Can a Totalitarian Dictator Ever Threaten to Dominate the World Again

Of all the geopolitical transformations against the liberal democratic world these days, the one for which nosotros are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism. We are non used to thinking of authoritarianism as a distinct worldview that offers a real culling to liberalism. Communism was an ideology — and some thought fascism was, every bit well — that offered a comprehensive understanding of human being nature, politics, economics and governance to shape the behavior and thought of all members of a society in every attribute of their lives.

We believed that "traditional" autocratic governments were devoid of grand theories about club and, for the about part, left their people alone. Dissimilar communist governments, they had no universalist pretensions, no anti-liberal "ideology" to export. Though hostile to democracy at home, they did not care what happened across their borders. They might even evolve into democracies themselves, unlike the "totalitarian" communist states. We even got used to regarding them equally "friends," every bit strategic allies against the swell radical challenges of the day: communism during the Cold War, Islamist extremism today.

Similar so many of the theories that became conventional wisdom during the belatedly 20th and early 21st centuries, nevertheless, this one was mistaken. Today, authoritarianism has emerged as the greatest claiming facing the liberal autonomous world — a profound ideological, as well every bit strategic, challenge. Or, more accurately, information technology has reemerged, for authoritarianism has always posed the virtually stiff and enduring challenge to liberalism, since the birth of the liberal thought itself. Authoritarianism has now returned as a geopolitical force, with stiff nations such as People's republic of china and Russian federation championing anti-liberalism as an culling to a teetering liberal hegemony. It has returned as an ideological strength, offering the age-old critique of liberalism, and simply at the moment when the liberal world is suffering its greatest crisis of conviction since the 1930s. It has returned armed with new and hitherto unimaginable tools of social control and disruption that are shoring up authoritarian rule at home, spreading it abroad and reaching into the very heart of liberal societies to undermine them from within.

Dawn of the struggle

An 1876 engraving of a John Trumbull painting depicts the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The Founders based the document on the philosophy that all humans were endowed with "natural rights." (West.L. Ormsby via the Associated Press)

We in the liberal world have yet to encompass the magnitude and coherence of the challenge. We do not know how to manage the new technologies that put liberalism at a disadvantage in the struggle. Many of us exercise not care to wage the struggle at all. Some find the disciplinarian critique of liberalism compelling; others value liberalism also little to care if the world lodge that has sustained it survives. In this new battle of ideas, we are disarmed, maybe to a higher place all because nosotros have forgotten what is at stake.

We don't remember what life was similar before the liberal idea. We imagine it equally a pre-ideological world with "traditional autocrats" worshiping "traditional gods" who did non disturb "the habitual rhythms" of people'due south everyday life, every bit Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former U.S. administrator to the United Nations, in one case put it. This is a fantasy. Traditional society was ruled by powerful and pervasive beliefs most the creation, most God and gods, about natural hierarchies and divine authorities, nigh life and afterlife, that determined every attribute of people'southward existence.

Average people had little control of their destiny. They were imprisoned by the rigid hierarchies of traditional order — maintained by brute force when necessary — that locked them into the station to which they were born. Generations of peasants were virtual slaves to generations of landowners. People were non free to recollect or believe equally they wished, including most the most vitally of import questions in a religious age — the questions of conservancy or damnation of themselves and their loved ones. The shifting religious doctrines promulgated in Rome or Wittenberg or London, on such matters equally the meaning of the Eucharist, were transmitted down to the smallest parishes. The humblest peasant could be burned at the pale for deviating from orthodoxy. Anyone from the lowest to the highest could exist subjected to the most horrific tortures and executions on the society of the king or the pope or their functionaries. People may have been left to the "habitual rhythms" of work and leisure, but their bodies and their souls were at the mercy of their secular and spiritual rulers.

Only with the advent of Enlightenment liberalism did people begin to believe that the individual conscience, as well as the individual'southward trunk, should exist inviolate and protected from the intrusions of state and church. And from the moment the idea was born, it sparked the most intense opposition. Non simply did Enlightenment liberalism challenge traditional hierarchies, but its rationalism also challenged the traditional behavior and social mores that had united communities over the centuries. Its universalist understanding of human nature and the primacy of the individual cut against traditional ties of race and tribe — and fifty-fifty of family.

The new revolutionary liberalism, therefore, never existed peacefully side by side with traditional autocratic society. Traditional rulers and societies fought back with an anti-liberal worldview — an "ideology" — every bit strong and comprehensive as liberalism itself. Counter-Enlightenment thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre condemned the Enlightenment's extolling of the private'south will and desires, insisting on "individual abstaining" in a well-ordered, hierarchical, authoritarian society.

The autocracies of Russia, Austria and Prussia that crushed the French Revolution during the early 19th century tried after to establish an social club to keep liberalism at bay. The Concert of Europe and then admired today by former secretarial assistant of state Henry Kissinger and other "realists" fought and killed for divine-right authoritarianism, for the authority of the church building, for the "natural" hierarchy of order. Metternich's Austria and Alexander I's Russian federation were the early prototypes of the mod police state. They engaged in extensive censorship, airtight universities, maintained networks of spies to go along an eye on ordinary people, and jailed, tortured and killed those suspected of fomenting liberal revolution.

Nor did they limit their attacks against liberalism to their own lands. They intervened with force to crush stirrings of liberalism in Spain, Italy, Poland and the High german principalities. Alexander I even contemplated extending the anti-liberal campaign across the Atlantic, to Spain's rebellious colonies, prompting President James Monroe to proclaim his famous doctrine.

To 19th-century Americans, European authoritarianism was the great ideological and strategic challenge of the era. The American commonwealth was born into a globe dominated by great-power autocracies that viewed its birth with warning — and with good reason. The American revolutionaries founded their new nation on what, at the time, were regarded as radical liberal principles, gear up forth most conspicuously by the 17th-century Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, that all humans were endowed with "natural rights" and that government existed to protect those rights. If it did not, the people had a correct to overthrow it and, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, to class a new government "well-nigh likely to result their Safety and Happiness."

Natural rights knew no race, grade or faith. The founders did notclaim that Americans' rights derived from English political "civilization" and tradition. As Alexander Hamilton put it, the "sacred rights of mankind" were not to be found amongst "parchments or musty records" but were "written, every bit with a sunbeam . . . past the hand of the divinity itself" and thus could never be "erased or obscured by mortal power."

