Authoritarianism and autocracies take many forms. So how do you know it when you see it? Our guide to the erosion of choice, rights, truth and power is Anne Applebaum, author of several books including, most recently, Autocracy, Inc..
Transcript
Archival: [00:00:07] Indisputable is that the government is using military courts to try civilian protesters, that opposition figures are behind bars, that the president says he wants to change the Constitution in order to, quote, restore the peace. How is that not creeping authoritarianism?
Archival: [00:00:22] Chairman Mao may loom large here as a symbol of strength, but he's also a reminder of the chaos that can come when one [00:00:30] leader has far too much of it.
Archival: [00:00:32] The Iranian regime has shut down the internet all across the country as it brutally cracks down on massive protests.
Archival: [00:00:39] Increasingly hardcore autocracy one man rule.
Archival: [00:00:43] Orban successfully transformed Hungary's democracy into an autocracy.
Archival: [00:00:48] The actual framework of governance that Maduro has been able to bend to his will, to be able to stage phony elections like the one that's going to be held this weekend.
Archival: [00:00:56] Unless he's forcibly removed from power. Mr. XI should now [00:01:00] be able to personally choose for how long he will govern.
Archival: [00:01:02] Much of that control now rests in the hands of just one man.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:13] Hey, Nick.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:13] Hey there, hannah.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:14] This is Civics 101. And this is an episode about something I think a lot of us think we understand terms that we hear a lot, perhaps especially lately. But as with so many things we talk [00:01:30] about on Civics 101, I had to ask myself, do we know what we are talking about? So, per usual, I found someone who for sure knows what she is talking about.
Anne Applebaum: [00:01:44] I'm Anne Applebaum, I'm a staff writer for The Atlantic. I also teach at Johns Hopkins University, and I'm a working historian.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:52] I came to Anne with a question. My question was, what is authoritarianism? And right off the bat, [00:02:00] I think I got a better catch all term for the thing we are talking about today.
Anne Applebaum: [00:02:06] So authoritarianism or autocracy is a political system in which one person or one small group of people, or sometimes one political party rule without any checks and balances, without independent courts, without an independent media, without a legitimate opposition. They're able to rule without any anything [00:02:30] hampering them at all. They're not obligated to follow the rule of law, meaning that a legal system in which laws are made by courts and judges separately from whoever is in power. Instead, they operate according to something that we call rule by law. That means the law is whatever the person in charge says it is, so it can change from one day to the next. That's the simplest definition of autocracy.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:55] Autocracy. That word feels both generally [00:03:00] Really nefarious, but also kind of cool and removed, like kind of clinical. It does.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:05] And okay, so I think that this will help you. That word comes from both ancient Greek and ancient Latin. It went from meaning, you know, self-power or self-control to being a word used to describe military commanders with a lot of power. And eventually it kind of got smudged into being the word sometimes used to describe the person in charge of everybody [00:03:30] and everything.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:31] All right. Cool. That makes a lot more sense.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:33] Moving on. And told me that there are many autocracies on this earth of ours, and they are not identical, but they share three characteristics.
Anne Applebaum: [00:03:45] People don't have guaranteed rights. So you don't have, for example, the right to freedom of speech in any kind. You can be arrested for something that you say, even if it's true or even if it's not important or significant. You [00:04:00] don't have the right to contest power or to affect or change whoever is in power. So you have a single leader or a single political party. They rule and there is no legitimate way to be in opposition to them. There's no way to change your own government. You don't. You can't vote. Or if you can vote, the vote has a significance. Some autocracies do create very elaborate fake essentially systems of voting, kind of pretend voting. But [00:04:30] you don't have any ability to change the regime. You don't have rights in the regime, and you also don't have the ability to, you know, make an argument based in law. You can't say you have taken away my property, and that's illegal according to this particular statute, because the law will change according to what the leadership wants it to be.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:55] So basically you get no say, right? [00:05:00] You have no protections. The rules could change at any minute. One minute you're standing on solid ground and the next thing you know, the floor is lava. Right.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:10] But again, these governments vary. So is a dictator, for example, an autocrat? Yes. Is an autocracy a dictatorship? Not necessarily. It's kind of a a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square situation. [00:05:30]
Anne Applebaum: [00:05:30] There are many different kinds of autocracies. Um, you know, there's Communist China and nationalist Russia and theocratic Iran, and they all have very, very different rules, and some of them have more access to freedom or to other ideas than others. Some are very tightly controlled.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:45] And all of those nations. Hannah, correct me if I'm wrong here. They all kind of work together, right? Like, I know that China and Iran, for example, they support Russia's war on Ukraine.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:55] Oh yeah, among many other things, and actually wrote a book about that. It's called [00:06:00] autocracy, Inc. and you should read it. It's not about all of these governments agreeing or thinking the same thing. It's more like this informal way of using your absolute power to keep someone else in absolute power. And then, Nick, there are plenty of governments that have autocracy vibes, so to speak, but aren't, you know, broadly autocratic, at least not yet. They're dabbling pinch of control here, dash of restriction [00:06:30] there. And then there are countries that actually take it even further.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:34] Further than no rights, no say no protections, no consistency.
Anne Applebaum: [00:06:39] There's a further step. We used to speak often about totalitarian systems, and these are systems in which the political leadership really does seek to control everything. So not just politics, but also economics, also social life, also education, culture, everything. And so everybody inside the system is is meant only to read [00:07:00] and listen and think. According to a set of rules, you know, a set of ideas given by the leadership, probably it's fair to say that totalitarianism is hard to achieve. It's hard to really prevent everybody from thinking differently from what the regime says. But the attempt to create it has been real. I mean, there have been there have been a number of very real attempts to create totalitarian systems.
Nick Capodice: [00:07:24] So Anne here is describing utter total control, right. Like [00:07:30] thought police levels of control or something close to that.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:34] Yeah. I mean, you know, thought police is kind of impossible. But I think that would be the dream in a system like this. Right. And again, it's not exactly an easy thing to do, but if you give a mouse a cookie, they might just tell you that two plus two equals five.
Nick Capodice: [00:07:46] All right, Hannah, here's what I have to know. How how does a country become something like this? Is it possible, for example, for a democracy to stop [00:08:00] being a democracy or to become an autocracy.
Anne Applebaum: [00:08:04] So I don't know that there's a playbook for creating autocracies. There are some countries where there has never been anything else, so there has never been democracy in China. You can't really speak of there being a playbook to achieve something that is pretty much always been there. There is a path towards authoritarianism that a number of democracies have followed. So democracies do decline. They have been declining since the time of ancient Rome, when the American [00:08:30] founders were writing the Constitution. They had that example in mind.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:33] You know, it may come as a surprise, but I actually do think about ancient Rome all the time. What happened there was that a democratic system was dismantled over time by corruption, division and military threats. We can talk about that some other time. It's a long story, but the framers were sure thinking about it when they wrote the Constitution.
Anne Applebaum: [00:08:59] They were thinking about [00:09:00] how to prevent democratic decline, and democratic decline usually involves the rise to power of perhaps an elected, legitimate leader who begins to take apart the institutions I've been talking about. So a leader who seeks to take over state institutions that are meant to belong to everybody and instead make them work for him, either politically or financially, or a leader who seeks to politicize the justice system instead of having justice be something [00:09:30] that is neutral, that is meant to where you know, the courts, you know, the legal system are supposed to abide by the Constitution and by the law. An authoritarian leader will try to change that so that courts are politicized and the courts will respond to whatever, whatever the leader wants. Sometimes the path to authoritarianism also includes attempts to control public conversation or information. So to push hard against independent media to silence critics first, either legally or but maybe [00:10:00] eventually using repression. Not all autocracy involves repression or, you know, jail or violence, but many of them end up doing that because in order to keep control, authoritarian leaders very often wind up relying on violence.
Nick Capodice: [00:10:14] I guess that violence is a pretty direct path to forcing people to give you what you want.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:20] Well, if you're trying to undo a system where citizens have power, they might not be super thrilled to just give it to you. So sometimes [00:10:30] it's about taking, and taking is rarely peaceful.
Anne Applebaum: [00:10:35] But in the beginning, the decline of a democracy. And we've seen and this is, by the way, something that can happen either led by movements coming from the left. There's a version of that, for example, that took place in Venezuela over the last couple of decades.
Archival: [00:10:47] In 2013, the then president Hugo Chavez, passed the baton to Maduro after being diagnosed with cancer. His successor promised to continue the socialist revolution, lifting people out of poverty. [00:11:00] But that promise is well and truly broken.
Anne Applebaum: [00:11:03] Or movements coming from the right. And they're the kind of classic modern examples. Probably Hungary, a country whose elected leader slowly took apart the state, removed rights, removed, changed, altered the situation so that rule of law didn't really apply in Hungary.
