Populism, polarization, and post-truth are strategies. But it takes something more concrete than organizing principles and grand strategies to make this new approach to power work. For that, today’s autocrats need tools—specific psychological, communicational, technological, legal, electoral, financial, and organizational techniques to assert their power and shield themselves from the forces that constrain them.
We think of these techniques as power tools. They are the means through which 3P autocrats gain, wield, and maintain power. Here we get down to the brass tacks of how power has responded to the centrifugal forces that have begun to disperse and weaken it. Some of these tools are new, while others are updated versions of the tried-and-true weapons in every demagogue’s arsenal; all are made doubly effective by the fragmentation of our political debates, the poisonous worldwide explosion of distrust in public institutions, and the new digital technologies that act as force multipliers of these tools.
Money is power and power is money. This adage is more valid today than ever. Old-style rulers dip into their nation’s coffers unrestrained by laws or institutions. Through gifts, stipends, subsidies, and preferential access to business deals—or simply through graft—they enable themselves and their families and friends to amass unfathomable fortunes. We have all seen the photos of their palaces, planes, yachts, and cars. And we have also seen how they use money as a tool to strengthen their grip on power: to keep the military happy and loyal, to buy the support of regional chieftains, to fund a vast police state and security apparatus that repress the opposition, and to ensure that journalists remain docile and tycoons content. Dictators also use their fortunes to project their power beyond their country’s borders. They fund allies, co-opt foreign politicians and influencers, and buy foreign media companies and sports clubs, all while building international financial networks that serve to advance the interests of the ruling family and the nation it controls.
3P autocrats also need money to enrich themselves and their cronies. Like traditional dictators, they need the financial wherewithal to retain, cement, and extend their power. But unlike completely unaccountable dictators, 3P autocrats need to be more careful about the ways they get rich, make others rich, and use money to fortify their regime. They still do all of that but more stealthily and while being more mindful of the need to look like democrats, honest government officials, and corruption-busters.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia provides an illustrative example of the use of money as a power tool. When, in 1999, Putin became president, Russia was in the grip of a wild, gangland-style constellation of oligarchs who had appropriated the bulk of the old Soviet Union’s industrial, mineral, and energy wealth. The Moscow of the 1990s was shot through with frightening lawlessness, with business tycoons operating as a law unto themselves and the killings of rivals in broad daylight a frequent occurrence. The chaos of the Yeltsin years served no strategic purpose for the Kremlin, and Putin quickly realized that step one in establishing lasting control of the state would be to bring the oligarchs to heel.
In his book Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy, Anders Aslund explains how Putin, a former KGB agent, relied on his community of spies and secret-service operatives to do precisely that.1 From 2000 to 2003, Putin took pains to make the new pecking order clear: the rich could remain rich, could become much richer still, but only if they got clear on their political priorities. The message was conveyed without subtlety: within a few months of taking office, Putin launched a major attack on Vladimir Gusinsky, whose TV station, NTV, committed the capital sin of not merely criticizing the president but mocking him. Other defenestrations followed. Those who challenged the new arrangement had an alarming propensity to turn up dead in peculiar circumstances. The rest soon got the message.
Supplanting the Wild West of the Yeltsin era with a strong, hierarchical, and democratic-looking autocracy, Putin ensured that Russia’s oligarchs served him first. The deal was easy to understand: stoke the Kremlin’s displeasure and not only could your wealth vanish with frightening speed, but you ran the risk of being “canceled”—not in the cultural way common nowadays but in a brutal and often definitive manner. Henceforth, the oligarchs’ wealth was theirs only provisionally, so long as it served the president’s interests. Media could be startlingly profitable, but only so long as it actively supported the Kremlin’s line across the board. Their business empires would be expected to be surrendered to the state at a second’s notice, with their private ownership serving to sustain plausible deniability.
Perhaps the clearest case was that of Yevgeny Prigozhin, “Putin’s chef”—the Moscow restaurateur and caterer who found himself at the head of a sprawling business thanks to his closeness with Putin. Prigozhin is best known as the putative owner of the infamous St. Petersburg–based Internet Research Agency, in effect a Kremlin asset deployed to destabilize politics worldwide and suit Putin’s geopolitical interests. Prigozhin’s case may be the most visible, but it is by no means unique. Prigozhin-like figures, with one foot in the legal economy and one in organized crime, seem to flourish wherever a 3P autocracy is consolidating its power.
In Venezuela, it was Colombian trucking magnate Alex Saab, who leveraged his regime contacts in Caracas into a huge personal fortune by bilking the Venezuelan state through billions of overcharges for food imports, then used his money to prop up the Maduro regime. In the Philippines, it was Dennis Uy, the Chinese Filipino son of small-town traders, whose fortune grew with dizzying speed to include everything from casinos to Ferrari dealerships to water utilities. Not surprisingly, Uy has been close personal friends with Rodrigo Duterte for twenty years. In Hungary, it was Lőrinc Mészéros, a friend of twenty years from Viktor Orbán’s home village, who made the shift from construction worker to billionaire business tycoon in a short five years and was awarded enormously lucrative government contracts. And in Angola, the power of money stayed in the family as Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of longtime autocrat José Eduardo dos Santos, became a billionaire and Africa’s wealthiest woman thanks to “family ties, shell companies, and inside deals.”2
In Brazil, under the rule of the Workers Party, the country’s top engineering firm, Odebrecht, was turned into a conduit for bribes to control politicians at home and abroad, with kleptocracy effectively becoming an instrument of Brazil’s foreign policy.
In each of these cases, autocrats worked to both empower and control the major holders of wealth in their countries and were in no way shy about then using that wealth to bolster and sustain their own power. By the same token, the regimes were quick to punish business interests unwilling to bend to the will of the leader.
These might seem like concerns mostly for weak or endemically corrupt countries, but the big Western democracies are in no way immune. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi blatantly exploited his private wealth to sustain his political power for decades. In the United States, the Supreme Court instituted a remarkable system of legalized payoffs to politicians through its notorious 2010 Citizens United decision. The ruling hatched the infamous political action committees (PACs) and opened a flood of unregulated private funding for private political campaigns. It also “fixed” the corruption problem by rendering legal the kinds of arrangements most countries treat as criminal matters. Partly as a result, the normal cost of a U.S. presidential election campaign soared past the billion-dollar mark.
