How to Build a Twenty-first-Century Tyrant

Autocracies are resurgent, and today’s would-be strongmen are using a new set of tools.

By Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
May 16, 2022

A new type of authoritarian has learned to exploit electoral democracy and social media, turning citizens into fans. Illustration by Karolis Strautniekas



A person climbing a ladder up a statue of a dictator.


Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, as the song has it—and now let us meet the new dictators and see whether they are the same as the old. Are the authoritarians who grace, or disgrace, our world, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Vladimir Putin, more like or unlike their twentieth-century predecessors? This is not an academic question—well, actually, it is an academic question, but a good kind of academic question. Its answer has consequences for our actions.

If the run of dictators is approximately the same as it has always been, we might conclude that our strongman problem is not traceable to a specific ailment but to a constant, bellows-like oscillation of societies that move toward openness and then close down. In one standard account, the successes of a liberal society—taking in alien influences, expanding individual rights, and profiting from pluralism—spur a backlash among a threatened segment of the population (usually an odd coalition of underclass and overlord), who yearn for some phantasmal, völkisch, organic community. A tyrant rises to fulfill that need.

Another account says that, in times of violent social change, the most militant of factions tend to triumph, and then the leader of the faction becomes the dictator of the land. Something like this happened twice during the French Revolution, first with the rise of the Jacobins and then with Napoleon’s coup d’état; the same pattern occurred with the Communist revolutions in Russia and in China. Though it most often makes a left turn, the process can turn right, as with Franco, in Spain. In either case, a period of turbulence is followed by a period of terror.

But it’s also possible that dictators represent an ever-changing category, shaped by local specifics. In the twenty-first century, the story would be that, say, globalization produces inequality (or that immigration produces panic), and that the resulting anxiety intersects with the siloing of social media. This account has continuities with the old ones, but insists that the particulars of a moment matter, and create authoritarian leaders of a specific mold. We find ourselves using the same names—dictator, tyranny, fascism—to designate very different people and processes.

Whichever position you adopt comes with optimistic and pessimistic takeaways. If you conclude that the situation was ever thus, you will believe that it will likely be righted at last, but also that the cycle will never end. If you believe that this time is different, you can search for a durable fix—a more equitable economy, a gentler form of globalization, the tempered restoration of national identity—while knowing that the fix may not fix it. The unexciting truth is probably that authoritarians are a permanent feature of human existence, and that an array of circumstances allows them to flourish. Cancers all have a family resemblance, and each has a specific pathology. Although we refer to them by the same name, some are caused by cigarettes and some by UV radiation and many have no traceable cause at all.

But which pathology is which, and how do you tell them apart? Two new books, each with virtues of its own, take on the question. Moisés Naím’s “The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century” (St. Martin’s) is a foreign-policy maven’s account of how recent demagogues have come to power and used the tools of our time—social media, television, the society of spectacle—to promote one-man rule and the suppression of dissent. Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman’s “Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century” (Princeton) offers a social-scientific perspective on the mechanics of the new autocrats and their common world view. And these two books follow a marching band of others. Narendra Modi plays a limited role in both, but is studied in K. S. Komireddi’s “Malevolent Republic,” while Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s “Strongmen” is a cross-historical study, with a focus on gender politics: tyranny and masculinity are tightly allied.

