There seems to be no shortage of enthusiastic believers in the promises that populists make. In some ways, the more interesting question about them isn’t why they behave the way they do, but why their followers remain so keen to believe them.
On one level the answer is obvious: because populists say what their followers want to hear. That includes feel-good promises that will be quickly ignored or, if implemented, will either be ephemeral or fall short of delivering the expected—indeed, promised—results. But at a deeper, more troubling level, the question is why the followers continue to support populists even after there is overwhelming evidence that their promises are empty, their policies a failure, and their politics bad for democracy. Why support politicians whose purpose is to stay in power as long as possible at any cost, and who are bent on concentrating power at the expense of their followers’ well-being?
This is the real puzzle: not so much why autocrats are willing to do whatever is necessary to gain and retain power, but why it is so easy for demagogues and charlatans to gain followers. And behind this question lies a dark suspicion: could it be that 3P autocrats are popular because of their authoritarianism rather than despite it?
The sense that the appetite for autocratic leadership is rising is not just a matter of perception. The share of people who would like to see “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliaments and elections” grew by 10 percentage points in the United States in two decades starting in the late 1990s, by almost 20 points in Spain and South Korea, and by 25 points in Russia and South Africa according to research carried out in 2016 by Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk.1 Worse, the bulk of the shift is due to changing attitudes among younger people.
What has whetted this appetite worldwide for the type of 3P leadership and policies that has ended up hurting those who supported the populists? What caused this stealthy authoritarian drift?
Did a common set of experiences across countries as diverse as Brazil, Bolivia, India, Israel, Italy, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, the United States, and Venezuela prime their publics for 3P leadership? What are those experiences? Are they economic? Sociological? Psychological? Technological? All four somehow? Or did this new form of stealthy autocracy spread through contagion—due to a demonstration effect pushing beyond geographic boundaries as aspiring autocrats learned from one another’s success?
As we will see, political scientists, sociologists, and social psychologists have begun to converge on a set of explanations for why people’s tolerance for more authoritarian governments is on the rise. In this view, common experiences of economic dislocation build up to a perception that society is changing too fast in ways that people perceive as threatening. This perception of threat activates broadly shared, but normally dormant, psychological predispositions toward authoritarianism and a preference for authoritarian leaders.
Today, those authoritarian predispositions are being activated more frequently thanks to the effects of technological hyperconnectivity. And that hyperconnectivity makes the threat implied by fast, large-scale, societal change much more potent. It gives it political depth and fosters a broad assault against the foundations of liberal societies: freedom and democratic checks and balances.
The fragmentation and degradation of the power of the nation-state is one of the biggest reasons people find their social environment threatening. Why? Because traditional power centers are increasingly constrained. In particular, nation-states—the entities that provided the building blocks of the international order for two centuries—are losing the ability to foster the economic fortunes of their societies, leaving their people hungry for increasingly radical solutions to problems traditional politicians seem unwilling to address or unable to solve. And that’s a pent-up grievance that aspiring autocrats know how to stoke and exploit.
The reaction to the increasing ineffectiveness of the nation-state to provide shelter to their citizens against the mounting threats of an uncertain world is an important driver of the demand for autocratic government in the twenty-first century.
Societies don’t abandon democratic principles on a whim. They do so after sustained periods of dislocation, disappointment, and the deterioration of their living standards. They do so when a critical mass of citizens concludes that personal progress is an impossible dream. Once that point is reached, it is only natural then to perceive society as alien, unjust, morally adrift, and threatening.
That explains why the aspiring 3P autocrats find their ideal hunting grounds not among the poor but among the disappointed: people who’ve come to expect a level of material well-being and public services that they suddenly find beyond their reach.
You don’t have to be poor to be disappointed about your lot in life. It is not even economic inequality, though inequality feeds the feelings of injustice that make people angry. The main problem for those who have their basic needs covered (food, a roof over their heads, some regular income, healthcare, safety) is status dissonance: the frustration that wells up when people conclude that their economic and social progress is blocked, and they are stuck in a lower rung than the one they expected to occupy in society. Status dissonance is amplified by the sense that rather than coming closer to your rightful place in society, you’re falling further and further below your natural spot in the pecking order.
This experience of status dissonance ties together the outlooks of widely different people who have supported aspiring autocrats in very different contexts. The downwardly mobile schoolteacher in the Philippines, the displaced autoworker in Michigan, the unemployed young university graduate in Moscow, and the struggling construction worker in Hungary may not have much lived experience in common, but each feels the sting of disappointment from a life that doesn’t live up to the expectations they had formed, to the future they had envisioned for themselves and their families. The story of the twenty-first century so far is the story of how the disappointed lash out politically, creating a series of crises that liberal political systems are ill-equipped to process fairly and respond to in a timely and effective way.