In today’s world, money remains what it has always been: the high road to influence, now repurposed in the service of populism, polarization, and post-truth.
Aloof and out-of-touch elites nurture populism. Groups at the top, disconnected from the people and with dwindling popular support, create the opportunities that populists exploit. They proceed by polarizing the political sphere as much as possible, using however much truth or untruth it takes to energize, organize, and mobilize supporters. Luckily for populists, there’s nothing easier than to portray an elite as aloof and out of touch. Being aloof and out of touch is a basic ingredient of what makes an elite an elite. The new breed of populists, then, can find material to work with pretty much anywhere.
Liberal democracies are based on laws and permanent institutions like parliaments and courts. Less visibly but just as crucially, they also depend on norms: the unwritten but generally accepted boundary lines that define how things are done. The outcome of slow, subtle historical processes, norms seep into the DNA of institutions over time. A norm is the sort of rule that everyone gets without anyone needing to point it out explicitly.
As E. J. Dionne, Norm Ornstein, and Thomas E. Mann explain:3
Political norms are defined as “a standard or pattern, especially of social behavior, that is typical or expected of a group.” They are how a person is supposed to behave in a given social setting. We don’t fully appreciate the power of norms until they are violated on a regular basis. And the breaching of norms often produces a cascading effect: As one person breaks with tradition and expectation, behavior previously considered inappropriate is normalized and taken up by others.
Over time, networks of norms weave together tacit but powerful understandings about what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate in politics. Together, they form what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt called “the soft guardrails of democracy”—the implicit, shared sense of “how things ought to be done” that binds together a democratic political culture.4
The new breed of populists finds democratic norms to be particularly inviting targets. Precisely because they’re unwritten, they seem to invite a challenge. How do you call someone out for breaking a rule that isn’t ever quite made explicit? Even the process of pointing out that a norm is being broken weakens it by bringing what was once tacit and unspoken out into the open, where it can be debated and attacked.
This is the paradox of norms. Unspoken rules are central to the health of democracies. But because they’re unspoken, norms are ill-defined, and that makes them vulnerable. Norms are crucial but weak, and 3P autocrats know to pounce on weak restraints on their power. Better yet, flouting rules both sets you off as a different kind of leader and undermines limits that box in power, all in one go.
Donald Trump established himself as an instinctive master of this style from the very start, possibly because he genuinely never grasped the unwritten rules well enough in the first place to understand that he was breaking them. Trump’s transgressions, his willingness to “go there,” to do things that just aren’t done, defined his approach to power. The Trump presidency was an institutional slaughterhouse of Washington’s sacred cows. Time after time, he reveled in doing things everyone knows aren’t done. From appointing obvious industry cronies to regulate the industries they used to represent (right up to the extreme of appointing a coal lobbyist to head the Environmental Protection Agency), openly siding with America’s dictatorial adversaries above his own intelligence services, defending torch-wielding neo-Nazi protesters at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas, and refusing to commit to accepting the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, no rules seemed to be protected from the president’s transgressions. Watching this cavalcade of outrages sobered Washington’s political chattering classes in a way George Packer powerfully captured:5
The adults were too sophisticated to see Trump’s special political talents—his instinct for every adversary’s weakness, his fanatical devotion to himself, his knack for imposing his will, his sheer staying power. They also failed to appreciate the advanced decay of the Republican Party, which by 2016 was far gone in a nihilistic pursuit of power at all costs. They didn’t grasp the readiness of large numbers of Americans to accept, even relish, Trump’s contempt for democratic norms and basic decency. It took the arrival of such a leader to reveal how many things that had always seemed engraved in monumental stone turned out to depend on those flimsy norms, and how much the norms depended on public opinion. Their vanishing exposed the real power of the presidency. Legal precedent could be deleted with a keystroke; law enforcement’s independence from the White House was optional; the separation of powers turned out to be a gentleman’s agreement; transparent lies were more potent than solid facts. None of this was clear to the political class until Trump became president.
For Timothy Snyder, whose book On Tyranny is the standout take on the subject in our times, it is in this serial attack on democracy’s soft guardrails that Russia’s influence has worked most insidiously in America during Trump’s term in office.6 “A lot of the ways that our democracy is going sour already happened already in Russia,” Snyder told an interviewer in 2019. “It’s not just that Russia helped Mr. Trump to get elected, it’s that a certain Russian way of doing politics has spread pretty widely.”7
Other 3P autocrats have preferred a more gradual approach, one that dilutes the initial shock value of norm-breaking by spreading it out over time. You can think of this as the boiled-frog approach to norm-breaking, after the old, zoologically suspect idea that a frog dropped into boiling water will jump straight out, but one placed in lukewarm water that’s gradually heated to a boil will fail to realize what’s happening until it’s too late. As it happens, there is increasing empirical evidence that the old adage about boiling the frog has real psychological underpinnings. As Anne Applebaum notes, citing a 2009 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, when a norm-breaking behavior is introduced gradually, people are more likely to accept it: “This happens, in part, because most people have a built-in vision of themselves as moral and honest, and that self-image is resistant to change. Once certain behaviors become ‘normal,’ then people stop seeing them as wrong.”8, 9
Boiling the frog is, in itself, a form of stealth: moving gradually wears opponents out, and their cries against abuses become constant and therefore easy to tune out. Bolivia and Hungary show how this is done. Evo Morales and Viktor Orbán built much of their early appeal by flouting rules of political propriety that seemed sacrosanct to the existing elite but no longer meant anything to people outside it. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez intuited that breaking these kinds of inside-baseball norms was a win-win for him. It’s not just that ignoring rules that hemmed in their power made autocrats more powerful; that’s obvious. It’s that they could use the elite backlash set off by norm-breaking to cement their credibility as outsiders. As we already discussed, this is exactly what Silvio Berlusconi did in the 1990s, and Donald Trump did in the early twenty-first century.
But not all norm-breaking is of the boiled-frog variety. Some of the 3P autocrats seem to go for a different tack—call it the shock-and-awe approach to norm-breaking. Perhaps the most extreme example comes from the Philippines.
