Rachman relies on the idea that swings in politics last about three decades, followed by a change in direction (a bit reminiscent of the eternal return in ancient myths). So, for instance, the power of the democratic state grew from the end of World War II until the 1970s. Then, spurred by stagflation, the democratic majority got tired of the growth in government power, resulting in three decades of government in retreat—or so Rachman argues. Helped by the Great Recession, changing democratic majorities then brought about the age of the strongman around 2010. But why didn’t the powerful democratic state return (assuming it was ever in retreat), instead of strongmen taking over? I will come back to this question later.
“As a result of this international movement towards personalized politics,” Rachman argues, “it has become harder to maintain a clear line between the authoritarian and democratic worlds.” I’ll also come back to the question of the extent to which the democratic world was really non-authoritarian.
For now, let’s focus on what Rachman’s book is built around: interesting portraits of the strongmen who have appeared in the 21st century, not only in countries with new or potential democracies, but often in old democracies too.
Gallery of rogues / Strongmen share many common traits. They claim to embody the “will of the people,” and they clash with political, legal, and private institutions that limit their power. They are nationalists. They often present themselves as defenders of religion despite their frequent personal impieties and moral flaws. Toughness (if not cruelty) is an important part of their image. They are liars or ignoramuses or both.
Their degree of power covers a vast spectrum, from Xi Jinping in China, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, and Vladimir Putin in Russia at one extreme, to Donald Trump in America and Viktor Orbán in Hungary at the other. Many others can be found between the two extremes, such as Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Recep Tayyep Erdogan in Turkey. Each strongman’s exact position along a power axis is, of course, a debatable matter because political power is a multidimensional phenomenon.
The author of The Age of the Strongman presents Putin, who came to power in 2000, as “the archetype and the model for the current generation of strongman leaders.” Putin’s image was crafted to present him as a savior-hero who would restore Russian greatness. After the invasion of Crimea, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s future lawyer, gushed of Putin, “That’s what you call a leader.” Many other populists admire the president of Russia.
On the use of often contradictory lies by Putin (and other strongmen), Rachman writes,
Vladimir Putin and his propagandists established the technique of a “firehose of falsehoods” as a fundamental political tool. The idea is to throw out so many different conspiracy theories and “alternative facts” (to use the phrase of Trump’s aide, Kellyanne Conway) that the truth simply becomes one version of events among many.
The fact that The Age of the Strongman was written before the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine illustrates the shrewdness of Rachman as an observer of the international scene.
Erdogan became prime minister of Turkey in 2003. After a failed coup in 2016, he launched a multifaceted campaign against civil liberties, canceling the passports of 50,000 people, sacking 4,000 judges and prosecutors, closing more than 100 media outlets, and jailing many political opponents. Turkey has become more like what it was in 1903 when Émile Faguet, the French Academician and classical liberal, wrote that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy aimed at organizing society so that individuals “would be more oppressed than in Turkey.”
In 2012, Xi took power in China. