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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians

give the authorities wide discretion in applying them to regime opponents. Such measures are typically paired with a court system that uses law merely to justify political instructions from the executive branch, making a mockery of due process and international conceptions of the rule of law.

4. History revised: A number of countries have undertaken a refashioning of history to buttress the legitimacy and aims of the current government. Historians and journalists are forbidden to cross certain redlines set by the authorities. In China, the state has prevented the publication of full, accurate, or critical accounts of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, or the Mao Zedong era in general. In Russia, Joseph Stalin has been rehabilitated. He is now officially portrayed as a strong if mildly flawed leader rather than as the man responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people. In Turkey, Erdoğan has decreed that high school students should study the defunct Ottoman language, challenging a nearly century-old reform linked to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, modern Turkey’s founder.4

5. Democracy redefined: It is a testament to the power of the democratic idea that authoritarian leaders around the globe have claimed the mantle of democracy for forms of government that amount to legalized repression. Even as they heap disdain on the liberal order, they have often insisted on the validity of their own systems as types of democratic rule. They even devise terms to describe their special variant, such as “sovereign democracy,” “revolutionary democracy,” or “illiberal democracy.”

6. Return of the leader for life: Among the changes invariably instituted by modern authoritarians is the de facto or de jure removal of constitutional limits on presidential terms. Preventing the concentration of power in a single leader is a fundamental goal of democratic governance, but authoritarian propaganda has presented term limits as artificial constraints, associated them with foreign origins, and claimed that they do not suit every country’s unique historical, cultural, or security conditions.

While these ideas may not amount to a coherent or complete ideology, they do form the basis for an impressive degree of collaboration and alliance-building that has brought together modern authoritarian regimes with significantly different economic systems, official creeds, and sources of political legitimacy.

A loose-knit league of authoritarians works to protect mutual interests at the United Nations and other international forums, subverting global human rights standards and blocking precedent-setting actions against fellow despots. With the formation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Russia, China, and a number of Central Asian governments have come together to discuss common regime-security strategies.5

More disturbingly, modern authoritarians collaborate to prop up some of the world’s most reprehensible regimes, apparently reasoning that the toppling of one dictator thins the herd, inspires imitation, and endangers them all. This is most visible in Syria, where Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela at various times have offered diplomatic support, loans, fuel, or direct military aid to the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Dashed hopes
Democracy recorded unprecedented gains during the 20th century’s last decades. In 1975, Freedom House found that just 25 percent of the world’s sovereign states qualified for the Free category; by 2000, the share of countries rated as Free had reached 45 percent.6

The numbers told an optimistic story, and a series of accelerating social trends suggested that the recent improvements would hold firm and expand as the new millennium dawned.

There was, to begin with, a strong identification of free societies with free markets. The degree of economic freedom varied from one society to the next, and corruption was a problem in practically all of the new democracies. But there was no longer a major bloc of countries that rejected capitalism, and practically every country sought to deepen their participation in the global economic system, as witnessed by the number of governments seeking admission to the World Trade Organization. Authorities in the United States and elsewhere predicted that as countries came to accept the rules of the game set down by the WTO, they would also be more amenable to accepting the norms of liberal democracy, including fair elections, freedom of expression, minority rights, and the rule of law.

A second development was the introduction of the internet and other digital media. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, communist governments in

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