You can think of this as the “dashed expectations” model of political instability. It has been around for at least a couple of centuries. Its spiritual parent was Alexis de Tocqueville, the French chronicler of American life who back in the early nineteenth century had already pinpointed the revolutionary potential of dashed expectations and the status dissonance they engendered.2
This idea of dashed expectations as a prime mover in human history was fully fleshed out by the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington in his classic 1968 book, Political Order in Changing Societies.3 Standing on its head the consensus of his day, which held that countries would inevitably become more stable and democratic as they modernized and became more prosperous, Huntington persuasively argued that modernization itself is often a driver of political instability, not a solution to it.
In the mid-twentieth century, Huntington maintained, modernization gave people a powerful political voice long before developing countries’ economies could give them a material stake in maintaining stability. Marshaling evidence from all around the globe, Huntington showed that both traditional agrarian societies and advanced capitalist economies were often stable, but “modernizing” countries (that is, those in transition from the former to the latter) fell prey to coups, insurrections, civil disorder, and civil war with clocklike regularity.
For Huntington, the problem was that the new technologies associated with the modernization of his day (such institutions as the labor union, the newspaper, and the political party) empowered people to make political demands that traditional political systems were not able to satisfy. He argued that modernization was prodigiously efficient at generating status dissonance on a mass scale, and that was why it brought about destabilizing political turmoil.
Fast-forward five decades. Today, the new information technologies enabling groups to organize politically—the talk radio show, affordable travel, the mobile phone, Twitter, the WhatsApp group—look much different from the ones Huntington had in mind. Huntington never intended his model to account for the breakdown of the political systems of advanced industrialized economies—he was writing about Bangladesh and Indonesia, not Italy, the United Kingdom, or the United States. Yet the mechanisms he identified resonate powerfully with the experiences of the advanced countries in the twenty-first century.
Today, new identity groups form around a burning sense of grievance. They’re brought together by the very real experience of being left behind economically, disrespected culturally, and immersed in an increasingly alien-seeming, threatening society. It is these groups, propelled by status dissonance, that are creating political instability on an unprecedented scale in political systems all around the globe.
There are broad differences with the mid-twentieth-century reality Samuel Huntington examined. In his day, the world was undergoing rapid decolonization, and the Soviet Union vied with the United States for global preeminence. The flavor of political instability tended to be revolutionary: long-marginalized groups were coming to the table for the first time and demanding a share of a prosperity they had never known. Today, its flavor in higher-income countries is more often defensive: groups that have had to fight for a modicum of financial security find their positions threatened or eroded, and they demand protection. Their goal is to beat back an alien tide of change rather than to pave the way for an earthly utopia.
For all these differences, the basic insight remains: when a critical mass of people in society feel their expectations in life have been dashed, conditions soon build up to a crisis. And in today’s world, those whose expectations have been dashed are able to reach out to one another and build communities of meaning in a way that had never been technologically possible before.
On April 23, 2018, a young man by the name of Alek Minassian got into a rented Chevrolet Express van, drove it to downtown Toronto, and plowed it into a crowd of pedestrians, killing nine. Speaking to police after the attack, Minassian identified himself as a member of the online community of incels—short for “involuntarily celibate”—and described his action as a revenge attack against the women who had rejected his romantic advances over the years. It wasn’t the first murderous attack associated with self-described incels—in 2016, a young man by the name of Elliot Rogers had shot six women in Isla Vista, California, before turning his gun on himself.
On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant loaded several guns and explosives into his car and attacked the small Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing fifty. Tarrant live-streamed the attack from a helmet-mounted camera and left behind a long, rambling, far-right manifesto aimed squarely at members of his online community of virulently Islamophobic white nationalists.
It is important to understand what specifically is new here. It certainly is not the sexual frustration of young men. Nor is it the hostility toward immigrant communities practicing an unfamiliar religion. Those are as old as time.
What is new is the way technologies now allow people like Minassian, Rogers, and Tarrant to forge new identities through online communities that validate their experiences and create a path toward radicalization for their most militant members. If they’d only had access to the technology of the twentieth century, an Alek Minassian or an Elliot Rogers might well have been driven to despair by their lack of success with women, and Brenton Tarrant might have been consumed by his loathing for Muslims, but they wouldn’t have understood themselves as fellow members of a single group, a community with shared interests and resentments able to nurture the revenge fantasies of its most volatile young members.