Manila, the sweltering, sprawling capital of the Philippines, may not be the kind of city you think of when you hear the word “elite,” but to Filipinos, brought up in a country where a handful of Manila’s old-money families have run things since anyone can remember, Manila plays very much the role in the political imagination that Brussels plays in Britain or Washington does in the United States. And nowhere is the out-of-touch Manila elite more actively resented than on the impoverished southern island of Mindanao. Home to eleven of the Philippines’ twenty poorest provinces, Mindanao is also religiously and culturally different enough from the capital to feel its elite’s power as almost foreign. Mindanao turned out to be the perfect breeding ground for the kind of charismatic outsider able to rally the people against the corrupt elite. And that’s just what happened, in the form of the seven-term mayor of Davao City, Rodrigo Duterte.
Duterte’s claim to outsider status was a carefully constructed fiction. The son of a provincial governor, Duterte literally grew up in power. He was elected deputy mayor of Davao in the 1980s, when Mindanao was known as “Little Nicaragua” because of the violent leftist insurgency that permeated the island. Alongside the Marxists were a dazzling proliferation of criminal gangs, kidnapping squads, and petty crooks that kept Davao’s citizens in a state of permanent, low-level fear.
A core skill for any populist, new or old, is to identify areas where the people’s common sense and the elite’s common sense are in irreducible conflict. Duterte understood that the westernized elite in Manila, steeped in the culture of human rights, was aghast at the whole notion of an extrajudicial killing. But back in Davao City, his constituents were under assault by a rising wave of violence and criminality driven by small-time drug dealing. Nobody in Mindanao would mind that much if the police simply went out and killed the people dealing the drugs—in fact, constituents were clamoring for just such a move. And to Rodrigo Duterte, the howls of outrage this would raise from the Manila elite were encouraging sounds, not something to avoid.
The mayor grasped that he could build a political profile out of championing death squads—a radically simple solution to the crime problem that would, as an added benefit, clearly mark him out as different from the hated elite. Norm-breaking becomes an instrument of polarization, the second broad strategy in the 3Ps recipe. Duterte may not have owned a TV station, like Silvio Berlusconi, or a real estate empire, like Donald Trump, but he came to see a path to becoming a celebrity nonetheless by establishing himself as the guy who would champion solutions other politicians just wouldn’t.
Duterte built his reputation as mayor of Davao City on his barely concealed sponsorship of what came to be known as the DDS, the Davao Death Squad. A loose confederation of hit teams run by former soldiers and police officers, the DDS was given carte blanche to take out social undesirables: street kids, small-time drug dealers, anyone who, in the mayor’s view, was a menace to public order. Conservative estimates suggest that between 1998 and 2014, the DDS claimed no fewer than 1,424 lives.10 In its straightforward brutality, the DDS incarnated an aggressive rejection of the westernized elite’s devotion to due process. For a politician looking to stake out the terrain Duterte was interested in, it was a no-brainer.
Incongruously, Duterte continued to maintain he had nothing to do with the Davao Death Squads.11 While glorifying violence broadly (he promised the fish in Manila Bay would grow fat from the corpses that would end up floating in it), he was careful never to be found giving a specific order that could be associated with a specific killing. It was a characteristic bit of populist, polarizing doublespeak: Duterte promised violence even as he distanced himself from any specific killing. It was shameless. And it worked.
In 2016, Duterte ran on an explicit promise to export the brutal practices he favored in Davao to the Philippines as a whole. Praising martial law and vowing to institute it if necessary, Rodrigo Duterte made sure no one could possibly outflank him on the tough-on-crime beat. Since his election as president in 2016, the Philippines has become a human rights catastrophe and Duterte a popular hero. Coasting on high approval ratings while the body count mounted, he wasted no chance to decry the out-of-touch elites who had pushed back against his get-tough approach to the war on drugs.
In this way, norm-breaking can also be put in the service of populism. Rodrigo Duterte built support for these brutal policies by relentlessly portraying concern for human rights as an affectation of a corrupt elite. Ordinary Filipinos’ common sense is simple: if drugs are a problem, then killing all the drug dealers and addicts is an obvious solution. The elite’s urge to say, “But no, but it’s more complicated than that,” only plays into the populist trap, portraying them as devoted to cosmopolitan abstractions rather than regular people’s simple, obvious interests.
And so flouting the norm against extrajudicial killing became, in the Philippines, an instrument in the service of both polarization and populism. Daring the old elites to stand up for the rights of hated drug dealers, Duterte lured them into a trap that allowed him to portray them as the enemies of the pure people. It’s a tried-and-true approach, and one that continues to pay dividends year after year.
Of course, the Philippines is an extreme example. But the Davao Death Squad shows another path whereby democracy can fall victim to the 3P autocracy. The trick is that any consensus of the elite can be characterized as corrupt. In the eyes of populists and their followers, any belief, norm, or routine shared by the elite is, by definition, suspect and therefore a prime target.
Tapping into common people’s contempt for the elite and resentment for the real or imagined abuses they have suffered is what populists have always done. Developing a sixth sense for stoking the contempt and stirring up the resentment is their superpower. The knack is to perceive, before anyone else does, what source of resentment is ripe for exploitation. Resentment of elite privilege is the preexisting condition populists are fated to mine; the trick is in knowing when and how.
But resentment is just a suppressed longing for something harder to admit: a thirst for revenge. Populists who sow seeds of resentment must be prepared to serve up revenge if their followers’ appetite is to be sated.
This truth is usually too brutal to face head-on, and in normal political discussions it is usually elided. We’re more comfortable with euphemism: we prefer to discuss reactionary politics, or the politics of victimhood, or the politics of economic anxiety. Underlying it all is something uglier and more visceral—too visceral for comfort but too human to ignore.
“Resentment” is one such euphemism: a polite word for the longing to hurt those you believe have wronged you. The politics of resentment are the politics of revenge.
Revenge can be physical, but it need not be. Slamming your enemies in jail and confiscating their assets can be revenge, but so can much more subtle, symbolic moves that may look tame from the outside but can be hugely resonant in a given context.
