The Staying Power of Illiberal Regimes
With democracy imperiled by the rise of new populist, demagogic leaders, Waller Newell of Carleton University offers a three-fold typology of tyranny that seeks not only to understand non-democratic governments of the past, but also the more recent vogue for illiberal regimes. Newell paints on a vast historical and methodological canvas, surveying political thinkers from ancient Greece to the present and a range of past and present governments.
His frame includes kleptocracies or exploitative states based only on a leader’s material interests (such as Syria under Bashar al-assad); reformist but still authoritarian regimes where leaders may advance public welfare (Alexandrian Greece, or Napoleonic France); and millenarian tyrannies promoting a collectivist, destructive, often utopian agenda (Mao’s China, or Cambodia under Pol Pot). Newell’s novel analysis is his claim that the tyrannical impulse is permanent, rooted in part in an antimodernist reaction against Enlightenment thinking and dissatisfaction with the idea that material progress is enough for the needs of rulers and ruled.
The historical breadth of analysis is impressive, even if Newell falters somewhat in making sense of recent developments (such as his claim that North Korea’s security crisis has been orchestrated by China under Xi Jinping is hard to sustain). In supporting a neo-conservative willingness to back moderate authoritarian regimes to combat the rise of more extreme millenarian tyrannies, he enters controversial territory, even while arguing that the US under
Donald Trump remains a resilient liberal democracy.