The special virtue of Naím’s book lies in the mordant detailing of its profiles, particularly those of certain second-tier autocrats—less famous than Putin and Erdoğan, but exemplary of the rise of what he calls “3P” (populist, polarizing, and post-truth) politicians. All of them follow a similar, and, to Americans, depressingly familiar route: after improbable success as loudmouth entertainers, not taken seriously by the political establishment, they attract a passionate minority and then suddenly, often by oddities of the electoral system or the management of parliaments, they’re in power. Their apparent clownishness disguises their potency. Take Italy’s Beppe Grillo, please. Naím writes, of one of his rallies, “Stalking his audience with his manic, rapid-fire delivery, Grillo drips scorn on Italy’s political elite, on the West’s mania for overconsumption, on consumer rip-offs, on the haplessness of the political left and the corruption of the right, ranting and raving as he grabs random audience members by the lapels.” Grillo was unable to come directly to power, owing to a party rule against nominating anyone with a criminal conviction. (He was found guilty of vehicular homicide in the eighties.) Grillo’s followers, his Grillini, “adhere to a confusing mismatch of an ideology—part radical environmentalism, part nativism, part heterodox economics, part anti-vaxxer hysteria.” His Five Star Movement, vaguely on the left, formed a coalition with a far-right party, the League, whose leader, Matteo Salvini, outsmarted Grillo and came into his own as another sort of populist role-player, the tough guy, the pseudo-gangster boss, promising to deport half a million immigrants and, well, make Italy great again.

Naím was once, in a happier day, the finance minister of Venezuela, and Hugo Chávez, who took a troubled but essentially prosperous country with a long democratic tradition and turned it into an international basket case, comes in for close study. Naím says that Chávez is wrongly seen as a Castro throwback. He is, in fact, a Berlusconi sideways toss: “From the Italian tycoon-cum-politician, Chávez had grasped that ideology matters less than celebrity status, and that with television you can create a world where style is substance.” Using his TV show, “Aló Presidente,” he modelled himself on Oprah Winfrey, listening empathetically to the difficulties of the people in his audience and pledging change. “He’d fulminate against the rising price of chicken and then hug a woman teary-eyed over her trouble finding the money for school supplies for her children,” Naím recounts. Chávez, of course, had no idea how to make school supplies or chicken cheaper. His was a retinue of fans, not followers, and they could be contented with theatrical gestures. Chávez once walked down the streets of Caracas, pointing at successful businesses and crying out, “Expropriate that!” As economic policy, this worked no better than one might think. Still, as with Evita Perón, not even catastrophic failures (a country that had been one of the world’s largest producers of oil ended up with gas shortages) could shake his fans’ faith. Naím reports that, after Chávez’s death, from cancer, in 2013, his devotees incorporated him into the Santería pantheon of gods.

On the bigger historical question, though, Naím is a little unsatisfying. What’s the difference between Beppe and Benito? Between Chávez and the Peróns? Mussolini, too, depended on charismatic, extra-political exchanges with his countrymen, and Juan and Evita had the haziest of ideologies, apart from a set of repeated populist gestures. Their performances were rooted, as befitted the time, in newsreels and still photographs and tabloid mystique, but were more than a bit “3P”-ish. Are we seeing a genuinely new phenomenon, or just a variant of an essentially unchanging one? For that matter, are we even justified in calling men like Salvini or Chávez or Bolsonaro “dictators” and making them part of the history of autocracy? They often get booted out, after all, by the same electors who welcomed them in.

Guriev and Treisman’s book, on the other hand, takes the contrast between old and new as its singular subject, drawing a yin-and-yang distinction between “fear dictators,” the classic kind, and “spin dictators,” the contemporary kind. Its central observation is that the new generation of authoritarians, whether fully fledged or still aspirant, as in the U.S., usually exploit the apparent levers of democratic politics but use more discreet forms of manipulation to extend their rule. Rather than cancel elections, they rig them; rather than outlaw opposition media, they marginalize them; sooner than start a gulag, they put constraints on Google. They are autocrats in their hatred and contempt for liberal institutions other than the one that helped them into power. (Guriev and Treisman trace the ancestry, surprisingly, to Lee Kuan Yew, the seemingly benign Prime Minister of Singapore for three decades, who was, they believe, the first modern leader to combine an authoritarian core with a civil surface.)