Revenge comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. To Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—and, more importantly, to his legions of followers—allowing women to wear the Islamic headscarf at Turkey’s public universities was an act of revenge. It was a symbolically loaded rebuke to decades of strict secularism promoted by Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founder. The secular part of society that Ataturk nurtured experienced Erdoğan’s move as a direct, even personal attack. To Evo Morales, changing the official name of Bolivia to the Plurinational State of Bolivia was an act of symbolic revenge for hundreds of years of white domination of the indigenous population.
Populists know there are rich political spoils to be had from satisfying their fans’ thirst for symbolic revenge. There’s nothing new about that—demagogues since time immemorial have known there is always a constituency eager to make their enemies suffer. Surely, the Roman general who ordered Carthage razed to the ground and salt spread over the ruins wasn’t doing it for strategic advantage—he was doing it to meet his soldiers’ demand for vengeance.
But the twenty-first-century autocrats share an instinctive feel for how people’s lust for revenge can be turned into a weapon against constraints on their power. This explains some things that are otherwise hard to make sense of: decisions whose only purpose seems to be to hurt the perceived elite. Even if those decisions do nothing for the autocrats’ supporters. Even if those decisions actually hurt their supporters.
The Latin American left has long been animated by a multicentury epic narrative of oppression that gave rise to a thirst for revenge. Books such as Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America (a copy of which Hugo Chávez once famously gifted Barack Obama during a serendipitous encounter in the corridor of a presidential summit) popularized a profoundly simplified narrative of European imperial conquest and despoliation that cried out for redemption through revenge.12 Even though decades after its publication Galeano himself came to condemn the approach in his youthful megahit, the damage had been done. 3P autocrats like Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez found a willing audience for a political line that treated the entire history of Latin America as nothing more than the story of common people’s brutal victimization by a rapacious white elite … and they proceeded to sell themselves as the vehicles for avenging that victimhood.
During a stroll one fine Caracas afternoon in 2010, Hugo Chávez launched his most ambitious attempt to deliver that revenge. Walking around Caracas’s colonial-era central square with a camera crew in tow, Chávez theatrically asked his assistants what use a building across the street from the parliament served.
“That building is now in private hands, mi comandante,” one of his aides said deferentially, and then added, “Some jewelry businesses now operate out of there.”
“¡Exprópiese!” Chávez thundered. “Expropriate it!”
By the end of his short stroll, Chávez had theatrically shouted the same order—“¡Exprópiese!”—again and again, repeating it at each private building visible from the square, and in doing so set a course for radically altering the system of property ownership in Venezuela. In the months that followed, businesses large, medium, and small would be taken into state ownership—from sophisticated power and telecommunications companies with tens of thousands of employees to relatively small food processing plants with a few dozen employees and farms of all sizes all over Venezuela. Chávez wasted no chance to portray the expropriations as aimed at sticking it to an old, entrenched oligarchy that had been exploiting everyday Venezuelans. These were the politics of revenge put at the center of an entire governing program aimed at remaking society along revanchist lines. It was exhilarating. It was also insanely terrible policymaking that destroyed Venezuela’s economy and democracy and would, within a generation, mire Chávez’s ecstatic fans in one of the worst humanitarian disasters Latin America has ever seen.
For Chávez, the specific impact of a policy mattered less than its symbolic impact. To Chávez, the goal was to inscribe himself in a historical narrative as the heroic champion of the oppressed. To him, the archetype of that champion would always be Simón Bolívar, the legendary independence-war hero who drove the Spaniards from six Latin American countries and—in his telling—led a people’s revolution against the elite. Chávez loved to quote a line from Chilean Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda: “Bolívar awakens once every hundred years, when the people awaken.”13
The claim, never quite uttered but never really hidden, was clear: Chávez was no normal political leader. He was a larger-than-life historical figure, a crusader sent to exact revenge for hundreds of years of accumulated grievances.
The grievances 3P autocrats address are of a particular nature. They are not the broad-based grievances of an oppressed class in the way the left-wing politics of old conceived them, nor are they the grievances against an overgrown, overweening government that the conservative right had vented for so long. Those old gripes had the ambition to unify large sections of society under a common cause: the economic betterment of wage workers or the increasing freedom of every citizen. They gave rise to identities that had aspirations to being universal—though of course those aspirations were never achieved.
The grievances 3P autocrats exploit are different. Rather than serving as the basis for broad and broadly inclusive identities, they configure tribes—groups of intensely loyal followers who band together under the logic of the politics of fandom. Rather than broadly inclusive distinctions, these grievances configure narrow identities that empower the logic of polarization. After all, polarization is always about us versus them, and drawing sharp boundaries between the “us” and the “them” is the key step in any polarization strategy.
You can see the beginnings of this kind of identity-for-polarization strategy as far back as Silvio Berlusconi’s scesa in campo speech, where he drew sharp lines between the two Italies: “the Italy that works against the one that chatters, the Italy that produces against the Italy that wastes, the Italy that saves against the one that steals,” and so on.14 From the beginning, the forerunner of the 3P framework had grasped that splitting his country down the middle along emotionally charged lines could propel him to power.
As 3P strategies have been more fully developed, the power of identity to shape political battles and define the limits of what is acceptable has bloomed. From Vladimir Putin putting the Russian Orthodox Church at the center of his image of a virtuous Russianness to Hugo Chávez’s creation of a newly militant “Bolivarian” identity, 3P autocrats know the key to powerfully polarizing the political sphere is to put political support for them at the center of their supporters’ self-identity.
When political differences come to be identity-based, political debate shifts from being a discussion about ideas to being a conflict between incompatible visions of the good life. If my group incarnates all that is righteous, noble, and good and your group stands for all that is wrong, base, and bad, there can hardly be a civil discussion between us. I no longer need to learn how to live peacefully alongside you, despite our differences; rather, my aim is to defeat you and banish you from the political scene once and for all.
Identity is a peculiar force in the 3P autocrat’s toolbox because it cuts both ways. It redefines not just the self-understanding of the autocrat’s followers but also that of the autocrat’s opponents. In Venezuela, to be anti-chavista became as much a cornerstone of regime opponents’ identity as being chavista became to those on the other side. In Turkey, simply knowing where a person stood with regard to Erdoğan became enough to infer all kinds of things about them. In the United States, whether you were pro- or anti-Trump, self-identification came to overshadow all other political considerations. To many, not wearing a face mask during the pandemic became a signal to others of that person’s political identity.
