The Paradox Of Authoritarianism: Where Are History’s Successful Dictatorships?
Conservatives in America increasingly admire autocracies, but where are the 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, reliance on electoral approval via public opinion, or protections of minority rights, autocracies ought to be, in theory, streamlined paragons of governmental success. That’s what wannabe dictators and their brown-nosing bootlickers believe.
Authoritarian regimes can have some relative ideological advantages thanks to the state-sponsored corruption of all aspects of political life they impose on their people—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.
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 seemingly theoretical likelihood—there’s a very apparent “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 infamous example of authoritarian failure is Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler’s “Triumph of the Will” and vowed thousand-year Reich ended after only twelve. The Nazis, along with their little brother of Mussolini’s Italy, are the quintessential authoritarian case studies: a dictatorship 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 and propagandized.
The Allies bombing German cities relentlessly, and racing each other to the Reichstag in Berlin while forcing German residents across the country to dig up the mass graves surrounding concentration camps to see and smell the results of their deplorable eugenics ideology is a real wake up call from Goebbels’s 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 (usually ethnic or religious) nationalism that claims the nation’s greatness is achievable if the citizens only blindly follow him. This “strongman” ambition featured 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 weakness.
But failures and defeats always inevitably come. The fundamental contradiction of populist movements headed by strongmen leaders is that no societies are coherent conglomerations of hive-minded individuals willing to endure any hardship for the good of the motherland. All societies, even small ones, are politically pluralistic and contain a multitude of beliefs, ideologies, and lifestyle predilections.
As any democracy will admit, political pluralism can often make “good politics” and effective public policy highly paradoxical endeavors where even well-intended efforts to improve society and citizens’ lives routinely face electoral obstacles and bureaucratic failures due to differences in opinion and perspective throughout the government’s legislative and executive processes.
Every policy and bureaucratic choice inherently creates winners and losers, at least to 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.
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 of being wrong about something. Smart dictators should be able to quickly and effectively course-correct toward better policies, but the narcissistic, sociopathic kinds of people who become dictators don’t ultimately care about the policies as much as how the policies affect their image.
Which leads most dictators to doubling-down on bad policies, often followed with severe scapegoating of alleged enemies both at home and abroad, all to avoid owning up to a single mistake, no matter how miniscule. Unfortunately for humans throughout all of history, this usually means persecution of ethnic or religious minorities, belligerence toward external states that dictators claim must be conspiring against them, or both. Whatever it takes to preserve the dictator’s shallow ego.
However, phantasmagoric scapegoating ultimately cannot 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, followed by increasingly conspicuous lies, self-destructive purges of the few still-loyal dissenters capable of problem-solving, and, eventually, desperate Hail Mary policies of outright political sadism.
This pattern shows why authoritarian regimes tend to resort to external military campaigns for short-term fixes of declining domestic approval, souring public morale, and growing economic malaise. Ginned up patriotism for suffering and dead soldiers abroad is a powerful domestic distraction. 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, bootlicking, self-destructive egotism, and absurd hubris that ultimately brings it down.
This is why personalist authoritarian states rarely last longer than their dictators — North Korea’s hereditary, communist dictatorship is an odd, historically unique outlier—because when state power is controlled largely according to the whims and foibles of one characteristically narcissistic eccentric, a power vacuum is inevitable when the dictator dies. Often nations adopt more liberal governance following the death of a personalist dictator, and, when they don’t, the succeeding dictators typically institute a big incarceratory or murderous purge to both eliminate political rivals and install their own loyalists to inject their own personalist whims and foibles into the application of the state’s power, which puts their own, new totalitarian regime on borrowed time.
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 leader can double-down their 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, America’s government is democratic enough that his most corrupt instincts and desires were curbed long enough for an election to replace him. A second Trump term would obviously test American institutions much further, although —sadistic political violence from his underlings exceptingxs—he’d only Constitutionally have four more years in power.
Decision-making overall 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.
Liberal democracies are also much better at ideologically handling the occasionally needed course-correction because their penchant for free speech means that the state’s entire media apparatus is not based upon pretending the leader 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 or moral value. Because there are frequent 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. This makes for better, more stable internal politics.
Personalized totalitarianism is obviously what’s driving Vladimir Putin’s disastrous and sociopathic war in Ukraine. Years of economic mismanagement and bewildering corruption in Russia have forced Putin time and time again to invade nearby neighbors to reverse sinking approval ratings, and this time it was Ukraine’s turn. Brutal invasions and forced wartime patriotism are his only political crutch because his government doesn’t institute free and fair elections, and Putin’s regime therefore has no legitimate mandate from its people. His grasp on power depends on arresting, poisoning, and pushing out of windows his political rivals because his little ego can’t endure democracy or giving Russian citizens any other choice of leadership, and when Russia continues suffering from kleptocracy and a lower standard of living than most of the rest of Europe, Putin must distract the Russian people with wars against their smaller neighbors while blaming America, NATO, the EU, and the West as a whole.
Unsurprisingly, Putin’s inner circle is now full of brown-nosing yes men so conditioned toward surrealist flattery that Putin has spectacularly and disastrously miscalculated and mismanaged his invasion of Ukraine. Putin evidently received the doctored intelligence reports on Ukrainian capabilities and patriotism he wanted — rather than needed — to hear, and had no idea how much kleptocratic rot, theft, and fraud had hollowed out the Russian military’s effectiveness. Putin’s perfunctory conferences on the eve of the invasion with visibly nervous underlings endorsing his made up rationales for “liberating” Ukrainians in very large rooms with preposterously long tables made Putin look like a strong, smart leader, but it sure backfired. His strongman theatrics with shirtless horse-riding jaunts, participation award hockey games, military parades, stuffed ballots, and fake news have at last met reality with his military bogged down in eastern Ukraine getting crippled for a generation.