We long agone lost sight of what a radical, revolutionary claim this was, how it changed the fashion the whole world talked about rights and governance, and how it undermined the legitimacy of all existing governments. As David Ramsay, a contemporary 18th-century American historian, put it: "In no historic period earlier, and in no other country, did homo always possess an ballot of the kind of government, under which he would choose to live." Little wonder, equally John Quincy Adams later observed, that the governments of Europe, the church building, the "privileged orders," the diverse "establishments" and "votaries of legitimacy" were "deeply hostile" to the United States and earnestly hoped that this new "dangerous nation" would before long plummet into civil war and destroy itself, which it almost did.

The boxing between liberalism and traditional authoritarianism was the original ideological confrontation, and it remained theideological confrontation for another century and a half. The principles of Enlightenment liberalism, as set along in the Declaration of Independence, were the core event over which the Civil War was fought. When the United States miraculously survived that war and emerged as a great ability in its own correct in the belatedly 19th century, the autocratic claiming remained in the form of a Germany nevertheless ruled by Hohenzollerns, a Russian federation still ruled by the czars, an Austria still ruled past Habsburgs, a Turkey still ruled by Ottomans, and a Japan and Red china yet ruled by emperors.

The nadir of absolutism

World War I, fought mainly in the trenches along the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, was very much a state of war between authoritarianism and liberalism. (John Warwick/National Library of Scotland)

Historians and political scientists long ago drained World War I of ideological import. But for those who fought it, on both sides, it was very much a state of war betwixt liberalism and authoritarianism. For the British and French, and eventually the Americans, it was a fight to defend what British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith in 1914 called "the liberties of Europe," by which he meant liberal Europe, against "militarism," "Prussianism" and autocracy. And Germans agreed. Steeped in the Romantic, Counter-Enlightenment tradition, they regarded the Anglo-Saxons as soulless materialists.

Germans exalted the primacy of the state and the community, the Volk, the Kultur. When President Woodrow Wilson took the United States to war in 1917 in the hope of making the world "condom for democracy," it was to defend the liberal "Atlantic Customs" against this coherent, anti-liberal credo backed by a German war machine machine of unprecedented strength and efficiency. The rise subsequently the state of war of ii even greater challenges to liberalism — in the forms of Nazi Federal republic of germany and Imperial Japan — marked the failure of that hope. Their defeat in World War Ii gave it a new nativity.

The end of that war marked the nadir of authoritarianism. All the disciplinarian great powers of the 19th and early 20th centuries had been destroyed over the class of four decades — czarist Russian federation, forth with the Habsburg, Ottoman, Chinese, Prussian, and afterward, German and Japanese empires. They fell not because they lost some historic battle of ideas, however. They lost bodily battles. They were brought downwardly by wars, or, in the case of Russia, by an unlikely communist revolution that could only have succeeded because of disastrous wartime experience.

Nor did communism defeat Nazism in World War Two. Russian and U.S. armies defeated German armies. The subsequent division of the world between a liberal American superpower and a communist Soviet Spousal relationship was likewise the product of war. The sometime Russian empire was catapulted into an unprecedented and, as it turned out, untenable position of global influence. The Common cold War was not a last showdown betwixt the merely ideologies left for humanity to choose from. Information technology was but the confrontation of the moment.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the United nations in New York in October 1960. (Associated Printing)

President John F. Kennedy speaking to a articulation session of Congress in May 1961. (Associated Printing)

LEFT: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the United nations in New York in October 1960. RIGHT: President John F. Kennedy speaking to a articulation session of Congress in May 1961. (Associated Press photos)

It is not surprising that we saw communism as the greatest claiming commonwealth could face. It had the ability of the Soviet Union behind it, while the authoritarians were weak pawns on the chessboard of the Cold War. The goals and methods of the Bolsheviks, the terror and oppression they employed to raze an entire economical and social order, seemed not only uniquely pernicious but too irreversible. That was the cardinal indicate of Kirkpatrick's 1979 essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," in which she laid out her famous doctrine of supporting "traditional autocracies" in the struggle against "totalitarian" communism. While the former could, over time, possibly make the transition to democracy, she argued, there was "no example of a revolutionary 'socialist' or Communist society" making a transition to democracy.

The thesis turned out to be wrong, however: Communism was neither unreformable nor irreversible. The fanatical utopianism of the Marxist-Leninist projection proved as well much at odds with fundamental elements of human nature, including the desire to amass wealth and property equally the fruits of one's labor. Information technology could not hands survive in a competitive world. Though, in different circumstances, it might accept lasted much longer, whatever transformation that required so much violence and state repression was fighting an uphill battle.

Communism's other problem was, ironically, that its leaders chose to compete on the same aeroplane as liberalism: They measured success in material terms. Soviet leaders promised to meet and surpass the West in improving the standard of living of the average denizen. They failed, and suffered a crisis of confidence almost their ideology. When Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the organization by introducing elements of political and economic liberalism, he inadvertently brought most its demise. China adopted a state capitalist system without the political reform. Both proved that communism was neither invincible nor inadaptable.

Humans do not yearn only for liberty. They also seek security — non merely physical security confronting attack, only the security that comes from family, tribe, race and civilization.Liberalism has no particular respond to these needs.

The liberal democracies had overestimated the challenge of communism, and they underestimated the challenge of traditional authoritarianism. And this, also, was understandable. Throughout the years of the Cold State of war and during the era of liberal dominance that followed, the world's autocracies were too weak to challenge liberalism every bit they had before. They struggled merely to survive. The correct-wing dictatorships that depended on the United States for money and protection had to at least pay lip service to liberal principles and norms, lest they lose that support. Some held elections when pressed, provided space to "moderate" political opponents and allowed liberal international nongovernmental organizations to operate within their borders, monitoring their human rights records, working with ceremonious society and training political parties — all every bit a way of avoiding potentially fatal economic and political ostracism.