To be clear, the salience of political views in people’s identities had been growing in the United States for many decades before Donald J. Trump took center stage. In 1960, just 5 percent of voters said they would be displeased if their child married someone from the opposing political party; by 2010, some 50 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats said they would be upset by such a match.15 By 2017, though, 70 percent of Democrats were telling pollsters they could not date a Trump supporter.16 By 2020, 83 percent of those with a very unfavorable view of Trump would refuse to date one of his supporters.17
Interestingly, in the United States such views have come to supplant old dividing lines that were once seen as central. In 1958, just 4 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriages. By 2020, 86 percent did.18 This suggests a rather different interpretation of “identity politics” than the one usually bandied about. Rather than dividing over classic markers of identity such as race, Americans are increasingly sorting themselves on the basis of political attitudes with regard to race, with folks who identify with Donald Trump’s racial attitudes forming one team and those who reject it forming the other. The intensity of ill will between the two heralds an era of ongoing political instability in the United States.
3P autocrats transform identity into power by embodying their followers’ fantasies. Trump’s job is to embody Trumpism—to live the dream of unlimited wealth and power his followers crave. As Francis Fukuyama has argued, leaders craft an identity that affirms the wounded dignity of their followers by living the way the followers wish they could live. That identification is always both positive (with the leader) and negative (against those the leader defines as the enemy). That’s why identity politics is always the handmaiden of polarization.19 All too often, aspiring autocrats who have a special knack for wielding identity as a tool for polarization succeed at dismantling democracies.
The tools the 3P autocrats use are nothing if not adaptable. They can be hitched to agendas as radical as socialist revolutions or as extreme as Filipino death squads. But the true mark of their versatility is that they need not be hitched to any ideological agenda at all.
That’s the lesson of the two most successful applications of the 3P playbook in recent years: Brexit in Britain and the election of Donald Trump in the United States. These cases illustrate the new approach pushed to the limit: set up in opposition to two of the oldest and most mature democracies on earth. More to the point, they show their effectiveness not so much in the service of an agenda as in opposition to any agenda.
The tools of the 3Ps can, it turns out, be put in the service of the politics of nihilism. In some populists’ hands, they can be used not so much to advance a given program as to advance the rejection of any program.
Think of Britain’s traumatic experience with Brexit. It’s a peculiar case because in Britain, the tools picked from the menu of options offered by populism, polarization, and post-truth were applied by committee, as it were—without having any single recognizable leader at the front of the charge. It was a diffuse, leaderless sort of new power that saw the public of a G7 country stand up to reject the organizing principle of an entire country’s elite because it was beloved by that elite.
The seminal moment in the Brexit referendum came when one of the highest-ranking cabinet secretaries, Michael Gove, confronted with a long list of august organizations that had rejected Brexit, stunned his Sky interviewer with a simple answer: “The people of this country,” Gove said, “have had enough of experts.”20
Gove’s official title was no less than Lord High Chancellor of the United Kingdom—an unlikely appellation for a would-be enemy of the learned elite. Here was a onetime president of the hyperexclusive Oxford Union debating club denouncing elitism and deriding expertise. But for all the shrieks of contempt from elite quarters, Gove perfectly captured the mood of deep nihilism washing over the British electorate.
After the 2016 referendum, in which 52 percent of Britons voted in favor of leaving the European Union, pollsters would find that attitudes toward experts were among the best predictors of the way Britons would vote in the Brexit referendum.21 Those who agreed that it’s wrong to rely too much on so-called experts and better to rely on ordinary people were three times as likely to favor Brexit as those who disagreed. And those who agreed that the opinions of professional people with expertise are better than relying on ordinary people were five times as likely to vote to remain in the EU as those who disagreed.22
Gove had latched onto an important insight, one that elsewhere I’ve dubbed the “paradox of trust.” These days, people are increasingly unwilling to believe the insights of actual experts who have spent careers painstakingly studying a given subject. But this skepticism that Gove was exploiting comes alongside a newfound willingness to trust charlatans peddling easy answers to complicated questions. Even as the words of real experts carry less and less weight in the public sphere, the words of quacks and charlatans spread with unprecedented speed on social media. Why? Because we’re irresistibly drawn to messages that confirm our preexisting biases and flatter our prejudices. In the hands of populists utterly indifferent to truth and happy to exploit the paradox of trust in the service of polarization, skepticism becomes a tool of devastating effectiveness.
The mood of deep suspicion of elite institutions, opinions, and habits that Britain’s Brexiteers had latched onto has been extensively documented on the other side of the Atlantic as well. In his book The Ideas Industry, Daniel Drezner shows how, for more than a generation, people’s willingness to defer to expert opinions has cratered throughout the West.23 In the United States, it took a bold politician to fully grasp the full potentiality of this moment. Where enough voters are alienated enough from an elite, anti-intellectualism can become a devastating ideological weapon.
In this regard, Donald J. Trump’s shortcomings became his biggest asset. Take climate science. There are plenty of sophisticated GOP politicians who are willing to cynically pretend not to understand the science of climate change. There’s Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, who in 2009 sponsored green energy legislation24 but in 2011, hoping to ward off a primary challenge from the right, refused to acknowledge that climate change is human-caused.25 Or Newt Gingrich, who a decade ago performed in thirty-second TV ads about the need for a bipartisan approach to climate change26 and now denies any such phenomenon is happening at all.27
The feigned ignorance of an Upton or a Gingrich often isn’t entirely convincing, though, because it’s so obviously fake. It takes a politician who is genuinely unable to understand the science of climate change to gain those voters’ trust. A genuine ignoramus can achieve things, politically, that a pretend one just can’t.
Donald Trump’s rejection of expert knowledge had a taste of authenticity, with deep roots in the endless expanses of his ignorance. It works as a power tool because to the populist’s mind, a stink of suspicion clings to abstraction, to theorizing, and, in general, to a sophistication that is foreign to the pure people whose interests the populist claims to represent.