The two social scientists pack their account with meaty graphs and well-organized evidence. Some of what they say is familiar to anyone who reads the papers: new dictators use social media (including bots or fake accounts) and typically arrest their opponents for nonpolitical crimes that make their convictions less obviously persecutional. But Guriev and Treisman advance subtler arguments, as they show that authoritarian rulers can come to power by democratic means and stay there. Some of it is simply the workings of fear: the intimidation of private firms by government threats, and the cynical erosion of what are still exasperatingly called norms. (A norm is a standard social expectation, like the audience wearing evening clothes at the opera; submitting to the peaceful transfer of power is a premise, like the cast singing at the opera.) Yet “Spin Dictators” also suggests that the very forces that temper authoritarian power can accelerate its ascension. As globalization and the rise of the Internet make it harder to exercise absolute power, dictators may deploy more limited power that allows space for unthreatening dissent without allowing real opposition.

Once again, there are more historical continuities here than are first apparent. Napoleon, the very model of the nineteenth-century autocrat, ruled constitutionally and by plebiscite, however rigged the voting might have been. And he was immensely shrewd in his efforts to marginalize or co-opt his opposition—wooing a liberal philosopher like Benjamin Constant or allowing the Marquis de Lafayette to retire to the countryside unmolested, even offering him the recently invented Légion d’Honneur.

The over-all arc that Guriev and Treisman present is in any case surprisingly positive: we learn that, in the nineteen-eighties, fully ninety-five per cent of countries with newly authoritarian rulers were alleged to be torturing political prisoners; in the two-thousands, that share fell to a mere seventy-four per cent. In 1981, the constitutions of “non-military dictatorships” enumerated an average of 7.5 liberal rights; by 2008, the number had risen to 11.2. The rights are not secured, of course, but they exist. As the level of violence in the world has decreased, the rhetoric of authoritarianism has become, worldwide, necessarily less militaristic and more consumerist. Guriev and Treisman detail the malevolent strategies that spin dictators use against their critics—having them framed for sexual and business misdeeds is a common one—and the way in which they may enlist Interpol as a bureaucratic collaborator in targeting enemies. But they also emphasize that being marginalized is not the same as being murdered, the typical recourse of fear dictators. The bayonet is blunted, though a hundred blunted bayonets pointed at a single throat is enough to silence a speaker.

How to reconcile their thesis with the madness of the moment? In some ways, their work is already in need of an update. Vladimir Putin plays a significant role for them: at one point, his cult of personality in Russia is distinguished from earlier, Stalinist cults and likened instead to something as wholesome and fan-generated as Obama ornaments sold on the sidewalks of D.C. “There is no Putin salute, dance, or other enforced ritual, no bible of Putinism that all must study and recite,” Guriev and Treisman write. “Most Putin merchandise comes not from central propagandists but from street-level hucksters eager to cash in.” Putin is seen as illustrative of the new era in his ability to assert authority without ever invoking absolute power.

Within days of the invasion of Ukraine, though, “violent repression and comprehensive censorship”—the hallmarks of the fear dictator, per Guriev and Treisman—made a quick comeback, with people being arrested just for holding blank pieces of paper as a protest, while the Russian government fought a war on civilians in finest Stalinist style. Two years earlier, Putin had tried to assassinate his leading political opponent, Alexei Navalny, and, when the effort failed, left him to languish in prison. When push comes to shove, it seems, the spin dictator stops pushing and starts shoving. In an instant, the new dictators will forgo soft and confusing action and go back to the hard stuff, like a reformed drunk who isn’t all that reformed.

Yet reviewers risk overreacting to a current event as much as social scientists risk overgeneralizing with their graphs. That people are not entirely different from earlier primates does not mean that people are not different. We have, as these books illustrate, a strong common intuition that a new type of authoritarianism surely does exist, one that exploits electoral politics, even if its impulses balance uneasily between genuinely dictatorial and painfully democratic. Hungary’s Orbán, Turkey’s Erdoğan, Venezuela’s Chávez and Maduro, Poland’s Kaczyński and Duda: they all do seem to belong to a class that’s distinct from the illiberal leaders of the previous century. Is it possible to construct a short taxonomy of the generational differences between dictators, and to say what’s new about the new ones?