Archival: [00:11:20] Many Hungarians see their right wing prime minister as this totalitarian. Many people are worried about core democratic values such as free speech or an independent [00:11:30] judiciary. Many members of the EU Parliament say the rule of law in Hungary is being threatened.
Anne Applebaum: [00:11:36] I mean, it can happen pretty fast. Um, Hungary is a very small country, and so it turned out to be very easy for a democratically elected leader who had that idea in his head to capture institutions, to put people in charge of the institutions who would be loyal to him personally and not to the Constitution, for example. He did that fairly quickly over several years. Venezuela. The left wing example is a is [00:12:00] an example of a place where it took longer. There were a series of elections. The Hugo Chavez, who was the original, who led the original assault on the political system, was actually, you know, reelected a couple of times legitimately and really only was later on when he and then his successor, Nicolas Maduro, began to break the law more systematically, that you could really call Venezuela a full autocracy rather than just a messy democracy.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:34] So [00:12:30] there's no one way that this happens. It could be pretty quick under one person, or it can be slower under a series of leaders who have that same goal of breaking the government.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:46] Yeah, there are a lot of paths, a lot of tactics that can contribute to the decline of a democracy or some other system of government and the rise of an autocracy. So, Nick, you asked me, is it possible [00:13:00] for a democracy to stop being a democracy? And I told you earlier that it's possible for a country to have autocratic elements without being autocratic. It's also possible to be a democracy while you're losing elements of democracy. So one of the examples that Ann brought up was, you know, when people who follow the law or tell the truth are threatened. I mean.
Anne Applebaum: [00:13:25] This is something that came up after the 2020 election. So Republicans who followed the law [00:13:30] and understood that the election was not stolen, they found that when they spoke the truth, they were assaulted both online and sometimes in real life. And when you have a situation where people are afraid to say true things or afraid to make arguments because they're worried that somebody will murder them in their families, then you already begin to have a situation where people don't feel free. And that began to happen in the United States, very notably after after 2020.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:56] And also pointed to the problem of government Becoming [00:14:00] performative. So that's like taking systems that exist to uphold the law and using them basically to put on a show.
Anne Applebaum: [00:14:09] Congressman Jim Jordan ran something called the Weaponization of Government Commission in the last Congress, and took it upon himself to examine the work of people who do research into disinformation, for example, or into patterns of conversation online, and unfairly accused some people who had been researchers who had been academics of being involved in censorship, which they were not involved [00:14:30] in. You know, this then led to a series of court cases. Eventually they made it all the way to the Supreme Court. But the entire time, I mean, both the congressional hearings and the court cases were based on things that hadn't happened. Um, you know, so again, when when lies or untruths become a kind of fundamental basis of political argument and become accepted by, you know, by people within the system, then you're also on a road towards autocracy.
Nick Capodice: [00:15:05] All [00:15:00] right. So I have to ask at this point, are we, Hannah, are we on the road towards autocracy? Is this democracy? American democracy in trouble?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:20] Well, we're going to get to that after a quick break.
Nick Capodice: [00:15:23] Oh, come on, for real.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:25] But before that break, a quick reminder that Nick and I have a book that covers a whole lot [00:15:30] of the story of this nation. In fact, it is the perfect companion for those moments when you find yourself asking, is this against the law? Is there any precedent for this? Why is this happening? It's called A User's Guide to Democracy, and it is just that. You can get it wherever books are sold.
Nick Capodice: [00:15:59] We are [00:16:00] back. We're talking about autocracy today, what it is, what it looks like and how it happens. And just before the break, Hannah, you decided to make us all wait to hear whether this nation of ours is on an autocratic road.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:15] So is it. Well, we can't predict where this is leading, right? We can't predict the future.
Nick Capodice: [00:16:21] You're an artful dodger, McCarthy.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:23] But we know what autocracy looks like. Or rather, Anne Applebaum knows. And we [00:16:30] are learning. And Anne says that this democracy, our democracy, has had cracks in the foundation for a while now.
Anne Applebaum: [00:16:38] There have been elements of American democracy that have been broken for a long time, you know, and we all know what they are. The amount of money, including the secret money in politics, the money that people can use to create PACs or to support election campaigns, you know, has led to American elections becoming a kind of circus. I mean, by comparison to elections in other democratic countries, most countries don't spend [00:17:00] millions and millions, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on their election campaigns. And we do. And I think that's a sign of real decline, the change in the nature of information, the fact that people get information that they receive through algorithms that have been designed to to send people emotive and angry and divisive material. This is how the interweb works more broadly. It's not just about social media. You know, the advertising system rewards people who who have, [00:17:30] you know, angry and divisive conspiracy theories, for example. And by allowing those ideas to dominate the information system and to, you know, and to help divide Americans and to create deep partizanship, those changes have been in the works for a long time, and they precede anything that's happened in the last in the last few years.