Distrust of elites bleeds into distrust of the tools the elite uses to sustain its power. Soon, hostility extends to intellectual effort of any kind, and to the institutional buttresses of that effort: universities, elite publications, research institutions, think tanks, the entire system of academic credentialing designed to certify expertise. “Burn it all down,” the 3P autocrat says. “It’s a trap. It works against you and your family.”
As far back as 1958, Michael Young had foreseen these trends in his prescient sociological satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy.28 Young imagined a dystopia where people’s place in society was decided entirely on merit, with a cognitive elite sitting atop a finely stratified social system that the less meritorious came to find wholly oppressive. In the book, the poisonous atmosphere of distrust between the meritocrats and the masses they disdain builds up to a massive revolt that overthrows the entire system. The book placed the revolt in 2033.
But, outside the realm of dystopian fiction, what actually happens when a nation turns decisively against merit as an organizing principle in society? What are the consequences of reorganizing today’s highly complex postindustrial societies systematically away from a reliance on expertise? Has anyone actually tried such a thing? What happens?
Here Hugo Chávez once again points the way. Chávez bolstered his populist credentials by displaying his contempt for technocrats’ claim to expertise. Their reliance on technical jargon and the cold, analytic way they used to communicate looked to him like evidence that it was all a big scam. Take this passage from December 2002, lifted from one of his famous Sunday talk shows:
Boards, meetings, reviews, because on top of it all they really know how to make your head spin. Once I called a board meeting at PDVSA [the national oil company] and came out with my head spinning. I said, “I’m going to need some sleep,” because they came at me with everything: slides, projections, this, that, the other thing, and you end up dizzy. I had to lie down, I slept about twelve hours straight, my head totally spinning. I said, “No, no more, I’m not putting up with this anymore,” I want a report, so I can read first and I’ll call you, one at a time, for explanations, maybe the finance chief first, and the other guy, then the other guy. But it didn’t matter, you gave them orders and they weren’t followed … Venezuela’s had a state within the state … it was a black box, and now we’re opening it and the vipers are coming out.29
Breaking the technocrats’ grip on PDVSA became an obsession for Chávez, a project he was determined to carry out at any cost. PDVSA, the president decided, had had enough of experts. In 2020, within two decades of this style of leadership, PDVSA’s oil production had fallen 90 percent, and long lines for fuel formed at gas stations throughout the country—an unimaginable outcome in one of the world’s biggest and oldest oil producers.
Such catastrophes are worth it to 3P autocrats if they allow them to solidify their populist credentials. That’s why the temptation to insult the technocratic elite is always hard to resist. It’s difficult to believe, to take just one example, that a deliberate insult was not intended when, in 2017 as president, Donald Trump appointed onetime Texas governor Rick Perry to head the Energy Department. It was that department whose name, famously, Perry had been unable to recall in a debate four years earlier when asked which cabinet offices he proposed to eliminate. The blunder had sunk his presidential bid … and now here he was, asked to lead a department he’d felt such contempt for he couldn’t even remember he wanted to eliminate it.
But seldom has skepticism-as-contempt been more transparently deployed than in Rex Tillerson’s brief tenure as U.S. secretary of state from 2017 to 2018. Tillerson, the former CEO of oil giant ExxonMobil, had no government experience at all and openly disdained the expertise of the Foreign Service professionals he supposedly led. He proceeded to unleash a form of institutional vandalism that will take years, if not decades, to undo. Flouting the convention that cabinet secretaries fight to preserve their departments’ budgets, Tillerson gleefully jumped onto an aggressive budget-cutting campaign that he could use as cover to purge the Foreign Service, shedding invaluable expertise accumulated over decades in one of the most prestigious parts of the U.S. government. With recruitment into the Foreign Service suspended, dozens of top posts unfilled, and the department facing draconian budget cuts, America’s interface with the world was crippled by a wave of disinvestment in human capital. Together with a move, deep into the administration’s lame-duck period, to weaken civil service protections insulating heads of federal agencies from political retaliation, the administration seemed intent to rid the government of its most seasoned experts.
“America has had enough of experts” seemed to be the motto favored by the Trump administration. As the premium on political loyalty to the president overshadowed all other considerations, it left not just the Department of State but the state itself weaker and less capable. The president stunned Washington by deriding even America’s intelligence community, at one point comparing intelligence leaks to the practices of Nazi Germany. It’s important to recognize this project for what it is: an unmistakable early warning sign of a 3P autocracy in progress, and one with terrifying echoes of even older forms of misrule. It was Hannah Arendt who first noted, back in 1951, that “totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”30
She wasn’t wrong. Just right about more than she realized.
Media constitutes one of the most powerful checks on the pretensions of would-be autocrats, which makes the taming of the press a top priority. A free media is not just enormously irritating to leaders who rely on populism, polarization, and post-truth to govern, but it is a dangerous threat to their hold on power. Free media thwarts leaders’ ability to establish their narrative as the truth. Which is why a testy, adversarial, and eventually hostile relationship with the media is one of the clearest signs of looming autocracy.
Of course, autocrats have always sought to silence those who would criticize them. A generation or two ago, controlling information flows meant censorship: actual regime officials wielding a red pen in a newsroom while the political police stood ready to jail publishers, editors, and journalists who antagonized the regime. Those old, twentieth-century mechanisms of media control have hardly died out. In 2019, New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger warned that his newspaper was seeing an alarming rise in the rate at which journalists around the world were being muzzled, repressed, and jailed. “To stop journalists from exposing uncomfortable truths and holding power to account,” Sulzberger wrote, “a growing number of governments have engaged in overt, sometimes violent, efforts to discredit their work and intimidate them into silence.”31 But the old mechanisms of media control are not enough to control the threat of free media in the information age.
Old-style censorship continues to be practiced in old-school dictatorships; China is the standout example, but Cuba, Russia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Belarus, Iran, Venezuela, and many other repressive regimes continue to practice it as well. Erdoğan’s Turkey, for example, is the country with the world’s largest number of jailed journalists. In less autocratic regimes, the internet has rendered censorship and media repression increasingly ineffective. There are simply too many new ways to bypass the state’s censorship efforts.
