The Authoritarian Paradox
Conservatives around the world love autocracies, but where are successful ones?
The premise of authoritarian governments is that with more centralized control over the policy-making process, dictators should be able to enjoy greater freedom of action and faster political results than democracies. Without the constant partisan infighting, competing special interests, and reliance on electoral approval, public opinion, and protection of minority rights for legitimacy, autocracies ought to be, in theory, streamlined paragons of governmental success.
Authoritarian regimes tend to have several relative ideological advantages thanks to their state-sponsored corruption of all aspects of political life, including tight control over the media, loyal police and paramilitary forces, rubber-stamping legislative bodies, and hyper-partisan judicial courts. With such centralized control, authoritarians should be able to act more strategically toward long-term goals and initiatives, enact more coherent and consistent policies, and implement them more efficiently. Additionally, when some policies inevitably do not work out as intended, dictators should be able to quickly and effectively course-correct toward better policies.
Yet the examples of enduring authoritarian successes are hard to find. Similar to the Fermi Paradox—as in why have we not found evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial beings despite their seeming theoretical likelihood—there’s a very real Authoritarian Paradox. Why do autocracies historically fall far below liberal democracies in most political, social, economic and cultural metrics, and often end in spectacular failure?
The most notorious example of authoritarian failure is Nazi Germany. Adolph Hitler’s “Triumph of the Will” in a proclaimed thousand-year Reich ended after only twelve. The Nazis, along with their little brother dictatorship of Mussolini’s fascist Italy, are the quintessential totalitarian case studies: an authoritarian regime takes control with delusions of grandeur, huffs its own supply of scapegoating propaganda to avoid any responsibility for the problems their decisions and actions create, and then implodes when the lies needed to justify their increasingly brutalist totalitarianism become so great that reality can no longer be obscured. The Allies bombing German cities relentlessly and racing to the Reichstag in Berlin while forcing German residents across the country to dig up mass graves in concentration camps and properly bury the victims of their deplorable eugenics ideology is a real wake up call from Goebbels’ relentless dream-weaving of Aryan supremacy and Germanic Lebensraum.
The reason why authoritarian regimes routinely fail is because of their definitionally surrealist path to power. To consolidate control, an aspiring dictator launches a campaign on some form of populist nationalism that claims the nation’s greatness is achievable if the citizens only blindly follow him. This “strongman” ambition necessitates the dictator puffing himself up as much as possible by engineering a public bureaucracy and state media that heaps all praise upon him, while shielding him from any criticism or hint of political defeat.
But failures and defeats always inevitably come. The fundamental contradiction of populist movements headed by strongmen leaders is that no societies are individually coherent conglomerations of like-minded individuals. All societies, even small ones, are politically pluralistic and contain a multitude of beliefs, ideologies, and predilections.
As any democracy will admit, political pluralism makes good politics and effective public policy highly paradoxical endeavors where even well-intended efforts to improve society and peoples’ lives routinely face failure from differences in opinion or perspective. Every policy and governmental choice inherently creates winners and losers to at least a tiny degree, both literally in socio-economic outcomes and figuratively inside the minds of offended and disgruntled individuals within disparate demographic factions. Policies proposed as “economically efficient” by some might be deemed ethically or morally repugnant by others, and even the wisest technocrats occasionally implement seemingly benevolent policies that reveal wishful thinking or faulty logic once facing real-world application. Other policies originally designed to promote civic morals or ethical purity may become political controversies, discriminatory injustices, or simply indefensible wastes of money and resources. Every political leader makes some mistakes whether they’re crafting small, wonky policies or attempting large-scale social transformation, and when these failures come very rarely can a self-obsessed dictator meticulously maintaining a cult of personality cope with the public embarrassment.
This leads to widespread scapegoating both at home and abroad to avoid owning up to any mistake, no matter how small, and often includes persecuting ethnic or religious minorities, blaming other external states who must be conspiring against the nation, or, most often, both. Anything to preserve the dictator’s shallow ego. However, phantasmagoric scapegoating ultimately can’t solve a nation’s fundamental problems, and dictators’ “I alone can fix it” mythology necessitates escalating commitment to whatever flawed national programs they promised would bring greatness with a tighter grip on the media to hide evidence that the national goals are not being met. Critics who publicize the cracks in the strongman facade get punished with corrupt applications of state power, and increasingly obvious lies, self-destructive purges of the few still-loyal dissenters capable of problem-solving, and desperate hail mary policies of political sadism follow.