As the scholars Yong Deng and Fei-Ling Wang take noted, even Chinese leaders after the Tiananmen Foursquare repression in 1989 lived in "constant fear of being singled out and targeted" by the "international hierarchy dominated by the Usa and its democratic allies." The Chinese toughed information technology out, but many autocrats in those decades did not make it. The Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos, Chile's Augusto Pinochet, Haiti'south Jean-Claude Duvalier, Paraguay's Alfredo Stroessner, and the Southward Korean military junta were all forced out by a Reagan administration that had quickly abased the Kirkpatrick doctrine. Over the side by side decade and a one-half, others followed. In 2003, 2004 and 2005, the mail service-communist autocrats in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Ukraine all gave mode to liberal forces that had received training and support from liberal nongovernmental organizations, which the dictators had permitted to avoid alienating the liberal globe.

A lone Chinese man stands in the path of tanks at Beijing'south Tiananmen Foursquare in June 1989. Estimates said that as many equally 10,000 people died during nearly two months of pro-democracy protests. (Jeff Widener/Associated Press)

The authoritarians' weakness reinforced the conventionalities among liberal democracies that ideological competition had concluded with the fall of communism. In the cursory era of liberal hegemony that followed the terminate of the Cold War, we did not worry, because we did non notice, as authoritarianism gradually regained its power and its voice as liberalism'south most enduring and formidable challenge.

In Russian federation, for example, nosotros believed that communism had been defeated by liberalism, and in a sense it was, but the winner in mail-communist Russia was not liberalism. The liberal experiment of the Boris Yeltsin years proved besides flawed and delicate, giving style most immediately to 2 types of anti-liberal forces: ane, the remnants of the Soviet (and czarist) constabulary state, which the erstwhile KGB operative Vladimir Putin reestablished and controlled; the other, a Russian nationalism and traditionalism that the Bolsheviks had tried to vanquish but was resurrected by Putin to provide a veneer of legitimacy to his autocratic rule.

Equally Putin dismantled the weak liberal institutions of the 1990s, he restored the czarist-era role of the Orthodox Church, promised strong leadership of a traditional Russian kind, fought for "traditional" values against LGBTQ rights and other gender-related bug, and exalted Russian federation's special "Asiatic" grapheme over its Western orientation. Then far, this has proved a durable formula — Putin has already ruled longer than many of the czars, and while a abrupt economic downturn could shake his hold on power, equally it would any authorities's, he has been in power then long that many Russians tin can imagine no other leader.

The few autocracies that survived the era of liberal hegemony did and so past refusing to make concessions to liberal norms. Either they had the strength and independence to weather liberal disapproval or they had something the United States and its autonomous allies needed — or thought they needed. The Chinese had both, which allowed them simply to crush all liberal tendencies both inside and exterior the ruling oligarchy, and to brand sure they stayed crushed — even as China'southward leadership made the tricky transition from Maoist communism to authoritarian state capitalism. Most Arab dictatorships also survived, either because they had oil or because, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. xi, 2001, the U.s. returned to supporting allegedly "friendly" autocrats confronting radical alternatives.

The examples of autocracies such as Russia and Communist china successfully resisting liberal pressures gave hope to others that the liberal storm could be weathered. By the end of the 2000s, the era of autocrats truckling to the liberal powers had come up to an end. An disciplinarian "backfire" spread globally, from Egypt to Turkey to Venezuela to Zimbabwe, as the remaining authoritarian regimes, following Putin'southward example, began systematically restricting the space of civil society, cutting information technology off from its foreign supporters, and curbing free expression and independent media.

The pushback extended to international politics and institutions, likewise. For too long, equally one Chinese official complained in 2008 at the Earth Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the liberal powers had determined the evolution of international norms, increasingly legitimizing intrusions into the domestic diplomacy of authoritarian powers: "You Western countries, you decide the rules, you give the grades, you say, 'You have been a bad boy.' " But that was over. The authoritarian governments of Russia, People's republic of china, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran all worked to weaken liberalism'south concur. Their different ideological orientations, which Americans regard every bit all-important, did not brand them lose sight of their mutual interest as non-liberal states. The event, equally Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put it in 2007, was that, for the commencement fourth dimension in many years, at that place was real competition in "the market place of ideas" between different "value systems." The West had lost "its monopoly on the globalization process."

The authoritarians now take regained their confidence and found their voice in a way they have not since 1942 and, only every bit was true in the decades before World War II, the most powerful anti-liberal regimes "are no longer content simply to contain democracy," as the editors of the Periodical of Democracy observed in 2016. The regimes now desire to "curl information technology back by reversing advances dating from the fourth dimension of the democratic surge."

These authoritarians are succeeding, but not only because their states are more than powerful today than they have been in more than seven decades. Their anti-liberal critique is also powerful. It is non just an excuse for strongman rule, though it is that, too. It is a full-blown indictment of what many regard as the failings of liberal society, and it has broad appeal.

The Berlin Wall, which separated Soviet-controlled East Germany from West Berlin, had stood for 28 years before information technology was opened in 1989. (Carol Guzy/The Washington Post)

It has been decades since liberal democracies took this challenge seriously. The stop of the Cold War seemed like indisputable proof of the correctness of the Enlightenment view — the conventionalities in inexorable progress, both moral and scientific, toward the accomplishment of the physical, spiritual and intellectual freedom of every individual. History was "the progress of the consciousness of freedom," every bit Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel put it in 1830; or as Francis Fukuyama wrote in "The End of History and the Last Human being" in 1992, there were fundamental processes at work dictating "a common evolutionary pattern for allhuman societies — in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy."

The premise underlying these convictions was that all humans, at all times, sought, above all, the recognition of their intrinsic worth as individuals and protection against all the traditional threats to their freedom, their lives and their dignity that came from state, church or community.

This idea has generally been most pop in relatively good times. Information technology flourished during the belatedly 19th and early 20th century earlier being dashed by Globe State of war I, the rise of communism and fascism, and the decline of republic during the 1920s and 1930s. Information technology flourished again after the terminate of the Common cold War. But it has always been an incomplete description of human nature. Humans do not yearn simply for liberty. They too seek security — not but physical security confronting attack but as well the security that comes from family, tribe, race and culture. Often, people welcome a strong, charismatic leader who can provide that kind of protection.

Liberalism has no item answer to these needs. Though liberal nations take at times produced strong, charismatic leaders, liberalism's main purpose was never to provide the kind of security that people detect in tribe or family. It has been concerned with the security of the individual and with treating all individuals equally regardless of where they come from, what gods they worship, or who their parents are. And, to some extent, this has come at the expense of the traditional bonds that family, ethnicity and religion provide.