In the twenty-first century, the new methods of control are subtler and harder to spot. They rely more on pressure, persuasion, and cooperation than on brute force. Nowadays, censorship works via subterfuge; it is stealthy, indirect, or both.32 Governments bribe journalists, editors, or media owners; they block or filter search results; they keep close electronic surveillance over journalists and their sources, and stealthily pressure editors to fire the most problematic ones. They control access to imports, whether newsprint or imported equipment and spare parts (for video cameras, for example), and they shut dissident media out of government economic subsidy schemes available to their pro-government competitors. Tax inspectors are constantly deployed to audit the noncompliant media companies, operations of foreign news organizations are restricted or banned outright, and editors and journalists receive stealthy suggestions about the stories that are better left untold. The security services hack online news media to disrupt them or shut them down, buy out outlets that don’t toe the government line, create stealth or fake news sources, and launch lookalike sites meant to muddy muckrakers’ reputations.
The tools at their disposal are endless, subtle, hard to discern, and brutally effective. They nurture an atmosphere rife with self-censorship, which in turn produces a gray area between freedom and outright coercion.
How does this work in practice? Poland offers a good example. Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the Law and Justice Party, announced in 2020 that his party, which had narrowly won an election, would seek to “re-Polonize” and “deconcentrate” all privately owned media. Soon thereafter, senior Polish officials confirmed that a state-owned oil company—yes, an oil company—was negotiating the purchase of twenty of the country’s twenty-four regional newspapers. For those not willing to sell, Kaczyński—whom the Washington Post described as “a nationalist populist who crusades against immigrants and gay rights”—announced punitive laws.33
There are many other examples, but the cases of two broadcasters—Venezuela’s RCTV in 2007 and the Philippines’ ABS-CBN in 2020—are both illustrative and striking. Both were venerably old: RCTV was the oldest commercial broadcaster in Venezuela, ABS-CBN the longest-running commercial broadcaster in all Southeast Asia. Both were general-interest broadcasters, focused on entertainment programming and targeting a mass audience. Both included small but feisty news and opinion services that held the government to account and often attacked it in strong terms. They even shared a spot on the dial and a colloquial name: everyone in Venezuela called RCTV “El Canal 2,” while everyone in the Philippines knew ABS-CBN as “Channel 2.”
Both were shut down because their respective government regulators refused to renew their broadcast licenses. It was precisely their mass appeal that made them unacceptable to the 3P autocrats in Caracas and Manila. If a cable news network with a relatively small audience of middle-class news junkies criticizes the government, that’s one thing. Broadcasters like Russia’s NPR-style Ekho Moskvy, which courts a niche, highly educated, NPR-style audience, typically get hounded and harassed rather than shut down outright. But when a general-interest broadcaster beams critical content at the massive popular audience, reaching far into the country’s cities and towns, it is quite another. Yet rather than being silenced by tanks and soldiers, these broadcasters were shut down with lawyers and administrative minutiae. Indeed, the governments involved steadfastly refused to acknowledge that the broadcasters had been shut down at all. Their broadcast licenses had merely been denied renewal—a pseudolegal distinction without a difference if ever there was one. Both staggered on via satellite and online, reaching a tiny fraction of the mass audiences they had once enjoyed. Each was defanged as an effective counterweight to the 3P autocrat running its country.
Or take an example from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. On the morning of October 8, 2016, the staff of Népszabadság, Hungary’s leading broadsheet, was in for a surprise. The electronic access keys to the building and their newsroom had suddenly stopped working. Their work phones and emails also had stopped functioning. The paper, they soon came to realize, had been shut down. Népszabadság had become the highest-profile victim of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s campaign against independent media. Like any good stealthocrat, Orbán had made sure to preserve plausible deniability. The newspaper was officially closed for financial reasons by its Austrian owners. It was pure coincidence, Hungarians were told, that the decision came just days after Népszabadság had published a series of hard-hitting corruption exposés pointing the finger directly at members of Orbán’s inner circle.
Taking on an iconic brand and its most visible opponent, Orbán overreached, creating a cause célèbre that could galvanize international response. Soon, international organizations were publishing action alerts warning about the collapse of free speech in an EU member country.
The international outcry over Népszabadság tended to obscure what was a much broader and more systematic attempt to bring all of Hungary’s media under the 3P autocrat’s thumb. Starting immediately after his election in 2010, Orbán had moved aggressively to transform Hungary’s state broadcaster into a propaganda organ for Fidesz, his ruling party. From that point on he set out on an aggressive campaign to neutralize critical newspapers, radio stations, and TV broadcasters throughout the country.34 First Orbán hit them in the pocketbook, withdrawing state advertising from critical media and using the Media Council—Hungary’s media regulator—to levy heavy fines against dissident media. Soon he moved to replace critical staff members altogether, largely by asking businesspeople friendly to the regime to buy meddlesome newspapers.
In August 2017, Orbán allies bought up the remaining handful of independent regional newspapers in Hungary, leaving three regime-connected businesspeople in control of every regional newspaper in the country. In previous years, Orbán’s business friends had bought independent radio and TV broadcasters as well as popular online news portals. Seven years after his ascent to power, Orbán had concluded a clean sweep of independent regional media in Hungary.35
What’s notable here is the way populists from seemingly opposing ends of the ideological spectrum converge on the same mechanisms of media control. Time was when ultimate censorship came in the form of a knock on the door from the secret police in the middle of the night. That was the twentieth-century pattern. In the twenty-first, this was replaced by tax audits, fines over recondite regulatory regulations, the withdrawal of government advertising budgets, and entreaties from mysterious “private investors” seeking an ownership stake.
And that’s the story of the 3Ps autocrats’ power tools writ large. Hungry for unchecked control but needing to keep a minimum of democratic credibility, leaders in vastly different contexts, even those espousing opposing ideologies, converge on the same practices for reasserting power in the face of institutions created to contain the concentration of power. They may have nothing in common ideologically, but they all intuit that ideology really has very little to do with the demands of power today. That’s why they converge on the same few power tools again and again.
