Dictatorships and fear

The world has been reminded in recent weeks of the underlying fears and insecurities that plague dictatorship; in this case, a Chinese Communist dictatorship so lacking in self-confidence that it threatens to suspend relations with the NBA because an NBA general manager sent a tweet supporting demonstrators in Hong Kong.

Dictators always sleep uneasily, however powerful they otherwise appear, so long as there is a place on Earth that isn’t a dictatorship.

Historian Robert Kagan titled his superb history of early American foreign policy Dangerous Nation not because the infant republic presented any actual military threat to Europe but because the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were sure to eventually undermine the legitimacy of European monarchy. A scraggly band of former British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard counted for nothing on the scales of power, except for the power of ideas, where it proved irresistible.

It is because freedom is forever a threat to dictatorship that dictators feel it necessary to prevent their people from hearing about people living in freedom elsewhere, with the extent of their efforts providing a useful indicator of their insecurity and weakness. They take pains to include the word “republic” in their names as a cynical testimonial to that which they seek to suppress.

During a Cold War that featured a dangerous nuclear arms race and periodic crises that threatened to turn cold into hot, we sometimes lost sight of the way in which it was Western freedom rather than the Pentagon or CIA that most terrified the old men in the Kremlin.

Although the Bolshevik Revolution was carried out in the name of an ideology (Marxism) that promised true human liberation and more genuine forms of democracy and freedom, by the time the sclerotic Soviet regime limped to its demise, it was requiring the registration of all typewriters as a means of ferreting out subversive pamphleteers. Whatever Marx and Engels might have once prophesied, that was not the behavior of people who believed history was on their side.

In sharp and revealing contrast, Das Kapital and the scribblings of Lenin and Chairman Mao were widely available in any American library or decent bookstore, and socialists of various stripes pervaded the faculties of our colleges and universities, always ready to denounce American democracy and identify heaven on Earth in places like Havana, Hanoi, and Managua.

Within that contrast, between the open society and the closed, between one allowing dissent and one that did everything possible to suppress it, was found the best indicator of how the Cold War would turn out. Jimmy Carter might have lectured us on our “inordinate fear of communism,” but it was the communists who were actually most afraid.

Whereas American democracy was (and still is) tested by often scathing self-criticism and an intense marketplace of ideas, Soviet communism atrophied as it hunkered behind rigged elections, censorship, and walls where the guns pointed only inward.

As for China, we should now feel safe to discard the misguided belief that its authoritarian nationalist system constitutes some kind of “model” that will prove superior and thus worthy of emulation. The Soviets said the same thing about their “state socialism,” with Nikita Khrushchev promising that our grandchildren would live under communism because it would prove more efficient and productive than our messy capitalist order. Western observers who visited the Soviet Union and returned claiming to have seen a “future that works” now tell us more about human credulity than the future.

Whatever stability the Chinese state appears to have, the fact remains that its leaders live in constant fear of the outside world and the subversive ideas it contains. Their problem is that the “performance legitimacy” it enjoys requires continued economic growth, but that growth in turn requires continued engagement with the frightening world beyond its borders. Its efforts to dictate and intimidate Western businesses flow from this dilemma.

The CCP might have powerful new technologies for the purpose of control and punishment, but that it feels compelled to resort to such methods tells us all we need to know about its insecurities. Legitimate governments enjoy the support of their people and permit not just criticism but also free, open testing of their right to rule at the ballot box.

Xi Jinping and his cronies tell us that the Chinese people have values fundamentally different from ours, that our notions of freedom and self-government for some reason don’t resonate there, but their actions suggest otherwise.

It is useful to keep in mind that ideological challengers always crop up when democracy appears to be performing poorly (as many currently feel it is, on both sides of the Atlantic). It was no coincidence, along such lines, that fascism and communism enjoyed their highest levels of support in America in the Depression decade of the 1930s.

But let us not be deceived by such historical ebb and flow: By the very steps they take to protect their rule, the tyrants in Beijing loudly proclaim their weakness. They might have the power to intimidate easily intimidated NBA executives and players, but they remain terrified of their own people.

The idea that the future belongs to dictators afraid of Winnie the Pooh is laughable.