This collision between private hatreds and internet communities of hate has proven deadly. In Toronto and Isla Vista and Christchurch, the toll was counted in innocent lives lost. And more will surely follow.
Fringe communities such as incels and white nationalists are experiencing the profound disempowerment of dashed expectations just as radical new technologies of empowerment have come onto the scene: the internet, of course, but also the broader development of an information society along with an explosion in international trade that brings millions of new products into every market and the availability of much cheaper air travel that enables much more human mobility (at least until a pandemic breaks out). We live in an era of abundance, when there is more of everything: more people, cities, nations, ideas, more products, computers, companies, medicines, NGOs, religions, terrorist groups, criminal cartels—and also more virtual communities where experiences can be reaffirmed, and new communities can come together in ways that weren’t possible just a couple of decades ago.
The revolutionary changes in economics, technology, and mindsets facilitate the creation of virtual communities formed by individuals who a generation ago might never have thought their experiences made them into members of anything. Back when Huntington was writing his book on political order and the expectations gap, the sexual frustration of a young man in Canada or the animosity toward Muslims of one in New Zealand were not politically salient facts because those young men didn’t create a collective identity around their experiences or views.
By massively lowering the costs of networking with others who hold them, the “more revolution” both empowers fringe views and enmeshes their proponents in communities that reject automatic deference to authority. Together with vastly increased geographic mobility, these trends contributed to the transformation that caused power to decay in the first place.
The loners of yesteryear are becoming members of collectives that can be aggressively disruptive, even dangerous. New technologies have made extreme views easily available to millions for the first time while at the same time lowering the barriers that once kept people who subscribed to those views from acting in coordination with one another. It is a combustible combination.
The postwar consensus was built on a series of unspoken understandings about the bounds of acceptable political discourse. Openly racist or authoritarian views were silenced not through state censorship but by a diffuse sense among editors that they were not respectable. All it took to police those boundaries was an editorial class educated in broadly similar institutions and sharing broadly similar values and worldviews applying broadly similar editorial criteria to a limited handful of outlets.
The system allowed considerable leeway to explore controversial new ideas, but within limits. In the second half of the twentieth century, neo-Nazis, eugenicists, and ethnonationalists did not, as a rule, find a platform on the six o’clock news or in the opinion pages of prestige newspapers. That millions of people might have wanted to read their views hardly figured into the decision.
The communications infrastructure of the twenty-first century operates in precisely the opposite way. It has developed around powerful algorithms designed to identify and cater to popular but underserved points of view. Algorithms heap rewards on those able to produce such content, directing gushers of advertising revenue at them. The communications infrastructure of the twenty-first century systematically broadens the available range of views instead of restricting it.
In the United States, a conveyor belt was established to take extreme views out of online communities and circulate them to broader and broader audiences. Extremist opinions that got their start in life in the fever swamps of the internet (unregulated message boards such as 4chan and 8chan, or lightly regulated forums like Reddit and YouTube) would get laundered for consumption by mass audiences through media outlets such as Fox News and One America News Network. Once this happened, traditional media would pick up the thread, fully normalizing the discussion of views once deemed too extreme for mass dissemination.
Similar processes took hold in many other places. In Israel, the hard-right Channel 20 gives ample airtime to extreme religious and nationalist views that often echoes with eliminationist themes as solutions to the Palestinian question. Channel 20 routinely scours Israel’s far-right online media ecosystem for new contributors, such as the far-right pro-settler News 0404 website, and launders their points of view for a broader audience.
This model has proven its cross-cultural appeal. In India, President Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP government has tightly allied itself with Republic TV, a news channel anchored by Arnab Goswami, one of India’s most recognizable media personalities. Launched in 2017, Republic TV hews closely to the Fox News/Channel 20 model: loud, brash, and unabashedly partisan, it trawls India’s sprawling social media spaces looking for stories of outrages committed by Muslims to report. Playing continuously to a crude Hindu nationalism, it has built a mass following, and its agitators continually intimidate critics of the regime, whom it systematically slams with the term “anti-national.” On Republic TV, “national” is equated with “Hindu,” while “Hindu” is equated with Modi’s policies. To criticize any aspect of government policy, therefore, makes you “anti-national.”
As a result of these trends, aspiring autocrats find it far easier to connect with people whose views would once have been beyond the pale. Once racist and xenophobic appeals are in wide circulation and larger and larger communities have begun to sympathize with them, it becomes much easier for aspiring autocrats to claim the mantle of a cause and champion it.