This pattern is why authoritarian regimes unsurprisingly tend to resort to external military campaigns for short-term fixes of declining domestic approval, souring public morale, and spreading economic malaise. However, because typically at this point every adviser or bureaucrat willing to speak truth to power has been silenced in one way or another, the war is badly waged by the remaining yes-men who have been promoted past their competence on account of their brown-nosing rather than any expertise or intellectual sagacity. The basic premise of political unilateralism inevitably creates the bureaucratic culture of fear, lies, paranoia, backstabbing, boot-licking, self-destructive egotism, and absurd hubris that ultimately brings it down.
This is why personalist authoritarian states in particular rarely last longer than their dictators (North Korea’s hereditary dictatorship is an odd outlier) because when state power is controlled largely according to the whims and foibles of one temperamentally and characteristically sociopathic eccentric, a power vacuum is inevitable. There are many examples of states adopting more liberal governance following the death of a personalist dictator, and even in cases when a new dictator takes over they quickly inject their own personal whims and foibles into the application of the state’s power after a big, murderous or incarceratory purge to both eliminate any political rivals and install their own loyalists.
The pleasant part of liberal democracy is that when there is a gulf between the promises of leadership and the results of their efforts, free speech and voting allow a nation to try something or someone new before the wounded, ambitious autocrat can double-down his oppressive power-grabbing with a murder spree. The numerous checks and balances foundationally designed into constitutional democracies along with the legal requirement of at least a plurality of public approval mean that democracies are much more institutionally protected from psychopaths. Donald Trump was certainly a wannabe dictator, but fortunately our government is democratic enough that his most corrupt instincts and desires were curbed long enough for an election to replace him. Decision-making may be much institutionally slower in democracies, but the same conditions in autocracies that allow them to make good decisions fast also allow them to make bad decisions fast.
Democracies are also much better at ideologically handling the occasionally needed course-correction because the state’s entire media apparatus is not based upon pretending the dictator is a magnificent genius who is never wrong and will never lead the nation astray as long as mindless loyalty is maintained above any other civic value. Because there are elections, leaders in democratic governments do not have to intrinsically personalize literally every development in domestic politics and foreign policy, and can more fluidly change with evolving current events and public opinion.
Personalized politics is obviously what’s driving Vladimir Putin’s current efforts to invade Ukraine. Years of economic mismanagement and bewildering corruption in Russia has forced Putin time and time again to invade a nearby neighbor to reverse sinking approval ratings, and this year it was Ukraine’s turn. Brutal invasions and forced patriotism are his only political crutch because his government doesn’t really have a legitimate mandate from its people. The Putin regime depends on poisoning its political rivals and pushing them out windows on tall buildings to continue winning rigged elections because his little ego can’t endure democracy or giving Russian citizens any other choice of leadership.
Unsurprisingly, Putin’s inner circle of brown-nosing yes men have become such surrealist flatterers that Putin has spectacularly and disastrously miscalculated the Ukrainians’ will to preserve their sovereign democracy, and entirely misjudged his kleptocratic military’s capability of achieving his strategic goals. Putin’s perfunctory conferences on the eve of the invasion with visibly nervous underlings endorsing his made up rationales for “liberating” Ukrainians telling him the inaccurate things he wanted to hear in very large rooms with preposterously long tables made Putin like a strong, smart leader, but it sure backfired. The strongman theatrics with his shirtless horse-riding jaunts, participation award hockey games, military parades, stuffed ballots, and fake news have at last met reality.