Nick Capodice: [00:17:49] Money and information. Isn't that always the way?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:53] And not just money. Secret money. Hidden money. And says there are different types of [00:18:00] economies at play here, one that is in the light and another in the shadow.
Anne Applebaum: [00:18:06] We often forget that alongside the normal economy, alongside the economy where you and I pay taxes, and if we have businesses, we are subject to regulation. And if we own a company, our name is on all the documents. There is also another economy where where money is kept offshore, where it flows through shell companies that are held anonymously. Property can be purchased anonymously. And that world, that [00:18:30] kind of offshore world has been hugely beneficial both to the autocratic world and to people inside the democratic world who who want to evade the law or evade taxes or hide, hide their wealth. It's not a subject people know much about, but it's that the growth of it, explosive growth of it, I should say, over the last decade, is another indication that our democracy, not just in the United States, but in Europe as well, is declining because so much money can be taken and hidden secretly and giving people [00:19:00] power and influence secretly that that is impossible to know. I mean, transparency and accountability are marks of democracy, and secrecy is a mark of dictatorship. Okay.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:12] Another thing that we need to talk about. Does it matter when our leaders use language that autocrats use?
Anne Applebaum: [00:19:20] I worried a lot during the last election campaign about some of the language that Donald Trump was using, because to me, it was reminiscent of language I had heard in other times [00:19:30] and other places. So when you call your opponents vermin, or you talk about them as enemies of the people,
Archival: [00:19:34] The radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, they are truly the enemy of the people they are.
Anne Applebaum: [00:19:42] That's language borrowed from the dictatorships of the past. And you do that if you like Viktor Orban or like Hugo Chavez. If you're somebody who wants to be able to say, I have complete power and authority, my enemies and opponents are vermin. You know, you don't have [00:20:00] to take account of them or they're enemies of the state. They're traitors. That gives you license to begin to take apart the state. Remember that democracy depends on a kind of. You know, it's almost a I mean, it's almost sort of inhuman, a very difficult kind of sense of fair play.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:19] And talked about the fact that there are rules, there are systems that we are all supposed to agree on and abide by rules and systems that are designed [00:20:30] to keep this country democratic.
Anne Applebaum: [00:20:33] Once people begin to break that rule or break that bargain, and once the, you know, there's a winner takes all system whereby if you win an election, you get to destroy everything or change everything, then it becomes much, much harder to maintain a democracy. And that language is now part of our system. This idea that one side or the other side is illegitimate and can't be allowed to rule that level of partizanship that we reached in the US is really reminiscent [00:21:00] only of the years leading up to the Civil War in its power and strength, and we've been divided about many things before. Um, is profoundly worrying. I mean, just the language that people use about politics now is very, very different from the language people used a decade ago.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:14] So here's what I need to know. Does Ann think that words matter? I mean, obviously she does. She just said that this language that calls one side illegitimate means a level of division that is profoundly worrying. But [00:21:30] there are those who say who have said that words are just words. Hannah Bach worse than a byte kind of thing.
Anne Applebaum: [00:21:39] What people say and how they say it does have consequences. Words have consequences, and how the language that people use to describe their opponents describe their country. This tells you a lot about them. And so it should be at least at the very least, a kind of warning sign.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:54] Now, we have heard politicians use inflammatory language in this country. I know we're hearing a lot of it right now, [00:22:00] but we have dealt with it before, right?
Anne Applebaum: [00:22:03] The language remains disturbing because if you look at the history of American politics, you know, at least in the 20th and 21st century, you don't hear people talking like that in US politics. I even looked at I went back and read some of the speeches of segregationists from the 1960s, and even they don't talk about their political enemies as vermin. And so I thought that was a I thought that was a real break with tradition. So it's very hard to know how [00:22:30] to talk about someone who's broken with tradition, who's run a campaign that's notably different than anything that's gone in the past, while at the same time, you know, not sounding hysterical or hyperbolic. It's a fine line. And I don't, you know, I'm not sure that I'm not sure that we found it.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:48] This hyperbolic thing. I think this is important to think about. How do you talk about hearing words in this country that were used by autocrats in [00:23:00] the past. Ideas and actions in this country that look. Autocratic. If you say, well, that language sounds like language used in countries where. Democracy has eroded, where autocracy rose. And we should worry about that. There are those who. Would say, you need to relax. And Anne says the language you use to talk about this kind of language. That really matters to me.
