The Threat of Autocracy
Like most of the world, I’ve spent a good deal of the last few months actively watching Russian troops lay siege to Ukraine with a horrible dread. Even someone with a rudimentary understanding of history can see the frightening parallels between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions and those of Adolph Hitler that set the stage for World War II. The parallel is further enforced not only through Putin’s belligerent actions and ambitions, but through his extensive use of propaganda to build iron-clad loyalty within Russia.
Whether Russia’s invasion of Ukraine results in another global conflict on the level of the 20th century World Wars remains to be seen, but even if the combination of economic sanctions imposed by the West accompanied by strong and unified solidarity with and tactical support for the Ukrainian people successfully stamp out the embers of war, the incursion illustrates a larger and more significant global battle—one that pits the ascendant model of 21st-century autocracy in direct opposition to the liberal democratic model of an open free society that millions died defending in the 20th century.
As German Lopez recently observed in The New York Times, democracy has been on a worldwide decline for over a decade, and a primary factor of this decline is the rise of authoritarian rulers like Putin. “Putin has spent more than two decades consolidating power, rebuilding Russia’s military and weakening his enemies,” Lopez writes. “He has repeatedly undermined democratic movements and popular uprisings … and he has deployed Russian troops to enforce his will, including in Georgia and Crimea.”
Putin’s disdain for democracy is well-documented. In a 2019 Financial Times interview, he called the political concept of liberalism—a philosophy that promotes individual rights and civil liberties—ill-suited for the modern world. “The liberal idea has become obsolete,” Putin said. “It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”
Putin’s stranglehold on Russia may be the most visible example of eroding democracy, but it’s certainly not the only one. Last October, Sudan’s top generals seized power from civilian leaders, dashing the country’s hope of holding its first free vote in decades. In Nicaragua, incumbent President Daniel Ortega won re-election—but only after detaining at least six of his opponents and dozens of prominent critics. And following the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, the elected government collapsed, replaced once again by authoritarian Taliban rule.
Perhaps the most disturbing recent example, though, is in Hungary, where leader Viktor Orbán has discarded concepts of multiculturalism and immigration in favor of a society based strictly on Christian values. Through crafty propaganda campaigns, Orbán has managed to package his vision of a kleptocratic government in a way that’s become appealing to conservatives worldwide (Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson are but two right-wingers to openly praise Orbán’s model).
While few Americans would be willing to stand up and voice support for Putin’s military actions—other than former President Donald Trump, who called the invasion “smart”—many have tacitly approved of his principles. “The American right has turned to the power of the state to impose their will on the rest of us, just as Orbán and Putin have used the state in their own countries,” Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson wrote in November. “[The fact] that those who claim to love America, which once billed itself as the leader of the world, are taking their lead from minor authoritarian countries … shows the extraordinary poverty, or perhaps the extraordinary greed, of their vision.”
In some ways, I think conservatives’ support of Putin’s and Orbán’s principles comes as a result of misunderstanding what liberalism truly means. We are a people obsessed with labels, and the ideological battle of liberal vs. conservative has become so calcified that conservatives believe anything “liberal” must be bad and anything “anti-liberal” must be good.
This couldn’t be in further juxtaposition from the ideals upon which our country was created. Our founders built this country on the concepts of liberal democracy—what I call in my book, American Schism, Enlightenment principles. The freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are wholly liberal ideals from the Enlightenment’s concept of the social contract, which form the bedrock of our national credo: the Declaration of Independence of 1776. This document, along with the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Citizens, not only epitomizes Enlightenment political philosophy, but also set the standard for what would enable the flourishing of humanity (read further for statistics to document this assertion).
One key element of this model was what we today call the separation of church and state. Our founders vehemently opposed the marriage of Christian values and government policy. Most of them were long-standing adversaries of instituted religious authority, even if they were privately men of faith. The separation of church and state was codified in the Bill of Rights and reaffirmed by the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which specified in unambiguous terms that the country was not founded in any sense on the Christian religion.
Richardson puts it best when she writes: “In today’s America, those who call themselves ‘conservative’ are the very opposite of conservative: they are dangerous radicals seeking to bring us to our knees by attacking the grand philosophy that made this nation great—and which, if we could finally make it a reality, could make it greater still—replacing it with the stunted beliefs of petty tyrants.”
While lay postmodernists can argue the founders’ intent until they’re blue in the face, what’s undeniable is the measurable and documented positive impact of building a modern society based on enlightenment ideals. The empirical data documenting the success of the Enlightenment model of modern society—one that relies on and respects the building of a decentralized and empirically-based constitution of knowledge—is more than compelling. Consider that human life expectancy in 1790 was around 30 years. Two hundred years ago, one in five children didn’t survive to age 5, and 4/5 of the world lived in extreme poverty. Now, our life expectancy is over 70 across the globe; over 99% of children survive past age 5; and only 1/5 of the world lives in the same extreme level of poverty.
Indeed, Enlightenment thinkers realized that human beings have the capacity to observe the universe and rely on reason to problem solve. With those talents, they could create a new, free society enabled to improve the human lot. As documented extensively by Stephen Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, in his book Enlightenment Now, the Enlightenment framework has fostered “more human prosperity in the last 200 years than in the prior 2000.”
What’s also undeniable is the halting of that progress resulting from a global decline in democracy. According to WorldBank.org, global extreme poverty rose in 2020 for the first time in 20 years, and more than 40% of the global poor live in economies affected by fragility, conflict, and violence—a number predicted to rise as high as 67% in the coming decade.
Autocratic leaders like Putin can rail against the tenets of democracy all he wants, but history—and the data—do not lie.
While I fear that it’s inevitable the 21st century battle of autocracy versus democracy will continue to play out on the global stage as the West gets further drawn into the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the same battle closer to home within the United States is just as vital. The fight against autocracy can’t just be waged on foreign soil. It also must be addressed within our own borders by those who are pushing to reject the liberal ideas upon which our country was founded.
Benjamin Franklin was correct when he was asked after the Constitutional Convention if the citizens of a new nation would have a republic or a monarchy. “A republic,” Franklin said, “if you can keep it.”