Sometimes, however, this new media ecosystem can give rise to mass movements without any need for an established media organ to magnify their claims. The Gilet Jaune (Yellow Vest) protest movement that began in France in late 2018, for instance, seemed to spring fully formed from a single online petition by a motorist angry at rising fuel taxes. Week after week for months on end, the Gilets Jaunes have organized through Facebook groups to come together in numbers, wearing their high-visibility yellow vests and clashing with security forces as they put forward demands that could find no champion in organized politics. France’s state and society have been rocked to the core by a message that in an earlier technological age might never have made it out of the letters-to-the-editor slush pile.
The Gilets Jaunes are one of the most dramatic demonstrations of demand for the new autocracy—but they fit neatly into a long history of previous expressions of leaderless discontent. The trend spans the globe, from Spain’s Indignados movement and America’s Occupy Wall Street (along with the broader Occupy movement) to the decentered mass movement for democracy in Hong Kong, the leaderless protests that rocked Chile, Ecuador, and many other Latin American countries in late 2019, and the extraordinary explosion of anger against police brutality that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. Each of these was the outcome of internet-enabled spontaneous organization processes that bypass traditional institutions for political participation, and each one has baffled and threatened the political elite.
Groups defending previously unspeakable views have become major power players throughout Europe, from Italy’s Five Star Movement and Britain’s Brexiteers to Spain’s far-left Podemos and its far-right Vox movement and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland. Time and again, people whose views abhor elite opinion have banded together to create movements so powerful that the establishment is compelled to pay attention.
Yet questions remain. Why, amid the sea of views in this new world of unlimited access to every sort of opinion, were authoritarian views so often the ones that seem to win out? Why not transcendentalism, say, or radical vegetarianism? Why did the new media ecosystem pick out the messages of the 3P autocrats as winners? What made these sorts of pitches so devastatingly effective in the information age? Why, in other words, were so many willing to overlook the obvious signs of authoritarianism in these aspiring leaders’ personas?
The question has it backward. The 3P autocrats became popular because of their authoritarianism, not despite it.
To answer these questions, we need research. Fortunately, in top universities, authoritarianism is a hot topic. Long a sleepy backwater, the academic study of authoritarianism has boomed. The reasons are hardly a mystery: the trends documented in this book—and, in particular, the election of America’s most openly authoritarian president in several generations—has set off an explosion in studies, PhD dissertations, experiments, surveys, and essays.
Psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists have organized their research around a few early insights. The first is that vast numbers of people are receptive to authoritarian messaging. An increasingly well-established thread of social scientific research suggests that large numbers of people are predisposed to authoritarian politics. This is not at all the same thing as saying that people are born authoritarian. A predisposition can very well remain dormant unless and until it is coupled with an environment liable to activate it. Vast numbers of ancient hunter-gatherers may well have been predisposed toward obesity, but without easy access to foods rich in fat and sugar, few would have become obese. Similarly, people predisposed to backing autocrats will not do so unless their environment prompts them in that direction.
And what is that prompt?
Researchers have converged on an answer: the preeminent trigger able to activate authoritarian predispositions is the perception of threat.
Threat, in this context, must be understood not just as a physical threat, though certainly physical threat is a part of it. Sociologists typically take the concept more broadly to include threats to the moral order.
As far back as 1997, an experimental study by Stanley Feldman of Stony Brook University found that “people who value social conformity are predisposed to be intolerant but may not be intolerant without the required threat, whether it is a particular group that is threatening or a perception that social order is in danger more generally.”4
The perception that the world around you is changing in ways you cannot predict or control feels deeply threatening to a sizable subset of any population. As Duke University researcher Christopher Johnston and his team found, ethnic change polarizes people in just this way, with those predisposed to dislike uncertainty adopting increasingly strident anti-outsider views as a response to ethnic change.5 When coupled with economic circumstances that are precarious or deteriorating, that predisposition to equate change with threat becomes doubly potent.
Research findings are, as always, mixed, but one study, conducted ahead of the 2020 U.S. election by a team led by Michele Gelfand of the National Science Foundation, makes the link between threat perception and authoritarian voting patterns even clearer.6 It found that the more voters were concerned about external threats, the more intolerant they became of otherness and the more supportive they were of Trump’s candidacy. U.S. voters’ preoccupation with threat correlated strongly with their support for policies to tighten state surveillance and control over stigmatized minorities such as monitoring mosques, creating a registry of Muslim Americans, and deporting illegal immigrants.