This is why successful authoritarian states are so hard to find. Autocracies and their populist nationalisms are mere façades for egotistical psychopaths to keep political power by any means necessary despite subpar economic and social performances. Unfortunately, nations continue giving authoritarianism a try because wannabe dictators can fool gullible conservatives both domestically and abroad who have weak critical thinking skills and don’t realize that of course totalitarian regimes APPEAR effective, strong, masculine, or whatever other adjective they’re trying to project after they’ve intimidated every media source into helping them orchestrate their nationalist choreography. It doesn’t take a full national saturation of pavlovian propaganda long before the dictator’s dupes start believing the country’s minorities run an invisible yet omnipotent cabal, or that their racial or nationalist identity affords them some exclusive, personal significance, or, eventually—like in North Korea—that the dictator golfs nothing but holes-in-one and doesn’t poop. It’s not like dictators are going to allow media coverage of things that don’t glorify the regime, or permit dissenting opinions on the country’s direction. A very contemporary example of this was the recent Hungarian election in which authoritarian Victor Orban’s challenger got a whopping five minutes of airtime on state television throughout the entire campaign despite wall-to-wall, free and fawning coverage for Orban.
Autocratic, nationalistic propaganda is ultimately a dumb carnival trick for low-information people to build a movement large enough that a nation’s politically apathetic citizens don’t join the citizens with liberal values in protesting the incremental loss of rights and freedom that autocracies inevitably institute. Which is why it’s frustrating that people in liberal democracies who enjoy the freedom of robust, consensus-driven bureaucracies and law-based institutions would be supportive of and apologetic for dictators such as Vladimir Putin.
Now, there is one example of a seemingly successful autocracy you’re probably wondering about: China. But is China REALLY successful?
The Chinese Communist Party came to power after a long civil war that killed tens of millions of Chinese citizens. When the CCP won, they drove the country as well as hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens’ lives into the ground by abetting Mao Zedong’s personalistic dictatorship. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” prioritized a plethora of harebrained industrialization and collectivization schemes including forcing uneducated, rural farmers to take all their metal belongings and throw them into backyard furnaces to create low quality steel instead of farming food so that historians can only guess how many millions of people starved to death (estimates range from 15-55 million). Even when the Chinese officials knew the GLP was a failure, they refused foreign aid and food in order to try and save face.
When Mao died in 1976, China experienced an economic “miracle” that many have attributed to the CCP’s technocratic, long-term thinking to strategically and methodically fashion China into a global superpower, but it might better be viewed as simply a country of a billion people no longer starving and murdering tens of millions of its own people in absurd collectivization schemes.
Is it objectively worthwhile or ideologically meaningful for an autocracy to keep power long-term if its people don’t have rights and are relatively unhappy compared to peer nations? Sure, China can build things fast with unfettered eminent domain, but it also ruins familial wealth and displaces thousands of citizens from their ancestral homes. Sure, China can collectivize resources with its nominal communism, and force millions into poverty, concentration camps, and death, but is it really impressive for autocracies to callously zero out human life?
Internally, there are plenty of Chinese demographic trends that portend mass unrest in coming years and decades. China has a massively aging population fueling speculation China will get old before it gets rich and struggle with the economic liabilities of not having enough young people to cover the retirement costs and slipping economic growth rates. China also has millions more single men than women, a culturally problematic surplus of young testosterone. China is also a very pluralistic society without as much internal unity as the government would like to pretend to the world. There are several large minority groups that the government is actively oppressing with a heavy hand, namely China’s Muslim populations including most notably the Uyghurs, as well as Tibetans and democracy-enjoying residents from Hong Kong. Taiwan is also a huge potential catastrophe for China in waiting, and whether or not President Xi decides to forcibly invade or politically annex the island could become as big a political catastrophe as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has turned out to be.
The more that Xi governs towards his conception of the personal legacy he wants to build for himself, the more likely it is that he’ll make a major miscalculation or lose a big gamble that hurts China. Also, the more wealthy China becomes and the bigger its middle class grows, its people will demand greater personal freedoms that will inevitably threaten the CCP’s totalitarian population control. A giant population that can fuel economic growth can also fuel mass protests and revolutions.
China may seem like an autocratic success story for now, but there are many reasons to not be bullish on Chinese totalitarianism for long, most importantly because autocracy is just bad governance.
Check out these links to some of my other recently published writings!
Here’s a Biblical satire I published at The Haven:
Elisha From The Bible Explains Why He Made Two Bears Maul Forty-Two Children
Here’s a poem I published at The Lark:
And here’s a piece I published on The Halfway Post:
The Apology Paul Ryan Owes America
Thanks for your eyeball attention!
-Dash MacIntyre
Follow me on Twitter at @HalfwayPost to interrupt your daily doomscrolling with jokes and liberal humor!