperienced novice – a man with a reputation for dubious property dealings – would turn the country around. But sometimes substance is less important than style. Many – especially working poor and Evangelical Christians – believed Fujimori’s own words that only he could “guide it [the country] to a better future”.²⁸ At his mass rallies (he was largely ignored by the established media), the crowds enthusiastically chanted “El Chino, El Chino”. In fact, as his name indicated, Alberto Fujimori was not a ‘Chinaman’; his father had immigrated from Japan. But his supporters were not that discriminating – let alone concerned with the anything as unimportant as the names of far-away Asian countries. He had never been elected to anything, and only ran for the presidency when none of the political parties would nominate him to run for the Senate. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. But these were not normal times. The centre-left Popular Revolutionary Alliance, which had governed for a decade, was a shadow of its former, confident, self. The attempts to nationalise industries had failed and the war against the rebels had been a disaster. Experts in the International Monetary Fund – and Pentagon – had demanded drastic measures. And for good reason, the national income had fallen by 20 per cent during the years of socialist rule and the national debt was at record levels.²⁹ This was not the time to experiment with an unknown outsider. Now common sense had to prevail. But the business community and the higher echelons of society – in a word ‘the elite’ – was optimistic. The left-wing candidate was likely to lose, and Frente Democrático, the Conservatives, were in a strong position. The party was committed to privatisations, tax cuts, and the neo-liberal recipes known as the ‘Washington Consensus’. Its candidate, Mario Vargas Llosa (yes, it is that same man whom we cited at the beginning of this chapter!), was an acclaimed academic and writer with a distinguished record as a public servant. He looked set to become Peru’s next president. Admittedly, things did not exactly go to plan. Vargas Llosa only narrowly won the first round of the presidential elections by 32 per cent in April 1990. Rather surprisingly, the Popular Revolutionary Alliance’s Luis Juan Alva Castro, was beaten into third place by Fujimori. Yet, there was no panic. The outsider with the Japanese name, could not conceivably win – especially as he was now facing a trial related to his property dealings. In short, the strong showing for El Chino, did not perturb the establishment. Fujimori was, at best, a naïve buffoon prone to outlandish proposals that economists saw as conclusive proof of economic illiteracy. How could anyone take him

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seriously when he espoused protectionism and urged people to eat llamas instead of beef?³⁰ The result in the first round was a rejection of the socialists not – so it was believed – an endorsement of El Chino. Vargas Llosa continued his campaign. and his endorsement of the neoliberalism of Washington. Fujimori continued to tour the poorer parts of the country with his simple message that he – and only he – could clean-up the capital and solve all the problems. Maybe it was complacency. Or maybe it was lack of due diligence. Elections are often lost when opponents are underestimated and when candidates fail to critically examine themselves. This proved fatal for Vargas Llosa. In the end, Alberto Fujimori won 62 per cent of the votes. It was not the first time an impossible outsider had pulled off the impossible. He had done so by appealing to the authoritarian personality. We shall return to what he did once he was elected. But that is for the next chapter. For now, we need to look at the factors – social and psychological – that motivate those who typically vote for candidates like him.

The Authoritarian Personality To understand the aetiology³¹ of dictatorship one needs to appreciate and analyse the ‘input-side’ of the problem. We have already touched upon Thymos– the indignation that Plato considered to be the ultimate cause of the breakdown of democracy. But we have not yet painted a portrait of the voter who willingly votes for a demagogue who may go on to dismantle democracy. It is often assumed – at least in the popular press and public discourse – that the ‘angry white man’, the right-wing populist who votes for the likes of Orbán or Trump – is a new phenomenon.³² But the idea that progressive leftist parties lost the support of working class voters is nothing new. In the late 1950s, Seymour M. Lipset wrote The gradual realisation that extremist and intolerant movements in modern society are more likely to be based on the lower classes than on the middle and upper has posed a tragic dilemma for those intellectuals of the democratic left who once believed the proletariat necessarily to be a force for liberality, racial equality, and social progress.³³

The same paradox still persists.³⁴ Sixty years later it is still the parties of the liberal left that champion tolerance and human rights, and they are – not surprisingly –

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being abandoned by many blue-collar workers who think political correctness has gone too far. Lipset, further wrote The workers judged by the policies of their parties were often the backbone of the fights for greater political democracy, religious freedom, minority rights, and international peace, while parties backed by the conservative and upper classes in much of Europe tended to favour more extremist political forms, to resist extension of suffrage, to back the established Church, and to support jingoistic foreign policies.³⁵

But, he went on, “Events since 1914 have gradually eroded these patterns. In some nations, working-class groups have proved to be the most nationalistic sector of the population”.³⁶ These working-class voters, rather than being ‘progressive’, have, “been in the forefront of the struggle against equal rights for minority groups, and have fought to limit immigration”.³⁷ This assessment is very close to what one can read in political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart’s Cultural Backlash, written 60 years later. They write that, ‘authoritarian populism’ is “endorsed most strongly by blue-collar workers who have lost manufacturing jobs, by those living in declining areas, and by households struggling to pay the bills”.³⁸ Thus, on the input side of politics it is a case of the more things change the more they stay the same. But why? What, at the microlevel, are the reasons for these attitudes? In part, it seems plausible, that Thymos played a part, though we do not have empirical evidence for this, only convincing arguments by Plato based on acute observation. Some sociologists who specialised in the ‘authoritarian personality’, however, have provided more evidence that Plato was right. The sociologist Theodor W. Adorno – of the famous Frankfurt School suggested as much in a posthumously published lecture. In Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus (‘Aspects of the New Right-wing Extremism’), he wrote that “even in times of full employment people [in certain trades] were feeling superfluous [überflussig]”.³⁹ Many of these people used to have a trade, and would identify as being part of the lower middle class. These people were proud not to be working class, and for this reason they were opposed to the Labour movement and the parties representing the working class, which explained why they had “such hatred for socialism, or what they believed to be socialism”.⁴⁰ For this reason, they would, for identity reasons, vote for parties that would bring back what Adorno called “some cliché version of the past”.⁴¹ Without much evidence, they would blame the left for the consequences brought about by the policies of the right. Adorno, who was writing about the revival of the far-right Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, observed they were voting for a party that promised “to make Germany great again” (‘Deutschland muß wieder obenauf kommen’).⁴²

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Adorno warned his audience against condescending dismissal of “the lunatic fringe, as they are called in America”, and observed that there were people who “harboured these views in all democracies”.⁴³ Indeed, that these views had universal currency was the main tenet of the book authored by Adorno and colleagues, namely The Authoritarian Personality. ⁴⁴ The study, in the words of Max Horkheimer’s preface, presented a portrait of a personality that was different from the traditional bigot, but rather an individual who united the characteristics “of a highly industrialised society with irrational or antirational beliefs”.⁴⁵ In some ways, this was not an entirely new endeavour. In the early 1930s, William Reich had published Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (‘The Mass Psychology of Fascism’), which in a popular form explained support for demagogues as a result of repressed sexuality along Freudian lines.⁴⁶ While the Frankfurt School incorporated elements of psychoanalysis into their research on authoritarian personalities, the focus was more on the sociological aspects, and the type of individual who potentially would be tempted to vote for demagogues. These individuals, an early study by Erich Fromm (another of the Frankfurt Scholars) had suggested, who saw the world as governed by irrational forces politically sought comfort from feelings of powerlessness by identifying with a powerful leader to whom they also submitted.⁴⁷ But in the earlier studies, these conclusions were merely based on sporadic observation and analyses of perceptions. In other words, the evidence was not that different from Plato’s. This changed when Adorno moved to America. Drawing on survey techniques and public opinion research, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality developed a questionnaire.⁴⁸ Based on this they were able to establish the so-called F-Scale, which measured the degree to which the respondents had the traits of ‘an authoritarian personality’, which included superstitious beliefs, submissiveness, destructiveness, and a penchant for identifying with strong personalities. But what was more interesting, especially from the perspective of the study of the breakdown of democracy, was that individuals with a high F-Score typically would be “easily offended by … unassimilated minority groups”.⁴⁹ The same individuals were often sceptical of science, and tended to agree with the statement, “what the country needs is fewer laws and agencies, and more courageous, tireless, and devoted leaders whom people can put their faith in”.⁵⁰ Such people, in an empirical echo of Plato’s Thymos – would also hold the view that “no insult to our honour should go unpunished”.⁵¹ Again, the neurobiological explanation complements the philosophical one. As a neuroscientist observed, “Despite their differences, pride, shame, and guilt all activate similar neural circuits, including … amyg-

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dala. Interestingly, pride is the most powerful of these emotions at triggering activity”.⁵² While Adorno et al. were inspired by psychoanalysis, they fundamentally held that social factors were the most important cause. In Horkheimer’s summary, Freudians like Wilhelm Reich, “placed undue stress on the personal and the psychological rather than on the social aspect of prejudice”, for “the cause of irrational hostility is in the last instance to be found in social frustration and injustice”.⁵³ Once again, the theories seem to be supported by findings from developed capitalist nations in Europe and North America in the 21st century. In the words of Norris and Inglehart, “the ‘Left-behinds in developed societies, suffering from sluggish job growth, stagnant wages, and deteriorating public services, seem most vulnerable to the call of authoritarian populism”.⁵⁴ But does this mean that the people living in these societies are likely to vote for leaders who actually bring about the break-down of democracy? Certainly, there are plenty of examples of voters in developed societies who hold views that are identical to those identified by Adorno and colleagues. For example, in Israel, many of those who vote for Benjamin Netanyahu – a politician who has displayed some of the demagogic traits that characterise despots – fit the bill.⁵⁵ Right-wing authoritarianism is rife among Likud voters, and even more so in parties to the right of this party. Israel is not yet a dictatorship despite its imperfect democratic system, which more or less systematically discriminate against the Palestinians in the occupied territories. But for how long? There is always a danger of going too far if we, to quote one sociologist’s colourful expression, that Adorno and his colleagues were, “subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy – by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum”.⁵⁶ We must always be careful not to cry wolf when we spot a less dangerous canine. That a minority hold these views is not proof that democracies will die. And, in fairness, Adorno, as we have seen, was aware of this. However, it is a cause for concern when a minority hold these views. Yet, in most Western democracies, the number of people who vote for, for example, Geert Wilder’s Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands, Perussuomalaiset in Finland, or Nye Borgerlige in Denmark is less than 20 per cent. The danger is only present when the percentage approximates a majority. Needless to say, no party will say that it aims to dismantle democracy, but once in power, such parties – so history has shown – often do. But can we compare the past with the present? Are there examples of parties that have campaigned as authoritarian populists and who have dismantled democracy once they have got into power? And, if so, by which means have they done so? Often they have used the courts. Israel is, once again, a good example. In the first edition of this book, I

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was confident that Israel was still a country governed by the rule of law. After Netanyahu returned to power in late 2022, he began an assault on Israel’s courts. As The Economist summed up the situation, “determined to curb the powers of the country’s robustly independent Supreme Court. The new minister wants to introduce an “override clause” which would allow a simple majority in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, to pass laws deemed unconstitutional by the court”.⁵⁷ It sounds very much like death by a thousand cuts. Is it? This is the question we will seek to answer in the next chapter.

Chapter Seven: The Courts, the Press, and the Dictators Power corrupts – and absolute power corrupts absolutely Lord Acton¹

There is no universal pattern, no universal master plan for dismantling a democracy but there are – as we have seen – many similarities. To get elected you need to appeal to the people’s sense of indignation, and it helps if they have the traits of the authoritarian personality, and if the would-be dictator is a malignant narcissist. But this is not enough. Typically, there is a trigger, something that prompts the demagogue to seize control, albeit through gradual steps. So what happens? It often begins with a conflict between the president and the congress. And in this, winning control over the media and the courts is essential. Few have done this better than Vladimiro Montesinos, the right-hand man of Peru’s Alberto Fujimoro. We have video evidence of the process as it actually happened. This is how democracy was disestablished in Peru. We are in the engine room of democracide deep in a building in Lima … – “And now comes the good stuff, one, two, three, four, five, six …”, Montesinos, a thick-set, forty-something, with a trademark comb-over of jet-black hair, smiled wryly, as he counted the bundles of dollar bills.² The other man was José Crousillat. The rather handsome television executive in his mid-thirties, looked uncomfortable, shifted in his seat, and tried to sound businesslike. But there was no hiding that he was nervous and out of his depth, – “Better this other bag, no?” he tried, pointing to his kitbag. – “Which one? No, no, this one is great because you can close it”, giggled Montesinos. – “You can keep it as a gift”, he chuckled, and continued counting, “… seven, eight, nine, ten, a million”.

In every walk of life, in every profession, there are naturals who perform their arts with the effortless ease of greatness. Vladimiro Lenin Illich Montesinos Torres (his parents named him after the founder of the Soviet Union) was a master at his devious craft. After the surprise election of the total outsider Alberto Fujimori (see Chapter 6), the new president was in no doubt who could help him. Montesinos was a natural choice as ‘security advisor’ for the new executive. The two had met when Fujimori was in trouble over his property investments before the election. He needed a lawyer and Montesinos came with good recomhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783111327839-011

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mendations – at least, if crafty cunning and a relaxed attitude to ethics are seen as desirable characteristics. Having graduated from the Chorrillos Military Academy (also the alma mater of Hugo Chávez), Montesinos had worked (covertly) for the CIA, before studying law at the University of San Marcos. Or so it was said. In fact, the institution had no record of him, but this minor detail had not prevented him from passing his bar exam. And, in truth, he was rather good at his job. He made a career out of defending drug barons – including Evaristo ‘Papá Doc’ Porras (one of the leaders of the notorious Medellín Cartel). There was always a whiff of deceitfulness about the portly man of Greek descent who bore an uncanny resemblance to the B-movie image of a Sicilian gangster. That he had also been involved in illegal arms dealings was not a disadvantage in his new line of work. Fujimori needed a fixer; someone who could get things done, especially, as the press, the courts, and the Congress refused to bow to the wishes of the newly elected president. Peru was not a unique example. It had happened countless times before; a popularly elected president with a populist bent found himself at odds with other institutions of the state. This had been the true for Louis Napoleon in the 19th century and the same pattern had repeated itself through countless times in the 20th century. The chroniclers of the 19th- and 20th-century political history almost saw it as a law of political science that the, so-called, “dual democratic legitimacy” of both the president and the Congress was the cause of democratic breakdown.³ As far back as 1851, Napoleon III, as we have seen, dissolved the republic after a clash with the National Assembly). Fujimori was following the same script. The Peruvian was impatient with a foot-dragging legislature. Like other caudillos, he too believed that he had a higher form of democratic right by virtue of representing the whole nation, especially as he was elected on a programme of resolving the chaos that faced the Latin American country. Two months into his presidency, none of his Bills had passed the legislature. Not surprisingly, Fujimori was growing increasingly unhappy as he sat in his office in Casa de Pizarro, the official residence of the Peruvian president. There was a reason for this deadlock. Presidents are elected to administrate and govern, but not to legislate. But, more importantly still, constitutions in liberal democracies are created to ensure that minorities are protected, and that public policy reflects the interest of more than a narrow section of society. An elected president who wanted to steamroll policies through without debate and deliberation was not – and is not – the way of democracies under the rule of law. Liberal democracies hark back to the days when revolutionaries in the 18th century in France and America wanted to prevent rule by absolute monarchs.

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Back then, it was self-evident that “when the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person there can be no liberty”.⁴ In order to prevent this, a system under which different powers could keep each other in check was proposed. Under this arrangement, as one of the authors of the American Constitution wrote, “the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachment by others”.⁵ This wasn’t a logic the Fujimori was willing to accept. And he was in a disadvantaged position. His new party, Cambio 90–Nueva Mayoría, had not secured anything like the ‘majority’ implied by its name, nor a mandate for cambio (or ‘change’ as the word translates into English). Congress was still controlled by the old parties. With less than a third of the seats in either chamber, El Presidente – as he now styled himself – was effectively powerless. Congress would not pass a single law proposed by Fujimori, notwithstanding that he had won 62 per cent of the votes in the run-off for the presidential election.⁶ How could this be? The president was in no doubt it was a stitch-up, a conspiracy orchestrated by the elite; by the very politicians he had been elected to kick into touch. They had run up massive debts, failed to deal with the terrorists – and now they were trying to create obstacles for Fujimori. He was aghast. “Are we really a democracy?”, he asked rhetorically in an interview. He did not wait for an answer. That was not his style. In any case, he had already made up his mind, “we are a country that has always been governed by powerful minorities, oligopolies [and] cliques”.⁷ He was furious. Congressmen – Fujimori called them “unproductive charlatans”⁸ –refused to carry out the people’s wishes. And the courts – “jackals” and “scoundrels”, as he called them⁹ – blocked him when he sought to use decrees to target the terrorists. And the judges weren’t even elected by the people. Of course, in many democracies compromises and the ‘art of the possible’ is part and parcel of statecraft, and in every democracy, there are rules and regulations which must be observed. Except, Fujimori did not subscribe to this view, and he, “couldn’t stand the idea of inviting the President of the Senate to the presidential palace every time he wanted Congress to approve a law”. He preferred to govern Peru alone – from his laptop, as he often bragged.¹⁰ As Congress continued to push back, Fujimori considered his options. The fundamental architecture of the political and legal institutions could not be changed – not right now, anyway. First, he needed to weaken the system without breaking it; to find a way of neutralising parliament and weakening the courts that would en-

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able him to govern without interference. But first he needed a sympathetic press, one that wasn’t openly hostile to him. Different politicians have slightly different approaches. Two decades later, Viktor Orbán “enacted changes to the election laws … [that] transformed a plurality into a two-thirds parliamentary mandate”;¹¹ 80 years earlier, Benito Mussolini too began by changing the electoral system¹² and Juan Perón, in Argentina in the 1950s, found ways of impeaching judges, and threw in a smattering of electoral fraud to neutralise his democratically elected opponents.¹³ Fujimori had little leeway in appointments to the government. Under the Peruvian constitution (and indeed practically all other democratic systems), the ministers had to be supported by a majority in the Congress, which he did not have. But the president was able to choose the head of the security services. He promptly appointed his attorney to lead the secret police, the aptly abbreviated SIN (Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional). And, as we saw above, Montesinos was a natural. It is in the nature of true craftsmanship that the grandmaster perfects his art by dazzling improvisation. Virtuosos, whether in chess, music, politics, or crime, know the classic moves but distinguish themselves by coming up with imaginative and inspired new ones. Montesinos was no exception. Instead of using the formal channels of politics, he simply bribed top-officials, opposition politicians, judges, and media executives – and did so with tax-payers’ money. Through the bribes, the inconvenient obstacles to governing could be circumvented and Fujimori could govern, or so he claimed, in the interest of the people. The approach was deceptively unpretentious – this was the genius of it: monetary enticements, albeit subtly mixed with more hard-hitting measures should the former fail. The meeting with José Crousillat, the vice president of América Televisión, whom we met at the start of this chapter, was one of many meetings Montesinos had with influential people. He always used a hidden camera to have evidence in case the clients became difficult. He even got them to sign contracts. In this way, they were complicit in illegal behaviour and would find it hard to defend themselves against charges of corruption. We know about their conversation because some of these videotapes were leaked a decade later.¹⁴ But, for now, we need not worry about this and must concentrate on the matters at hand. So back to the neon-lit backroom in an office building in downtown Lima. Under normal circumstances, Montesinos would arrange his payments in monthly instalments. This worked best. With a steady extra income, the judges, the politicians, and the media executives, would adapt their lifestyles and could be relied on not to ask awkward questions. But sometimes – especially when he was dealing with more important cases – he needed to apply a personal touch.