To exalt the rights of the individual is to weaken the authority of the church building and other authorities that presume to tell individuals what they must believe and how they must behave. Information technology weakens the traditional hierarchies of birth and grade, and fifty-fifty those of family and gender. Liberalism, therefore, cannot assistance but threaten "traditional values" and cultures. Those are maintained either by the ability of traditional authorities or by the pressures of the customs and majority opinion. But in a liberal country, the rights of the few, once recognized, supersede the preferences of the many.

In Europe and the United States, this has meant the breakup of white, Christian cultural ascendancy equally liberalism has progressively recognized the rights of people of color; of Jews and Muslims; of gays and others with sexual orientations frowned upon, if non forbidden, past the major religions; and, more recently, of refugees and migrants. Liberalism is a trade-off, and many have often been unhappy at what was lost and unappreciative of what was gained.

Liberalism at state of war with itself

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, in Ankara in June 2017. Erdogan used a 2016 insurrection endeavour to crack downwardly on dissent and to consolidate presidential power. (Associated Press)

Liberalism has thus always been vulnerable to anti-liberal backlashes, specially in times of upheaval and uncertainty. It faced such a backlash in the years between the two world wars and during the global economical depression. In 1940, liberal republic looked to be on its final legs; fascism seemed "the wave of the future," as Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote at the time.

Liberalism faces a backlash once again in the present era of geopolitical, economic and technological upheaval. In such times, many people focus on liberalism'due south shortcomings, the things it does non provide and the things it either weakens or destroys. The thing liberalism does provide — security of the individual'southward rights against the country and the community — is easily taken for granted or devalued. Even in the United States, the one nation founded on the principle of universal rights, the public has supported the brake of rights in times of perceived emergency, whether justified or not. In other nations where experience with liberal democracy has been cursory and shallow, and where nationalism is tied to blood and soil, it seems almost inevitable that political forces would emerge promising to defend tradition and culture and community confronting the "tyranny" of liberal individualism.

That is the backlash mounting beyond the globe, and not only amidst the increasingly powerful authoritarian governments of Russia and China, simply too within the liberal democratic world itself.

Hungary'due south Viktor Orban has been in the vanguard, proudly proclaiming his "illiberalism" in continuing up for his land'due south white, Christian civilisation confronting the nonwhite, not-Christian migrants and their "cosmopolitan" liberal protectors in Brussels, Berlin and other Western European capitals. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dismantled Turkey'southward liberal institutions in the name of Islamic beliefs and traditions.

Within the democratic world, there are alliances forming across borders to confront liberalism. In his 2018 book, "The Virtue of Nationalism," influential Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony urged unified resistance by all the "holdouts confronting universal liberalism," the Brexiteers, the followers of Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in kingdom of the netherlands, the Hindu nationalists of India, too as the increasingly nationalist and illiberal governments of Poland and Hungary — all those who, like State of israel, "wish obstinately to defend their own unique cause and perspective" against the "proponents of liberal empire," by which he ways the U.South.-led liberal-democratic guild of the by 70-plus years.

And, of course, the United States has been experiencing its own anti-liberal backlash. Indeed, these days the anti-liberal critique is and then pervasive, at both ends of the political spectrum and in the almost energetic segments of both political parties, that at that place is scarcely an onetime-style American liberal to be found. Merely regarding the authoritarian resurgence that is altering the world today, the virtually significant developments are occurring among the U.s.' conservatives. But as the American left once admired international communism equally an opponent of the capitalist system information technology deplored, a growing number of American conservatives, including those in accuse of U.S. strange policy, discover themselves in sympathy with the resurgent authoritarians and proponents of illiberalism.

Volunteers of the right-fly Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, in Meerut, India, in Feb 2018. (Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images)

Supporters of far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen in Villepinte, France, in May 2017 — a week earlier Le Pen lost the presidential election to Emmanuel Macron. (Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images)

A pro-Brexit protester near the Parliament in London in January. Britain faces a March 29 borderline for its get out from the European Union, approved past voters in a 2016 plebiscite. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

TOP: Volunteers of the correct-fly Hindu nationalist grouping Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, in Meerut, India, in February 2018. (Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images) LEFT: Supporters of far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen in Villepinte, France, in May 2017 — a week before Le Pen lost the presidential election to Emmanuel Macron. (Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images) RIGHT: A pro-Brexit protester nigh the Parliament in London in January. U.k. faces a March 29 deadline for its exit from the Eu, approved by voters in a 2016 referendum. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

The anti-liberal critique has always resonated with at least some strains of American bourgeois thought. In that location has always been a tension in American conservatism. As Post columnist George F. Volition once observed, the "severely individualistic values" and "atomizing social dynamism" of liberal capitalism invariably conflict with the traditions of community, church and other institutions that conservatives accept always valued. At times, some conservatives take questioned the "whole concept of universal natural rights" and accept sought to ground American democracy in a particular cultural and political tradition. Instead of defending the principles of the Declaration of Independence, they have defended tradition against the destructive power of those principles. This was a dissimilar idea of American nationalism, and it was inevitably spring up with questions of religion, race and ethnicity, for it was almost preserving the ascendancy of a particular cultural and political tradition which happened to exist white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.

From the early 19th century onward, a consistent theme in American history has been the fright that an Anglo-Saxon Protestant U.s. was being threatened both from inside and from without — from inside by the calls for the liberation and enfranchisement of African Americans, and from without by the influx of non-Anglo-Saxon, non-Protestant immigrants from Ireland, from Japan and Communist china, from southern, eastern and key Europe, and later from Latin America and the Centre East.

This remains a theme of modern conservatism. During the 1950s and 1960s, Russell Kirk looked to the segregationist South as the essential pillar on which the American republic rested, and believed that in these "times of trouble" the Southward had "something to teach the mod world." William F. Buckley Jr. criticized such "convulsive measures" as the 1954  Supreme Court conclusion in Chocolate-brown v. Lath of Educationbecause they did "violence to the traditions of our arrangement." When a mob of white students attacked a immature blackness woman who had been admitted to the University of Alabama following a courtroom social club in 1956, Buckley criticized the courts for declaring illegal "a whole set of deeply-rooted folkways and mores" and argued that the "white community" was "entitled to take such measures" every bit were necessary "to prevail, politically and culturally." Nor, he wrote, could the nation get away with "feigning surprise" at the tearing reaction.

