The most useful lesson of growing up under a dictatorship is that dictatorships are never absolute. Sometimes they are even democracies – ones that thrive by co-opting those with proximity to power and managing those who do not benefit. That management is often through brute oppression, but mainly it is through securing consent by convincing enough people that things are about to get really great. Any minute now, once the enemies of the people are thwarted, a corner will be turned. Authoritarian democracies recognise anger, foment it, then bottle it for their own purposes.
The trick is to always have a horizon, distant but in sight, beyond which things will get better. While this happens, the trappings of national success assuage the masses and give a sense of power, prosperity and momentum. In Egypt, as the jails swelled with political prisoners, the military government erected grand pharaonic monuments and embarked on a colossal construction project in the capital. In India, Narendra Modi entrenched authoritarianism while he wooed big business and launched enormous infrastructure projects and Hindu temples. Dictators establish themselves as both great modernisers and stabilisers, promising both conservatism and futurism. They emphasise traditions and values but wrap these up in technology, urbanisation and even a certain aesthetic – clean lines, mirrors, glass and steel skyscrapers.
But the beneficiaries of modernity remain relatively limited. And so the rest of the work of political stabilisation has to happen through populism – the creation of a threatening other (the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or just all Muslims in India) and the promise to eliminate it. If all else fails, there is legal capture, persecution and imprisonment. Such governments have understood that, in the absence of social justice and redistribution, the way forward is to deal with disaffection through strongmen leaders, lies and the ostracism of those who object.
This style of governance is not just confined to states in the global south. As someone with a foot both there and in the west, I can see a through line. Globalisation and free market capitalism, the organising principles of all but a few states, delivered on their promise of bringing us all closer together. But what often gets overlooked is how these processes made us more similar by creating winners and losers in pretty much the same way across the world. The standardisation of ways of living and doing business that globalisation produced anchored the winners, and unmoored the losers. Our lives are much more recognisable to each other than they were 30 years ago. We have all been flooded by goods, services, apps and digital entertainment, and yet we still feel the need for something else – for a sense of security beyond just our ability to consume in the immediate term.
Pretending to meet that need is what delivered Donald Trump’s victory. He understands that an oligarchic system that enriches a few cannot deliver economic security to the masses. If you want the majority of the public on your side, you have to promise change, but not in a way that actually reconfigures society.
The problem is not a rapaciously capitalist system that has resulted in broken healthcare provision, a legislature captured by rich lobbies or deregulation that has stripped workers of their statutory rights and consequently created an epic transfer of wealth to a billionaire class. The problem is the undocumented immigrants, the enemies within the bureaucracy who tried to bring Trump down, the diversity extremists. If you are the Democrats and all you have to counter this powerful vision is a lot of nice values and dancing “joy” but no material proposal to radically change people’s lives, you haven’t even brought a knife to a gunfight – you’ve brought Oprah Winfrey.
The socially liberal free market model that progressives believe in has seized up. It was always going to without more aggressive regulation, redistributive policies and the sort of high tax and high spend safety net that is necessary when traditional social arrangements are shattered. In the wake of globalisation, whole communities in the west were deindustrialised while a poorly paid urban working class was created in the global south. After the 2008 financial crash, wealth became concentrated and shut an entire generation of people out from the life their parents had. In the 2010s, with the rise of Silicon Valley tech companies, another number was added to a ballooning precariat: drivers, riders and box packers were plunged into poorly protected and poorly paid work. Social media launched with the promise of crowdsourcing truth to power and bringing us all closer together, then succumbed to enshittification, misinformation, deepfakes and racism.
Modern life is out of control. There was no path for the Democrats to mimic the trick of Trump and the rest of the authoritarian crew. Hampered by the increasing exposure of what little can be done by liberals in a neoliberal world, progressives in the US can only point to the importance of law and order and institutions. It’s a problem that Labour in the UK may well soon face. All you need is one compelling rightwing figure and Labour’s rousing “things will get worse before they get better” approach will be shredded.
So long as centrists double down on this system and hope for the best, western democracies will be vulnerable. I remember, in the tumultuous aftermath of the Arab spring, the question over whether Arabs were “ready for democracy” – but democracy alone cannot guarantee freedom and equality if the economic system in which it exists prevents those very qualities from emerging. It was easier to overthrow Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak than unseat the military-private commercial partnerships behind him.
The authoritarians have an answer to the problem of systems too established and lucrative to undo: lie, scapegoat and appeal to people’s fears, prejudices and vanities. Liberals don’t. Because they cannot grasp that within such systems, the benefits of rationality and individual freedoms, and the pursuit of scientific endeavour and personal prosperity just do not accrue meaningfully to enough people any more.
It is easier to believe that it is racism that elected Trump, or backwardness that reversed the Egyptian revolution, or ethnic supremacism that elevated Modi. But the truth is that, all over the world, the old order is gone and the new one is bewildering. People feel trapped and want a sense of release, a promise of a dramatically different future, or just a future. Even if that sense of freedom comes vicariously from an autocrat who has flexed and snapped the chains of the system. And they want to feel as if they are part of something bigger and stronger as they get lonelier and weaker and their worlds fracture and atomise by the day. It’s not that they are not ready for democracy – democracy is not ready for them.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
