Absiste viribus indubitare tuis
Guiding
landmarks on the road to recovery of democracy
It is
unacceptable that so many people in today’s society still continue to suffer
from pain, endure misfortunes and tragedies, without even realizing the true causes of social ills, without trying
to scrutinize and explore the origin of problems, they try to adapt to reality persistently
and stubbornly, but also often in vain. They compromise with their conscience,
losing a greater or lesser part of their humanity. Seeing what is happening
around, guided by our bitter life experience, we are often afraid to reveal our
longing for love, goodness, we hide our true feelings deep inside, not trusting
each other, not believing in honesty, spirituality, unselfishness, we become
hypocritical and wicked. As a result, it becomes difficult to find even in
ourselves, to realize and implement our innate humanity. Has it really become
so complicated to be a Human in the modern era?!
Why can we not
still or why do we not try to find those responsible for the anti-humanism, why
do we not prevent incompetent leaders, reckless politicians from ascending to
power and continuing to retain it?!
Dictators Without
Borders
Living in a democracy is no longer
protection from authoritarianism.
JAN
21, 20205:45 AM
Donald
Trump’s election in 2016 sparked a veritable cottage industry of commentary
about the decline of democracy and the rise of authoritarian forces. Essays
like Masha Gessen’s “Autocracy:
Rules for Survival” and books like Steven Levitsky’s How
Democracies Die made the rounds among jittery Americans
suddenly wondering if they would recognize the end of American democracy when
it came. Three years later, it’s clear that, if there’s a tipping point where a
country goes from “free”
to “not free,” the U.S. is still far from it. That House
Democrats were able to impeach Trump without fearing for their lives
demonstrates that reality. And yet, the impeachment inquiry also highlights the
degree to which this president has managed to carry out brazen displays of
authoritarian behavior with no consequences thus far.
Much
of the early handwringing focused on whether the United States could ever
transition from a democratic republic to an authoritarian regime. It
downplayed the degree to which authoritarianism is not just a political system
but a type of political behavior that can happen in democratic systems as well.
Commentators also missed that authoritarianism is increasingly global: The U.S.
hasn’t gone from being a “free” to a “not free” country so much as the
distinction between those has blurred.
This isn’t
quite what we thought the age of Trumpian authoritarianism would
look like.
The
impeachment inquiry focuses on Trump’s apparent effort to leverage state power
to discredit and undermine a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.
A leader targeting political opponents with trumped-up charges or selective
investigations is textbook authoritarian behavior. When Vladimir Putin’s chief
opposition rival, Alexei Navalny, is targeted
with embezzlement charges, or when thousands of potential rivals of
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are imprisoned
based on conspiracy theories, we recognize this sort of abuse of
power for what it is. But there’s a wrinkle in Trump’s case: He tried and
failed to wield the American justice system against other enemies (James Comey
and Hillary Clinton) and so resorted to leaning on the mechanisms of power of a
foreign nation—one much more vulnerable to corruption and influence. Tellingly,
he has also called on China, an authoritarian state, to investigate the Bidens.
This
isn’t quite what we thought the age of Trumpian authoritarianism would look
like. We are accustomed to thinking of authoritarianism vs. democracy as a team
sport: the Axis against the Allies, the Soviets against the West. But that
traditional understanding might not make sense anymore, as governments reach
beyond their borders to inflict state pressure and violence.
Leaders
of authoritarian countries are increasingly able to pressure and silence
critics in the “free” world. Leaders of democracies can enlist authoritarian
governments against their own critics. Globalization may once have been thought
of as a force that undermined authoritarianism, but lately it seems to be the
democrats who are playing catch-up.
A
useful framework for our current moment is suggested by the Dutch political
scientist Marlies Glasius, who proposes that
we devote less attention to identifying authoritarian regimes and
more on authoritarian practices. Freely elected leaders like
Rodrigo Duterte, Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump are not “authoritarian” in the
same way as leaders of China, Saudi Arabia, or Russia, where opposition groups
are barred and elections are either fraudulent or nonexistent. But that doesn’t
mean that they can’t take authoritarian actions. Recent events in India, where
widespread protests have broken out against a proposed law that
bars Muslims from the same path to citizenship enjoyed by migrants of other
religions, makes this very clear. India is still “the world’s largest
democracy” and Modi enjoys popular legitimacy. That hasn’t stopped him from
pushing a policy apparently inspired by the police
state of Myanmar.
Glasius
defines authoritarian practices as “actions … sabotaging accountability to
people over whom a political actor exerts control, or their representatives, by
disabling their access to information and/or disabling their voice.” They
enable domination and subvert the channels by which people are supposed to be
able to make their preferences heard in a democratic society. Subverting the
justice system to selectively investigate a government rival is just such a
practice.
What
does that look like in practice? The most blatant examples of globalized
authoritarianism are when governments actually kill
or attempt to kill their critics in other countries, as Saudi Arabia
did in the case of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, or Russia allegedly did to
Sergei Skripal, the former spy who was poisoned along with his daughter in
England in 2018. The leaders of democracies have been all-too-willing to brush
aside these incidents in order to preserve economic or security relationships.
But
other expressions of authoritarian power are becoming much more subtle and
difficult to trace.