Authoritarians' sympathetic friends: American conservatives

President Vladimir Putin has ruled Russian federation since 1999. One observer says the former KGB operative has positioned himself as the leader of the world's "socially and culturally conservative" mutual folk against "international liberal democracy." (Alexey Nikolsky/AFP/Getty Images)

In the decades since, it has sometimes been hard to distinguish between conservative efforts to protect political and cultural traditions against the assaults of progressive liberalism on the one hand, and the protection of white Christian clout against the demands of racial and ethnic and other minorities on the other. Today, many in the United States — mostly, but certainly not exclusively, white Christians — are once more defending themselves and their "deeply-rooted folkways and mores" confronting decisions past U.S. courts granting rights and preferences to minorities, to women, to the LGBTQ customs, to Muslims and other non-Christians, and to immigrants and refugees. And maybe once more we should not "feign surprise" that they are mounting a challenge to the liberalism in whose proper noun this assault on traditional community and beliefs has been launched. The backlash certainly played a part in the election of Donald Trump and continues to roil the United States today.

Nor should we be surprised that there has been a strange-policy dimension to this backlash. Debates most U.S. foreign policy are as well debates virtually American identity. The 1920s combined rising white nationalism, restrictive immigration policies and rising tariffs with a foreign policy that repudiated "internationalism" as anti-American. The "America First" motility in 1940 not only argued for keeping the U.s.a. out of the war in Europe, but besides took a sympathetic view of German arguments for white supremacy.

Those views were suppressed during a state of war fought explicitly confronting Nazism and its racial theories, and and so during a Cold War waged against communism. Just when the Cold War ended, the old concerns most the nation's social and cultural identity reemerged. The political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who one time fabricated the example for authoritarianism as a necessary stage in "modernization," in his more than avant-garde years worried that the Us' Anglo-Saxon Protestant "identity" was being swamped by liberalism in the form of "multiculturalism." He both predicted and charily endorsed a new "white nativism," and it was largely on these grounds that in his post-Cold War writings about a "clash of civilizations," he urged Americans to pull dorsum from the world and tend to their ain "Western" culture.

There has always been an element of anti-Americanism in that strand of conservatism, in the sense that information technology has stood in opposition to the liberal Enlightenment essence of the American founding. Abraham Lincoln wrote of this essence when he described the universal principles of the Annunciation of Independence as an "apple of gold" and the Union and the Constitution every bit the "flick of silvery," the frame erected around it. At a fourth dimension when many in both the Due south and the North were calling for a bourgeois defense of a Constitution that enshrined slavery and white supremacy, Lincoln insisted that neither the Constitution, nor even the Matrimony, were the ultimate guarantors of Americans' freedoms. It was the universal principles of the Declaration that lay at the eye of free government — the "picture was made for the apple, not the apple for the moving picture."

The Ceremonious War vindicated that view on the field of boxing, and ever since, the story of the United States has been the continual expansion of rights to more and more groups claiming them, every bit well equally continual resistance to that expansion. When conservatives object to this historical reality, they may or may not be right in their objections, but it is to America that they are objecting.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary in Apr 2018. Orban has systematically weakened Hungary'south free printing, its contained judiciary, and its open and competitive political organisation. (Laszlo Balogh/Getty Images)

These days, some American conservatives detect themselves in sympathy with the world's staunchest anti-American leaders, precisely because those leaders accept raised the claiming to American liberalism. In 2013, Putin warned that the "Euro-Atlantic countries" were "rejecting their roots," which included the "Christian values" that were the "basis of Western civilization." They were "denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual." Conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan responded by calling Putin the vocalization of "conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries" who were standing upwardly confronting "the cultural and ideological imperialism of . . . a decadent Westward."

The conservative thinker and author Christopher Caldwell recently observed that the Russian leader is a "hero to populist conservatives around the world" considering he refuses to submit to the U.S.-dominated liberal world lodge. If the polls are to be believed, the number of favorable views of Putin has grown among Trump supporters. They are not simply post-obit their leader. As the political scientist M. Steven Fish observes, Putin has positioned himself as the leader of the world'southward "socially and culturally conservative" common folk confronting "international liberal commonwealth." Orban in Hungary, the self-proclaimed leader of "illiberalism" inside the democratic world, is some other hero to some conservatives. Caldwell suggests that the avowedly anti-liberal Christian republic that Orban is trying to create in Hungary is the sort of republic that "prevailed in the United States lx years ago," presumably before the courts began imposing liberal values and expanding the rights of minority groups.

Political theorist Marc Plattner argues that the gravest threat to liberal democracy today is that the "mainstream center-right parties" of the liberal democratic world are being "captured by tendencies that are indifferent or even hostile to liberal democracy." He does not mention the The states, simply the phenomenon he describes is clearly present among American conservatives, and not just among the "alt-right."

Liberalism under attack at domicile, from both the left and the correct

Presidential candidate Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Reno, Nev., in January 2016. As president, Trump's nationalist views have shaped his foreign policy, leading the Usa to tilt toward anti-liberal forces in Europe and elsewhere. (Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post)

If such views were confined to a few intellectuals on the fringe of that broad and variegated phenomenon we call American conservatism, it would matter less. Only such thinking can be constitute at the highest reaches of the Trump administration, and information technology is shaping U.Southward. foreign policy today. Last autumn, President Trump alleged to a rally of supporters, "You know what I am? I'1000 a nationalist, okay? I'grand a nationalist. Nationalist. Use that word. Apply that word."

In Brussels in Dec, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo likewise made a case for nationalism, insisting that "nothing can replace the nation-state as the guarantor of autonomous freedoms and national interests." The thought echoes Hazony's volume "The Virtue of Nationalism," which argues that truthful republic comes from nationalism, not liberalism. It was a nod to the nationalists of Europe waging their crusade against the "liberal imperialism" of the Eu. And, indeed, the Trump administration has been openly putting its pollex on the scale in this battle, seeking, as Richard Grenell, the U.S. administrator to Frg, put it, to "empower" the bourgeois forces in Europe and United kingdom while denigrating German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the mainstream liberal parties on both the center-correct and centre-left.