First, there’s their dependence on accessibility and the embrace of forms of entertainment, even grotesque and burlesque entertainment. Though Benito and Evita played on a public stage, they sought an aura of remote mystery. The history of how Napoleon was depicted typifies this kind of progression: from popular imagery of him as a soldier to heroic Romantic imagery of him as a conqueror to hieratic figuration as he became emperor. By contrast, Grillo and Chávez and the rest remain here among us: they don’t mind being familiar, chuckling, confidential, as long as they can be omnipresent. They understand that omnipresence is key in an era of round-the-clock television and social media. “Triumph of the Will,” Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film for the Third Reich, depends on the Olympian grandeur of Hitler’s descent directly from the clouds into Nuremberg on the day of the rally. That kind of rock-star mystique is now reserved for actual rock stars. Populist politicians, arrived or ascendant, appear haphazardly and then stay on camera for hours.

This is not entirely new—nothing ever is—but the crossbreeding of clownishness and politics has never been so intense. The Russian dissident literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin taught us to cherish “carnival” culture as a liberating force in social life. It’s in the authority-mocking brio embodied by the comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, or, for that matter, by the self-deprecating clowning of Alexei Navalny, unashamed to play video games and to make lip-synched TikTok videos. Yet the social-subversive impulse can serve different masters. As Emanuel Marx points out in his book “State Violence in Nazi Germany” (2019), Kristallnacht, in November of 1938, occurred during a carnival season that Catholics traditionally celebrated: “For the mass of participants and bystanders, the Kristallnacht was a noisy and rowdy carnival that suspended for a few hours the ordinary standards of behavior.” Breaking the windows of Jewish merchants could be as much a gleeful, subversive, Rabelaisian activity as mocking the overlords. Indeed, the Nazis in power gently chided, and even tried, a handful of the rioters for overdoing it.

Today, a rollicking carnival vibe still has the capacity to blunt the most sinister side of the authoritarian to his critics (Oh, come on, he’s just having fun!), and to encourage his followers to express previously censored emotions: You can say (or do) that now! Cultural historians of the future will doubtless note the resemblance of Donald Trump’s manner to that of the insult comic, from Don Rickles to Don Imus, and even the pre-reformed Howard Stern. We were not to take him entirely seriously, until it all became entirely serious.

Another feature of the new despots is how they typically enlist religion as an ally. The classic dictators often had a troubled relationship with the religious establishment, recognizing that their own ideologies were a new, rival form of faith. This got settled in negotiated but uneasy concordats. The new dictators, whatever their personal beliefs, typically make common cause with believers. For some, the move seems purely a matter of calculation; Orbán, raised an atheist, embraced Christianity as he embraced power.

Finally, today’s autocrats tend to have a changing rather than a fixed series of villains. Anti-Semitism was always central to Hitler’s world view. Stalin, too, was a man of cemented antipathies. As the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore’s work has shown, Stalin was a genuine Marxist intellectual who believed in class warfare and the evils of the bourgeoisie as much as any student at the Sorbonne. By contrast, Berlusconi and Erdoğan and Orbán and the rest are essentially opportunists of hatred; one day their villain is the multinational corporation and the next it’s socialism. Cosmopolitan liberalism is their chief hatred, but they draw it as a monster of many faces. In general, there’s an overt quality to the new authoritarians, cynicism turned into irresistible candor. With them, what you see, and what they say, is what you get.

Beyond the specifics of what is newly emerging and what’s neatly recidivist in our generation of dictators, one might turn to the disheartening possibility that dictators of any vintage are merely variants of the larger, permanent type of gangster government. The brilliantly incisive hypothesis of the late sociologist Charles Tilly was that the tyrant merely represents, in more vivid plumage, the nature of leadership in any modern state. In his view, all states, far from being derived from some social contract, arise as protection rackets and largely remain so. In the real world, Tilly insisted in his classic study “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime” (1985), there’s never any “consent of the governed,” just submission of the frightened. The state and its actors are not a security service designed to protect you from invaders but a scheme designed to make you pay to protect yourself from them. John Gotti’s Ozone Park is the model of a modern state. You have not ceded a certain amount of freedom in exchange for protection from violence, since the violence is coming from the same people you ceded your freedom to. Our attempt to come up with a special category of dictators is like distinguishing the caporegime of a Mafia family from the Mob boss of the Commission. They’re all gangsters.