This is why successful authoritarian states are so hard to find. Autocracies and their nationalisms are mere façades for egotistical psychopaths to keep political power by any means necessary despite the inevitable subpar economic and social performances that come from just one temperamental person making all the decisions and allowing little or no dissension.
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 intimidating every media source into helping them orchestrate their nationalist choreographies. 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 policies or direction.
The American conservatives enamored with Putin’s projections of strength and militaristic masculinity are fools falling for Putin’s obvious fake news, and Donald Trump is chief among them. The US military might enlist female, gay and trans soldiers, have poetry readings on some base somewhere, and do other things conservatives feel aren’t “masculine,” but, if Russia is effectively stalemated against a Ukrainian military using America’s aged, hand-me-down weapons systems built in the 90s, imagine what spectacular damage the US could do to the entire Russian frontline with a sortie of a couple hundred F-35s, some stealth bombers, the Navy’s Mediterranean 6th Fleet, and the US military’s unparalleled combined arms capabilities. The US could find and destroy every piece of Russia’s military hardware emitting the faintest electromagnetic signals in a couple of hours, and Russian soldiers everywhere would be abandoning their transport vehicles, tanks, trenches and bases to flee Ukraine on foot. That is real strength, not Putin’s propaganda videos of shirtless Russian soldiers that Trump, GOP members of Congress, and Fox News hosts fawn over.
Autocratic, nationalistic propaganda is ultimately a pandering carnival trick for morons, which is why it’s frustrating that people in liberal democracies such as America, who enjoy the robust freedoms of consensus-driven bureaucracies and law-based institutions, would be supportive of and apologetic for dictators like Putin.
Now, there is one example of a seemingly successful autocracy you’re probably wondering about: China. But is China actually successful?
The Chinese Communist Party came to power after a long civil war (which overlapped with a war against imperial Japan) that killed tens of millions of Chinese citizens. When the CCP won, it drove the country into the ground by abetting Mao Zedong’s personalistic dictatorship. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” prioritized a plethora of harebrained industrialization and collectivization schemes — like forcing uneducated, rural farmers to take all their metal belongings and throw them into backyard furnaces to create low quality steel instead of farming for food — so that historians can only guess how many millions of Chinese starved to death (estimates vary wildly from 15-55 million). Even when the Chinese officials knew the Great Leap was a failure, they refused foreign aid and food in order to try and save face. Classic authoritarian move: never admit fault, no matter how many citizens die.
When Mao died in 1976, China experienced an economic “miracle” that many have attributed to the CCP’s technocratic, long-term plan 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 people in absurd collectivization schemes.
Is it impressive that the average Chinese citizen is a fraction as wealthy as the average American or Western European? The better response to China’s economy catching up to Japan and the US in terms of GDP might more accurately be “where have they been?” This outcome is inevitable for a country with the largest population in the world if it stops sabotaging itself. What would actually be an impressive economic miracle is if a country with way fewer people than the US, such as Argentina, caught up to America’s GDP.
Is it impressive that China has developed a strong technological industrial base by stealing Western technology and intellectual property? Wouldn’t it be much more impressive if it had been organically grown?
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 communist mandates, and force millions into concentration camps, and shut down the entire society to hide its pandemic failures, but is it really impressive for autocracies to callously zero out human life and liberty on their economic spreadsheets?
It’s important to remember that the CCP has only been around since 1921, and the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. That’s a mere 74 years. Let’s see where the CCP is when it reaches the current age of America’s democracy.
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 that China has peaked, and is now getting old before rich. There are many political liabilities of not having enough young people to cover the rising costs of retirement and old-age healthcare, or fill the jobs of their grandparents to keep up economic progress. China’s GDP “miracle” has stalled out, and is sitting on a huge real estate bubble because building huge apartment buildings and whole cities no one is living in was a sneaky way for the CCP to keep its economic growth statistics misleadingly high. China’s one-child policy and social sexism has also led to millions more single men than women, which is a very culturally problematic surplus of young, disgruntled testosterone. America is suffering from increasing numbers of self-described “involuntary celibate” incels, but America has nowhere near China’s estimated 35 million extra men.
Socially, China is 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 suppressing with a heavy hand, notably China’s Muslim populations including the Uyghurs, as well as Tibetans and democracy-enjoying residents in Hong Kong. Taiwan is also a huge potential catastrophe for China in waiting, and whether or not President Xi Jinping decides to politically annex and forcibly invade the island could decide whether China continues to grow economically or is shunned and crippled with sanctions banning it from most of the world’s industrialized economies
Following Putin’s example, as well as all the other autocrats before them, the more that Xi Jinping 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, the more 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, and time will tell if Chinese censorship and social totalitarianism can keep up with people’s inherent desire for freedom and liberty.
China may seem like an extremely rare autocratic success story for now, but there are many reasons to not be bullish on China’s Leninist dictatorship for long, most importantly because autocracy is just bad governance.
Thanks for your eyeballs!
—Dash MacIntyre
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Some depictions of an authoritarian regime seems very similar to the ingrained and unfettered white nationalism plaguing U.S. Black, Jewish, Muslim and other people of color with police brutality and other domestic terrorism. Authoritarian oligarchs are complicit.