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Some of the officials needed more convincing before they would turn a blind eye to the President’s dealings. And, this time it was necessary to impress upon the young man that bribes were not the only option. Though Montesinos was at pains not to be too explicit, – “Remember why Pinochet had his problems? We’ll not be so clumsy. And, besides what is the point of ordering the death of somebody?”, he observed, with a sudden steely gaze that left the television in no doubt what he meant. Crousillat nodded. – “No, need to go there”, he seemed to think to himself. He took the money, shook Montesinos’ hand, got up, and walked out. The security advisor looked pleased with himself, smirked towards the hidden camera, and rose from his seat. One more problem solved. One more obstacle eliminated. Montesinos did not need to use force. Not this time, anyway. Later, it became clear that he had personally supervised and taken part in torture of political opponents. But this was not his modus operandi. Generally, he preferred bribery and blackmailing to brute force. The meeting with Crousillat was one among hundreds. And Montesinos did not just rely on video tapes of his meetings with his ‘clients’. He also recorded hundreds of judges, politicians, and journalists entering into brothels and nightclubs and presented them with this.¹⁵ It generally worked. Very few public officials wanted to discuss why they were visiting strip-joints in the company of scantily clad women half their age. Crousillat was not the only one who took the money in exchange for handing over editorial control. Montesinos gave the majority shareholder of Channel 9 $50,000 for firing two investigative journalists. He went even further than that. In a later leaked videotape of one of Montesinos’ ‘conversations’, he declared victory over the press, “We’ve made them sign papers and everything … All of them lined up, all lined up. Every day, I have a meeting at 12:30 … and we plan the evening news”. ¹⁶ Montesinos and Fujimori were not alone in singling out the media as the target for special treatment. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez used similar tactics to silence the last vestiges of critical journalism. Viktor Orbán in Hungary did the same. When the newspaper Magyar Nemset began to report critically about the prime minister, the paper lost advertising contracts and was deprived of other funding. Two days after Orbán’s election victory in 2018 the paper closed down. And, like Fujimori, Orbán too had a hitman behind the scenes. From a nondescript office in central Budapest, Antal Rogán, controlled a media empire “whose main task was to disseminate the Hungarian Prime Minister’s message”.¹⁷ The methods employed in the central European capital were not as elaborate as Montesinos’, but the aim was the same: to silence all opposition with a minimum of fuss.

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For Montesinos’ aim was not just to create a mouthpiece for the government – though that too. It was equally essential to lull the public into a sense of political apathy. Once again, his tactic was not unique. The examples are manifold. In Venezuela, the once critical television station Venevision, scrapped political shows for astrology programmes – and ditched the news bulletins in favour of soap operas. In ancient Rome, it was ‘bread and circuses’. In Venezuela, where bread was hard to come by, it was a mix of sport, celebrity gossip, and superstition. Yet, for all Montesinos’ tricks, scheming, and underhand tactics, the president did not have total control. Fujimori had been consistently careful to give the appearance of following the rules of the constitutional game, of being a democrat. After he was elected, he continued to campaign and repeated his well-rehearsed lines to a jubilant crowd. He was – as he continued to maintain – a man of the people and the people’s only real representative. This strategy was successful, at least from a public relations standpoint. After two years’ inertia, impasse, and deadlock, Congress’s approval rating stood at a paltry 17 per cent. Fujimori’s by contrast had risen to 42 per cent.¹⁸ On 5 April 1992, Fujimori pounced. He announced on national television, that the hitherto existing system had been “a deceptive formality – a façade”. He issued Decree Law 25418, which declared that “the articles of the Political Constitution and the legal norms that oppose this Decree Law are suspended”.¹⁹ Congress did not cave in. The legislature rejected the Decree and swore in Vice President Máximo San Román. This was to no avail. With its low approval rating and Fujimori’s control over the army, Congress was powerless. The president arrested the main opposition leaders, including former President Alan Garcia, suspended Congress, and called for the election of a new special assembly to draw up a new constitution. This new constitution, he assured the people, would be a more democratic one. For his action was not, so he said, “selfish”, rather it was “a popular uprising”, and not, as his opponents called it, un autogolpe, a coup. He was just “temporarily dissolving” Congress and “reorganizing” the judiciary.²⁰ In some ways, Fujimori’s move was surprising and unusual. In many other instances, similar declarations had followed apparent national crises. Twenty years later Erdoğan used the rather convenient military coup against himself as a pretext for declaring martial law. In a similar way, Ferdinand Marcos used a series of bombings in 1972 to declare that his was “not a military take-over” and that he, as a man of the people, would seek the consent of the governed in plebiscites.²¹ Fujimori did not use any particular pretext or incident to justify his action. The theme is often the same, but it is played with different variations. True to his professed commitment to democracy, Fujimori was willing, indeed, happy, to let the people decide. What was the problem? He, the man of the people, was even allowing the people to vote for the members of the constituent assembly

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in free elections, and then subsequently in a plebiscite on the new constitution itself. Of course it was, at the very least, debatable how free the elections could be with the former president under house arrest and facing trial on dubious charges. In the not dissimilar situation, in Turkey President Erdoğan jailed many of his opponents and then held a plebiscite on a new constitution, which granted him near absolute powers, but effectively prevented the opposition from campaigning. Fujimori had pioneered the same script. The lack of a level playing field, predictably, was condemned by foreign media, but most governments failed to speak out, and the few that did, were not following up with diplomatic or political action. Fujimori was safe. Moreover, his actions were popular. On 7 April 1992, the polling company Apoyo published a survey conducted in Lima, where 71 per cent of the respondents approved the dissolution of Congress. The same survey found that 89 per cent approved the restructuring of the judiciary. Having bribed the media, he was in control of the message and that helped convince the population, or so it seems. Was it democratic? Only if, by this term, we mean the blunt rule by a numerical majority, but not if this epithet signifies a basic degree of fairness and modicum of freedom of expression. But Fujimori – again like Erdoğan in 2016 – could afford to limit freedom of expression in the name of stability and democracy. Indeed, two weeks after the autogolpe, there was support for his action notwithstanding that 79 per cent defined the regime as “dictatorial”.²² Not surprisingly, the other political parties were unsure how to respond. The President used this to great effect. The opposition’s failure to coordinate its actions, Montesinos’ control over the media, and with several opposition figures in jail, Fujimori’s Cambio 90 won 44 out of the 80 seats for El Congreso Constituyente. The rubber-stamp body duly drafted a new constitution. The Senate was abolished, the powers of the courts were restricted, and the president was given wider powers to rule by decree. With the media in tow, campaigning in the plebiscite was a onesided affair. Fujimori won, albeit, only by a margin of 4 per cent. But a win is a win. He now had the legal powers to go on governing, and do so in the name of the people! But his most important achievement was the power to appoint and dismiss judges.

Who Neuters the Guardians? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ‘Who guards the guardians’ is a Latin phrase found in Satires, a work by the Roman poet Juvenal early in the second century AD.²³ The

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poet was not particularly concerned about politics, the rule of law, or anything remotely to do with constitutional theory. In fact, the original line referred to marital fidelity. Yet, throughout the ages – from Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill and on to The Simpsons and Star Trek the Next Generation ²⁴ – the line has been used as a shorthand for the need to have objective, dispassionate, and impartial arbiters who can adjudicate in cases of dispute. That is, neutral referees who – in another Latin shorthand – sine ira et studio (‘without anger or fondness’) apply the laws enacted by the representatives of the people or by the citizens themselves.²⁵ There are many reasons why independent courts are needed in a rule-based democratic country. In a succinct summary, the Dutch political scientist Arend Lijphart summed it up thus A written and rigid constitution is … not a sufficient restraint on parliamentary majorities [or a President], unless there is an independent body that decides whether laws are in conformity with the constitution. If parliament itself is the judge of the constitutionality of its own laws, it can easily be tempted to resolve any doubts in its own favour. The remedy that is usually advocated is to give the courts … the power of judicial review – that is, the power to test the constitutionality of laws passed by the national legislature.²⁶

There are many examples of how this in practice safeguarded democratic systems from breakdown. In India, the dominance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has raised fear in some quarters that the Hindu-Nationalist firebrand would undermine the institutions of the world’s largest democracy, that it too would descend into an illiberal democracy, or even become an autocratic state. This fear still persists. After all, Modi’s reign as governor of Gujarat was plagued by outbreaks of sectarian violence and a less than even-handed treatment of Muslims. Doomsayers and pessimists were not surprised, when Vajubhai Vala, the BJP governor of the southern state of Karnataka appointed a fellow BJP politician to the position of Chief Minister of the state. He did this notwithstanding the two other parties, Janta Dal and the Congress Party, had won a majority in the state assembly and had agreed to enter into a majority coalition. Vala gave his BJP comrades two weeks to form a government. Enough time, said critics, for them to bribe, cajole, and intimidate members of the other parties to defect. Rumours circulated that “sums of up to 1 billion rupees (around $15 million) had been offered as lures”.²⁷ Montesinos’ tactics were applied on an epic scale! It was at this moment, the institutions of Indian democracy kicked in; “Only after India’s Supreme Court intervened were the two parties allowed to form a majority coalition, which the governor shamefacedly accepted”.²⁸

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It is examples such as this that show the necessity of having impartial and independent ‘guardians’. But the story of Karnataka also explains why would-be despots from Bolivia to Budapest, from the Andes to Ankara have targeted the courts in their attempts to win control over the political system, and why it was so important for Fujimori to win for himself the power to appoint and dismiss members of the judiciary. Courts can effectively block controversial and unconstitutional actions and can limit the powers of a popularly elected president who seeks to rule by decree. This effort at undermining of the ‘custodes’ is not just a feature of Latin American democracies. In fact, in recent years it has been most pronounced in richer European democracies. For the founders of the American Republic it was self-evident that the scope of politics was limited, that the Constitution contained Certain specified exceptions to legislative authority; such for instance, as it shall pass no bills of attainder, no ex post facto laws, and the like. Limitations of this kind can be preserved in practice in no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all reservations of particular rights would amount to nothing.²⁹

But it was precisely these ‘exemptions to legislative authority’ the so-called and self-professed illiberal democrats took issue with. For the far-right governments in Poland and Hungary, for example, democracy meant the unfettered power of the majority to rule unimpeded by unelected courts. In Poland, once a country famous for a vibrant civil society and ditto norms that prevented even the Soviet Communism from taking root, the inappropriately named Law and Justice Party (PiS) have since 2010 “sought to dismantle its checks and balances, especially through its changes to the Constitutional Court”.³⁰ The pattern was eerily familiar and bore many resemblances with earlier developments in Latin America under Fujimori and Hugo Chávez (see below). Under the first rule of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kacyński (2005 – 2007) several initiatives were blocked by the Trybynal Konstytucyjny. To his disgust, the Polish strongman witnessed how the judges effectively blocked conservative policies aimed at strengthening traditional Catholic values. He vowed never to accept this again. Once returned to power, in 2015, Kaczyński (now observing the role of all-powerful éminence grise) began his assault. Albeit through subtle means. Before the election there were five vacancies on the Trybynal. The outgoing Sejm (the legislature), had approved three and let Kaczyński appoint the last two. The new government did not return the gentlemanly gesture. PiS dismissed the already confirmed three justices, appointed five relatively unknown jurists in their stead. In addition, they passed a decree stipulating that any constitutional challenges henceforth would require a two-thirds and not a simple majority.

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Having packed the court with the five supporters, the PiS had fireproofed itself against judicial review challenges.³¹ The action was as swift and professional as it was Machiavellian, and was fully in line with the Florentine Renaissance writer’s advice: “the new ruler must determine all the injuries he will need to inflict, and inflict them once and for all”.³² This was not exceptional. Indeed, in some ways, Poland was playing copy-cat with Hungary’s likeminded Fidesz government. Thus, in 2011, Jaroslav Kaczyński, had promised his supporters, “that I am deeply convinced that a day will come when we will have Budapest in Warsaw”.³³ He was beginning to deliver on his promises. But he still had some catching up to do if he were to live up to his pledge. Re-elected in 2008, Viktor Orbán had a head-start. Like his Polish opposite number, he had also seen his policies blocked by courts and other state-bodies during his first term from 1998 to 2002. Like his Polish colleague, the Hungarian Prime Minister had also focused his efforts on the courts. He followed the same tactic and expanded the number of justices from eight to fifteen, and – like Kaczyński – passed legislation that gave his party – much strengthened in parliament after a much-criticised reform of the electoral system – a virtual monopoly of appointing judges.³⁴ In both cases, such changes as enacted in Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere were used to silence critics through selective use of libel laws, by rendering the courts impotent as a guardian of the constitution, and as a mechanism for protecting cronies from inconvenient litigation and investigations into ill-gotten gains and the fruits of nepotism and kleptocracy. “The benefit of controlling the modern state is less the power to prosecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty”, wrote David Frum, former speech writer to George Bush in a critical essay about the democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe.³⁵ Perhaps, would-be autocrats compare notes. Both Kaczyński and Orbán had plenty of masters to learn from. But none, perhaps, more so than Hugo Chávez. True, the latter claimed to espouse a novel form of Latin American socialism, whereas the former were – or claimed to be – devout Christians defending national and conservative values.³⁶ But ideological concerns were of little importance in matters of statecraft. Populists may be averse to receiving expert advice in matters of public policy, international trade, and on the beneficial consequences of immigration on economic growth. But when it came to learning lessons from other autocrats, evidence-based policy-making was always exemplary. There can be little doubt that Kaczyński and Orbán looked to Chávez for inspiration. For the story of the usurpation of powers over the judiciary Caracas-style provides a near perfect example of how to neuter the guardians through gradual and seemingly democratic means.

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In 1999, Chávez reacted swiftly when he won the presidential election on a pledge to change the political system. It was almost as if the new president dared the Supreme Court of Venezuela to defy him; as if he was spoiling for a fight. He stated that he would dissolve Congress (where he did not hold a majority). The justices took the bait, and predictably ruled this action unconstitutional. Once again, in a pattern so familiar from Louis Napoleon to Alberto Fujimori, the President declared that he had the democratic legitimacy, and that he was merely honouring his election promise to call a Constitutional Convention with the power to suspend all state institutions – including the judiciary. Needless to say, his election victory did not give him a mandate to change the rules of the game. He was merely allowed to act within the limits of the constitution, which meant to serve as the head of the executive: to implement and administer. But this was not how Chávez saw the role of the president. He saw the election as a mandate to rule without interference from others. And he had – at this stage – popular support on his side. The Supreme Court caved in, perhaps in the expectation that they could be spared if they played along, or perhaps because they were politically naïve. After some hesitation, they reversed its original decision. Not everybody on the Bench was happy. A dissenting voice, Judge Cicilia Sosa, despairingly noted, “the Supreme Court committed suicide to avoid being assassinated”.³⁷ She was right. The Court’s hopes of survival were dashed. A year later, the Supreme Court of Venezuela had been replaced by a more pliable and less independent Supreme Tribunal of Justice. Sometimes we can recognise patterns in real life in a more undiluted form in works of fiction. In Sinclair Lewis’s fictional, account of an imagined America descending into autocracy, the pattern is the same, just more extreme. Having encountered opposition against his decrees, President Buzz Windrip cajoles, threatens and bribes the judicial branch into effective submission.³⁸ Witnessing the rise of dictators like Hitler and Mussolini and lesser-known autocrats like Engelbert Dollfuß in Austria and Gyula Gömbös in Hungary, all of whom gradually disbanded democracies, Sinclair Lewis, chronicled how the aforementioned Buzz Windrip gradually turned America into a dictatorship using many of the same tricks later employed by Fujimori, Chávez, and Erdoğan. There is almost invariably something comical about populist demagogues: Mussolini’s self-important pose, Putin’s naked torso, and Louis Napoleon’s self-aggrandisement, underline the philosopher’s observation that the rise of the populist allows “a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part”.³⁹ Like Sinclair Lewis’s realworld counterparts, his fictional character Buzz Windrip, “was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic”.⁴⁰ And, yet, in a way that is familiar to readers in the 21st century he “was an actor of genius”,

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he “would whirl his arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes”. It was even reported that he had a strange hairdo!⁴¹ There is a pattern to the breakdown of democracy. It goes like this: the president is elected by the people but so is parliament. Both claim to represent the people but the president normally has the upper hand. Like Napoleon Bonaparte, Ferdinand Marcos, and Alberto Fujimori, Buzz found himself at odds with the equally legitimately elected legislature. He too could not tolerate dissent and immediately began to complain that his plans were delayed by the talking shop in Congress. His solution was simple and eerily similar to the tactics employed by Fujimori and Chávez Congress shall serve only in an advisory capacity [and the] Supreme Court shall immediately have removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them unconstitutional or by any other action, any or all acts of the President.⁴²

But, of course, this was fiction, ‘it can’t happen here’! Not in real life. Or could it? Well, perhaps in Peru or the Philippines, or, at a stretch in Poland, Hungary. But not in America, Britain, or France, not from long-standing and wealthy democracies. It Can’t Happen Here! And yet, less than one hundred days into his presidency, Donald Trump slammed the otherwise lauded US Constitution as “archaic” and “really bad for the country”, because the Senate and the House of Representatives were able to block his legislation. “Maybe”, he said, “we have to take on the system. For the good of the country we can’t go through with a system like this”.⁴³

Chapter 8: What is the Track-Record of Autocratic Regimes? Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise … Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.… Winston S. Churchill¹

Thomas Hobbes, famously believed that the best way of securing the Commonwealth was through That great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence. For by this authority, given him by every particular man in the Commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him that, by terror thereof, he is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies abroad. And in him consisteth the essence of the Commonwealth; which, to define it, is: one person.²

Hobbes was clear that this individual had to be a ‘one person’. For, as he wrote in his other, and less famous work, Behemoth, “people always have been, and always will be, ignorant”.³ Another philosopher with the same Christian name (sic!), namely Thomas Aquinas, shares precious little of the Englishman’s materialist and scientific outlook on life. But both men, their differences notwithstanding, supported monarchy. According to the Catholic Saint, “Government by one person is likely to be more successful than government by the many”.⁴ But that, of course, was in the Middle Ages, at a time when everybody believed in fairies and Hell physically located below the ground. In the modern age it has been different. Maybe things just change? In any case, since the Second World War it has been difficult to find anyone who would stand up for rule by one man or an unelected clique. Even North Korea is officially called The People’s Republic of Korea. This has slightly changed after the millennium. A book aptly entitled Against Democracy railed “against democratic triumphalism”, and the author went on to ask – somewhat rhetorically – “what kind of value does democracy have – if any?”⁵ The question remained unanswered in the book, but others have helpfully found that “all international wars since World War I have involved dictatorships. Two-thirds of civil wars and ethnic conflicts since World War II have erupted in countries under authoritarian rule”. And, yet, at the same time, “the fastest growing countries in the world are dictatorships”. Perhaps the 40 per cent of the world’s countries that are ruled by an authoritarian regime are more successful – despite their tendency to go to war.⁶ This, once again, is a factual question, one that can be https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111327839-012

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answered by data and evidence and not by selected examples. The fundamental question is simple and straight forward: do dictatorships yield better results than democracies, or vice versa. But we start at a different place. I once had a job in Africa. It was at the military academy in Accra in Ghana. Right next to a mango grove. Though, they never produced any mangoes – not for sale anyway. Why was it there? My colleague, a charismatic military man with a baritone voice gave me nonchalant explanation, “Well, it was one of the things, our leader Kwame Nkrumah, had to concede. You see, the commander wanted to grow mangos, so the President gave the land to him in return for his support. But he was a great man! He made the country great.” My colleague was, somewhat exotically in these parts, named Vladimir, after the founder of the Soviet Union, “I was born in the year when Nkrumah was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.” No doubt, Nkrumah had charisma, a legendary African statesman, the first President of the independent Ghana in the 1960s. He had charm too. Princess Margaret invited him to dance parties at Buckingham Palace with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. But Nkrumah ruled as an absolute – if mostly benevolent – dictator. However, he was not all-powerful. He needed the support of other prominent individuals. Was Nkrumah successful? Did he get things done in the interest of the people and the country as Vladimir claimed? Maybe bequeathing an orchard to a general with horticultural interests was a price well worth paying if it improved the lives of his subjects. For maybe this is the price we just have to accept. You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few proverbial eggs, as Lenin reportedly said. So, perhaps a wee bit of bribery is just one of the things we have to put up with, and it didn’t really hurt anyone, right? There is a reason for recounting this story from my sojourn in Ghana. Many people agree with Vladimir, and not just in West Africa. Faced with seemingly insurmountable environmental, economic, and social problems many people seem to think that a strong leader would be able to resolve the current malaise. In Britain, one of the world’s longest established democracies, 54 per cent want “a strong leader who is willing to break the rules” – only 23 per cent do not.⁷ Even the Australians, an egalitarian people devoted to the classless idea of ‘mateship’, are increasingly in favour a ‘strong man’. While the hankering for a benevolent despot is not as high as in the United Kingdom, no less than 33 per cent of Australians rated having an authoritarian style of leader as being ‘very good’ or ‘fairly good’ in a recent survey. Ten years before, the number was ten per cent lower.⁸ So, maybe they are right? Perhaps having a powerful leader – even someone who is not always acting within the limits of a constitution is a good thing. Possibly a ruler like Nkrumah is better because he gets things done! Admittedly, it might

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not be politically correct to say so in polite company, but dictatorships have something rather intuitively appealing to them, do they not? Why be governed by the uneducated few if a wise man could govern? Historically, it is certainly not unique to champion rule by an enlightened absolute ruler. In the early 1600s, King James, was the first monarch to rule over both England and Scotland. Perhaps not surprisingly, he was a strong believer in the government by an absolute monarch. He wrote The ignorance, and (which is worse) the seduced opinion of the multitude blinded by them, who thinke themselves able to teach and instruct the ignorants, procured the wracke and overthrow of sundry flourishing Commonwealths; and heaped heavy calamities, threatening utter destruction upon others.