World
superpowers have, for example, newfound abilities to censor or chill speech
outside their borders. By acting as gatekeeper to the massive Chinese audience,
for example, the country’s government has essentially
acquired final cut privileges on films shown abroad as well as
in China. In an effort to avoid Chinese ire, filmmakers have gone as far as
to digitally
re-edit the 2012 Red Dawn remake to make the
villains North Korean instead of Chinese and cast white
actress Tilda Swinton to play a Tibetan sorcerer in Doctor
Strange.
Last
year, long-standing concerns among China watchers about Beijing’s ability to
carry out censorship on a global scale burst into the public consciousness in a
high-profile dispute between the Chinese government and the NBA. After Houston
Rockets executive Daryl Morey’s tweet in support of the Hong Kong protesters
was met with a furious reaction from China, the NBA’s second-largest market,
the league went through a grim cycle of damage control and self-censorship,
following in the footsteps of brands from Marriot, to Delta, to BMW that have
found themselves targets of Beijing’s ire after perceived slights. The English
soccer team Arsenal is now facing
a similar dilemma to the Rockets’ after a star player spoke out
about the treatment of the Uighurs.
Referring
to another company’s surrender to Chinese government sensitivities, China hawk
Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted, “Recognize
what’s happening here. People who don’t live in China must either self censor
or face dismissal & suspensions. China using access to market as leverage
to crush free speech globally.” Rubio is correct, here. And if he thought about
it a little harder, he might consider how the president he backs has openly
solicited Chinese help to pressure his own domestic critics.
Why
is authoritarianism globalizing? For one thing, countries are more economically
interdependent than ever before. During the Cold War, East bloc countries
sought to prevent their citizens from having access to American consumer goods.
Today, China and the United States are strategic and ideological foes but
deeply enmeshed in each other’s economies. China is both making and consuming
those consumer goods. This interdependence creates leverage: Countries like
China can use the size of their markets to induce foreign firms and governments
to play by its rules, even when those rules run contrary to those other
countries professed political values.
The U.S. has
also engaged in authoritarian acts abroad, and long before Trump.
It
was once hoped that improved communications technologies and the internet would
undermine authoritarian governments by allowing their citizens access to
forbidden information. Instead, those same communications channels can be just
as easily used to spread authoritarian propaganda and misinformation.
The
nature of warfare and geopolitical competition has also changed. Rather than
direct military conflicts between national governments, today’s wars are more
likely to resemble the one in Ukraine, a muddled conflict between militias and
proxy forces that has aspects of both a full-fledged occupation and a civil
war. Putin’s Russia has been particularly good at exploiting the ambiguity of
conflicts like Ukraine and Syria to bolster its own global influence.
Major
powers like the U.S., Russia, and China were once fairly forthright in divvying
up the world into spheres of influence and ideological blocs. Today, they
insist that they are respecting other countries’ sovereignty and not imposing
their values abroad, while doing just that.
The
U.S. has also engaged in authoritarian acts abroad, and long before Trump. One
of Glasius’ primary examples is “digital surveillance such as that practised by
the US National Security Agency and revealed by the Snowden leaks.” The U.S.
has long leveraged
its dominant position in the global financial system to compel
other countries to comply with its sanctions, launched covert drone strikes
outside of declared battlefields, turned over terrorist suspects for
interrogation by governments with less scrupulous human rights laws, and backed
coups as part of the Cold War’s ideological competition. In recent days, the
Trump administration has escalated an international crisis with Iran by
assassinating a senior military official in a foreign country with barely an
attempt to ground that action in domestic or international law. The fact that
the target of the strike, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, had himself made a career of
expanding the Iranian state’s authoritarian violence to neighboring countries
only highlights how this kind of transnational violence is becoming normalized.
We
can argue about whether these practices by the United States are
“authoritarian” themselves, but they certainly provide all governments with a
playbook of how state-sponsored violence and coercion can be projected abroad.
It
might seem ironic that globalized authoritarian practices are becoming more
common in an era of backlash to globalization. Some of the same governments
carrying out these practices are also reinforcing their borders, cracking down
on international migration, walling
off their communications infrastructure, and stamping
out any forms of ambiguity when it comes to citizenship or
territorial control. The borders that these governments enforce serve to
control and monitor the activities and movements of their citizens while
leaders are free to reach across those borders to commit (and sometimes
collaborate on) authoritarian practices. If they manage to enrich themselves
through these practices, a world of offshore tax havens and ambiguous legal
jurisdictions—a world the British journalist Oliver Bullough has termed “Moneyland”—is
at their disposal.
This
is a challenge for anyone pushing back against authoritarianism. It feels as if
half the world is erupting
in protest against corrupt and anti-democratic government
practices right now, but these movements have failed to connect across borders
and circumstance. Moments of transnational solidarity are rare enough to
be treated
as curiosities. “Global” justice bodies like the International
Criminal Court are hamstrung in their ability to bring human
rights abusers to justice by national jurisdiction and state sovereignty. But
there are positive signs as well. Human Rights Watch’s just-released 2020
World Report, which focuses on the threat Chinese censorship poses
to free expression outside China’s borders, suggests awareness of the new
dynamic is growing. And several presidential candidates—notably
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—have explicitly linked the fight
against authoritarianism globally to tackling corruption and inequality at
home, an acknowledgment of the transnational nature of the problem.
In
an era where authoritarian actors are reaching across borders and
collaborating, it’s time for advocates of democracy to do the same.
