By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, December 21, 2022
As 2022 draws to a close, it’s worth celebrating that
this hasn’t been a good year for authoritarianism.
This might seem Pollyannish. After all, just last month,
the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance issued a
report concluding that democracy is in decline while authoritarianism is
deepening. Freedom House cataloged “The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule”
back in February. “The global order is nearing a tipping point,” the nonprofit
declared, “and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee
freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.” A Pew study of
global attitudes concluded in May: “As democratic nations have wrestled with
economic, social and geopolitical upheaval in recent years, the future of
liberal democracy has come into question.”
I don’t dispute any of that, with one caveat: The future
of liberal democracy is pretty much always an open question, because liberal
democracy is always under threat from the authoritarian temptation.
Authoritarianism comes naturally to humans, while liberalism has to be
taught—and fought for. Whenever liberal democratic capitalism seems to
stumble—which is often—authoritarianism suddenly seems like a viable
alternative (I wrote a whole book about this).
Sadly, authoritarianism can sound appealing in the
abstract, but people tend not to like it when they actually experience it. And
while it often works very well for the authoritarians themselves—Vladimir Putin
may, in fact, be the world’s richest man—it fails for the average citizen.
People need to see the failures. As Edmund Burke said,
“Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.”
But it isn’t failure per se that undermines
authoritarianism. Every system is flawed, every government makes mistakes. It
is the inability to admit and remedy mistakes that is authoritarianism’s
Achilles’ heel.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published
an article on how Putin badly blundered in his attempt to conquer Ukraine in a
matter of days.
Perhaps the biggest lesson is that in a system lacking a
free press, democratic oversight, and any incentive to point out problems, the
war planners became blind to even the most obvious problems. Instead of the
“walk in a park” Putin had been assured, the Russian military revealed itself
to be shot through with corruption and ineptitude—because the dumbest thing you
can do in Putin’s Russia is tell him something he doesn’t want to hear.
Putin and his brand of despotism had a lot more fans at
the beginning of 2022 than at the end, because his disastrous war demonstrated
how much stronger he was on paper than in reality.
Iran is another example for mankind. The ruling regime is
having its worst crisis of popular legitimacy since the Islamic Revolution in
1979 because the Iranian people have been denied any ability to meaningfully
redress injustice—or even call attention to it—other than mass protest and
disobedience.
And in China, widely considered best-in-class among
authoritarian regimes, President Xi Jinping has reversed course after two years
of a “zero tolerance” COVID-19 policy that involved welding people into their
homes during lockdowns. The reversal is welcome, but it came only after vast
spontaneous protests shook the regime and called into question Xi’s grip on
power.
Say what you will about all of our missteps in response
to COVID-19, we are in a far better place today than China—the subject of so
much admiration early in the pandemic—which didn’t use the last two years to
develop viable vaccines of its own or buy them from the West. At best,
authoritarianism didn’t prevent a COVID-19 reckoning but merely postponed it.
In the U.S., and the democratic world generally, the fad
of illiberalism can seem appealing, in part because our system’s failures are
always on display, while authoritarianism’s remain hidden behind Potemkin
facades until the victims can’t take the oppression anymore. That’s why
authoritarian regimes are often like marble—very strong, but also very
brittle—and when they crumble it almost always comes as a surprise, at least to
their admirers abroad.
Sadly, I don’t think the Chinese regime is about to
crumble any time soon, though I’m less gloomy about Russia or Iran. I do think
they will all crumble eventually, because tyranny is not sustainable over the
long haul—when there is a viable alternative available.
This has been a good year for that alternative, because I
think at the end of 2022, fewer people look around at authoritarianism in the
real world and think: That’s the future I want to be part of.
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