James believed he spoke for educated opinion when he concluded that, “Monarchie, a forme of government, resembling the Divinitie, approacheth nearest to perfection, as all the learned and wise men from the beginning have agreed upon”.⁹ This was not an original view but one that had famously been espoused by the French philosopher Jean Bodin in his book Les Six livres de la République from 1576 and later would be followed by the somewhat less original English theoretician Robert Filmer.¹⁰ But Bodin was the first to fully develop the doctrine of absolutism. The Frenchman was a formidable scholar, whose writings on sovereignty and use of comparative examples make him one of the pioneers of political science. But Bodin did not merely state that monarchy is “the best, the most happy, and the most perfect type of state”.¹¹ he was also historically important for being the first theorist to espouse the view that “the prince is responsible before God”.¹² Such a position will be seen as odd for those living in a secular age, but it must be remembered that Bodin lived at a time of exceptional religious upheaval, and at a time when religion was the dominant concern for people. Bodin relied on patriarchal notions of the father as the head of the household and extrapolated this view to conclude that monarchs had a paternal power over their subjects. But Bodin was not merely a dogmatic scholar who found arguments in Scripture, he also justified monarchy on utilitarian grounds, that the state, “was never more flourishing than at a time when the people did not concern themselves with any exercise of power”.¹³ This view was uncontroversial in the two hundred years that followed. Enlightened absolutism, as practised by, for example, Frederick the Great in Prussia, only reinforced this belief. In the late 18th century, Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, eulogised the rule of the enlightened absolutist in his narrative

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If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus [Marcus Aurelius’s successor]. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws … The labours of these monarchs were overpaid by the immense reward that inseparably waited on their success by honest pride of virtue and by the exquisite delight of beholding the greatest happiness of which they were authors.¹⁴

Of course, Gibbon did not witness this time himself. And it seems questionable if this period was ‘happy’ for the Christians who were thrown to the lions. But sometimes nostalgia clouds people’s perceptions. When a Mexican family of a friend of mine visited Paris in the early 2000s, they made a point of visiting the grave of the dictator Porfirio Díaz at Cimetière du Montparnasse, “there were fresh flowers”, my friend (she is the artist who made the cover of this book) reported. Díaz, became a legendary figure; he is famous for the great one-liners, like “Pobre México. Tan lejos de Dios, tan cerca de los Estados Unidos” – “Poor Mexico, so close to America, and so far away from God’.¹⁵ And, to be sure, Díaz was a comparatively enlightened ruler; he eagerly sought advice from experts and Científicos, and openly declared that he was inspired by “the ideas of the French Positivist Auguste Comte”.¹⁶ But Díaz also oppressed dissent, and in the end bankrupted his country before he was forced into exile in France, where he subsequently died. Dictators accept little dissent, and for this reason most eye-witness accounts are somewhat rosy and leave out the incompetence, the shortcomings, and the outright cruelty that often characterise real-life tyrants. Until the French Revolution, this belief in the benevolent despot was shared by many enlightened observers. And, not surprisingly, by all monarchs. For example, Josef II – the Austrian Emperor (and brother of the unfortunate Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France who was executed) – summed up the official philosophy of government by a single individual in the words, “Alles für das Volk, aber nichts durch das Volk” – “Everything for the people but nothing by the people”.¹⁷ This view was only contested by renegade thinkers like the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who inspired the French Revolution. After they had deposed the King, the French revolutionaries enacted a very liberal constitution – they even decriminalised homosexuality and gave civil rights to the Jews. But the Revolution turned sour. The English poet William Wordsworth welcomed the storming of the Bastille; he had believed that reason had asserted

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“her rights”,¹⁸ and uttered the famous words, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”.¹⁹ Now he warned against “democracy”. He shuddered at the thought that ordinary people could be given the vote, and warned that “[If ] the pot-house keepers of our overgrown manufacturing towns and enormous cities had each and all been invested with the right of voting, the infection would spread like a plague”. In short government by the people would be “the greatest political evil that could befall the land”.²⁰ In short, after the French Revolution, most turned away from democracy. The system of government by the people had led to chaos and ultimately resulted in the wars of Napoleon. In a textbook for students of law at the University of Berlin from 1821 the future lawyers were told that, “the idea that all should participate in the business of the state … [was] a ridiculous notion”.²¹ To have a monarch, the writer of the textbook wrote simply, was “an expression of rationality”.²² One of the law students who used the book was named Karl Marx. The man who went on to write the Communist Manifesto had but scorn for liberal democracy: “any state after a revolution requires a dictatorship – and an energetic one at that”.²³ This idea still has many followers. In the People’s Republic of China, so-called ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ is based on the idea that increased prosperity is a result of the (allegedly) wise stewardship of the Communist Party. President Xi, not surprisingly, has said that the philosophy of Karl Marx remains “totally correct”.²⁴ But, of course, a quote does not establish a fact. While an increasing number of people in the West (and the governments of China, Russia, and Turkey) believe that government by a strongman is more beneficial, the proof is ultimately in the proverbial pudding of facts. And the question is as simple as it can be: do autocratic regimes or those with strong leaders outperform democracies?

Is Dictatorship Efficient? Since 1973, the American think tank Freedom House has published a ranking of countries according to the fairness (or often otherwise) of their elections.²⁵ Basically, theirs is a measure of democracy. The Freedom House Score (which is not unlike Polity IV which we used in previous chapters) is based on assessments on whether a country holds: 1. Competitive, multiparty political system; 2. If there is adult suffrage for all citizens without criminal convictions (some states may further punish and subjugate people with criminal convictions by disenfranchising them from the democratic process);

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If these regularly contested elections are conducted in conditions of ballot secrecy, reasonable ballot security, and the absence of massive voter fraud that yields results that are unrepresentative of the public will; If there is significant public access of major political parties to the electorate through the media and through generally open political campaigning. Based on expert assessments, which can be criticised, for a country to be categorized as an electoral democracy, it must score seven or more out of twelve in political rights subcategory A (Electoral Progress), and have an overall aggregate score of 20 in their political rights rating and an overall aggregate score of 30 in their civil liberties rating.

Based on this measure (and it is admittedly not a perfect one), it is possible to make a simple correlation between the two factors: democracy and the GDP per capita. The result is rather unambiguous. There is simply little to support the claims that autocrats do better. Far from it, in fact. The statistical correlation between Democracy and GDP per capita, is strong at R = .464, and with a margin of error of less than one per cent. Simply put, there is a clear statistical correlation between democracy and wealth. We also find correlations between democracy and more education, and more democracy is statistically associated with longer life expectancy. Thus, the correlation between good education and democracy is even stronger (R = .48) and life expectancy and democracy is stronger still (R = .50).²⁶ Contrary to the stated beliefs of the likes of President Xi, King James VI, and Karl Marx, democracy works. The alternative does not.

The Cost of Kleptocracy So why don’t dictatorships work? There are many reasons but being in charge is not quite as easy as one might think. This is what Kwame Nkrumah realised. The strong man always has to be on the look-out for enemies, even among his closest allies and friends. That is why the Ghanaian strongman had to placate the army commander and give him an orchard. Thus, the despot – whether in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy or in the 21st century – is distracted from the business of governing because he fears he will be overthrown. And the longer the dictatorship lasts, the more enemies the tyrant will get, and the more desperate he becomes. The real problem in a dictatorship is that most despots are faced with the same problem as Kwame Nkrumah in the example at the beginning of this chapter; to secure continued support from other powerful people lest they should find a better offer.

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As discontent wells up, those in powerful positions (generals, rich men, and influential individuals) will demand an ever-increasing price for their loyalty. When protests began in Venezuela in the 2010s, President Maduro increased pay to the military. Gradually, as the discontent rose, the pay of top brass of the army in the oil-rich but impoverished Latin American country increased tenfold while pay for hospital doctors decreased by the same proportion.²⁷ Some have even seen tendencies in this direction within the European Union. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, has been accused of “siphoning off tens of millions of pounds” under a system that English conservative newspaper The Times called “legalised corruption”.²⁸ The Economist, another widely trusted publication with a centre-right political preference, wrote about how Orbán, to placate local elites, paid for a football stadium, which “cost a fortune” and a “tourist train”, which, “runs half-empty most of the time”. Like in Ghana and Venezuela, “Kleptocratic elites bleed public services while Fidesz, the ruling party, chips away at Hungary’s democracy”.²⁹ The aim of this chapter is not to make a moral judgement on dictatorship, but merely to show that the economic case for this system of government is found wanting. The money that is channelled to pointless projects to keep potential challengers sweet costs vast sums, which could otherwise have been spent on improving the livelihood of the many. “Under absolutist political institutions”, the economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson concluded, “those who can wield this power will be able to set up economic institutions to enrich themselves and augment their power at the expense of society”.³⁰ Maduro, like Kwame Nkrumah before him, and even Victor Orbán, recognises the elementary logic of dictatorship. The autocrats who do not understand the anatomy of authoritarianism will have a short career. To be a policy expert, someone who actually brings prosperity to a country, will not last long in the job unless, he understands the politics of giving handouts to the powerful few. As alluded to, this logic does not only apply to modern day dictators. To be a successful despot, you need to give windfalls to those who can keep you in power. Alexandru Cuza (1820 – 1873), the king of the Danubian Principalities – now known as Romania – did not appreciate this. Cuza was, by all accounts, a benevolent and enlightened ruler, but he was not a democrat. Yet, in many ways, he was the model benign despot; someone who was willing to cut corners to get the necessary but difficult policies enacted. Well-educated and with an understanding of economics, agriculture, and foreign affairs, he began a series of reforms that included public education and land-reform. This massively improved the backward state of the country. But the reforms were not well-received by the landowners. Cuza refused to give handouts to the powerful military and to wealthy aristocrats. After only five years in power, he was removed by the so-called “Monstrous coalition”.³¹ Being an

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expert in policy is less important than keeping the powerful happy – at least if a dictator wants to survive.

Silencing the Wisdom of the Crowds “My gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me”, a contemporary politician infamously said.³² It is perhaps the defining character of the autocrat – or politicians of a similar ilk – that they have an elevated opinion of themselves, as well as they are thin skinned and, consequently take unkindly to criticism. Strongmen build their authority on a unique claim to being right. For this reason, those who speak truth unto power fall out of favour with the strongman – or suffer a much worse fate. When the philosopher Seneca criticised Emperor Nero, he was ordered to commit suicide – and duly complied. But no politicians are universal geniuses who know all policies. Governing is a difficult business. You need facts and the government needs to know what works in order to make the trains run on time, keep the economy ticking, and crime low. Fundamentally, “it is the duty of governments to form the truest opinions they can”.³³ And it is very rare that know-it-all dictators possess all the facts themselves, or that the ruler can objectively be described as ‘very smart’. Once more, this is nothing new. In The Prince, Machiavelli’s handbook for would-be despots written over four centuries ago, he advised the budding autocrat that he “should be a constant questioner”, and that he should “let people understand that [he was] not offended by the truth”.³⁴ Yet, very few tyrants have followed this advice. From the 1960s to the 1990s, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku ruled Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) as his personal fiefdom. He styled himself as “The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake” – although this was not reflected in the wellbeing of the population who steadily got poorer during his reign.³⁵ The dictator was not keen on being told if things went wrong, and this was reflected in memoranda and the submissions he received from his advisors. These had not read Machiavelli’s advice, or they were (understandably) reluctant to act on it for fear of reprisals. Ron Wintrobe, in his seminal The Political Economy of Dictatorship, cites briefings by intelligence officers, who wrote to inform the dictator During this ten-day period all remains calm across all the area of Mangola. All the people work in joy, doubling their energy thanks to the continuity of the regime. The recent ministerial reshuffle accomplished by the Father of the Nation brought forth great joy among the population which promises him a sincere attachment.³⁶

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Dictators, as Wintrobe also noted, “may promise not to harm their subjects, but such promises are unenforceable”, so the officials continued to feed the dictator a stream of rosy pictures of the tranquil countryside.³⁷ Occasionally, the dispatches would admit that there were disturbances, for example “36 robbers who were sowing terror … [were] kept in the central prison of Bumba … which [was] not well maintained and their escape [was] to be feared”. Nevertheless, the dictator was assured that “the situation is calm”.³⁸ In most dictatorships the same is still true. Some things never seem to change. When Li Wenliang, a Chinese doctor, dared to warn about a Coronavirus in late December 2019 he realised that the Chinese Communist Party were ‘offended by the truth’. As a conscientious medical practitioner concerned about the wellbeing of his colleagues, he sent a message to a chat group warning them about the outbreak and urging them to wear protective clothing to avoid infection. The group was monitored by the authorities. Four days later Dr Li was summoned to the Public Security Bureau on the charge of “making false comments” and having “severely disturbed the social order”. He was forced to sign a letter. He had no choice but to comply. A month later he was dead. The outbreak of COVID-19 provided incontrovertible evidence that he was not making false comments. In fact, if he had been allowed to speak freely, literally millions of lives could have been spared, and trillions of dollars would have been saved. But speaking truth onto power would have threatened the control of the Chinese Communist Party.³⁹ This unwillingness to listen to ‘facts’, even when they will save millions of lives, is the fundamental problem with dictatorships, and perhaps the chief reason they do not work. Democracies perform better because they allow different opinions. When the philosopher John Stuart Mill and his wife Harriet Taylor Mill wrote their famous book On Liberty, they wanted above all to tell their readers that the “only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind”.⁴⁰ All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. And the evidence shows that dictators and despots are fallible. These arguments for democracy are also supported by neuropolitical findings. The human brain has a dual capacity for both high sophistication and a residual primitive instinct. This is nothing new. While he stressed our capacity to reason, Plato, as noted above, observed that we possess a feeling of anger of being left behind, which prompts us to support demagogues.⁴¹ What we are witnessing in today’s societies is a variation of the same theme which locates this feeling of Thymos in the section of the older brain (especially in the limbic system). By reverting

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to this evolutionarily ‘old’ part of the brain, we run the risk of reversing the gains we have made through our evolutionary history.

Emergency Powers? But could there not be a time when it is necessary for a strong man to at least temporarily take control? Might it not be better to allow a competent and strong leader to assume emergency powers and allow him to enact legislation to deal with the crisis? During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a total of 37 countries – many of them officially democracies – introduced emergency legislation that silenced opinion and made it an offence to criticise the government. Was this not understandable and justifiable in this extreme situation? No, it was not. According to the argument put forward by Harriet and John Stuart Mill the answer is negative. The evidence does not suggest that assuming absolute powers and ruling like a dictator helps to solve problems. In fact, silencing dissent at a time when more rather than fewer opinions are needed seems rather counter-productive. Again, the same argument applies; by shutting down discussion we are robbing ourselves of solutions that could have helped solve the problem – like in the case of the unfortunate Dr Li in China; if the dissenting “opinion is right”, we are “deprived the opportunity of exchanging error for truth”.⁴² No one, perhaps, made a better argument for free discussion and against autocracy than Thomas Paine, the English revolutionary, who took part in both the American and the French Revolutions. In a short pamphlet that was read by an estimated 10 per cent of the then American population, the one-time bankrupt corset maker, took direct aim at an unnamed authoritarian state (it was England), and described it as “exceedingly ridiculous in the composition”, because, it “first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required”.⁴³ Would-be despots might point to the Roman Republic to justify that they assume powers during an emergency. But, for the Romans, dictatorship meant something rather different from what it means today. “The Roman institution [of the dictator]”, wrote Alfred Cobban, “was an honourable and universally respected constitutional device of the Republic for meeting a crisis”.⁴⁴ At the end of the 80s BC, the Roman Republic was in such a “crisis” after over 400 years of existence. The different groups were fighting over scarce resources. The more conservative Optimates were at loggerheads with the Populares, who largely represented the lower classes. The City State that successfully had subdued their rivals in Carthage a few decades earlier, was drifting towards anarchy. During the wars – and during other crises – the Romans, always an inventive lot – had appointed a trouble shoot-

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er, a so-called Magister Populi (literally master of the people) – to deal with the problem at hand. In 82 BC, the Roman Senate followed the old tradition, and appointed a dictator. But the Senate did not do their homework. They assumed that the old way of doing thing would work. Traditionally, the Roman constitution was based on tacit and unwritten understandings. But the Magister they appointed was not following procedure. His name was Sulla (or Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, to give him his full name). He was an aristocratic military man. He became a national hero when he beat the invading tribes of the Cimbri and the Teutones (two tribes from presentday Denmark) in the famous Battle of Vercellae in 101 BC. As a military man Sulla was – as so many of his colleagues throughout history – rather impatient, and not awfully keen on procedure and detail. That had consequences. Once named Magister Populi, he went well beyond the established precedent. Until that time, there were a number of restrictions on Roman ‘dictators’, that limited their powers in ways that modern autocrats rarely appreciate – or publicly acknowledge. The Roman institution of dictator did not entitle the holder of this temporary office to make new laws. The role of dictator was that of ‘giving orders’, not that of ‘governing’.⁴⁵ Moreover, the role was only legitimate because it was “bestowed in accordance with public institutions, and not assumed by the dictator by his own authority, and always to the benefit of the state”. Unlike the case of Hungary in 2020, which had no sunset clause, in the Roman Republic, “a dictator was appointed for a limited time and only for the purpose of dealing with such matters as had led to his appointment”.⁴⁶ The person appointed to wield the emergency powers merely “had the authority to make the decisions he thought fit in order to solve a definite and urgent danger”, but “he could do nothing to diminish the constitutional position of the government, as would have been the case if he had taken away the authority vested in the senate or the people, or have abolished the ancient institutions of the city”.⁴⁷ Even Carl Schmitt, an infamous German lawyer who later became a legal advisor for the Nazi regime, was clear that the “dictator cannot change the laws; neither can he suspend the constitution”.⁴⁸

Why Democracy Works At a time when some scholars are questioning the very rationale of democracy and argue for various kinds of restriction of the influence of the people,⁴⁹ it is worth taking a look at the diametrically opposite trend and argument: that more democracy creates more welfare gains and enhances human rights. Even a cursory look at the basic evidence suggests that democracies are doing rather well. As we

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showed above democracies simply do better. Another statistic will suffice. Of the top 25 countries on the UNDP Human Development Index, 24 are pluralist democracies – the only outlier being Singapore (which scores as ‘Partly Free’). And other indicators show the same trend notwithstanding the theoretical arguments advanced by critics of democracy. An American academic has – without empirical evidence – opined that “democracies systematically underperform”⁵⁰ and urged the introduction of a socalled “epistocracy” with “restricted suffrage and plural voting”.⁵¹ These provocations might hug headlines. But they simply do not stack up. The evidence is quite clear. Democracies perform better, especially in the long run. Some dictatorships might do well at first, such as Peru, the Soviet Union, and to a degree Argentina under Perón. But they run out of steam. So, why exactly is democracy better, and are there particular forms of democracy that make democracies perform well? In addition to the factors already mentioned, such as the cost of kleptocracy, pluralist systems do well because they provide an efficient way of using information. Is there even a biological reason why democracy works? In a sense the answer can be answered in the affirmative, and we may even say, that we are hardwired to think democratically. “At the heart of a strong democracy is talk”, wrote the American writer and scholar Benjamin Barber.⁵² And this ability to learn from each other through speech is uniquely human. Only humans have speech and listening centres in the brain. As a relatively weak species, the ability to communicate gave humans an edge over other animals on the savannah. Much of this, admittedly, is speculation. We were not there to record it. But the archaeological record shows that humans lived together from early on. To hunt large animals, such as buffalos, you need to work together. And that is what Homo sapiens did. Simply fending for yourself was not a credible option. When the Greeks said that man (and woman) is a zoon politicon, the translation is not a ‘political animal’, but more properly a social being. In everything, and especially in the wild, collaboration is king. The ability to cooperate made “selfish behaviour more costly than at any previous point in our evolutionary history” and the evolution of language “increased both the probability and the severity of negative consequences for selfish actions”.⁵³ But, of course, politics does not rely on biology alone, it also needs institutions.

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The Theory of the Democratic Feedback Loop Democracy more works in a way that is analogous to perfect competition in the marketplace, “the important type of political competition is the competition between parties for votes. Votes are the currency that allows parties to hold elected office and set policy … Party competition pushes government in the direction of efficient policies”.⁵⁴ Hence, “much like a high-cost firm that cannot survive in a competitive, a political party that imposes high costs on a majority of the voters will be voted out in competitive election” as these “transmit information to policy makers in much the same way as prices transmit information in competitive market”.⁵⁵ The argument for democracy is thus the same as that of the invisible hand in the economic theory of Adam Smith;⁵⁶ individuals – without knowing it themselves – create a higher level of aggregate welfare if they pursue their own individual goals. In the words of Friedrich Hayek, “because every individual knows so little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us know best … we must trust the independent and competitive efforts of the many to induce the emergence of what we shall want to see”.⁵⁷ The epistocrats who postulate that the elite knows best are suffering from the delusion that some – the experts – have a monopoly of knowledge; of what is best. But it is precisely this fallacy that led to the collapse of communism – a supposedly ‘scientific’ system of government. This position needs not be based on the theories of neo-classical economics. Indeed, it was a well-known contention in classical political philosophy. In ancient Greece, no less a scholar than Aristotle made the same argument in the Politics It is possible that the many, when they come together may be better, not individually but collectively, just as public dinners to which many contribute are better than those supplied at one man’s cost. For where there are many, each individual, it may be argued, has some portion of virtue and wisdom, and when they have come together, just as the multitude becomes a single man with many feet and many hands and many senses, so also it becomes one personality as regards the moral and intellectual faculties.⁵⁸

And in the Middle Ages, Marsilius of Padua observed in The Defender of Peace (written c. 1324) When once rules of this kind, the future laws, have been discovered and diligently scrutinised, they should be laid before the assembled citizen-body for approval or rejection, so that if any citizen thinks that anything needs to be added to them or taken away, changed or totally repudiated, he can say so … For as we have already said, the less learned citizen can sometimes perceive something that should be corrected with regard to a proposed law even though they would not have known how to discover it in the first place.⁵⁹

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He also noted, “although not every, nor the greater multitude, may discover the laws, every citizen is nonetheless capable of a judgement on those which have been discovered and put to him … and of perceiving if something should be added or removed or changed”.⁶⁰ Like these distinguished writers, our contention in this chapter is that democracy provides even greater incentives for politicians to offer policies that benefit the median voter. But could we go further and allow the people a role in the process. Could it be argued that more political competition in the law-making process not only increases the level of information, it also provides for better outcomes? The traditional argument was negative and the number of scholars, pundits, and politicians who have lamented the use of mechanisms of direct democracy is legion. For example, the Brexit vote (on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union) in 2016, was described as “depriving the UK citizens and businesses of the Single Market’s advantages”.⁶¹ Democracy, many seem to believe, works up to a point. This was the general conclusion reached by the writers from Polybius in ancient Rome to Montesquieu in the 18th century, who all championed a kind of balanced or mixed constitution, one with elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and, yes, a bit of democracy. As the Renaissance statesman Francesco Guicciardini (1483 – 1540) wrote Experience shows and reason confirms that as a result of its weakness the multitude is never ruled by itself, but always seeks an allegiance and a prop … [Hence] to maintain true and complete liberty one of the most important things is surely this: that there be a mean by which the ignorance of the multitude can be controlled and the ambition of the Gonfalonier kept in check.⁶²

Thus representative democracy is better than autocracy, both in theory and in practice, but even this can be improved. One of the shortcomings of pure representative democracy is that the political parties – as a result of the median-voter theorem⁶³ – tend to have near identical policies. Provision for direct legislation allows voters to reach voters outside the milieu of party competition. If these policies are popular, political parties are likely to pursue them. As voters – ceteris paribus – would want policies that increase social welfare (better education, health, and lower levels of crime), we would expect citizens to propose such policies in initiatives or to reject similar policies through citizen-initiated referendums. So, it is well established empirically that democracies historically have performed better than non-democratic states.⁶⁴ In recent years, scholars have turned their attention to the supposed effects of direct democracy. In a series of studies, the German economist Lars Feld and colleagues have found empirical support for

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the proposition that provisions for referendums have a positive effect on economic welfare.⁶⁵ But might there also be an effect in countries with fewer referendums? Might referendums also improve policy outcomes there? Hitherto there has been a dearth of studies related to the effect of referendums in countries outside Switzerland and the American states that use direct legislation frequently. A smaller study by this author,⁶⁶ found that there were distinct effects of referendums in Western Europe. Using UNDP Data, it was shown that there was a statistically significant correlation between initiatives and lower levels of inequality (R = −.65), with a margin of error of less than 5 per cent. The same finding was true more generally for constitutional provisions for referendum. Thus, countries that allowed ordinary laws to be submitted to the people were more equal (R = −.43).⁶⁷ The study also found positive though modest correlation between higher levels of public health and provisions for citizen-initiated referendums (R = .30).⁶⁸ However, the same study found that environmental protection is negatively correlated with provisions for initiatives (R = −.68).⁶⁹ Notwithstanding these correlations, many, nevertheless, find this type of democracy to be out of control and note that ancient philosophers preferred philosopher kings or a mixed constitution. Yet, many rulers we think of as absolute monarchs who tolerated no dissent, like the ones in the Middle Ages, were, in fact, balanced and kept in check by other forces. For example, the English judge and writer Sir John Fortescue (1394 – 479), the author of the author of De Laudibus Legum Angliae (‘Commendation of the Laws of England’) was at pains to show that Judges should uphold the law “even if the King should command to the contrary by his letters or by word of mouth”.⁷⁰ He was an important man, and his words have weight. After all, he was the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. Cicero is also said to be an example of a writer who wanted a mixed system of government. He made a case for such a system in Res Publica, his chief political work, where he wrote that “a moderate and balanced form of government which is a combination of the three good simple forms [monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy] is preferable to … kingship”.⁷¹ Some would therefore classify him as a non-democrat. This would be inaccurate. In fact, the great Roman statesman came much closer to a version of present-day Swiss democracy as a case for a system of representative government tempered by popular vetos by the citizens in referendums. He defended States in which men vote, invest leaders with military commands and magistracies, are canvassed by office seekers, and have bills submitted to them for legislative approval – but under circumstances in which they must grant what is sought, whether they want to or not, and in which they are asked to give to others what they do not possess themselves. Such men have no share in magisterial power, in public deliberations, in the panels of men who are chosen to be jurors in court, for all these privileges are granted on the basis of birth or wealth.⁷²

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In a similar vein, Machiavelli, some 1,500 years later, too defended a mixed constitution in his chief work Discorsi, and stressed that there were benefits to the “enmity between the senate and the populace”, and found that this mixture of aristocratic and direct democratic rule had “kept Rome free”.⁷³ Machiavelli, educated elitist though he might be, held, like Cicero, the view, the “the populace may be ignorant [yet] it is capable of grasping the truth when a man worthy of confidence, lays the truth before it”.⁷⁴ In other words, the magistrates should deliberate, but the people should have the last say. Sometimes researchers have been carried away. Some enthusiasts for direct democracy believe that it is a cure to all ills. Some have even suggested that more referendums would lead to more happiness.⁷⁵ Such findings are difficult to sustain across a large number of cases, but there is clearly something to be said for more democracy rather than less. The referendum and similar mechanisms provide a market-mechanism of politics. Like in the economic market, provisions for direct democracy introduce an element of competition that forces providers of public policies to sharpen their wit and up their game. With the constant risk that an issue can be submitted to the voters, the politicians have an incentive to follow the electors. Of course, like all other institutions, direct democracy is a “double edged sword”;⁷⁶ as a perceptive scholar has noted, “Democracy requires a healthy blend of faith and scepticism; faith that if people are informed and caring, they can be trusted with self-government; and a persistent questioning of leaders”.⁷⁷ It is because the latter is more likely to happen when the voters have mechanisms for holding their leaders to account that direct democracy seems to work even better than pure representative government. That both kinds of democracy are superior to autocracy is beyond doubt. And yet, sadly many voters are hoodwinked into supporting the cheap slogan of despots and demagogues that appeal to the citizens’ hurt pride and abuse their Thymos to grant themselves unlimited powers.

Concluding Postscript I shall use the words America and democracy as convertible terms … The United States are destined either to surmount the glorious history … or else prove the most tremendous failure of time Walt Whitman ¹

“Nothing”, wrote the philosopher David Hume (1711 – 1776), “appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few”.² Why is that? Hume did not answer the question, but his colleague Plato 2,000 years earlier had a theory as to why free people give up their liberties to elect a tyrant. In his famous book The Republic,³ the Athenian philosopher suggested that democracies broke down because the citizens demanded ever more recognition and rose up against the elite because they, the ordinary citizens, perceived they were not given – what they themselves considered to be – their due respect. Under these circumstances, they would often, paradoxically, undermine their own liberty by electing a tyrant who claimed to speak on their behalf. Angry that they have been left out, the political system would become polarised, “hence arise impeachments, prosecutions, and trials, directed by each party against the other”, and before long the people will “select a special champion of their cause, whom they maintain and exalt to greatness”.⁴ We can now connect the dots and link this theory to advances in neuroscience that connect anger and fear to the human brain, in particular the limbic system. We know that decisions as to whom people vote for are driven more by emotions and fear than by rational argument. In the words of a recent neuroscience study “the amygdala … [is] important in evaluating candidates for political office. Moreover, these effects were independent of either the perceiver’s culture or the candidate’s culture, suggesting that the neural basis for electoral decisions may extend across cultures”.⁵ In short, the centre in the brain associated with fear or fight, is activated when we choose a candidate. We do not have studies of demagogues, but it is a fair guess that the choice of a charismatic leader will be correlated with similar activation in the brain. But much as these insights add new dimensions, the fundamental facts are still better analysed through the lenses of historical examples and political philosophy. Dictatorship, surprisingly, does not start with authoritarianism and top-down decisions, although it ends there. Often dictatorship originates in a kind of hyper democracy, people think they are forgotten, and put their trust in a leader who claims to speak on their behalf, but who through trickery and demagoguery usurps https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111327839-013

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power and rules as a dictator. This has happened throughout history. It was this feeling of being ignored by the ‘elites’ that helped Julius Caesar win power, and it was the same tactic Napoleon Bonaparte used to become Empereur; people elect a demagogue, who claims to stand up for them (like Péron in Argentina and later Trump in America), and sometimes these strong men go on to become dictators like Mussolini did in Italy in the 1920s and as Erdoğan did in Turkey 90 years later. Why does this happen? In history there have been many explanations. And not all of them can be fitted into a neat theory. In particular during the Cold War, democracies disappeared when it was opportune for either the USA or the USSR to sacrifice the will of the people to geopolitical interests. But before in political history, between the World Wars, and after the Cold War, we have seen a familiar pattern that has often repeated itself, namely the slow demise of democracy. Formally, the institutions of pluralism are still in place, they just don’t exist in practice. But this alone is not enough, and, in any case, this does not explain why politicians sometimes begin to erode and undermine the institutions of democracy. So, what does? Partly, it has to do with the character of the would-be despot, who often has the psychological characteristics of malignant narcissism. But often it also has something to do with Thymos. When a man or a woman feels that someone “has been unjust to him [or her]”, the “spirit within them” starts “boiling” and she or he will be “fighting for what this individual believes to be just”. A feeling of “indignation” – as Francis Fukuyama has called it.⁶ When people feel they have been treated unjustly, they turn to politicians who claim to speak on their behalf. It would seem almost banal to cite contemporary examples of politicians who claimed to speak for the people, yet who were feathering their own proverbial nests of unlimited power. “We are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People”, said Donald Trump in his inaugural address. But he did not allow people to vote in referendums, rather he sought to restrict the franchise for groups that were opposed to his rule. The American institutions perhaps saved the world’s oldest democracy. Other countries were less fortunate when leaders with a similar appeal emerged. “We are the people. Who are you?”, asked the Turkish President Erdoğan to the applause of his jeering followers.⁷ Other examples could be cited. Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceaușescu, and, more recently, Vladimir Putin – in different ways – were keen to appeal to the ‘people’; to portray themselves as the people’s champion, and to ask for their approval in notoriously rigged plebiscites.⁸ The same pattern was true in the 1930s. Writing about the fascist and communist movements at the time, Hannah Arendt, in her deservedly much cited The Ori-

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gins of Totalitarianism, observed that, “the mob always will shout for ‘the strong man’, the ‘great leader’. For the mob hates society from which it is excluded”.⁹ For, like Napoleon III almost a century before him, who relied on the (engineered) will of the voters, so too was the Nazi regime (1933 – 1945) legitimised through what Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski described as “Hitler’s Volksbefragung through plebiscites”, which the same authors labelled as a “pseudo-democratic ritual”.¹⁰ So, driven by Thymos – in Plato’s sense of the word – people are so proud that they wilfully ignore facts – and even their best interests – when they feel humiliated. It is this feeling that is exploited by demagogues (perhaps unwittingly) appeal to the inbuilt tendency for ‘fight or flight’ that is associated with the amygdala. This part of the so-called limbic system gets activated when people feel fear, and when they, as a result, feel tempted to follow a leader who claims to champion them, but who later assumes absolute powers. We may understand why this happen. But to understand all is not to forgive all. To appreciate that some people feel left behind and neglected does not mean that they are, in fact, ignored, still less that the populist haranguer speaks for them. But the fact that they feel left out needs to be recognised and rectified. But the way to address their concern is not to deny the people ‘a say’ – as Plato would have preferred (i. e. through rule by philosopher kings) – rather it means the opposite. But the analysis as well as the description of the vainglorious demagogue turned despot who appeals to a people that feels, in Plato’s words, “despised and excluded … and therefore proves untrained and feeble” is too canny to be a coincidence.¹¹ So, writers from Plato, via Shakespeare to Dostoevsky (an A-list if ever there was one!) all perceived with exceptional lucidity how the people would choose an outsider; someone who “promises largely both in public and in public”, and who – in Plato’s words is “constantly exciting wars in order that the commons may stand in need of a leader”,¹² – sounds familiar. However, this is not, because Plato had supernatural powers of prophecy, but because it was his genius to see patterns based on recurrent human behaviour.

Can these theories still account for the rise of tyranny? We tend to think of democratic breakdowns as momentous events, like General Pinochet’s violent overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 – or more recently of Al Sisi’s military coup in Egypt in 2013. But this is not how democracies die, as we saw in Chapters 3 – 5. To be sure, there have been military coups, but that was

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mostly during the Cold War, when the military intervened with American or Soviet backing to forestall governments that were opposed to the interests of, respectively, Washington and Moscow. More generally, most democracies wither by stealth; almost without notice. The despotic leaders do not start by sending in the marines. Rather, they win power – often by using fake news – they then gradually replace the judiciary and other checks on power, and then they use libel or tax laws to silence the press and to eliminate opponents and business leaders. And hey presto after a few years the country falls into dictatorship. What we are witnessing now is not, therefore, a violent overthrow of power by a subtle undermining of democracy. Many of the institutions remain the same. Not much changes formally, but in practice everything is different. Tout c’est la même chose, mais plus ça change – to turn the French saying upside-down. I know one ought to be careful not to selectively cite the past as evidence for the future. “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes”, Mark Twain reportedly said. But it is at the very least interesting to note how the same gradual – almost undetectable – breakdown of democracy also was seen here many, many centuries ago. It is the word “gradual” that is the key here. The overthrow of government does not appear overnight but little by little – almost by stealth. It is the same today, as political scientists Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Franz wrote The playbook is consistent and straightforward: deliberately install loyalists in key positions of power (particularly in the judiciary and security services) and neutralize the media by buying it, legislating against it, and enforcing censorship. This strategy makes it hard to discern when the break with democracy actually occurs, and its insidiousness poses one of the most significant threats to democracy in the twenty-first century.¹³

. We are back to a more historically familiar pattern; from Octavian to Viktor Orbán, from Russia to Rwanda, democratic breakdowns have been gradual affairs not spectacular events. Democracies are dismembered in four stages, first a demagogue is elected by appealing to Thymos, secondly, he (and it is typically a man with narcissistic traits) changes the rules of the games (the electoral system, for example), thirdly he draws up new rules, and lastly the new rules are then used selectively against opponents of the regime, and after that the ruler has dictatorial powers. The general pattern is a kind of perverted rule of law; “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law!”¹⁴ Again, history does not repeat itself exactly, but there is a strange tendency to see some of the same patterns reoccur. In recent years, we have seen several ex-

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amples of rich businessmen who transform themselves into political leaders, Berlusconi in Italy, Trump in America, and Andrej Babis in the Czech Republic. Reflecting on history, it is odd to note how much has not changed. Two millennia ago, the Greek historian Polybius described how powerful men who had been successful in other fields would begin to “hanker after office, and when they find they cannot achieve it through their efforts or their merits, they begin seduce and corrupt the people in every possible way”.¹⁵ “Through senseless craving for prominence [the demagogues] stimulate the masses”, he continued.¹⁶ Sounds familiar? Well, perhaps because it is. Maybe, there is an inbuilt tendency in democracies that the people, in Plato’s words, are “misled by the slanders spread by their leaders”,¹⁷ a phenomenon we may now call ‘alternative facts’ or ‘fake news’. Plato and Polybius, of course, did not foresee Putin or Erdoğan, nor were they able to predict the antics of Mussolini, Mugabe, or Ferdinand Marcos. Much of what went on in the 20th and 21st centuries was unprecedented. But the events followed a pattern seen before and was a variation of the same theme – if you like a tune played in the wrong key, but nevertheless attractive to the many. This is not just an ancient observation. Many readers no doubt, will be familiar with Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America,¹⁸ in which an outsider with no political experience wins the presidency, concludes an alliance with Hitler, and begins anti-Semitic purges in the USA. It is interesting, perhaps indicative, of the similar trends in history, that a similar piece of fiction was written in the 1930s, in the era of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. In 1935, the American author Sinclair Lewis (who in 1930 was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature) published his novel It Can’t Happen Here. This man would “jab his crowds with figures and facts – figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect”.¹⁹ In Sinclair Lewis’s novel, Buzz is – of course – elected. Like other dictators-to-be he immediately begins the dismantling of the opposition. But not by rolling in tanks or burning down the parliament. Another one of the recurrent patterns of dictatorship, ancient as well as modern, is that the demagogue finds himself at odds with the equally legitimately elected legislature. The president cannot tolerate dissent and he immediately begin to complain that his plans are delayed by the talking shop in Congress. This process gradually – little by little – leads to the erosion of democracy. In Sinclair Lewis’s novel, Buzz Windrip is elected on a promise to limit the power of the legislature. His election platform contains a proposal for a Constitutional amendment saying

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Congress shall serve only in an advisory capacity [and the] Supreme Court shall immediately have removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them unconstitutional or by any other action, any or all acts of the President.²⁰

Congress, of course, refused. And Buzz Windrip begins his assault. Needless to say, this is fiction, It can’t happen here, not in real life. And yet, it does. Almost inevitably they dress up as democrats. In a letter to Dr Wilhelm Flick, his interior minister, Adolf Hitler, wrote that he was “steeped in the conviction that the authority of the state proceeds from the people”.²¹ The process of pseudo democracy is almost always rigged, controlled, formally free but never fair. Julius Caesar, to use an example, was a ruler of a similar ilk. “Once in office, Caesar proposed a radical program that included land distributions for the poor … When the Senate rejected it, he took it to the people”.²² President Erdoğan in Turkey did the same. But being a demagogue is not always easy. It is always a good tactic to seek the support of the people. But it is a risky strategy. Bolivian President Evo Morales decided to go to the people to abolish term-limits, but el pueblo rejected his proposal. If you want to go to the people, you need to make sure that everything is under control. And this is difficult early on. Though, once again, it is important to note that Morales was not able to dismantle democracy in the end. After the 2019 elections, there were massive protests against fraud. This suspicion was confirmed by a report by the Organization of American States, which pointed to irregularities in the process. After three weeks of protests the trade unions, the military, and the police asked Morales to resign. He fled to Mexico. The opposition leader, Jeanine Áñez, took over the presidency. After a controversial year as interim president, she decided not to run, and supported Luis Arce, a candidate from Morale’s Movimiento al Socialismo. Arce, a soft-spoken economist who had studied at Warwick University, won 55 per cent of the vote, and took over the presidency. Once again, conciliation probably saved a democracy. Áñez decided to let the interests of Bolivia come before personal ambition. When the history of democracy is written it is people like her that deserve credit. But, like many other heroes of defeat, it is unlikely that she will get the praise she deserves. For the bad guys often win. And they do this because they know how to rig the system to their own advantage. Benito Mussolini, to use a well-known example, did not come to power in a violent coup, but because he knew how to play the system. He assumed the reins of state gradually. There were no tanks in the streets, the march on Rome (Il Duce, of course, came by train!) was not a violent revolution. But the gradual strangling of democracy was efficient, nonetheless. Mussolini was frustrated by the slowness of parliament, but he did not arrest them. He used – or rather abused – democracy and the rule of law to undermine

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the self-same institutions. His Acerbo law was a reform of the electoral system, which gave the winning party the virtual guarantee of an overall majority.²³ What is most important is to ensure that the judiciary is on your side, though maintaining the support of the press is also essential. Again, this requires the would-be dictator to pursue different policies at the same time. Lewis Sinclair’s book, is – once again – prescient, and even prophetic, “the most liberal four members of the Supreme Court resigned and were replaced by surprisingly unknown lawyers who called the President Windrip by his first name”.²⁴ In the real world too, heads of the judiciary replace recalcitrant jurists who might strike down the edicts of the demagogues. All is done by the book, according to the letter of the law but not in its spirit. In Poland, the PiS government recently increased the number of judges, added new ones who were more favourably disposed towards the administration and then introduced a two-thirds majority to rule legislation unconstitutional. When Juan Perón became president in Argentina and faced opposition from four of the members of the Supreme Court, he got allies in Parliament to impeach three of the judges (the fourth resigned before proceedings were started).²⁵ Once the press and the judiciary are controlled, the regimes embark upon the third stage of the process of democratic dismantling. Again, everything is done by the book and (formally) in accordance with the constitution and following the rule of law. Except the rules are used selectively. The late Hugo Chavéz – president of Venezuela 1999 – 2013 – used his newly won control over the judiciary to enable him to rule by degree. ‘Autocratic legalism’, is the technical term, and it is not just a Latin American phenomenon.²⁶ But the gradual overturning of democracy is not just an institutional process. The demagogues also rely on dirty tricks. In Peru, President Alberto Fujimori’s henchman Vladimiro Montesinos kept newspapermen, senators, judges, and other officials under surveillance. He used potentially embarrassing visits to nightclubs as leverage. At the same time, newspapers were offered cash incentives not to write negative stories about the president. The system was gradually expanded. Newspapers were offered additional bribes to let Fujimori’s press-officers ‘agree’ to stories. After only three years, most television stations only showed sport, cooking shows, and quiz programmes: the modern-day equivalent of Panem et circenses (bread and circuses).

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The gradual take-over of power is nothing if not cunning Venezuela’s arsenal of autocratic laws exhibits two features. First, the autocratic aspect of these laws is not overt. It is often buried among an array of clauses or articles that empower citizens or other political groups [friendly to the government], and these surrounding clauses encourage empowered groups to support these laws. But there is always one other clause that ends up empowering the executive branch far more than other actors, which is what make these laws so autocratic. Second, these laws have been enacted in a constitutional manner, at least insofar as they have been duly approved by a constitutionally sanctioned process. This paradox poses a twofold problem for the opposition; 1) Such laws bolster the state’s capacity to control nonstate actors, and 2) they cannot be easily challenged because they have emerged through constitutional channels.²⁷

This is a sly and calculating approach to, what we might call, democracide. In Venezuela, the government passed The Law Against Illicit Exchange Transaction 2010. This – ostensibly – was introduced to limit the power of capitalists and made it illegal to make offers in foreign currency. As a result, companies had to get foreign currency from the Banco Central de Venezuela before they could buy imported goods. This meant that newspapers were not able to buy paper. According to Reporters without Borders one third of the 102 newspapers in the country had to reduce circulation due to these restrictions. A simple technical change unrelated to democracy, and introduced with populist sounding intentions, effectively silenced the opposition.²⁸ And there are other ways. Libel laws are another artful way of silencing the opposition. Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa won a massive $40 million defamation suit against the owners of El Universo, when the latter called him a ‘dictator’. But here we have to stop again. In fairness, it must be mentioned that Correa did hand over power to his anointed successor Lenín Moreno. To the surprise of his predecessor – but to the delight of democrats – Moreno did not follow in the footsteps of the likes of Medvedev in Russia and Madura in Venezuela. In a brave move, Moreno clashed with Correa and in 2019 he won popular approval in a referendum that reversed several key pieces of legislation passed by the previous administration that targeted wealthy individuals and banks. Democracies can be saved. Or so it seems. However, Moreno alienated many voters and supporters, and the riots that broke out in the country in 2019 do not leave room for complacency. But the examples of democratic reversal are rare. This is because would-be tyrants have another trick up their sleeve. In this case, tax laws. Selectively used, of course. In Turkey, President Erdoğan fined Dogan Yayin media group – which includes the country’s most read paper Hurriyat – for tax evasion. The company was fined $2.5 billion. The Dogan group had to sell off major assets to pay the fine. Not

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surprisingly, the only ones who were bidding were media groups friendly to the regime. Dictators learn from each other. The same trick was used in Zambia. In 2016, the independent newspaper The Post was closed. Not, mind you, because of its tendency to criticise President Edgar Lungu, but because the proprietor (allegedly) had not paid his taxes. “In true police states”, wrote George Bush Jr.’s former speech writer David Frum, “Surveillance and repression sustain the power of the authorities. But that’s not how power is gained and sustained in backsliding democracies. Polarization, not persecution, enables the modern illiberal regime”.²⁹ The essence of autocratic legalism is the selective use of the law. Some crimes go unpunished others do not; justice is not blind! Gradually, little by little, this process bears fruit. After a while all opposition is gone. But violence is still not widely used. It is always better to appear to be law abiding, even when it is almost comical. For example, in 2016, the Zambian opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema was arrested and charged with treason. His crime? He had not stopped for a motorcade carrying President Edgar Lungu. This “endangered the President’s life”, the High Court ruled. Its members were conveniently hand-picked by the ruling Patriotic Front.³⁰ Nearly everywhere, democracies are dying away. And yet, not many people are alarmed. Some point to popular uprisings, and suggest that protests in Thailand, Belarus, and before that in Sudan, are signs that democracy is not universally on the run. But in none of these cases have true democracies been established. The path of freedom is usually blocked when the new regime gradually become tyrants themselves. But this is often, and conveniently, overlooked. Challenges to democracy are often met with complacency. Writing less than a century before its downfall – and after literally hundreds of years of republican government – Polybius eulogised the Roman Republican Constitution as it had existed since 509 BC, “The elements by which the Roman Constitution are controlled are three in number [the consuls, the senate, and the people and so balanced is this system that it] is impossible even for the Romans themselves to declare with certainty whether the whole system is an aristocracy, a democracy, or a monarchy”.³¹ Polybius was an optimist. His sanguinity was premature. He believed the checks and balances would prevent one branch from usurping the powers of the others, that “the people would bestow offices upon those who deserved them”, that the Consuls “were obliged to account for their actions to the people”, and that “under no circumstances [would it be] safe for the consuls to neglect to cultivate the goodwill of both the Senate of the people”. In other words, “the designs of anyone can be blocked or impeded by the others”.³² Polybius wrote just before the end of the Roman Republic; his words were becoming obsolete as he

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wrote. The Roman system, Polybius concluded, had “arrived at its best and most perfect form”.³³ A few decades later it was gone. Those who believe that Western democracies have reached a similar or even higher level of perfection should be careful lest history repeats itself. And they cannot be certain that it will not. In fact, it is possible that we will not realise that we have followed the Romans down the path of tyranny before it is too late. The Roman emperors never publicly admitted the Republic had broken down; the fiction was always maintained that the true rulers were Senatus Populusque Romanus – or SPQR in the well-known acronym. Back then, the Romans were entertained into submission. Today, a combination of reality television, a steady stream of tweets and a modicum of social security ensure that the populus is kept in its place. Our democracy will not break down like in Nazi Germany in 1933 or Spain after the Civil War, it will not be replaced by dictatorship after a coup d’état in the style of Latin American despots of the Cold War era. Rather, like in the case of Napoleon Bonaparte, the voters will be seduced into voting for irreversible changes in dubious plebiscites and other forms of skin-democracy, and the despots will gradually replace judges and officials with hand-picked friends, who little by little will twist the system away from democracy. As in the Old Testament, in the First Book of Samuel, the people seem to insist on taking the high road to serfdom. And, like in Scripture they seem not to heed the warning of modern-day prophets of gloom and doom And Samuel told all the words of the Lord onto the people that asked of him a king. And he said, ‘This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, … he will take your daughters … And he will take your fields … and ye shall be his servants’.³⁴

And, “Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel and they said, ‘Nay; but we will have a king over us’”.³⁵ So, it seems, as in the Old Testament, we are destined to drift down towards more and more tyrannical governments. With certain exceptions, these systems of government will resemble the demagogues who appeal directly to the voters. Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğan come from countries with different traditions and with varying degrees of democracy and the Rechtsstaat. And it could happen in elsewhere in Europe and in America too. Restrictions on the franchise for African Americans by more or less sophisticated schemes of gerrymandering (and upheld by judges appointed by the powers that be) are already undermining the rule of law. The control of the appointment of justices in Poland and Hungary and complete control of the broadcasters in the same countries is likely to perpetuate the rule of leaders who sometimes publicly aspire to the same powers as Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The formal architecture of democ-

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racy will remain intact, but in reality there will be no free choice. Democracy is in danger of gradually withering away. Yes, there have been reversals of democratic backsliding. As we just mentioned, in Ecuador, the decline of democracy under President Rafael Correa has been reversed, when his successor Moreno repealed some of the restrictions against civil society organisations. And in Peru, the misrule of Alberto Fujimori came to an end when secretly recorded videos, showing Vladimiro Montesinos bribing officials, went viral and forced Fujimori to resign. But this was due to luck more than to a concerted effort on the part of his opponents. And these are the exceptions to the rule. Dictatorships are not generally replaced by democracies – at least not of the genuine variety. Just think of what happened after the revolutions in 1848 and after the Arab Spring. Nothing in history is inevitable. Some democracies have reversed the trend, some have even returned from what appeared to be certain death.

Are there things that can be done? Plenty, in fact. Historically, democracies do not tend to break down in parliamentary systems (though Italy under Mussolini is an exception to the rule). Presidential systems create a problem of dual legitimacy, and without powerful ‘veto-players’ (courts, political parties, and law-abiding bureaucracies) there is an inbuilt temptation for president to send Congress packing as in Peru. And then there is the response of more democracy. But what are the answers to the threat to democracy? As we saw in the previous chapter, more democracy works better than autocracy and kleptocracy. And the lack of a feed-back loop means that non-democratic regimes systematically underperform. And, what is more, there is a tendency that occasional referendums hold the governments in check, and hence contribute to better accountability, and through this better policy outcomes. “Take a chance on more democracy” – Mehr demokratie wagen – was the rallying cry of the legendary German Chancellor Willy Brandt when he took office in 1969.³⁶ But the involvement by the people must be real and meaningful; it must provide them with a way of voicing their grievances – whether perceived or real. And the best mechanism for doing this is through direct democracy, and not through pseudo-mechanisms such as the rigged plebiscites favoured by demagogues. But, as we have also seen, populism is a double-edged sword, to use the title of a recent book.³⁷ When the ancient writers wrote about mixed constitutions, we rarely appreciate what they meant. We criticise them for not supporting full de-

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mocracy. But what they were, in fact, advocating was a system not much different from the one that might actually be marginally more democratic than the system we have today. In most countries today, the executive is like the king, parliament like the aristocracy, and the people merely elected the latter. But under the system eulogised by Cicero, Polybius, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Rousseau – to name but five – the people played a much more important role. They were in a position to veto legislation. The system of mixed government does not fall short of presentday polyarchy, but is closer in form to the system that currently exists in California and Switzerland, two of the most successful and richest polities in the world. The critics of populism are right to a degree, when they warn against democracy gone amok. Popular government only works if the citizens accept the norms and the decisions. To have a proper functioning democracy we need to re-invent the notion of a civic culture, as it was pioneered by Almond and Verba in the mid-1960s. They concluded their famous study by concluding that a democracy was only safe if it contained a balance of subject, participant, and a dose of parochial culture. Democracy, in their view, means government by the people, however, for democracy to work properly the citizens must save their civic reserves, and only express their anger when this becomes absolutely necessary. Hence, in a wellfunctioning democracy the citizen has “a reserve of influence. He [or she] is not constantly involved in politics, nor does [s]he actively oversee the behaviour of political decision-makers. But [s]he has the potential to act if there is a need”.³⁸ Such a system exists in Switzerland, and to a degree in US states and some northern European countries. It ought to be emulated elsewhere. But institutions are just not enough. The lesson from the past few years is that demagogues are fully aware that courts, parties, and parliaments can hinder their consolidation of power. It is for this reason they act by stealth. And, it is for this reason we need to be vigilant. And, I might add, the critical role of a good liberal arts education might help us – and you – here. If I may digress. Liberal arts education is – at the risk of oversimplifying – based on René Descartes’ methodological doubt; the maxim de omnibus dubitandum est – ‘you ought to doubt everything’. Despots are dogmatists, and dogmatism is the dead of doubt. The dictator gains power on the premise of being infallible. But he rarely – or rather never – is. And this needs to be exposed ruthlessly through democratic means. The best antidote to impending tyranny is to expose it; to challenge any and every attempt to abuse the courts, the civil service, and the law. And this means that we must be critical and try to expose not only Erdoğan and Putin and the usual suspects but also EU countries that try to use the law disproportionately. Poland and Hungary are obvious examples, but one should not ignore the Madrid

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government’s legalistic and seemingly disproportionate response to the évènements in Catalonia. But, if it is any consolation, many despots, demagogues, and dictators come to a sticky end. Many will be familiar with the unedifying footage of the last hours of the lives of Romanian dictators Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu in 1989, and the no less brutal killing of the Libyan tyrant Muammar al-Qaddafi in 2011. Shakespeare’s John Cade whom we encountered above, was not atypical for a larger-than-life populist demagogue who ended his life under humiliating circumstances. He considered himself “the rightful heir onto the crown”. He aspired to glory, “the proudest peer in the realm shall not wear a head on his shoulders unless he pays me tribune”.³⁹ But he did not have organisational skills, he failed and fled, and lamented his fate and condemned the people who had come to their senses and had sided with the established rulers, And you, base peasants, do ye believe him? will you needs be hanged with your pardons about your necks? Hath my sword therefore broke through London gates, that you should leave me at the White Hart in Southwark? I thought ye would never have given out these arms till you had recovered your ancient freedom: but you are all recreants and dastards, and delight to live in slavery to the nobility. Let them break your backs with burthens, take your houses over your heads, ravish your wives and daughters before your faces: for me, I will make shift for one; and so, God’s curse light upon you all!⁴⁰

The last we hear of John Cade is that his dead body is dragged away, and unceremoniously dumped, “Onto a dunghill that shall be thy grave”.⁴¹

Epilogue to the Second Edition Shortly after the publication of the first edition of this book was published, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. This added another dimension to the dangers faced by dictatorships. Once again, autocracies threatened democracies. Many feared that the Russian leader would overrun his Ukrainian neighbour. Yet the war did not go to plan. While it is still being fought as this book goes to press, there are reasons to be moderately optimistic. The reason for this is that autocracies – like Russia – have an inbuilt weakness. We might call this the Perils of Bunker Mentality Go back 225 years. Back then, the word Potemkin Village derived from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Yes, the Russian rulers have been at it before!) Catherine the Great – the then Empress (or Tsarina) – wanted to know how pleased the Ukrainians were now they had been liberated by the Russians. Grigory Potemkin – her advisor (and lover!) – was in a bind. Things were not going to plan exactly. Large swathes of desolate land and a population that had suffered death and destruction at the hands of Russian soldiers made it difficult for the advisor to spin the success of the operation. But General Potemkin did not dare enrage the Tsarina. After all, she had – as we have seen – engineered the assassination of her husband Tsar Peter). So, what could he do? A crafty and cunning bureaucrat, Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the Dnieper River, and rented a crowd to cheer the Empress. She fell for it and returned to Moscow convinced the invasion had been a success. There is a reason for telling this story. For Vladimir Putin, in many ways, is in the same position as his 18th-century predecessor. Like Catherine, the current strongman in the Kremlin is not receiving correct information. It is always like that in a state run by an autocrat. It is almost a defining characteristic of dictatorships that the ruler is not told the truth. That Putin is pressing ahead is not just because he too sees himself as a wise and all-powerful father of the nation. It is also because his ruthlessness has detached him from reality. If we are not careful, we will have many leaders who – like Putin – have come to power through a slow process and by appealing to Thymos. Democracy is the best political system. We need to defend it. And we do this best if we are willing to openly discuss ‘policy’, and if we engage in solving problems rather in winning arguments. But it is important that we do not succumb to the fallacy that all can be resolved by knowledge and rational argument. To be sure reasoning and expertise is important, but we also need to be aware that passion plays a role. As humans https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111327839-014

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we have both higher intellectual powers as well as fears and emotions. Thomas Hobbes would – it seems certain – have been a fan of modern neuropolitics, and his conclusion to Leviathan is as poignant today as it was when it was written in 1651. He wrote, “in all deliberations and in all pleadings, the faculty of solid reasoning is necessary, for without it, the resolutions of men are rash and their sentiments are unjust”. Yet, he goes on, “if there be not powerful eloquence which procureth attention and consent, the affect of reason will be little”.¹ Peckham, London 15 May 2023

Epilogue to the first edition As the weeks passed it seemed that things had quietened down in America. For now, anyway. The reports of violence – it turned out – had been premature. I heard back from Vanea, who had rung and pleaded to escape the looming tyranny a few weeks before. She had moved to California, to live with “a man who could pay her bills”, and this raised whole new questions of domination and oppression. The world was in a desperate state, not just for educated women with bills to pay, but also for desperate peoples who give up freedoms to tyrants whose main concern is vainglorious pursuit of their perverted egos. Matt Qvortrup, in a back of a cab, on Regent Street, 21 November 2020

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Notes 1 Immanuel Kant (1781), Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp), p. 339. 2 Ecclesiastes, King James Version.

Preface to the Second Edition 1 Edmund Burke (2004), A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin), p. 161.

Introduction 1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000111n 2 Suetonius (2004), The Twelve Caesars (London: Penguin), p. 41. 3 Burke, The Sublime and the Beautiful, p. 92 4 John T. Jost and David M. Amodio (2012), ‘Political ideology as motivated social cognition: Behavioral and neuroscientific evidence’, Motivation and Emotion 36, 55 – 64. 5 Karina Blair, Abigail A. Marsh, John Morton, Meena Vythilingam, Matthew Jones, Krystal Mondillo, Danie I. C. Pine, Wayne C. Drevets, and James R. Blair (2006), ‘Choosing the lesser of two evils, the better of two goods: specifying the roles of ventromedial prefrontal cortex and dorsal anterior cingulate in object choice’, Journal of Neuroscience 26(44), 11379 – 11386. 6 For an introduction to the emerging literature on this see: Darren Schreiber (2017), ‘Neuropolitics: Twenty years later’, Politics and the Life Sciences 36(2), 114 – 131. 7 Max Weber (1972), Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr). 8 Max Weber (1988), ‘Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie’, in Max Weber: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann, 427 – 474 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr), p. 429. 9 Michel E. Montaigne (1834), Essais de Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Lefèvre). 10 Samuel Johnson (1850), A Dictionary of the English Language: In which the Words are Deduced from Their Originals; and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers (London: Henry G. Bohn), p. 412. 11 René Descartes (1878), Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences (Paris: Hachette et cie). 12 Baruch de Spinoza (1905), Ethica: ordine geometrico demonstrata (The Hague: M. Nijhoff ). 13 Mark S. Bonchek and Kenneth A. Shepsle (1997), Analyzing Politics: Rationality, Behavior and Institutions (New York: Norton), p. 7. 14 Clifford Geertz (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books), p. 17. 15 Isaiah Berlin (1996), Tolstoy and History (London: Phoenix), p. 14. 16 Matt Qvortrup (2014), Referendums and Ethnic Conflict (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press). 17 Benjamin Disraeli, House of Commons Debates, 31 March 1859, Col. 1236.

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18 Michael Oakeshott (1999), ‘Historical events’, in Michael Oakeshott, On History and other Essays, 49 – 104 (Indianapolis, Liberty Fund), p. 49. 19 Giambatista Vico, De antiquissima, cited in Isaiah Berlin (2013), Against the Current (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 149. 20 Adam Smith (2002), The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knut Haakonsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 275. 21 Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba (1994), Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 15. 22 King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, p. 7. 23 C. Wright Mills (2002), The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 7.

Chapter 1: The Theories of Democratic Breakdown 1 Aristotle (1944), Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1307b. 2 Karl R. Popper (2002), The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge), p. 118. 3 Max Weber (1968), Economy and Society (Berkeley CA: University of California Press), p. 226. 4 Weber Economy and Society, p. 225. 5 Weber Economy and Society, p. 225. 6 Weber, Economy and Society, p. 242. 7 Max Weber (1958), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans H. Gerth and Charles Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 260. 8 Weber, Economy and Society, p. 244. 9 Weber, Economy and Society, p. 244. 10 Michael Hameleers, Linda Bos, and Claes H. de Vreese (2017), ‘The appeal of media populism: The media preferences of citizens with populist attitudes’, Mass Communication and Society 20(4), 481 – 504, p. 481. 11 See for example, Christine Olden (1958). ‘Notes on the development of empathy’, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 13(1), 505 – 518. 12 James Madison (2003), ‘Federalist Paper No. 10’, in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New York: Signet Books), p. 76. 13 Aristotle, Politics, 1304b. 14 Hannah Arendt (1973), The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt), p. 311 15 Jeanette Edwards, Angelique Haugerud, and Shanti Parikh (2017), ‘Introduction: the 2016 Brexit referendum and Trump election’, American Ethnologist 44(2), 195 – 200. 16 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 351. 17 Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim, and Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan (2018), ‘The authentic appeal of the lying demagogue: Proclaiming the deeper truth about political illegitimacy’, American Sociological Review 83(1), 1 – 33. 18 Jürgen Habermas (1971), ‘Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommunikativen Kompetenz’, in Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie: was leistet die Systemforschung?, ed. J. Habermas and N. Luhmann, 101 – 141 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp), p. 137. 19 In public administration research this approach is sometimes referred to as the ‘parliamentary chain of governance’. Ole P. Kristensen (1981), ‘Norwegian power: A review of a research project’, European Journal of Political Research 9(4), 433 – 440. The term was originally introduced by Johan P. Olsen in Johan

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P. Olsen (1978), ‘Folkestyre, byråkrati og korporativisme – skisse av et organisasjonsteoretiskperspektiv’, in Politisk organisering, ed. Johan P. Olsen, (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget). 20 W. E. B. Du Bois (1968), Dusk at Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiograph. (New York: International Publishers), p. 597. 21 Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004). Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn. (London: Continuum). 22 Feodor Dostoevsky (2001), Notes from the Underground. 2nd Edition, trans. ed. Michael R. Katz (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.), p. 18 23 Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, p. 18. 24 Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, pp. 18 – 19. 25 Michael Gove, quoted in ‘Britain has had enough of experts, says Gove’, Financial Times, 3 June 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/3be49734 - 29cb-11e6 - 83e4-abc22d5d108c 26 Plato (1892), The Republic (London: Macmillan), pp. 144 – 145 (440c–440d). 27 Plato, The Republic, p. 143 (439a). 28 Plato, The Republic, p. 143 (439a). 29 David Brooks (2006), ‘All Politics is Thymotic’, New York Times, 17 March 2006. 30 Matthew E. Hirschtritt, Joshua D. Carroll, and David A. Ross (2018), ‘Using neuroscience to make sense of psychopathy’, Biological Psychiatry 84(9), e61–e63. 31 A. J. Hart, P. J. Whalen, L. M. Shin, S. C. McInerney, H. Fischer, and S. L. Rauch (2000), ‘Differential response in the human amygdala to racial outgroup vs ingroup face stimuli’, Neuroreport 11(11), 2351 – 2354. 32 David Sander, Jordan Grafman, Tiziana Zalla (2003), ‘The human amygdala: an evolved system for relevance detection’, Reviews in the Neurosciences 14(4), 303 – 316, p. 303. 33 Plato (1997) ‘Phaedrus’, in Plato Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, 506 – 556 (Indianapolis: Hackett), p. 523 (245a). 34 Plato ‘Phaedrus’, p. 523 (245a). 35 Alexander Hamilton (2003), ‘Federalist Paper No. 1’, in Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers, p. 29. 36 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1964), ‘Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité’, in Œuvres complètes. Vol. III, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Pléiade, 1954), p. 219. 37 Rousseau, ‘L’origine de l’inégalité’, p. 189. 38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnJp0oyOxs. Accessed 18 November 2020. 39 Rousseau, ‘L’origine de l’inégalité’, p. 187. 40 Rousseau, ‘L’origine de l’inégalité’, p. 189. 41 Thomas F. Pettigrew (2017), ‘Social psychological perspectives on Trump supporters’, Journal of Social and Political Psychology 5(1), 107 – 116. 42 Max Weber (1919) ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ – my translation. It is interesting to note that Weber had learned Russian and that he was an avid reader of Dostoevsky. See Paul Honigsheim, (2017), The Unknown Max Weber, ed. Alan Sica (London: Routledge). 43 Max Weber (1956), Staatssoziologie (Berlin: Duncler und Humblot), pp. 47 – 49. 44 Max Weber (2014), Politik als Beruf (Cologne: Anaconda), p. 57. 45 Max Weber (1978), Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 1450. 46 David Hume (2011), The Clarendon Edition Of The Works Of David Hume. A Treatise Of Human Nature: Volume 1: Texts, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 93 47 Jennifer Gandhi and Abigail L. Heller (2018), ‘Electoral systems in authoritarian states’, in The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Systems, ed. Erik S. Herron, Robert J. Pekkanen, and Matthew S. Shugart, 387 – 402 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 387. 48 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, p. 71.

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49 Anthony T. Bryan (1976), ‘Political power in Porfirio Diaz’s Mexico: A review and commentary’, The Historian 38(4), 648 – 668. See also Stephen Haber (2006), ‘Authoritarian government’, in The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, ed. Barry R. Weingast and Donald A. Wittman, 693 – 707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 696. 50 Tacitus (2003) The Annals of Imperial Rome (London: Penguin), p. 32 51 Tacitus, Annals, p. 32. 52 Mussolini cited in Alan Cassels (1990), ‘D. M. Smith, Italy and Its Monarchy (Book Review)’, Canadian Journal of History/Annales Canadiennes d’Histoire 25(3), p. 435. 53 Madeleine Albright (2018), Fascism: A Warning (London: Harper Collins), p. 118. 54 José Ortega y Gasset (1983), ‘Sobre la Vieja Politica’, in José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas, 26 – 31 (Madrid: Editorial Alianza), p. 26. 55 R. T. Desmond (1927), ‘Dictatorship in Spain’, Foreign Affairs 5(2), 276 – 292, p. 276. 56 Desmond, ‘Dictatorship in Spain’, p. 276. 57 Paul Preston (2020), A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain 1874 – 2018 (London: Harper Collins), p. 201. 58 See André Kaiser (1997), ‘Types of democracy: From classical to new institutionalism’, Journal of Theoretical Politics 9(4), 419 – 444. 59 Karl Marx (1977), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers), p. 6. 60 For example, the conservative British historian Andrew Roberts. See Andrew Roberts (2015), Napoleon the Great (London: Penguin). 61 Victor Hugo (1962), Napoléon le petit (London: W. Jeffs). 62 Karl Marx ([1852] 2007), Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp), quoted in p. 1, translated by MQ). 63 Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, p. 21. 64 John Stuart Mill (1991) ,‘Considerations on representative government’, in John Stuart Mill: On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray, 205 – 467 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 401. 65 Juan, J. Linz (1990), ‘The perils of presidentialism’, Journal of Democracy 1(1), 51 – 69, p. 53. 66 Barbara Geddes, Joseph, Wright, and Erica Frantz (2014), ‘Autocratic breakdown and regime transitions: A new data set’, Perspectives on Politics 12(2), 313 – 331. 67 Jonathan M. Powell and Clayton L. Thyne (2011), ‘Global instances of coups from 1950 to 2010 A new dataset’, Journal of Peace Research 48(2), 249 – 259. 68 Ronald Wintrobe (1990), ‘The tinpot and the totalitarian: An economic theory of dictatorship’, The American Political Science Review 84(3), 849 – 872. 69 Daniel Goldhagen (1997), Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage).

Chapter 2: Thymos and Amygdala: Neuropsychology and the Lure of Demagogues 1 See Ted R. Gurr (2015), Why Men Rebel (London: Routledge). 2 Gordon Tullock (1995), ‘Comment: Rationality and revolution’, Rationality and Society 7(1), 116 – 120.

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3 Giovanna Zamboni, Marta Gozzi, Frank Krueger, Jean-René Duhamel, Angela Sirigu, and Jordan Grafman (2009), ‘Individualism, conservatism, and radicalism as criteria for processing political beliefs: a parametric fMRI study’, Social Neuroscience 4(5), 367 – 383. 4 Henry A. Nasrallah (2020), ‘Neuro-politics: Will you vote with your cortex or limbic system?’, Current Psychiatry 19(10), 14. 5 Ryota Kanai, Tom Feilden, Colin Firth, and Geraint Rees (2011), ‘Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults’, Current Biology 21(8), 677 – 680. 6 Burke, The Sublime and the Beautiful, 103. 7 Burke, The Sublime and the Beautiful, 101. 8 Zamboni et al., ‘Individualism, conservatism, and radicalism’. 9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gncW1zqMFgs&list=PLR9ze-nvnT03DwLTtSz4GRGY9c4sFO_hV&in dex=1. 10 Thomas F. Oltmanns and Robert E. Emery (2010), Abnormal Psychology (Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall), p. 224. 11 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, p. 219. 12 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, p. 219. 13 Plato, The Republic, p. 306 14 Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brenswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford (2019), The Authoritarian Personality (London: Verso Books). 15 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, p. 5. 16 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, p. 15. 17 Plato, The Republic, p. 301 18 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, p. 20. 19 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, pp. 25 – 26. 20 See J. C. Sharman (2017), The Despot’s Guide to Wealth Management: On the International Campaign Against Grand Corruption (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). 21 Paul Lendvai (2018), ‘The most dangerous man in the European Union: The metamorphosis of Viktor Orbán’, Atlantic Monthly, 7 April 2018. 22 Thomas Aquinas (1959), ’Summa Theologica’ in Aquinas: Selected Political Writings, ed. A.P. D’Entreves. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, p. 161. 23 Rousseau, ‘L’Origine de l’inégalité’ p. 218. I have elaborated on this in a book about Rousseau. See M. Qvortrup (2021), The Political Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press). 24 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3. 25 Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 5, Scene 3. 26 Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 5, Scene 3. 27 Catherine Belton (2020), Putin’s People: How the KGB took Back Russia (London: William Collins), p. 259. 28 Girolamo Savonarola (2008) ‘Treatise on the Government of Florence’, in Selected writings of Girolamo Savonarola: religion and politics, 1490 – 1498, ed. Anne Borel and Maria P. Passaro (New Haven: Yale University Press), 187. 29 Tristan Taylor (2012), ‘Caesar’s Gallic genocide? A case study in ancient mass violence’, in 2012 Classical Association Annual Conference Handbook (The Classical Association), p. 123. 30 Tucker Higgins (2020), ‘Mary Trump’s tell-all memoir sells 1.35 million copies in blockbuster first week’, cnbc.com, 23 July 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/23/mary-trump-tell-all-memoir-sells-1point35-mil lion-copies-in-first-week.html 31 Mary L. Trump (2020), Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous (New York: Simon & Schuster), p. 26.

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32 Trump, Too Much and Never Enough, p. 13. 33 Trump, Too Much and Never Enough, p. 13. 34 Erin Leonard (2019), ‘Does a narcissist believe his or her own lies?’, Psychology Today, 18 June 2019. 35 Sigmund Freud (1991), Case Histories II: The ‘Rat Man’ Schreber the ‘Wolf Man’, a Case of Female Homosexuality. London: Penguin, p. 203. 36 Frederick M. Burkle (2019), ‘Character disorders among autocratic world leaders and the impact on health security, human rights, and humanitarian care’, Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 34(1), 2 – 7, p. 3. 37 Erich Fromm (1993), The Art of Being (New York: Continuum), p. 117. 38 Sigmund Freud (1977), On Sexuality (London: Penguin), pp. 362 – 363. 39 Michael Maccoby (2004), ‘Narcissistic leaders: The incredible pros, the inevitable cons’, Harvard Business Review 82(1), 92 – 92. 40 Fromm, The Art of Being, p. 117. 41 Erich Fromm (1964), The Heart of Man. Its Genius for Good and Evil (New York: Harper and Row), p. 77. Italics in the original. 42 American Psychiatric Association (2013), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Washington. 5th Edition (Washington DC: American Psychiatric Publishing), pp. 669 – 672. 43 See Walden Bello (2017), ‘Rodrigo Duterte: A fascist original’, in A Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Rodrigo Duterte’s Early Presidency, ed. Nicole Curato, 77 – 91 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). 44 Quoted in Gabriel Samuels (2016), ‘Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte mental health assessment reveals tendency to „violate rights and feelings“’, The Independent, 16 October 2016. https://www.indepen dent.co.uk/news/world/asia/philippines-president-rodrigo-duterte-mental-health-psychological-conditi on-a7355891.html 45 Samuels, ‘Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte mental health assessment’. 46 Burkle, ‘Character disorders’, p. 3 47 Ian Hughes (2019), ‘How to be a dictator: Timely look at narcissistic authoritarianism’, The Irish Times, 7 September 2019. 48 Theodore Millon (1996), Disorders of Personality (New York: John Wiley and Sons), p. 393. 49 CIA Report quoted in Bob Woodward (2007), Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981 – 1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster), p. 234. 50 Wilhelm Hofmann, Anna Baumert, and Manfred Schmitt (2005), ‘Heute haben wir Hitler im Kino gesehen: Evaluation der Wirkung des Films „Der Untergang“ auf Schüler und Schülerinnen der neunten und zehnten Klasse’, Zeitschrift für Medienpsychologie 17(4), 132 – 146. 51 Albin Krebs (1971), ‘Papa Doc, a ruthless dictator, kept the Haitians in illiteracy and dire poverty’, New York Times, 23 April 1971. 52 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8084629/Trump-brags-science-knowledge-super-geniusuncle-MIT-professor.html. Accessed 10 September 2020. 53 Suetonius (1998), Lives of the Caesars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 499. 54 Erich Fromm (1964), The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (New York: Lantern Books). 55 Fromm, The Art of Being, p. 117.

Chapter 3: Dictators 1919 – 1945 1 Sun Tzu (n.d.) The Art of War (Taipei: The World Book Company), p. 63. 2 Woodrow Wilson, Address to Congress, 2 April 1917.

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3 Francis Fukuyama (1989), ‘The end of history?’, The National Interest 16, 3 – 18, p. 4. Samuel P. Huntington (1993), ‘The clash of civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs 72(3), 22 – 49. 4 John A. Friedman (1992), ‘Freud’s Todestrieb: An introduction. Part 1’, International Review of Psychoanalysis 19, 189 – 196. 5 Joseph L. Mangina (2017), Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness (London: Routledge), p. ix. 6 Béla Greskovits (2015), ‘The hollowing and backsliding of democracy in East Central Europe’, Global Policy 6, 28 – 37. 7 Ian Kershaw (2016), To Hell and Back: Europe 1914 – 1949 (London: Penguin), p. 260. 8 Albright, Fascism: A Warning, p. 24. It is interesting that Trump acknowledged the source of this quote when he used it for his own campaign. See https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/trump-tweets-inte resting-mussolini-quote-219932 (Accessed 11 November 2018). 9 Friedrich Engels (1895), ‘Einleitung zu Karl Marx’ „Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850“’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Vol. 22 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berlin), pp. 509 – 527, p. 518. 10 Mikiso Hane (1992), Modern Japan: A Historical Survey (Oxford: Westview Press), p. 234. 11 Engels, ‘Einleitung’, p. 518. 12 Karl Popper (1988), ‘Karl Popper on Democracy’, The Economist, 23 April 1988. 13 On Liang Qichao and the Chinese Democracy Movement, see Andrew Nathan (1985), Chinese Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 45 – 66. 14 Yoshino Sakuzo quoted in William Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E. Tiedemann (eds), Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2nd edn, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 838. 15 See generally Andrew Gordon (1991), Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press). 16 A. V. Dicey (1911), A Leap in the Dark, 2nd edn (London: John Murray), pp. 189 – 190. 17 Carl Schmitt (1932), Legalitat und Legitimität (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot), p. 64. 18 V. I. Lenin ([1917] 1977), ‘Violations of democracy in mass organisations’, Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 25 (Moscow: Progress), p. 308. 19 Stanley G. Payne (1973), A History of Spain and Portugal (Vol. 2) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), p. 566. 20 Douglas L. Wheeler (1978), Republican Portugal. A Political History, 1910 – 1926 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), p. 142. 21 P. Ahonen (1992), ‘Domestic turmoil and diplomatic isolation: The Lapua Movement in Finnish foreign policy, 1929 – 1932’, East European Quarterly 26(4), 496 – 523, p. 499. 22 Lenin quoted in Christopher Hill (1971), Lenin and the Russian Revolution (London: Penguin Books), p. 86. 23 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ([1848] 1975), ‘The Communist Manifesto’, in Marx and Engels Collected Works VI (Moscow: Progress Publishers), p. 504 24 Marx quoted in https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm, Accessed 19 November 2018. 25 Bertrand Russell (1950), Unpopular Essays (London: Unwin), p. 219. 26 V. I. Lenin ([1917] 1932), State and Revolution (New York: International Publishers), pp. 23 – 24. 27 V. I. Lenin (1917), ‘„Democracy“ and Dictatorship’, in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 28, 368 – 372 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 368. 28 Quoted in F. F. Raskolnikov (1934), Tales of Sub-Lieutenant Ilyin: The Tale of a Lost Day (Moscow; English translation London: New Park Publications Ltd). 29 Joseph Stalin (1950), Speeches Delivered at Meetings of Voters of the Stalin Electoral District (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), p. 7.