Anne Applebaum: [00:23:29] I've [00:23:30] actually been very careful about using the word fascist.
Archival: [00:23:32] Donald Trump is lashing out at his former chief of staff for calling him a fascist.
Archival: [00:23:38] We certainly falls into the general definition of fascist for sure.
Anne Applebaum: [00:23:42] I know it was used by General John Kelly, who had worked for Donald Trump. You know, that's his right. Um, partly because it immediately makes people think of Nazi movies. And I don't think that America is going to become a Nazi movie. You know, it's not going to look like that.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:59] There's [00:24:00] one last thing I want to get to here. Yes, we are talking about autocracies. We are talking about the kind of words and actions that can guide a democracy into an autocracy. But ultimately, Ann says, the decline of democracy is not just about a politician or an anti-democratic movement.
Anne Applebaum: [00:24:19] Democracies succeed when their citizens are engaged, when people are engaged in politics, when they run for office, when politics [00:24:30] isn't a thing that is done by some kind of separate cast, you know that it's something that belongs to everybody. When people are engaged in political parties, when they join movements, when they express their ideas, when they're part of the system. And one of the things that modern authoritarian propaganda does is it tries to disengage people. One of the effects, for example, I mean this, as you can see in Russia, of a politics where there's a constant stream of lies. You know, when people are lying openly lying about things [00:25:00] that everybody knows is not true. When you see people doing that, that's something that political leaders do because they want to make people exhausted. You know, they're not lying because they think you're going to believe everything that you're lying about. They're lying because they want to make people say, oh, gosh, I have no idea what's true and what's not true. Politics is a dirty business. I better stay home. And so it's very important for ordinary people to not be fazed by that and to seek to remain involved. I mean, really, once democracy loses, it's once people aren't participating, then [00:25:30] it's very easily taken over by cliques or by the very wealthy or by people with ill intent. So staying engaged and being an active citizen is, you know, it's really the responsibility of everybody who lives in a democratic society. As I said again, it's not it's not something that like a special group of elites or fancy people or, you know, do. It's something anyone can do.
Nick Capodice: [00:25:53] I really appreciate that point, Hannah, because we say all the time that staying engaged is the way to keep our democracy [00:26:00] alive. But I'm not always sure that that lands with people. And I'm not even sure it'll land with people now. But here at least we have an historian who knows what it takes for democracy to die, because she's been studying it for a long time. So if you don't take us at our word, maybe you can take Ann at hers.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:26:23] Basically, don't let the people with money and power let you believe that you are not allowed into the club because you don't have money or you don't [00:26:30] have power. Because when we start believing that it's the most straightforward, the best way for us to eventually be banned from the club. And even though autocracies rely on secrecy, lies and hiding things from people, they also have clear tells. So what is an autocracy? It is no one thing, but what does an autocracy do? It keeps the power away from the [00:27:00] people.
Anne Applebaum: [00:27:00] It's important to remember that there are different kinds of authoritarianism. It's not like there's a huge alliance of autocracies and they all think the same thing. Autocracy can take different forms. China is a one party state. It's the Chinese Communist Party is the leadership. And the Chinese Communist Party is a big and complex organization with many different kinds of people in it. By contrast, Russia is really a one man dictatorship. There is no equivalent of the Chinese Communist Party. Iran is run is a theocracy that's run by religious leaders. Venezuela is a kind of [00:27:30] oligarchy run by a group of very wealthy people connected to Nicolas Maduro and his security and army chiefs. The forms of autocracy and the language of autocracy can look different and sound different. But, you know, pay attention to the fundamentals. You know, what kind of rights do people have? How does the legal system work? What kind of information are people allowed to have access to, and what kind of influence to ordinary people have on the way the government works? And that's how you know what level [00:28:00] of autocracy you're talking about.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:28:08] That does it for this episode. It was produced by me, hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Music in this episode by Anemoia. AutoHacker, Ambre Jaune, Dylan Sitts, King Sis, Andreas Dahlback, Lennon Hutton and Craig Reever. If you want more Civics 101, we've got [00:28:30] it for you. You can follow us on Bluesky at civics101pod, you can follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and you can go to civics101podcast.org to access everything we have ever made and get in touch with us. Don't forget, if you like us, leave us a review. Nick and I used to be actors, so without feedback, we're kind of at sea. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.