The liberal faith in modernization—the idea that education, the growth of civil society, and the need for a managerial class will eventually limit and lame whatever gangsters may gain power—seems a study in failure, reinforcing the evidently intractable nature of the problem of tyranny. In truth, the technocrats and the managers are almost always impotent in the face of the authoritarian state. Defiance requires extraordinary courage; obedience merely requires default behavior.

If there is something that distinguishes modern dictators from the general depressing run of gangster strongmen in human history, it’s that they make their way through the specific negation of existing liberal principles and institutions. They live to own the libs. Not very long ago, we often heard that the disease of populism rose from within liberal pluralism rather than being a cancer attacking it. Things are marginally clearer now. Guriev and Treisman end their book on a defiant note. Would-be autocrats have, they say, been foiled by liberal institutions, those legendary guardrails: “In more developed, highly educated societies, what holds back aspiring spin dictators, we have argued, is the resistance of networks of lawyers, judges, civil servants, journalists, activists, and opposition politicians. Such leaders survive for a while, lowering the tone and eroding their country’s reputation. But so far they have all been voted out of office to face possible corruption prosecutions.”

What’s more, the authors insist, the ideals of liberal institutions remain potent. “Spin dictators would like their citizens to trust them and distrust the West,” Guriev and Treisman write. “They thrive in a world of cynicism and relativism. But the West has something they do not: a powerful idea around which it can unite, the idea of liberal democracy.” Even Komireddi, a mordant critic of Indian politics, ends his book with an appreciation of what the Congress Party had built before. The rise of Modi, he concludes, “belatedly awakened us to what we may be poised forever to lose. It has revealed to us that the Republic bequeathed by the founders was not a sham. It was an instantiation of ideals worth fighting for: rising from the inferno of Partition, it defiantly rejected the baleful idea that national unity could not be forged in the crucible of human multiplicity.” For all the corruption and abuses, and an exasperating history of missed promises, India’s inherited parliamentary democracy turned out to be infinitely preferable to all else that was on offer.

Tilly himself admitted that liberal democracies—with their “minimum set of processes that must be continuously in motion for a situation to qualify as democratic”—finally transcend the gangster character of state formation. Freedom is not an illusion; tolerance is not repression. A historically unprecedented spectrum of opinion is openly available in Western liberal democracies, and opinion still drives political action. If sophisticates sometimes treat the value of free speech as a mirage, nobody in a truly autocratic society would make that mistake. Meanwhile, our own populist demagogues lie in wait.

What is easy to miss in the work of generalizing analysis is just how oppressive daily life under the new dictators can be. Many people in Russia today, as in the Soviet Union before, struggle to communicate to their counterparts in liberal democracies how brutalizing and simply draining it is to have to live among lies and treachery and the exercise of arbitrary power—how it becomes impossible to register a protest to any specific indignity or absurdity, because the next one is already on its way. Perhaps it helps to have lived through a repressive regime to understand that liberal democracy, not dictatorship, is the elusive, hard-won thing to be analyzed and anatomized. Unlike the proverbial butterfly of happiness, which vanishes when you pursue it, liberal democracy vanishes when you stop chasing it—or, as with Tinker Bell, when you stop believing in it. Oddly, this most secular of political credos requires the most sustained transfusions of faith. The ones who clap loudest for it to live are the ones who’ve watched it die. ♦

Published in the print edition of the May 23, 2022, issue, with the headline “Power Up.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/23/how-to-build-a-twenty-first-century-tyrant-the-revenge-of-power-spin-dictators