The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century

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Creating and accusing the Other, the enemy is part of the political practice in Sri Lanka. Rulers speak of imperialist conspiracy, Tamil separatism, Muslim Wahabism, NGO betrayals, Christian conversions or what not. They make ‘others’ monsters ready to pounce on the hapless majority, destroy them and conquer Sri Lanka. Moisés Naím: I think, well, it's very hard. I don't want to speculate what is in his mind. I can't speculate what's happening in his country. His country is essentially a Petrostate, that exports oil, gas and guns, the three main industries are that. The hydrocarbon energy industry and the weapons systems and the weapons sales around the world. What happens as a result of that, there is a delinking of Russia with Europe and all the clients of their natural gas and their oil. Where are the funds to sustain the Russian system are going to come from? Who is going to pay the price in terms of the distribution of that? We know about the highly unequal distribution of wealth and income in Russia and the concentration of economic power in a few oligarchs. It may be that what propelled Putin to do this is to create an antidote to the possibility to the threat that Ukraine becomes a model for his citizens in Russia. He needed to have a weakened failed state kind of thing full of refugees and displaced people in Ukraine to remind the Russians that that can happen to them, too. How did the ‘end of history’ turn into the renaissance of autocracy? Moisés Naím brings his incisive analysis and global perspective to the most disturbing question of the 21st century, showing how populism, polarization and ‘post-truth’ politics have powered the rise of leaders from Berlusconi to Bolsonaro, Orban to Erdogan, Duterte to Donald Trump. Anyone who cares about the future of truth and democracy should read this book." — Alan Murray, CEO of FORTUNE The result, in Naim’s view, is a hollowing out of democracy. ‘Political parties may survive in some form, the way vestigial wings do on flightless birds’. Ditto other ‘old institutions’ – legal, media, and social – ‘that once mediated between citizens and rulers’. In the beginning, the book presents the ‘3P’ framework: populism, polarization, and post-truth, which are methods for the new autocrats to eventually transform their countries into “mafia states.”

This book identifies and scrutinizes these innovations, showing their possibilities, inner logic, and contradictions—and then identifies the key battles democrats will need to win to prevent them from destroying freedom in our time. As you might have guessed, I did not rain farts upon my competitor’s blog. I did not shoot arrows at his articles. I did not seek retribution. After reading this study, I decided to completely turn away from what he was doing and focus all of my energy into making our blog even better. But what do you do if you were wronged? How can you deal with the intense emotional feelings of retribution? What do you do if you feel an intense need for revenge?The End of Power makes a truly important contribution, persuasively portraying a compelling dynamic of change cutting across multiple game-boards of the global power matrix." -- Washington Post

We need a revolution. It begins with falling in love with the Earth again,” writes the Vietnamese peace activist and Buddhist master Thích Nhát Hanh in Love Letter to the Earth, a slim, powerful book that should be a new Bible. In a series of beautifully written letters toMother Earth, suggested practices for the appreciation of all living things including oneself, and other “healing steps”, Hanh has given us a practical, spiritual, poetic and life-saving guide to how to fall in love again. He explains “there is no difference between healing ourselves and healing the planet” and why “caring for the environment is not an obligation, but a matter of personal and collective happiness and survival”. The End of Power makes a truly important contribution, persuasively portraying a compelling dynamic of change cutting across multiple game-boards of the global power matrix." — Washington Post Brian Lehrer: Do you have an economic take on whether that's possible to maximize the impact on Russia and minimize the impact on the US and its allies? Naim observes that when political differences become identity based, debate shifts from a discussion of ideas to being a conflict over incompatible visions of a good life. The author busts a myth about the poor being attracted to autocrat leaders, noting, “3P Autocrats find acolytes among the disappointed, not the poor.” When political differences become identity based, debate shifts from a discussion of ideas to being a conflict over incompatible visions of a good life.It is almost impossible for America’s European allies to hedge against that spectre. Their fate — and Ukraine’s — lies in the hands of US voters. It is easy to forget that early in Joe Biden’s presidency he made a bridge-building overture to Vladimir Putin. During the 2020 campaign, Biden barely mentioned Russia as a geopolitical rival to the US. China hogged all the attention. At the Geneva summit with his Russian counterpart in June 2021, the US president went to great lengths to massage Putin’s ego, even calling Russia a great power.