Putin has besides been aiding the illiberal nationalist movements in Europe equally a fundamental part of his global political strategy. Many of the movements have received funding from Russian sources, while the mainstream parties — or fifty-fifty those liberals not associated with a mainstream party, such every bit French President Emmanuel Macron — have been the target of Russian disinformation campaigns on social media. During the Cold State of war, when the Soviet Wedlock also engaged in large, if now quaintly primitive, disinformation efforts, the U.S. government poured significant resources into combating them. Today, though we have mounted the beginnings of a defence against strange manipulation, we have made little effort to respond to anti-liberal propaganda with our ain defense of liberalism.

That is not and then surprising when liberalism itself is under assault at home, from both the left and the right. Today, progressives continue to regard liberal commercialism as securely and possibly irrevocably flawed and call for socialism, just as they did during the Cold War. They decry the "liberal world order," the international merchandise and financial regime, and virtually all the liberal institutions established during World State of war II and at the dawn of the Cold War.

And, just as they opposed responding to the Soviet communist challenge — whether through arms buildups, the strategy of containment or by waging an ideological conflict on behalf of liberal democracy — modern progressives show footling interest in taking on the challenge posed past the authoritarian great powers and the world'south other anti-liberal forces if doing then would entail the exercise of U.S. power and influence. The progressive left is more concerned virtually alleged U.South. "imperialism" than almost resisting authoritarianism in places such as Venezuela.

During the Cold State of war, the American left was outnumbered past the broad coalition of conservatives and anti-communist liberals who, in their own ways and for their own reasons, joined together to support anti-communist containment and to make the instance for the superiority of liberal democratic capitalism over Soviet communism.

No such coalition has coalesced to oppose international authoritarianism or to brand the case for liberalism today. A broad alliance of strange bedfellows stretching from the far right to cocky-described "realists" to the progressive left wants the United States to abandon resistance to rise authoritarian ability. They would grant Russia and China the spheres of influence they demand in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. They would acquiesce in the world's new ideological "diversity." And they would consign the democracies living in the shadow of the authoritarian not bad powers to their hegemonic control.

As the Trump administration tilts toward anti-liberal forces in Europe and elsewhere, most Americans appear indifferent, at best. In dissimilarity to their near-obsession with communism during the Common cold War, they announced unconcerned past the challenge of authoritarianism. And so, equally the threat mounts, America is disarmed.

Much of the problem is but intellectual. We await at the earth today and see a multisided struggle among various systems of governance, all of which have their pluses and minuses, with some more than suited to sure political cultures than others. We have become lost in endless categorizations, viewing each type of not-liberal regime as unique and unrelated to the others — the illiberal democracy, the "liberal" or "liberalizing" autocracy, the "competitive" and "hybrid" authoritarianism. These dissimilar categories certainly describe the myriad ways not-liberal societies may exist governed. Merely in the nigh central way, all of this is beside the point.

Past far, the most significant distinction today is a binary i: Nations are either liberal, meaning that there are permanent institutions and unchanging norms that protect the "unalienable" rights of individuals against all who would infringe on those rights, whether the state or the majority; or they are not liberal, in which case there is nothing congenital into the system and respected past the government and the governed akin that prevents the state or the bulk from violating or taking away individuals' rights whenever they choose, in ways both minor and severe.

The distinction may not take been as straightforward during the 18th and 19th centuries, when U.k. and France had liberal institutions that genuinely challenged and even curtailed the power of absolute monarchies. But in today'south globe, there can be no liberalism without republic and no democracy without liberalism. Republic of hungary's Orban may speak of "illiberal" democracy, but he has systematically weakened the institutions — a gratuitous printing, an independent judiciary, an open and competitive political organisation — on which democracy depends.

The new tools of oppression in the 'illiberal state'

The portrait of candidate Abdel Fatah al-Sissi placed on a flag being sold by street vendors exterior a polling station in a Cairo suburb in May 2014. Sissi could soon have the authority to rule until 2034. (Jonathan Rashad/Getty Images)

A woman'due south painted finger signifies that she voted in Arab republic of egypt's presidential election in March 2018. (Salah Malkawi/Getty Images)

LEFT: The portrait of candidate Abdel Fatah al-Sissi placed on a flag beingness sold by street vendors exterior a polling station in a Cairo suburb in May 2014. (Jonathan Rashad/Getty Images) RIGHT: A woman'due south painted finger signifies that she voted in Arab republic of egypt's presidential ballot in March 2018. Sissi could shortly have the authority to dominion until 2034. (Salah Malkawi/Getty Images)

We are likewise easily fooled by the half-measures of autocrats and would-be autocrats. A ruler or a dominant majority may leave individuals alone for periods of time, or they may limit their rights simply in small ways, or simply on item bug. Just if they are not bound to protect individuals in their rights to life, liberty and property — and in this vital respect, to treat all people equally equals under the law — then the rights they let are simply conditional. Rulers may find it prudent, convenient or lucrative to allow people the complimentary exercise of some or most of their rights, only the moment circumstances alter, the rulers can practice whatever they want.

The distinction is important considering circumstances are changing. For the past vii-plus decades since the end of World War Ii and the beginning of the U.S.-led liberal world lodge, disciplinarian regimes faced many disincentives to deprive their people of individual rights. In a world dominated by liberal powers — and above all, by the United states — they had reason to fearfulness political and military punishments that could bear witness their undoing, and in many cases did. Regimes that went too far frequently paid a price eventually, and particularly if they were aligned with and dependent on the dominant liberal powers.

To have i example, South korea'south Park Chung-hee had thousands of people brutally tortured and many killed during the 1960s and 1970s — not only suspected communists and democracy activists, simply besides those simply overheard criticizing the authorities. That worked for a while to keep the regime in power, but later on Park was assassinated in 1979
and the United States began pressing for reform, his successors decided to rule with a somewhat lighter hand. Ultimately, they relinquished power peacefully, after being effectively ordered to do so by Washington. This gave rise to the idea that Republic of korea nether Park had been a "liberalizing" autocracy, when, in fact, it was an autocracy that succumbed to external pressures, which limited its ability to fend off domestic opposition.