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30 Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1936), Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation (London: Longman, Green & Co.), p. 560. 31 Karl Marx ([1867] 1965), The Capital, p. 10. 32 Marx, The Capital, p. 10. 33 V. I. Lenin ([1917] 1972) ‘Speech On The Agrarian Question November 14’, Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 26 (Moscow: Progress Publishers), pp. 321 – 332. 34 A. J. P. Taylor (1985), ‘Introduction’, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin). 35 Peter Pastor (1989), ‘Recent Hungarian publications on Bela Kun’, Slavic Review 48(1), 89 – 96. 36 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1970), The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers), p. 53. 37 Pastor, ‘‘Recent Hungarian Publications on Bela Kun’, p. 89. 38 William J. Chase (2008), ‘Microhistory and mass repression: politics, personalities, and revenge in the fall of Béla Kun’, The Russian Review 67(3), 454 – 483. 39 Alexander DeGrand (1995), Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (New York: Routledge), p. 26. 40 Mussolini quoted in Paola Peduzzi (2018), ‘La democrazia è un pollo’, Il Foglio, 22 April 2018. 41 For example, an article in The Daily Beast compared Trump to Hitler https://www.thedailybeast.com/ top-psychologists-compare-trump-to-hitler-and-mussolini-in-new-documentary-unfit. Accessed 15 September 2020. 42 Peter Fritzsche (2020), Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (New York: Basic Books). 43 Frank Dikötter (2020), Diktators (London: Bloomsbury), p. 42. 44 Giovanni Sartori (1966). ‘European political parties: the case of polarized pluralism’, in Political Parties and Political Development, eds Joseph La Palombara and Myron Weiner, 137 – 176 (Princeton: Princeton, University Press). 45 Bert Hoppe (1997), ‘Von Schleicher zu Hitler’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 4, 629 – 657. 46 Heinrich August Winkler (2010), Der lange Weg nach Westen: Deutsche Geschichte (München: C. H. Beck), pp. 526 ff. 47 Carl Schmitt, C. (1922). Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zu Lehre von der Souveränität (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot), p. 1. 48 Marcus Tullius Cicero (1928), The Republic, trans. Clinton W. Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 103. 49 John P. McCormick (2004), ‘Introduction’, in Carl Schmitt: Legality and Legitimacy, ed. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), p. xvii. 50 Dieter Nohlen and Philip Stöver (2010), Elections in Europe: A Data Handbook (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft), p. 899. That the Fidesz party almost a century later changed the electoral system, so that „a plurality result in the polls turned into a constitutional supermajority“ – is not surprising. They were learning from history https://verfassungsblog.de/legal-but-not-fair-viktor-orbans-new-supermajori ty/. Accessed 11 November 2018. 51 Mitchell A. Orenstein, Péter Krekó, and Atila Juhász (2015), ‘The Hungarian Putin?’ Foreign Affairs, 8 February 2015 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/hungary/2015 - 02 - 08/hungarian-putin 52 Kershaw, To Hell and Back, p. 263. 53 Maciej Hartliński (2019), ‘Twins in power. Jarosław Kaczyński and Lech Kaczyński as leaders of law and justice’, Polish Political Science Review 7(1), 96 – 106. 54 Anna Materska-Sosnowska (2010), ‘Poland’, in Elections in Europe, ed. Dieter Nohlen and Philip Stöver (Baden-Baden: Nomos), p. 1473 55 Adolf Hitler (1934) in Reichsgesetzblatt (henceforth RGB), Erster Teil, 1934, pp. 751 – 752.

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56 Benjamin C. Hett (2018). The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (New York: Henry Holt and Company). 57 William M. Johnston (1983), Karl Renner: The Austro-Marxist as Conciliator (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 105 – 109. 58 Karl Raimund Popper (1976), Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (Revised ed.) (New York: Fontana/Collins,) p. 119. 59 Kamila Staudigl-Ciechowicz (2020), ‘Zum Ende des Parlamentarismus in Österreich und Polen der Zwischenkriegszeit’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation 40(2), 183 – 200. 60 Time Magazine (1935), ‘By the Grace of God’, Time, 18 November 1935. 61 http://metaxas-project.com/the-fascist-hero-who-changed-the-course-of-history/ Accessed 15 November 2018. 62 George Orwell (2000), Homage to Catalonia (London: Penguin), p. 247. 63 Lord Rothermere quoted in Dominic Ponsford (2017), ‘Hitler, the Daily Mail and how Lord Rothermere showed he has learned the lessons of history’. The Press Gazette https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/hitlerthe-daily-mail-and-how-lord-rothermere-showed-he-has-learned-the-lessons-of-history/ Accessed 11 December 2020.

Chapter 4: Dictators During the Cold War 1 J. D. Perón (1973), La hora de los pueblos (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Liberación). In the original, „Las masas ascendentes reclaman una democracia directa y expeditiva que las viejas formas ya no pueden ofrecerles“, p. 9. 2 P. J. Fliess (1959), ‘Political disorder and constitutional form: Thucydides’ critique of contemporary politics’, The Journal of Politics 21(4), 592 – 623. 3 Donald W. Bradeen (1960), ‘The popularity of the Athenian empire’, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, (H. 3), 257 – 269. 4 Thucydides (1910), The History of the Peloponnesian War (London: J. M. Dent & Sons), p. 120. 5 While Barack Obama is often seen as an ethical politician, and someone who is less tainted by wars than his predecessor, it should not be forgotten that „a total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen during Obama’s two terms, compared to 57 strikes under Bush. Between 384 and 807 civilians were killed in those countries“, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017 - 01 - 17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbersten-times-more-strikes-than-bush, Accessed 11 December 2020. See also Peter Bergen and Jennifer Rowland (2013), ‘Drone wars’, The Washington Quarterly 36(3), 7 – 26. 6 Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, p. 394 (Bk V.89). 7 See Bernd Greiner (2009), War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press). 8 Ronald Wintrobe (2000), The Political Economy of Dictatorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 12. This research is largely based on the pioneering work by Neil Mitchell and James McCormick. See James M. McCormick and Neil J. Mitchell (1997) ‘Human rights violations, umbrella concepts, and empirical analysis’, World Politics 49(4), 510 – 525. 9 Jeane Kirkpatrick (1979), ‘Dictatorships and double standards’, Commentary 68(5), 34. 10 Kirkpartrick, ‘Dictatorships’, 39. 11 Kirkpartrick, ‘Dictatorships’, 39.

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12 https://research.un.org/en/undhr/draftingcommittee. Accessed 16 September, 2020. 13 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 1948. 14 Jessica M. Chapman (2006), ‘Staging democracy: South Vietnam’s 1955 Referendum to depose Bao Dai’, Diplomatic History 30(4), 671 – 703. 15 William Brownell (1963), The American Mandarin: A Study of the Life of Diem and of the Origins of the American Involvements (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), p. 158. 16 Stanley Karnow (1997), Vietnam: A History (New York, NY: Penguin), p. 239. 17 Triangle of Sadness (2022), written and directed by Ruben Östlund. 18 Julia Köstenberger (2007), ‘Die Internationale Lenin-Schule (1926 – 1938)’, in Biographisches Handbuch zur Geschichte der Kommunistischen Internationale: Ein deutsch-russisches Forschungsprojekt, ed. Michael Buckmiller and Klaus Meschkat, 287 – 309 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag), p. 287. 19 Roger G. Miller (2000), To Save a City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948 – 1949)Austin: Texas A&M University Press), p. 13. 20 https://www.willy-brandt-haus.de/das-haus/geschichte/sozialdemokratie-inhalt/ Accessed 22 September 2020. 21 Martin Broszat and Hermann Weber (1993), SBZ-Handbuch: Staatliche Verwaltungen, Parteien, gesellschaftliche Organisationen und ihre Führungskräfte in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone Deutschlands 1945 – 1949 (Munich: Oldenbourg), p. 418. 22 Mátyás Rákosi, quoted in Time Magazine (1952) ‘Hungary: Salami Tactics’ (14 April 1952). The Hungarian word for the practice is szalámitaktika. 23 Gottwald quoted in H. G. Skilling (1960), ‘The breakuUp of the Czechoslovak Coalition, 1947 – 8’, The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne d’Economique et de Science politique 26(3), 396 – 412. 24 See generally Richard F. Staar (1958), ‘Elections in communist Poland’, Midwest Journal of Political Science 2(2), 200 – 218. 25 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 326. 26 Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Kazimier Brzezinski (1956), Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA. Praeger). 27 Wintrobe, The Political Economy of Dictatorship, p. 11. 28 Samuel P. Huntington (1991), ‘Democracy’s third wave’, Journal of Democracy 2(2), 12 – 34. 29 https://ourworldindata.org/democracy Accessed 25 September 2020. 30 These were Egypt, Chile, Indonesia, Lebanon, Peru, The Philippines, Cuba, South Africa, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Ireland 31 Peter A. Goldberg (1975), ‘The politics of the Allende overthrow in Chile’, Political Science Quarterly 90(1), 93 – 116. 32 Juan J. Linz (1990), ‘The perils of presidentialism’, Journal of Democracy 1(1), pp. 51 – 69, p. 52. 33 James Dunkerley (1992), Political Suicide in Latin America and Other Essays (London: Verso). 34 John Fleming (1973), ‘The nationalization of Chile’s large copper companies in contemporary interstate relations’, Villanova Law Review 18, 593 – 647. 35 Inaugural Address of President Marcos, 30 December 1965. 36 William H. Overholt (1986), ‘The rise and fall of Ferdinand Marcos’, Asian Survey 26(11), 1137 – 1163, p. 1139. 37 On the radical period more generally see Joel Horowitz (2010), Argentina’s Radical Party and Popular Mobilization, 1916 – 1930 (Pittsburgh, PA: Penn State Press). 38 Joseph Page (1983), Péron: A Biography (New York: Random House), p. 233. 39 See generally, Rudiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards (eds) (2007), The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

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40 Péron quoted in Walter Little (1973), ‘Party and state in Peronist Argentina, 1945 – 1955’, Hispanic American Historical Review 53(4), 644 – 662, at p. 649. 41 Torild Skard (2015), Women of Power: Half a Century of Female Presidents and Prime Ministers Worldwide (Bristol: Policy Press), p. 41. 42 Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/argentina/argen1201 - 02.htm Accessed 8 February 2023. 43 Rodrick Barman (1988), Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798 – 1852 (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 123. It should be noted that according to Polity IV, the country only scored −6 during this period. 44 Rodrick J. Barman (1999), Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825 – 1891 (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 353. 45 Anthony W. Pereira (2018), ‘The US role in the 1964 coup in Brazil: A reassessment’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 37(1), 5 – 17. 46 Dieter Nohlen, Michael Krennerich, and Bernhard Thibaut (1999), Elections in Africa: A Data Handbook (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 341. 47 Herbert Feith (1957), ‘The Indonesian elections of 1955’, Modern Indonesia Project, Southeast Asia Program, Department of Far Eastern Studies, Cornell University. 48 See Daniel S. Lev (2009), The Transition to Guided Democracy: Indonesian Politics, 1957 – 1959 (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing). 49 François Mitterrand (2010), Le coup d’Etat Permanent (Paris: Les Belles Lettres). 50 Seymour M. Lipset (1959), Political Man (London: Mercury Books), p. 131. 51 Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, pp. 8 – 9. 52 https://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/FRN3.jpg. Accessed 25 September 2020. 53 https://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/spn2.htm. 54 Nohlen and Stöver, Elections in Europe, p. 674. 55 Sungjoo Han (1974), The Failure of Democracy in South Korea (Los Angeles: University of California Press), p. 28. 56 Han, The Failure of Democracy in South Korea, p. 29. 57 Andrew C. Nahm (1996), Korea: A History of the Korean People, 2nd edn (Seoul: Hollym International Corporation), p. 412. 58 Nahm, Korea, p. 412. 59 Kyung Moon Hwang (2010), A History of Korea (London: Macmillan), p. 229. 60 Hyung-A Kim (2004), Korea’s Development Under Park Chung Hee: Rapid Industrialization, 1961 – 79 (London: Routledge), p. 71. 61 Martha B. Olcott and Marina Ottaway (1999), ‘The challenge of semi-authoritarianism’, Carnegie Paper No. 7 (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), p. 1. 62 Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way (2010), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 5 – 7. 63 El Pais, ‘Vargs Llosa: Mexico es la dictadura perfecta’, 31 August 1990. 64 Dieter Nohlen, Florian Grotz, and Christof Hartmann (2001), Elections in Asia: A Data Handbook, Volume II (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 420. 65 C. I. Eugene Kim (1978), ‘Emergency, development, and human rights: South Korea’, Asian Survey 18(4), 363 – 378. 66 C. I. Eugene Kim (1972). ‘The meaning of the 1971 Korean elections: a pattern of political development’, Asian Survey 12(3), 213 – 224. 67 Nohlen, Grotz, and Hartmann (2001), Elections in Asia, p. 420. 68 Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra F. Vogel (eds) (2011), The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 27.

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69 Kim, ‘Emergency, development, and human rights’, p. 363. 70 Xenophon (1968) ‘Hiero’, in Xenophon: Scripta Minora (Cambridge, MA: Loeb), 3 – 49, p. 17. 71 This account is based on the summary of the events as reported in the Korean Times. No eye-witness accounts exist (https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/special/2012/09/178_75100.html ), and the narrative must therefore be treated with some caution. 72 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 5, Scene 5. 73 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-42465516. Accessed 24 November 2020. 74 Tim Shorrock and Injeong Kim (2020), ‘2 Days in May That Shattered Korean Democracy: The US response to a dictatorship’s repression in Gwangju in 1980 was even worse than we thought’, The Nation, 28 May 2020. 75 Aurel Croissant (2002), ‘Electoral politics in South Korea’, in Electoral Politics in Southeast and East Asia, ed. Aurel Croissant, Gabriele Bruns, and Marei John, 321 – 368. Singapore: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, p. 236. 76 Huntington, ‘Democracy’s third wave’, pp. 12 – 34. 77 Huntington, ‘Democracy’s third wave’, p. 12.

Chapter 5: Dictatorships and Demagogues after the Fall of the Berlin Wall 1 European Parliament, Parliamentary questions, 16 December 2014. E-010838 – 14. Questions for written answer to the Council. 2 Francis Fukuyama (1989), ‘The end of history?’, The National Interest 16, 3 – 18, p. 3. 3 Henry E. Brady and Cynthia S. Kaplan (1994), ‘Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union’, in Referendums Around the World: The Growing Use of Direct Democracy, ed. David Butler and Austin Ranney, 174 – 217 (Basingstoke: Macmillan), p. 180. 4 Stanley G. Payne (1987), The Franco Regime, 1936 – 1975 (Madison: University of Wisconsin), p. 616. 5 Gur Ofer (1987), ‘Soviet economic growth: 1928 – 1985’, Journal of Economic Literature 25(4), 1767 – 1833, p. 1767. 6 Ofer, ‘Soviet economic growth’, p. 1767. 7 Ofer, ‘Soviet economic growth’, p. 1767. 8 Christopher Smart (1990), ‘Gorbachev’s Lenin: The myth in service to perestroika’, Studies in Comparative Communism 23(1), 5 – 21. 9 Hans Marcus Enzensberger ([1989] 1999), Zickzak (Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp), p. 57. 10 Karl Marx (1967), The Capital. Vol. III (New York: International Publishers), p. 820. 11 Abraham Maslow (1943), ‘A theory of human motivation’, Psychological Review 50(4), 370 – 396, p. 373. 12 Maslow, ‘A theory of human motivation’, p. 374. 13 Lipset, Political Man, pp. 49 – 50. 14 Cited in Barbara Geddes (2007), ‘What causes democratization?’, in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, ed. Carles Boix and Susan Stokes, 317 – 339 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 320. The original article is Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi (1997), ‘Modernization: Theories and facts’, World Politics 49(2), 155 – 183. 15 Freedom House (1998), Freedom in the World (New York: Freedom House), p. 4. 16 Freedom House, Freedom in the World, p. 4. 17 OAS Quoted in https://freedomhouse.org/country/honduras/freedom-world/2020. Accessed 27 November 2020. 18 The Economist (2020), ‘The resilience of democracy’, 28 November 2020, p. 13.

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19 Cas Mudde (2013), ‘Three decades of populist radical right parties in Western Europe: So what?’, European Journal of Political Research 52(1), 1 – 19, p. 11. 20 Robert Mickey, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (2017), ‘Is America still safe for democracy?’, Foreign Affairs May/June issue, 20 – 29, p. 00. 21 Louise Tillin (2017), ‘India’s democracy at 70: The federalist compromise’, Journal of Democracy 28(3), 64 – 75. 22 Gyan Prakash (2019), Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (Princeton: Princeton University Press). 23 Myron Weiner (1977), ;The 1977 Parliamentary elections in India’, Asian Survey 17(7), 617 – 626. 24 Samuel P. Huntington (1991), The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: Oklahoma University Press), pp. 266 – 267. 25 Tarunabh Khaitan (2020), ‘Killing a constitution with a thousand cuts: Executive aggrandizement and party-state fusion in India’, Law & Ethics of Human Rights 14(1), pp. 49 – 95, p. 49. 26 Khaitan, ‘Killing a constitution’, p. 49. 27 Carles Boix and Susan C. Stokes (2003), ‘Endogenous democratization’, World Politics 55(4), 517 – 549. 28 https://hbr.org/2018/09/research-how-the-financial-crisis-drastically-increased-wealth-inequality-inthe-u-s 29 Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (2019), Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 414 – 415. 30 Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996), Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). 31 Linz and Stepan cited in Norris and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash, p. 421. 32 Andrew Solender (2020), ‘All the elections Trump has claimed were ttolen through voter fraud’, Forbes, 29 November 2020. 33 https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/23/2020-election-results-almost-no-trump-voters-consider-bidenthe-winner.html. Accessed 30 November 2020. 34 Cited in Norris and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash, p. 425. 35 Yascha Mounk and Roberto S. Foa (2017), ‘The signs of deconsolidation’, Journal of Democracy 28(1), 5 – 15, p. 1. 36 Mounk and Foa, ‘Signs of deconsolidation’, p. 7. 37 Lipset, Political Man, p. 413. 38 Mounk and Foa, ‘Signs of deconsolidation’, p. 7. 39 Mounk and Foa, ‘Signs of deconsolidation’, p. 7. 40 Mounk and Foa, ‘Signs of deconsolidation’, p. 13. 41 Max Weber (2014), Politik als Beruf (Cologne: Anaconda), p. 95.