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. Second, the elite-eye view of politics. This is about those holding formal power. The masses appear from time to time as shapeless blobs of protest, but these soon subside and normal service is resumed. Moisés Naím, the author, has some serious street cred. He is a Distinguished Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 2013, the British magazine Prospect listed Naím as one of the world’s leading thinkers. In 2014 and 2015, Naím was ranked among the top 100 influential global thought leaders by Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI) for his book The End of Power. An authoritative and intelligent portrait of the global spread of authoritarianism and its dangers...what sets [this] work apart from books like Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth is its unusually comprehensive armada of facts about the international drift over the past two decades toward authoritarian leaders, whether old-style dictators like Kim Jong Un or nominally elected presidents like Vladimir Putin.” —Kirkus

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These aspiring autocrats face a new set of options, and they have new sets of tools they can use to lay claim to unlimited power. Many of these tools did not exist just a few years ago. Others are as old as time but combine in new ways with emerging technologies and new social trends to become far more powerful than they have ever been before. The Crown by Emily Kapff is simple, beautiful and heart-wrenching: a dispatch from the future that takes the form of a picture book. A little girl, a princess, stands atop a landfill mound and has a message for us. This is a contemplative text with thoughtful and detailed illustrations that roll out from the possible grey of the future to the vibrant colours of life and nature that could be reclaimed. This is a book that begs us to change the world. 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. Moisés Naím’s The Revenge of Power is an urgent, thrilling, and original look at the future of democracy. It illuminates one of the most important battles of our time: the future of freedom and how to contain and defeat the autocrats mushrooming around the world. 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.

Yes, this made it much harder for him to steal our posts (and now he only does it occasionally) but more important, it made our blog better for our readers. We started getting more shares, comments and likes. Hoorah! I gauged them at the Galle Face Gotagogama. Aragalaya can be defined with the three words they always use, Nirpakshika, Nirprachanda and Aadaraya. Nirpakshika means they are not followers or slaves of anybody, any party or any ism. They are strong free adults; they think for themselves and they decide for themselves. Nirprachanda means non-violence stemming from human solidarity. Aragalaya was an experience of solidarity; not the narrow solidarity of groups of the same race, religion, language, class, caste or political party but the all-inclusive solidarity of the human race. At Gotagogama there was open trust and friendliness among all sorts of people. I remember one incident clearly; when the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu said that he was going to send food-aid to the Tamils in Sri Lanka, a young Tamil took the mike at Gotagogama and sent a message to the Chief Minister; Sir, either send food-aid to Sri Lankans or don’t send at all. Yes, we are Sri Lankans, period. Finally, they called their movement Aadaraye Aragalaya. I suppose it is inevitable; nirpakshika and nirprachanda leads naturally to the peculiar ethos of Aragalaya; an ethos of love, peace, friendship and brotherhood. It's so interesting because populism, which would seem to indicate popular opinion outside of the halls of power, connects to post-truth. Certainly we saw it among some of the supporters of Donald Trump and that could lead to authoritarianism. In the fifth century BC, Euripides released his tragedy The Trojan Women in a crowded theatre. The work recreated the end of the Trojan war – the Greeks’ great patriotic victory. What the proud Athenians heard on that tumultuous afternoon was the rage and despair of the mothers and wives of the enemy, accusing their heroes of cruelty. They came face to face with their own barbarity. Populists portray a political realm neatly cleft in two: the corrupt, greedy elite versus the noble and pure – but betrayed and aggrieved – Volk, the people.All of that as you said is fed by post-truth and that includes, but not only the social media and how lying and propaganda, manipulation of data, of information, of reality is part of the tool kit of these autocrats. The three Ps are essentially ways in which in the new world that we're living, autocrats that look and want to be seen as Democrats and have elections all the time. In fact, autocrats masquerading as Democrats. In that book I have 98 references to Putin's behavior aligned to the three Ps. At times this becomes a kind of ‘lament of the technocrat’. Naim, a former Venezuelan trade minister and editor of Foreign Policy magazine, asks ‘. ‘At a deeper, more troubling level, the question is why the followers continue to support populists even after there is overwhelming evidence that their promises are empty… [and they] are bent on concentrating power at the expense of their followers’ well-being?’ i.e. why have they stopped listening to us experts, dammit?