Making autocracy great again
Good autocrats the world over probably took notice recently when a vexatious little Bible salesman and wannabe dictator decided to endorse God in plugging a new version of the Good Book.
For autocrats, it’s usually the other way around. They like to insist that they are gods and not subject to the earthly rules they impose on everyone else. But maybe Donald Trump can have it both ways after all. He didn’t write the playbook on how to be an autocrat, but he’ll probably take credit for it anyway.
Where some democracies are wavering around the world, politicians are becoming adept at using new strategies to eat away at the foundations of freedom. By comparison, Trump is a rank amateur, but he’s learning quickly.
Autocrats are ambitious, socially manipulative, smart and ruthless. They tend to believe that people are only pawns on a chessboard. They have a deep sense of entitlement and see themselves as exceptional individuals who deserve admiration. They can be vindictive, but also good at concealing their true natures.
Even so, their main goal is the same. They want to monopolize political power, note authors Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman in their recent book “Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century.”
The old model of dictatorship was embodied in the violence and brutality of countries like the former Soviet Union and China under Mao. These days, however, it’s a different story.
“Violence is not always necessary or helpful,” these authors write. “The method of the new breed of autocrats is not to be feared but to become popular through the control and manipulation of information.”
Trump is on the right track.
For starters, he is a profound liar who surrounds himself with other liars in order to create a reality favorable to himself and his political base. Trump may be severely flawed and morally bankrupt, but those aren’t necessarily deficits for potential autocrats.
He remains popular even though many of his closest cronies have been charged and convicted of crimes ranging from misuse of campaign funds to tax fraud and lying to Congress, although his protege and former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders ended up as governor of Arkansas.
Here’s what The Washington Post wrote after its fact-checking team monitored Trump’s claims across the four years of his presidency:
“By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths. What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.”
The biggest lie is Trump’s claim that he actually won the 2020 presidential race. Based on that, he subsequently failed to aid in the peaceful transfer of power to the new president.
Not coincidentally, this fact-checking project by the Post was nominated by the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University for inclusion in a list of the Top 10 Works of Journalism of the Decade.
Mainly, the idea behind all the constant lying is to create chaos in order for Trump to pose as the person who has all the answers. Even his former top political adviser Steve Bannon has told the media that a key component of Trump’s strategy is to “flood the zone with sh*t.”
“Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world,” writes Heather Cox Richardson in her new book “Democracy Awakening.”
“Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up.” It’s a technique used to destabilize a population.
Not only that, but Trump is notorious for bashing legitimate journalists on a regular basis. Doubtless part of this has to do with his frustration at not being able to totally control what is spoken or written about him. After being banned from Twitter (now known as X) in 2022, Trump launched his own social media platform, Truth Social.
Still, he has much to learn about the autocratic realm. One way to do this is to cozy up to other autocrats like Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary, masters at controlling the media in order to stifle criticism and dissent. No self-respecting autocrat wants to be criticized by anyone, no matter the cost.
“I’ve spent years reporting in Russia, Hong Kong, China and now Eastern Europe,” Andrew Higgins, New York Times bureau chief for east and central Europe, said in a recent interview. “Media freedom and pluralism are the first to go when autocracy takes hold.”
For years, Putin has harassed and murdered journalists. Now, according to a recent report on PBS’ Frontline, those tactics are changing. “Media experts and press freedom advocates said that the Russian government has been passing laws that make the act of reporting the truth—which could be contrary to the state’s narrative—a crime.”
Russia’s repression of the media has snowballed over time to create a system where any independent media voice is now outlawed.
According to the Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, which is updated annually, Russia ranked 148th among 180 countries in 2014. By 2023, the country’s rank dropped to 164th. There are now more than 50 laws in Russia that restrict press freedom.
In Hungary, a country increasingly referred to as a “propaganda state,” its ruler Orban and his party essentially have gained control of all the media. The New York Times wrote recently that Orban doesn’t kill his opponents the way Putin does. “He gets his cronies to buy up independent media and starves the few others of advertising revenue.”
Another tactic in the autocrat arsenal is to find an ethnic group on which to blame all the country’s ills. This worked particularly well for Adolf Hitler when he started vilifying the Jewish race in the run-up to World War II. For Trump, his target is immigrants mainly from countries south of the U.S. Border. He refers to them as “not people” and “animals.” Dehumanizing a particular group is a prime way for him to consolidate his base.
Trump’s brand of autocracy is trickling down to permeate red states in the U.S. In Arkansas, Governor Sanders picks on the low-income folks while handing tax cuts to the wealthy. In regard to attacks on the First Amendment, she and her puppet Legislature have sought to micro-manage the media as well as school curriculum and public libraries.
Sanders recently refused to expand post-partum Medicaid coverage from 60 days to 12 months although Arkansas’ maternal mortality rate has been the worst in the country. Arkansas was only one of three states in the U.S. to turn down the expanded coverage.
“Governor Sanders’ willful disregard for the least among us defies public responsibility and human dignity,” guest columnist Blake Rutherford recently noted in these pages. Further, he said, the decision was “rooted in cruelty and should shock our collective conscience.”
Regarding attempts to control the media, Sanders’ Legislature recently tried to dumb down the state’s exemplary Freedom of Information Act, which protects the public’s access to government meetings and records.
The failed attempt came shortly after a blogger made an FOIA request to investigate the state’s purchase of a fancy and over-priced lectern for use by the governor. It’s a good example of how the FOIA can be used to hold politicians accountable. It’s also a reminder that some of them are always scheming to operate under the cover of darkness and out of public view, even if they have to change the law to do it.
Maybe another way to look at the machinations of autocracy, whether at home or abroad, is to consider this timeless message from that Good Book which Trump and his cronies may or may not have read. In Matthew 7:15-20, Jesus gives his disciples a warning against false prophets and a test for unmasking them:
“A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit; neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. By their fruits ye shall know them.”