This is by no means a U.S.-only phenomenon. Research conducted by a team led by Diana Rieger of Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, shows that German students in an experimental setting were significantly more likely to be swayed by far-right propaganda if they had been previously primed to focus on threats.7 Priming students to feel threatened also strengthened their identification with German nationality. This does not mean, of course, that foreigners are an actual threat—only that when they are perceived as such, that perception has political consequences. Whether in Germany, the United States, or anywhere else, ginning up people’s perception of threat unlocks their authoritarian predispositions with unnerving regularity.
As Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler argue in their book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, professional politicians and the political class that comments on them have been polarized for some time.8 For many decades, U.S. voters used to be relatively indifferent to the polarization of the elites. As Philip Converse of the University of Michigan established in his seminal 1964 study on the nature of belief systems in mass publics, most Americans in the early 1960s had only the haziest sense of what “conservatism” or “liberalism” meant and had little regard for the ideologies that animated the political class.9 That finding was replicated many times in the following decades. It’s only in recent decades that many regular Americans have come to fully identify ideologically. This shift can be seen clearly in the sudden rise in the number of people who tell pollsters they would disapprove of a son or daughter marrying someone who votes for the other party.
Some researchers have concluded that economic stagnation is driving more and more Americans to perceive their environment as threatening. Stagnant middle-class wages, growing inequality, and an increase in so-called deaths of despair (from addiction-related overdoses and suicide, among other causes) would, in this reading, be triggering people en masse to express authoritarian predispositions and to embrace authoritarian leadership.
In the long half century after World War II, when incomes were growing for most Americans and middle-class livelihoods were stable, the authoritarian predisposition remained dormant, and there was limited demand for what authoritarians have to sell. But when those dormant predispositions were activated, people began to look around for culprits, people to blame for their troubles. And they began to vote for leaders who will latch onto the same culprits as they do.
As Yascha Mounk notes in his book The People vs. Democracy, elites often make for an ideal culprit, as—in many cases—do immigrants and members of minority ethnic groups.10 Outsiders of all kinds come to be perceived as threatening: in Turkey, the outgroup is the Kurds; in Hungary, it is Syrian refugees; in 1930s Germany, it was Jews; today in America, it is Mexicans and Muslims.
Our starting point—but, it bears repeating, not our destination—is a cold, hard look at the actual material conditions facing those who thirst for autocracy. Status dissonance often has roots firmly planted in real economic shifts. In much of the developed world, the classes have been pulling apart from one another, with the rich doing better, the very rich doing much, much better, and everyone else stagnating or falling behind. In developing countries that fall prey to the 3P autocracy, the data are often thinner on the ground, but similar dynamics are discernible.
Measures for chronic hardship aren’t standardized, with different organizations and researchers applying different definitions. One such approach set out by the United Way, a U.S. charity, focuses on ALICE (asset-limited, income-constrained, employed) households. We’re not talking here about the poorest people in society—ALICE households, by definition, include working people. ALICE households span a broad swath of the working and lower middle classes: childcare providers, service industry staff, call center operators, and millions more in everyday jobs.11
The United Way defines ALICE households as those unable to afford the basics (housing, childcare, food, transportation, and healthcare, plus taxes) on the salaries they make. Eye-popping numbers of American workers fell below this level in 2017: 38 percent of households in Connecticut, 41 percent in Ohio, 44 percent in New York. Overall, in the fifteen states where research has been conducted, 41 percent of working households had to scrimp on the basics. Research in 2016 suggested that, nationally, 34.7 million households live in such circumstances—double the official U.S. poverty rate.12
Another clear sign of distress is the vast number of Americans who now say they would not be able to cover a $400 unexpected expense with cash. The U.S. Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decision Making, conducted in 2016, showed that two out of five American adults would have to borrow or sell something of value to cover such an expense.13 A follow-up survey in 2018 confirmed the finding. Three out of five working-age adults say they are not setting aside enough money for retirement. One-quarter say they have no retirement savings at all. These figures were collected before the onset of the catastrophic coronavirus-induced recession of 2020.
