The Kinship of Democracy and Autocracy
A Feature Review of
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
Anne Applebaum
Hardcover: Doubleday, 2024
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Reviewed by Amy Merrick
Beginning in the 1990s, politicians and investors justified their efforts to expand trade deals with China and the former U.S.S.R. by claiming that closer economic ties would inevitably spread liberal democracy. Whether or not this theory was ever fully believed, it is certainly not how things have played out. In Autocracy Inc., Anne Applebaum describes how governments such as Russia under Vladimir Putin and China under Xi Jinping are happy to take money from democracies while developing repressive regimes that reinforce one another in a web of corrupt relationships spanning the globe.
Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, is an experienced guide to this complex terrain. A historian and journalist, she has written five previous books, primarily about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including Gulag: A History, which received the Pulitzer Prize.
In Autocracy Inc., she highlights how democracies enable the behavior of autocrats for financial gain, allowing shell companies and anonymous real-estate purchases that can be conduits for money laundering. In Warren, Ohio, to name just one example, a crumbling and abandoned steel mill is a blighted reminder of a sprawling set of Midwestern real-estate investments linked to a Ukrainian oligarch. “The globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago,” Applebaum writes.
Autocrats employ surveillance, censorship, propaganda, and captive media—both at home and abroad—to control citizens and cultivate a climate of fear. They seek to undermine international institutions, insisting on “sovereignty” in an effort to dismantle long standing human-rights frameworks.
Another tactic autocrats use is harassment campaigns against their opponents, destroying their reputations or driving them into exile. Applebaum tells the story of Evan Mawarire, a Pentecostal pastor in Zimbabwe whose spontaneous video in 2016 lamenting the economic crisis in his country went viral, making him a celebrity.
But after Mawarire called for a general strike and millions of people participated, the government of Zimbabwe set out to portray him as a fraud and a traitor. He was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured. After he was released, Mawarire and his family fled the country—which the government then used as evidence for its false accusations that he was under foreign control.
The reach of these harassment campaigns can extend into democratic countries. Masih Alinejad, an Iranian activist who used social media to encourage women to stop wearing veils, was recently a target of an alleged assassination plot inside the United States, according to U.S. federal prosecutors.
The solutions Applebaum offers are mostly aimed at policymakers, who she says should target autocratic behaviors wherever they are found, rather than singling out specific countries. She recommends new laws that would require real-estate transactions in the United States and Europe to be more transparent to deter money laundering. She also suggests unwinding economic ties to autocrats and exposing campaigns that aim to spread disinformation.
Everyday people in the United States, as well as those in democracies around the world, should think of themselves as connected to one another and to people anywhere who support democratic values. Just as autocracies work together globally, those who oppose them need to share ideas and tactics. In the book, Ugandan musician and former presidential candidate Bobi Wine argues to a group of democratic activists that they form not an opposition but an option: “We are not victims.” Ultimately, Applebaum urges readers neither to lose hope nor to be complacent: political systems always can change, for better and for worse.
Donald Trump, recently elected to a second term as U.S. president, expressed admiration during his campaign for Putin, Xi, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He has used friendly media to spread false claims about the 2020 election, which he lost. He has repeatedly threatened to pull the United States out of NATO and describes his agenda as “America First.”
Trump also benefits financially from U.S. laws that mask the identities of real-estate buyers. Applebaum points out that one in five condos in buildings owned or branded by Trump has an anonymous owner. “Even while he was president of the United States, companies with mystery owners were still buying properties in Trump’s buildings; if that was a form of campaign contribution, we will never know,” she writes.
But Autocracy Inc. is not primarily about Trump, and the forces the book describes are larger than him, or than any single leader. Applebaum is clear-eyed in assessing a global politics characterized by shifting and opportunistic allegiances, where many countries are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic.
Autocracy Inc. is a slim book, and Applebaum sometimes skims too quickly around the world, assuming readers already have in-depth background about her subjects. Yet her warning rings out: a liberal world order may no longer exist, but there are still liberal societies. Flawed as they are and always have been, they are still worth fighting to protect. “They can be destroyed from the outside and from the inside, too, by division and demagogues,” she writes. “Or they can be saved. But only if those of us who live in them make the effort to save them.” The challenges ahead are great, but the consequences of giving up are greater still.
Amy Merrick
Amy Merrick is a senior professional lecturer in journalism at DePaul University in Chicago. She is also a freelance writer and editor, and a longtime member of the Religion in Literature book group at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest, Illinois. She is on Threads at @amyjmerrick
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