Another power tool used by the 3P leaders relies on the age-old argument that in the face of a national catastrophe it is necessary to empower an emergency government. National laws in many parts of the world include emergency provisions to allow executive branches to act decisively in situations when regular legislative processes would prove too cumbersome and slow; civil unrest, foreign invasion, economic collapse, mass protests, coup attempts, and most certainly pandemics have all been cited recently as occasions for emergency rule.
As we’ve seen, the new breed of autocrats is forever on the hunt for ways to get around institutional checks and balances. It is not surprising, then, that autocrats of all stripes are irresistibly attracted to emergency measures. They are preexisting pseudolaws, ideally situated to be abused beyond recognition without (technically) violating any given law.
There isn’t anything especially novel about this technique. The abuse of emergency legislation to unshackle the executive is a mainstay of autocratic regimes dating back generations. Fascist legal scholar Carl Schmitt noted in the 1930s that in any legal system, the ultimate power would always be the power to declare an exception. Every legal system, Schmitt reasoned, must make space for action in emergency situations. Because it is impossible for a lawmaker to foresee every potential eventuality, every legal system leaves room for ambiguity: situations that don’t quite fit the framers’ foresight but where decisions must be made. Some actors in the system must—by right or by might—be empowered to make those decisions and to make those exceptions. That, for Schmitt, is the ultimate fount of power—the loophole through which any and every decision can be rendered legal.36
In the hands of a Nazi apologist like Schmitt, this doctrine of the exception became the juridical justification for the Ermächtigungsgesetz of 1933—the Enabling Law that gave Adolf Hitler the power to legislate without the need for approval from the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament. Under the Enabling Law, the exception became the norm. Emergency became permanent and eventually blossomed into the Führerprinzip, the formal doctrine that the Führer’s spoken word outranked in legal status not only government policies, regulations, and practices but even written law.
Rule by exception became a mainstay of authoritarian government after the war as well, with the most notable example being Egypt, which was run under an “emergency law” that suspended basic civil liberties (including freedom of speech and habeas corpus) more or less continuously from 1967 until 2011. But countries as diverse as Argentina, Greece, India, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Spain, and Thailand spent considerable periods under emergency law during the Cold War.
In 2008, Silvio Berlusconi pioneered the use of emergency powers to enact a populist crackdown on immigration, approving a draconian decree that allowed the government to fingerprint all ethnic Roma in the country. The measure was widely criticized as an obvious racist attack on a marginalized community. The Roma—previously known as Gypsies—had long been blamed for crime in Italy, and Berlusconi’s emergency measure sidestepped guarantees against racial profiling to pick them out for additional scrutiny.
And if even fake emergencies are an irresistible temptation to autocrats, imagine how much more powerful a real emergency is. In 2020, the world got a crash course in the autocratic uses of emergency when a real emergency jumped front and center onto the world stage. The coronavirus pandemic created ample justification for expanding state power, with even the best-established democracies sharply curtailing usual freedoms to slow the spread of the virus. In Russia, this became a golden opportunity to roll out mass video surveillance on a scale never seen before, with facial recognition software attached to security cameras all around the country under the pretext of contact tracing. In Israel, the pandemic became the pretext for allowing the state to exploit gigabytes’ worth of mobile phone location data, pinpointing both Israelis’ and Palestinians’ exact whereabouts with frightening precision.
Other countries went well beyond this in the drive to exploit the coronavirus emergency for autocratic gain. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán canceled parliamentary elections and announced plans to rule by decree, issuing vague and unenforceable pledges to reverse the measures once the pandemic subsided. And China, the birthplace of the virus, unilaterally ended Hong Kong’s special status under the “one country, two systems” arrangement, extending the reach of Beijing’s security laws to the territory at a time when the international community was simply too distracted by the global health crisis to offer any real pushback.
In Chapter 10, we will describe in more detail the impact that the novel coronavirus pandemic had on the use and abuse of power, and how, at the same time, the virus also weakened the power of governments and leaders around the world.
It isn’t any one tool that gives the 3P framework its potency but rather their simultaneity. Together, these power tools encode a repository of insights into the nature of populism, polarization, and post-truth. The autocrats who wield them know that aggrieved masses propel to power those offering not just redress but revenge. They’ve grasped that the people most eager to sweep them into power are the most aggrieved: those whose identities revolve around feeling victimized in their own societies. Aspiring autocrats have relearned the old insight that nothing creates a visceral bond with followers like speaking directly to a deep sense of having been wronged. And they’ve done so using twenty-first-century communications tools unavailable to their predecessors.
Aspiring autocrats have turned the power of skepticism into a key propellant of their political project, mining a deep vein of contempt against elite experts to shield themselves against scrutiny—turning expertise almost into a badge of shame.
And they’ve harnessed the power of media control, sidestepping legacy news organizations by talking to people directly, first through rallies, later on TV and online, to devastating effect. Once in power, of course, 3P autocrats often go further, turning to increasingly sophisticated methods of controlling the information people have access to.
They turn to these tools because they understand that the checks and balances that are most effective in limiting their scope of action are not those written into laws. They’re written into something vaguer, more evanescent, and more pervasive: the sense of what’s normal. These “soft guardrails of democracy” can’t be codified, but they must be undone if aspiring autocrats are to achieve their ultimate goals. 3P autocrats know that to win they need to redefine what’s normal in a democracy, to prod it, poke it, and challenge it day in and day out until it collapses. They know that until that happens, their hold on power will never be fully secure. The road to autocracy requires war on that sense of what’s normal. Yes, war.
Whether they’re blazing new trails or reinventing well-trodden ones, the new breed of autocrats have developed a distinctive set of techniques and tools for sidestepping checks and balances as they work to gain and maintain power. Both by breaking norms to prove their bona fides as outsiders and by sating their followers’ thirst for revenge, they’ve learned to mobilize people’s rage against elites as an instrument for their power. That means exploiting people’s skepticism of experts while cutting off their access to critical reporting about themselves. And, when all else fails, it means dusting off emergency powers to circumvent the formal checks on their powers.
Each of these techniques, on its own, would be dangerous to the health of a free democracy. Deployed together, they create ample opportunities to replace a real democracy with a fake one, one that has all the trappings of the old democracy but none of its effectiveness in curbing the power of the nation’s chief executive.