Many dictatorships but lacked the means to oppress masses of people in means that were both constructive and affordable. If the only mode to command a population was to kill and torture anybody, that was not a promising business concern model, even if a government did accept the resources to sustain such a practice, which most did not — a lesson learned by the Chinese under Mao Zedong. Amend to effort to control what people said and thought, besides as frightening them with the consequences of incorrect thinking.

Merely, for a diversity of reasons, some were better at this "totalitarian" form of control than others. The more-modern societies such every bit East Germany's oppressed their people with scientific efficiency, just many other disciplinarian governments had neither the skill nor the resources to command their populations every bit effectively. In the United States, we deluded ourselves into believing that if authoritarian regimes were not engaged in systematic brutal repression, it was because they were "liberalizing"; they were often just incapable and were responding to the disincentives in a world dominated by liberal powers.

But the structure of incentives and disincentives is at present changing, because the structure of ability in the international system is changing. When Orban celebrated the "illiberal state" a few years ago, he claimed that he was but responding to the "great redistribution of global financial, economic, commercial, political and military ability that became obvious in 2008."

Since the belatedly 2000s, autocrats including Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in People's republic of china and Abdel Fatah al-Sissi in Arab republic of egypt accept given up the pretense of competitive elections or fifty-fifty commonage leadership. Rigged elections are no longer necessary to gratify liberal powers that lack either the volition or the ability to complain. It has become mutual do for autocrats to make themselves "president for life," as Xi did a year agone and equally Sissi has begun to do in recent weeks. This throwing off the mask, including past Sissi, a leader heavily dependent on and allegedly friendly to the The states, shows how few of the old disincentives remain, at least at the moment.

The incentive structure has inverse within the liberal autonomous world, likewise. Twenty years ago, when European and transatlantic liberalism was stronger, Orban'south illiberalism would non have been tolerated to the degree it is today. His success is evidence of the retreat of liberalism globally.

A fateful choice

Facial recognition software records the faces of people in Cathay in November 2017. Revolutions in communications technologies, data drove and artificial intelligence have reshaped the competition betwixt liberalism and anti-liberalism. (Gilles Sabri for The Washington Post)

The trouble is not but the shifting global balance of ability betwixt liberalism and anti-liberalism. The revolutions in communications technologies, the Net and social media, data collection and artificial intelligence have reshaped the competition betwixt liberalism and anti-liberalism in ways that take only recently get clear, and which practice not bode well for liberalism.

Developments in China offer the clearest glimpse of the time to come. Through the domination of cyberspace, the control of social media, the collection and utilise of Large Information and bogus intelligence, the authorities in Beijing has created a more sophisticated, all-encompassing and efficient ways of command over its people than Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler or even
George Orwell could have imagined. What tin exist washed through social media and through the employment of artificial intelligence transcends fifty-fifty the constructive propaganda methods of the Nazis and the Soviet communists. At to the lowest degree with old-fashioned propaganda, you knew where the message was coming from and who was delivering it. Today, people'due south minds are shaped past political forces harnessing information technologies and algorithms of which they are not enlightened and delivering letters through their Facebook pages, their Twitter accounts and their Google searches.

The Chinese government is rapidly acquiring the ability to know everything about the state's massive population, collectively and individually — where they travel, whom they know, what they are saying and to whom they are saying it. A "social-credit annals" will enable the authorities to reward and punish individuals in subtle, merely pervasive, ways. The genius of what republic scholar Larry Diamond has called this "postmodern totalitarianism" is that individuals volition "appear to be gratuitous to go well-nigh their daily lives" but, in fact, the country will control and censor everything they see, while keeping rails of everything they say and do.

This revolutionary development erases whatsoever distinction may accept existed between "authoritarianism" and "totalitarianism." What autocrat would not desire to acquire this method of control? Instead of relying on expensive armies and constabulary engaged in open killing and brutality against an angry and resentful population, an despot will now have a cheaper, more subtle and more than effective ways of control. Recognizing this demand, China is marketing the hardware and software of its surveillance country system to current and would-be autocrats on almost every continent.

Consequently, the binary distinction betwixt liberal and non-liberal governments is going to be all that matters. Whether a government is liberal or non-liberal will determine how it deals with new technologies, and there volition exist radical differences. Liberal governments volition have to struggle with the implications of these technologies for individual rights — and as we have already seen, it isn't easy. But liberal democracies will approach the problem from the bedrock premise that individual rights must be protected. The rights of private companies to sell what they want will accept to be balanced against the rights of individuals to protect their own data. The need of government to provide security by monitoring the communications of dangerous people will accept to be counterbalanced confronting the right of individuals not to be spied on past their government.

The problems that bedevil liberal democracies, however, are not problems at all for non-liberal governments. Whether "authoritarian," "totalitarian," "liberal" autocracy or "illiberal" democracy, they do non confront the same dilemmas: All these governments, past definition, do non accept to respect the rights of individuals or corporations. Individuals are not entitled to privacy, and there are no truly individual companies. Equally Diamond observed, in that location is "no enforceable wall of separation betwixt 'private' companies and the party-land" in China. But the same is true in Russia, where the majority of companies are owned by Putin and a pocket-size loyal oligarchy; in Egypt, where they are endemic by the military; in Venezuela, where they are owned by a business organization and military mafia; and in Turkey, where state capture of the economy has risen dramatically in recent years.

Even in more open and still nominally democratic countries such as Italy, India and Poland, not to mention Hungary, in that location is nothing to stop leaders from gaining control of the main purveyors of social media. As the political scientist Ronald J. Deibert has noted, the use of social media to control, confuse, mislead and divide a public is just as constructive in the hands of anyone seeking power in a republic as it is for established authoritarians. Today, every autocracy in the world demands that foreign companies locate their data-storage devices on its national territory, where the government can hack into it and control what goes out or in. But autocracies aren't the only ones making that need.

What we used to regard as the inevitable progress toward republic, driven by economic science and science, is being turned on its head. In not-liberal societies, economic science and science are leading toward the perfection of dictatorship.