Chapter 6: How Demagogues Get Elected – and Abuse Democracy 1 Robert Penn Warren (2007), All the King’s Men (London: Penguin), p. 94. 2 Mario Vargas Llosa (2013), Conversación en la catedral (Madrid: Alfaguara), p. 1. In English Mario Vargas Llosa (2014), Conversations in the Cathedral, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper & Row), p. 3. 3 Robert P. Warren (2002), All the King’s Men (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

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4 Niels Spierings and Andrej Zaslove (2017), ‘Gender, populist attitudes, and voting: Explaining the gender gap in voting for populist radical right and populist radical left parties’, West European Politics 40(4), 821 – 847, p. 821. 5 Spierings and Zaslove, ‘Gender, populist attitudes, and voting’, p. 821. 6 E. Harteveld, W. Van Der Brug, S. Dahlberg, and A. Kokkonen (2015), ‘The gender gap in populist radical-right voting: Examining the demand side in Western and Eastern Europe’, Patterns of Prejudice 49(1 – 2), 103 – 134, p. 103. 7 Nicholas O. Rule, Jonathan B. Freeman, Joseph M. Moran, John D. E. Gabrieli, Reginald B. Adams Jr, and Nalini Ambady (2010), ‘Voting behavior is reflected in amygdala response across cultures’, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 5(2 – 3), 349 – 355, p. 349. 8 Rule et al. ‘Voting behavior’, p. 349. 9 Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1963), The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 10 Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture: p. 339. 11 Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture: p. 347. 12 Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture: p. 346. 13 Marta Gozzi, Giovanna Zamboni, Frank Krueger, and Jordan Grafman (2010), ‚Interest in politics modulates neural activity in the amygdala and ventral striatum’, Human Brain Mapping 31(11), 1763 – 1771, p. 1763. 14 Stephen Greenblatt (2018), Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power (London: Bodley Head), p. 25. 15 William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Act 3, Scene 1, 330. 16 Shakespeare, Henry VI, Act 3, Scene 1. 17 Ellen C. Caldwell (1995), ‘Jack Cade and Shakespeare’s „Henry VI, Part 2“’,. Studies in Philology 92(1), 18 – 79. 18 Shakespeare, Henry VI, Act 4, Scene 2. 19 Shakespeare, Henry VI, Act 4, Scene 2. 20 Shakespeare, Henry VI, Act 4, Scene. 21 Shakespeare, Henry VI, Act 4 Scene 7. 22 Kenan Malik (2018), ‘In Erdoğan’s warped world, even intellectuals are now „terrorists“’, The Guardian, 20 May 2018. 23 Shakespeare, Henry VI, Act 4, Scene 7. 24 Shakespeare, Henry VI, Act 4, Scene 2. 25 Shakespeare, Henry VI, Act 4, Scene 7. 26 Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (2003), Informe Final. Annex 2, Lima, CVR, 2003, p.17. 27 Fujimori quoted in Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018), How Democracies Die (New York: Penguin), p. 73. 28 Quoted in Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 73. 29 Carlos Parodi (2000), ‘Perú 1960 – 2000’, Políticas Económicas y Sociales en Entornos Cambiantes. Lima: Centro de Investigación de la Universidad del Pacífico, pp. 204 – 206. 30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24AB4RhswDs (Accessed 24 May 2018). 31 I have deliberately chosen a medical term. In medicine, aetiology is the study of causes of diseases. 32 See for example Hannah Rosin in the New York Times ‘Even Madder Men’, 22 November 2013 https:// www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/books/review/angry-white-men-by-michael-kimmel.html Accessed 4 December 2020. At a more scholarly level see Michael Kimmel (2017), Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (London: Hachette UK). 33 Lipset, Political Man, p. 97.

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34 On the paradox of the white working class’s attitudes see the sympathetic portrayal in Arlie Russell Hochschild (2018), Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press). 35 Lipset, Political Man, p. 99. 36 Lipset, Political Man, p. 99. 37 Lipset, Political Man, p. 99. 38 Norris and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash, p. 164. 39 Theodor W. Adorno (2019), Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp), p. 12. 40 Interestingly the fear of ‘socialism’ was also recently used by Donald Trump, See e. g. Financial Times, ‘Trump says Biden would bring chaos and socialism to America’, 27 August 2020. 41 Adorno, Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus, p. 18. 42 Adorno, Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus, p. 17. 43 Adorno, Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus, p. 18. 44 Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brenswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford (2019), The Authoritarian Personality (London: Verso Books). 45 Max Horkheimer (2019), ‘Preface’, in Adorno, et al. The Authoritarian Personality, p. lxxi. 46 In fairness to Reich, he was less categorical than critics said, and conceded that, „the family cannot be considered the basis of the authoritarian state, only as one of the most important institutions which support it.“ Wilhelm Reich ([1933] 2019), Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (Giesen: Psychosozial-Verlag), chapter V. 47 Erich Fromm ([1936] 1980), ‘Studien über Autorität und Familie. Sozialpsychologischer Teil’, in Erich Fromm, Gesamtausgabe, Band I (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt), 141 – 188. 48 The Authoritarian Personality has been criticised on methodological grounds. Especially the survey has been singled out for criticism. For an early study see Don Steward and Thomas Hoult (1959), ‘A socialpsychological theory of the authoritarian personality’, The American Journal of Sociology 65(3), 274 – 279. For a more recent criticism see Roger Brown (2004), ‘The authoritarian personality and the organization of attitudes’, In Political Psychology: Key Readings, ed. John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, 45 – 85 (London: Psychology Press). 49 Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality, p. 230. 50 Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality, p. 231. Fast forward 70 years, and it seems that many supporters of the 45th President believe that a ‘tireless leader and devoted leader’ is someone who spends his time on the golf course when over 14 million people have contracted a deadly disease, and over 250.000 have died. 51 Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality, p. 232. 52 Eric Barker (2017), Barking up the Wrong Tree (London: HarperCollins), pp. 235 – 236. 53 Max Horkheimer (2019), ‘Foreword’, in Adorno et al. The Authoritarian Personality, p. lxix. 54 Norris and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash, p. 135. 55 Gidi Rubenstein (1996), ‘Two peoples in one land: A validation study of Altemeyer’s Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale in the Palestinian and Jewish societies in Israel’, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 27(2), 216 – 230. 56 Christopher Lasch quoted in John T. Jost, Jack Glaser, Arie W. Kruglanski, and Frank J. Sulloway (2003), ‘Political conservatism as motivated social cognition’, Psychological Bulletin 129(3), 339 – 375, p. 339. 57 The Economist, ‘Binyamin Netanyahu rushes to take on Israel’s Supreme Court’, 16 January 2023.

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Chapter Seven: The Courts, the Press, and the Dictators 1 Lord Acton, Letter to Archbishop Mandell Creighton, 5 April 1887. 2 All Montesinos quotes are from John McMillan and Pablo Zoido (2004), ‘How to subvert democracy: Montesinos in Peru’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 18(4), 69 – 92. 3 Juan J. Linz (1994), ‘Presidential or parliamentary democracy: Does it make a difference?’, in The Failure of Presidential Democracy Volume One: Comparative Perspectives, ed. John J. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela, 3 – 89 (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 6. 4 Charles Montesquieu (1989), The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne E. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p.157. 5 Publius ( James Madison) ([1787] 1961), ‘Federalist Paper No. 51’, in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rositer (London: Penguin), p. 319. 6 Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, p. 73. 7 Fujimori quoted in Catherine Conaghan (2005), Fujimori’s Peru: Deception in the Public Sphere (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press), p. 30. 8 Conaghan, Fujimori’s Peru, p. 30. 9 Charles D. Kenney (2004), Fujimori’s Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in Latin America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press). 10 Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, p. 73. 11 Kim Lane Schepple, ‘Hungary and the end of Politics: How Viktor Orbán launched a constitutional coup and created a one-party state’, The Nation, 26 May 2014. 12 Allan Todd (2002), The European Dictatorships: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 98 – 100. 13 Lee J. Alston and Andres A. Gallo (2010), ‘Electoral fraud, the rise of Peron and demise of checks and balances in Argentina’, Explorations in Economic History 47(2), 179 – 197. 14 McMillan and Zoido, ‘How to subvert democracy: Montesinos in Peru’, p. 77. 15 McMillan and Zoido, ‘How to subvert democracy: Montesinos in Peru’, p. 77. 16 Conaghan, Fujimori’s Peru, pp. 152 – 162. 17 Lili Bayer, ‘Orbán’s media puppetmaster’, Politico, 4 April 2018. 18 Peter H. Smith (1995), Latin America in Comparative Perspective: New Approaches to Methods and Analysis (Oxford: Westview Press). p. 295. 19 Decreto Ley 25418. Ley de Bases del Gobierno de Emergencia y Reconstrucción Nacional. 20 Smith, Latin America in Comparative Perspective, p. 236. 21 Marcos on ABC-News, 23 September 1972, Available on YouTube. 22 Reported in ‘El Autogolpe de Alí Baba’, Caretas, 5 April 2015 23 Juvenal, Satire VI, lines 347 – 348. 24 Edmund Burke (1780), A Vindication of Natural Society, 3rd edn (London: John Dodsley), p. 69. John Stuart Mill (1991), ‘Considerations on Representative Government’ in John Stuart Mill: On Liberty and Other Essays ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 203 – 467, p. 274. Star Trek: The Next Generation, 52nd episode, 1989, The Simpsons, Series 5(1), 1989. 25 Tacitus, Annals, 1.1. 26 Arend Lijphart (1984), Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 192. 27 Banyan, ‘Not Cricket: Indians often despair of their democracy. They should look at the bigger picture’, The Economist, 2 June 2018, p. 56. 28 Banyan, ‘Not Cricket’, p. 56. 29 Hamilton, ‘Federalist Paper 78’, The Federalist Papers, p. 465.

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30 Ivan Krastev (2018), ‘Eastern Europe’s illiberal revolution: The long road to democratic decline’, Foreign Affairs 97(3), 49 – 59, p. 50. 31 Bojan Bugarie and Tom Ginsburg (2016), ‘The assault on post-Communist courts’, Journal of Democracy 27(3), 69 – 82, p. 73. 32 Niccoló Machiavelli (1999), The Prince (London: Penguin), p. 30, 33 Kaczyński, 9 October 2011, Tvn24. 34 Bugarie and Ginsburg, ‘The assault on post-Communist courts’, p. 73. 35 David Frum (2017), ‘How to build an autocracy’, The Atlantic Monthly, 17 March 2017. 36 That Orban had been an atheist and – unlike most Hungarians – only christened as an adult when it became politically opportune was conveniently ignored. 37 Judge Sosa quoted in Allan Brewer-Carias (2010), Dismantling Democracy: The Chávez Authoritarianism Experiment (New York: Cambridge University Press), p. 59. 38 Sinclair Lewis (1978), It Can’t Happen Here (London: Penguin), p. 143. 39 Karl Marx, ([1869] 1962), ‘Vorwort zur Zweiten Ausgabe. Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Preface to Louis Bonaparte’ in Marx-Engels Werke, Vol. 16 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag) 358 – 360, p. 359. Translated by the author. 40 Sinclair, It Can’t Happen Here, p. 70, Hairdo, p. 69. 41 Sinclair, It Can’t Happen Here, p. 70. 42 Sinclair, It Can’t Happen Here, p. 64. 43 The Independent, ‘Trump slams „archaic“ US constitution that is „really bad“ for the country’, 30 April 2017.

Chapter 8: What is the Track-Record of Autocratic Regimes? 1 Winston Churchill, 11 November 1947, https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-formof-government/ 2 Thomas Hobbes (1946), Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Eccsiastical and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), p. 112. 3 Thomas Hobbes (1969), Behemoth: Or the Long Parliament (London: Frank Cass), p. 39. 4 Thomas Aquinas (1959), ‘De Regimine Principum’, in Aquinas Selected Writings, ed. A. P. D’Entreves (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), 2 – 83, p. 11. 5 Jason Brennan (2016), Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 6 and p. 204. 6 Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright and Erica Frantz, (2018). How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1 – 2. 7 According to the Hansard Society. This is based on this organisation’s annual survey. https://www.han sardsociety.org.uk/publications/reports/audit-of-political-engagement-16 Accessed 29 March 2020. 8 https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/support-for-authoritarian-leaders-in-australia-on-the-rise. 9 James I and VI ([1598] 1918), ‘The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: or the Reciprock and Mutuall Duetie Betwixt a Free King and His Naturall Subjects, in The Political Works of James I ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 53 – 70, p. 53. 10 Robert Filmer (1991), Filmer:‘Patriarcha’ and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press_. 11 Jean Bodin (1967), Six Books of the Commonwealth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), p. 210. 12 Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, p. 133. 13 Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, p. 137. It is beyond the scope of this book to go into detail with Bodin’s view. But it ought to be noted that he was a misogynist as well as an apologist for

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authoritarianism. He would only contemplate „elections to the Crown“ in the case where sovereignty might pass to a female, for electing a king was preferred to the succession of women, for that means outright gyrontocracy in defiance of „natural law“ Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, p. 203. Bodin – who lived during the reign of Elizabeth I (she was queen 1558 – 1603) seems to have conveniently overlooked that the self-styled ‘Virgin Queen’ restored the virtually bankrupt finances to a surplus, presided over a country that produced the likes of Shakespeare and Marlowe, and defeated the Spanish Armada. On Queen Elizabeth I’s policies see Anne Somerset (2010), Elizabeth I (London: Anchor Books), p. 655. 14 Edward Gibbon (1981), The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged Edition) (London: Penguin), p. 107. 15 Díaz quoted in Richard R. Fagen (1976), ‘The realities of US-Mexican relations’, Foreign Affairs 55(4), p. 685. 16 Natalia Priego (2012), ‘Porfirio Díaz, positivism and ‘the scientists’: A reconsideration of the myth’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 18(2), 135 – 150, p. 135. 17 https://www.habsburger.net/de/kapitel/der-nuetzliche-kaiser-joseph-ii. Accessed 20 April 2020. 18 William Wordsworth (1928), ‘The French revolution as it appeared to enthusiasts at its commencement’, The Poetical Works of Wordsworth: With introduction and notes, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 165 – 166. 19 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, pp. 165 – 166. 20 William Wordsworth ([1818] 2009), ‘Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland’, in Wordsworth’s Political Writings, ed. W. J. B Owen (Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks), 279 – 373, pp. 335 – 336. 21 G. W. F. Hegel (2008), Outlines of the Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 295. 22 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 258. 23 Karl Marx (1959), ‘Die Krisis und die Kontrerevolution’ in Marx and Engels, Werke, Vol. 5, (Berlin: Dietz Verlag), S. 398 – 404, p. 402. 24 https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-germany-marx-china/no-regrets-xi-says-marxism-still-totallycorrect-for-china-idUKKBN1I50F1 25 See https://freedomhouse.org/reports/freedom-world/freedom-world-research-methodology.< BREAK/>The Freedom House Score is largely based on expert assessments, which – as outlined in Chapter One, can be criticised. On this see Kenneth A. Bollen, ‘Political rights and political liberties in nations: An evaluation of human rights measures, 1950 to 1984’, Human Rights Quarterly 8(4), 567 – 591. 26 All are statistically significant with a margin of error of plus/minus of less than 0.01. All are based on 521 cases. The figures are based on the years 2010 – 2017. All data are from the World Bank. 27 The Times, ‘Venezuela’s Maduro buys loyalty of military amid coup fears’, 18 July 2018. 28 The Times, ‘Czech and Hungarian Leaders „siphoning-off millions“ in EU Funds’, 5 November 2019. 29 The Economist, ‘The EU is tolerating – and enabling – authoritarian kleptocracy in Hungary’, 5 April 2018. 30 Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (2013), Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (London: Profile Books), p. 80. 31 Elena Tereza Danciu (2014), ‘Re-flaming the political union and unionists: local historical reading frontlines’, Revista de Științe Politice. Revue des Sciences Politiques 44, 194 – 202. 32 Donald Trump in an interview with The Washington Post, quoted in Newsweek, ‘Donald Trump says „My gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me“’, 27 November 2018. 33 John Stuart Mill, ‘On Liberty’, p. 23. 34 Niccolò Machiavelli (1963), Il Principe (Turin: Einaudi), pp. 117 and 116. 35 Winsome J. Leslie (2019), Zaire: Continuity and Political Change in an Oppressive State (Abingdon: Routledge), p. 60.

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36 Wintrobe, The Political Economy of Dictatorship, p. 24. 37 Wintrobe, The Political Economy of Dictatorship, p. 25. 38 Quoted in Michael G. Schatzberg (1988), The Dialectics of Oppression in Zaire (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), p. 47. 39 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-51364382. Accessed 8 April 2020. 40 Mill, ‘On Liberty’, p. 25. While the cover only lists John Stuart as the author, he acknowledged in his autobiography that the book was „directly and literally our joint production“, John Stuart Mill (2018), Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 141. 41 Plato, The Republic, 439a. 42 Mill ‘On Liberty’, p. 21. 43 Thomas Paine (1995), ‘Common sense’, in Rights of Man. Common Sense and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1 – 59, p. 9. 44 Alfred Cobban (1939), Dictatorship: Its History and Theory (London: Jonathan Cape), p. 325. 45 Theodor Momsen (1887), Römisches Staatsrecht, Vol. 2 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel), p. 144. 46 Niccolò Machiavelli (2015), Discorsi Sopra La Prima Deca di Tito Livio (Milan: Bur), p. 135. 47 Machiavelli, Discorsi, p. 136. 48 Carl Schmitt (2014), Dictatorship (Bristol: Polity Press), p. 4. 49 Jason Brennan (2016), Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press). 50 Brennan, Against Democracy, p. 195. 51 Brennan, Against Democracy, p. 211. 52 Benjamin Barber (1984), Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), p. 178. 53 Dominic D. P. Johnson (2013), ‘The uniqueness of human cooperation: Cognition, cooperation, and religion’, in Evolution, Games, and God: The Principle of Cooperation, ed. M. A. Nowak and S. Coakley, pp. 168 – 185 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). 54 John G. Matsusaka (2004), For the Many or the Few: The Initiative, Public Policy, and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 140. 55 Matsusaka, For the Many or the Few, p. 141. 56 In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith famously wrote, „he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention … By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it“, Adam Smith (1925), Wealth of Nations. Vol. I (London: Methuen & Co), p. 421. 57 Friedrich A. Hayek (1960), The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 29. 58 Aristotle (1905), The Politics (London: Macmillan), p. 129. 59 Marsilius of Padua (2005), The Defender of the Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 80. 60 Marsilius, The Defender of the Peace, p. 75. 61 Andrew Glencross (2016), Why the UK Voted for Brexit: David Cameron’s Great Miscalculation (London: Palgrave), p. 72. 62 Francesco Guicciardini (1998), ‘Discorso di Logrogno/On How to Order Popular Government’, in Republican Realism in Renaissance Florence, ed. Athanasios Moulakis, 117 – 149 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc), p. 125. 63 Anthony Downs (1957), ‘An economic theory of political action in a democracy’, Journal of Political Economy 65(2), 135 – 150. 64 Amartya Sen (1999), ‘Democracy as a universal value’, Journal of Democracy 10(3), 3 – 17.

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65 Lars P. Feld, Justina A. Fischer, and Gebhard Kirchgässner (2010), ‚The effect of direct democracy on income redistribution: Evidence for Switzerland’, Economic Inquiry 48(4), 817 – 840. 66 Matt Qvortrup (2014), ‘Western Europe’, in Referendums Around the World: The Continued Growth of Direct Democracy, ed. Matt Qvortrup, 43 – 64 (Basingstoke: Palgrave), p. 59. 67 Qvortrup, ‘Western Europe’, p. 59. This figure is statistically significant at p