The stagnating incomes of such households play out across people’s lives in dramatic, life-altering, and, increasingly, life-ending ways. In the United States, the most dramatic manifestation has been the fast growth in deaths of despair throughout this century. Though sometimes equated in people’s minds with deaths due to opiate overdoses, deaths of despair span a much wider range of causes including alcoholism, addiction to other drugs, and suicide. As Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton University have shown, mortality rates from such causes grew exponentially between 1998 and 2015, with the entirety of the increase being among less well-educated people, in particular whites. Deaths of despair for this group more than doubled for men in those seventeen years and nearly quintupled among women. “Ultimately, we see our story as about the collapse of the white, high-school-educated working class after its heyday in the early 1970s, and the pathologies that accompany that decline,” Case and Deaton concluded.14
Suicide plays perhaps an underappreciated role in increasing mortality, with the suicide rate in the United States growing by fully one-third between 1999 and 2017 to forty-seven thousand deaths yearly. Deaths from drug overdoses had also been rising gradually until 2015, when they spiked by a shocking 16 percent in a single year. But the biggest contributor to the spike in deaths of despair is alcohol. Deaths related to drinking grew by around a third between 1999 and 2014. In all, some eighty-eight thousand Americans died for reasons related to alcohol in 2017, even more than the seventy thousand who died from opiate overdoses.
Broadly similar research has been conducted in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. People are not just imagining things. Economic hardship is a reality for broad swaths of the lower middle class throughout the developed world. Middle-class incomes have stagnated even as productivity rises, and while tax policies and income transfers have blunted the impact, they cannot negate it. Working-class and lower-middle-class people across the developed world have lost confidence in their ability to achieve the life that their parents enjoyed during the heyday of the postwar boom. They feel their place in the moral order is threatened because their place in the economic order is threatened.
Nor is this merely a phenomenon of the well-off West. Wherever 3P power takes hold, the pattern of economic and social dislocation that precedes it is similar. In Russia, Vladimir Putin rose to prominence after the society-wide convulsion brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union, when prices rose fast, standards of living were in freefall, and there was a generalized sense that the “moral economy” of the community was under assault. In Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, standards of living did not collapse, but alarm over an influx of unfamiliar foreigners melded together with powerful nostalgia for the lost age of “sausage socialism” (you may not be free, but there will be a sausage in your dinner for sure) combined to produce a powerful sense that yesteryear’s certainties could no longer be counted on.
In Venezuela, five decades of record-beating economic growth and growth in the middle class from the 1920s to the 1970s gave way to two decades of economic stagnation in the 1980s and 1990s that brought social mobility to a halt, creating a pervasive sense that the social contract between rulers and the ruled had been breached. In the Philippines and Brazil, slowing income growth together with perceptions of an out-of-control crime wave created an acute longing for predictability that expressed itself in the election of some of the most overtly authoritarian leaders in the world today.
Yet the rise of authoritarian politics and the kinds of fringe movements the internet empowers aren’t just a mechanical outgrowth of economic anxiety. The mediating factor is fear that the moral order of society is under threat. Because people who are relatively open to new experiences had sorted themselves into the center-left coalition, while the threat-averse identified largely with the right, this rise in economic insecurity translated into support for authoritarianism on the right much more than on the center-left. In this context, cynicism about the welfare state’s ability to cushion the blows from economic transformation builds into a kind of political nihilism: “If the state won’t help me,” many people seem to feel, “let it help no one.”
To Samuel Huntington’s legions of admirers, there’s an unmistakable whiff of déjà vu in the air. The thesis about the revolutionary potential of dashed expectations he rescued from Tocqueville remains as relevant today as it was a generation ago. Demand for autocracy is fed by a sense of vulnerability and threat across the fast-deindustrializing West as well as by the frustration in the global South at the sluggish pace at which living standards are rising (and in some instances they are declining). The two phenomena amount to the same problem: status dissonance as a global phenomenon.
Meanwhile, novel technologies and media landscapes create opportunities for people who feel threatened to form communities centered on ideas that wouldn’t even have received a public airing a generation ago. As communications channels explode, citizen journalism becomes common, and opinions can be shared with millions, yesteryear’s gatekeepers of polite opinion no longer have the power to keep authoritarian views out of circulation. In this brave new world, authoritarian messages have little trouble finding their way to ears primed to accept them. Electoral rewards are heaped on leaders willing to signal they are different by slaughtering the ideological sacred cows of yesteryear. The circle is closed, as a steady supply of autocratic leadership meets a rising demand for it.
3P leaders find their ideal hunting grounds in this specific mix of economic dislocation and technological empowerment set against the backdrop of a pervasive sense of threat. All of the ingredients for Huntington’s stew are there—if in modern incarnation scarcely imaginable to his 1960s outlook.
Political order, it turns out, really is fiendishly hard to maintain in changing societies. It is as true today as it was fifty years ago. The difference is that today the pace of change is incomparably faster.