If it was ever a fleck of myth that traditional authoritarian governments left individuals' individual lives undisturbed, now we are inbound a world where privacy itself may become a myth. In such a world, all non-liberal governments volition tend toward becoming "postmodern totalitarians." What nosotros used to regard as the inevitable progress toward commonwealth, driven by economics and science, is beingness turned on its caput. In not-liberal societies, economics and science are leading toward the perfection of dictatorship.

If null else, that should make the United States reconsider the idea of supporting "friendly" dictatorships. It was always a dubious proposition. As Elliott Abrams and others take recorded, the Reagan administration, which came into office convinced by Kirkpatrick's arguments for supporting "friendly" right-fly autocracies, shortly adamant that this was a mistake. It turned out that the "friendly" dictatorships were not actually friends at all. They were radicalizing their societies deliberately. They were more intent on crushing moderates and liberals than on eliminating radicals and revolutionaries, and not least considering they knew that the threat of radical revolution kept the coin and the weapons flowing from Washington. The Reagan administration discovered that, in the Philippines, South korea, Chile, Paraguay and Haiti, the "friendly" dictators were obstacles to democracy, non to communism.

Egypt'due south Hosni Mubarak played the game successfully for decades: He suppressed the moderate opposition while allowing infinite for the Muslim Alliance, knowing that the threat of a Alliance victory would keep the Americans on his side. Information technology worked until he lost control of lodge — resulting in the Brotherhood victory at the election box in 2012 that his policies had helped make inevitable. That we have unlearned this very recent lesson and are once once more looking to strongmen such as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi arabia and Egypt's Sissi as allies is a testament to how difficult it is for user-friendly myths to dice.

Today, we have fifty-fifty more powerful reasons not to support dictatorships, fifty-fifty those we deem "friendly." The world is now existence divided into two sectors: one in which social media and data are controlled by governments and citizens alive in surveillance states; and one in which individuals still have some protection against government abuse. And the tendency is clear — the surveillance-country sector is expanding and the protected infinite is shrinking. The world's autocracies, even the "friendly" ones, are acquiring the new methods and technologies pioneered past Russia and China. And, as they do, they become function of the global surveillance-state network. They are also enhancing the power and accomplish of Communist china and Russian federation, who by providing the applied science and expertise to operate the mechanisms of social control are gaining access to this e'er-expanding pool of data on everyone on the planet.

We accept already seen how authoritarian manipulation of social media transcends borders. Russia's Internet Research Agency, its bot farms, state-sponsored trolls and sophisticated hacking have made Americans' data and data space vulnerable — along with the minds into which that information is fed. A country such every bit Egypt may or may non exist an marry in the struggle confronting radical Islam, just in the struggle betwixt liberalism and autocratic anti-liberalism, Sissi's Egypt will be on the other side.

Much more is at risk than our privacy. Nosotros have been living with the comforting myth that the keen progress nosotros have witnessed in human behavior since the mid-20th century, the reductions in violence, in the brutality of the state, in torture, in mass killing, cannot be reversed. There tin can be no more than holocausts; no more genocides; no more Stalinist gulags. Nosotros insist on assertive there is a new flooring below which people and governments cannot sink. Only this is but some other illusion born in the era that is at present passing.

The enormous progress of the past seven-plus decades was not some natural development of humanity; it was the production of liberalism's unprecedented power and influence in the international arrangement. Until the second half of the 20th century, humanity was moving in the other management. We err in thinking that the horrors perpetrated against Ukrainians and Chinese during the 1930s, and against Jews during the 1940s, were baroque aberrations. Had Globe War Ii produced a unlike gear up of victors, as information technology might have, such behavior would accept persisted every bit a regular feature of existence. It certainly has persisted outside the liberal world in the postwar era — in Kingdom of cambodia and Rwanda, in Sudan and the Balkans, in Syria and Myanmar.

Even liberal nations are capable of atrocities, though they recoil at them when discovered. Non-liberal nations do non recoil. Today, we need only look to the concentration camps in China where more 1 meg Muslim Uighurs are being subjected to mental and physical torture and "re-education." As disciplinarian nations and the authoritarian idea gain strength, there will be fewer and fewer barriers to what illiberal governments can exercise to their people.

We demand to starting time imagining what information technology will be like to live in such a globe, even if the United States does non fall prey to these forces itself. Just as during the 1930s, when realists such every bit Robert Taft assured Americans that their lives would be undisturbed by the plummet of democracy in Europe and the triumph of authoritarianism in Asia, so nosotros have realists today insisting that we pull back from confronting the great authoritarian powers rise in Eurasia. President Franklin D. Roosevelt'southward answer, that a earth in which the United states was the "lone island" of democratic liberalism would be a "shabby and unsafe place to alive in," went largely unheeded so and no doubt will become largely unheeded again today.

To many these days, liberalism is merely some hazy amalgam of idealisms, to be saluted or scorned depending on whose ox is being gored. Those who have enjoyed the privileges of race and gender, who accept been office of a comfortable majority in shaping cultural and religious norms, are turning abroad from liberalism as those privileges accept get threatened — just as critics of liberal commercialism on the American left once turned away from liberalism in the proper noun of equality and justice and may exist doing then again. They do so, nevertheless, with an unspoken organized religion that liberalism will continue to survive, that their right to critique liberalism volition be protected by the very liberalism they are critiquing.

Today, that conviction is misplaced, and i wonders whether Americans would accept the same attitude if they knew what it meant for them. Nosotros seem to have lost sight of a simple and very practical reality: that whatever we may recollect about the persistent bug of our lives, nigh the appropriate remainder between rights and traditions, between prosperity and equality, betwixt organized religion and reason, only liberalism ensures our right to hold and express those thoughts and to boxing over them in the public arena. Liberalism is all that keeps the states, and has ever kept us, from being burned at the pale for what we believe.

More about this essay:

Robert Kagan answered reader questions. See the Q-and-A.

Spotter The Opinions Forum, a conversation virtually this essay with national security experts

Yale professor Samuel Moyn responds: If the liberal world offered more than economical security, maybe authoritarians would lose their appeal

Reason contributing editor Cathy Young responds: Yep, liberal democracy is struggling, and the progressive left isn't helping

Columbia University professor Sheri Berman responds: The master threat to liberal democracy comes from within, non from authoritarians

University of Texas professor Michael Lind responds: Robert Kagan'southward big incorrect thought

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2019/03/14/feature/the-strongmen-strike-back/

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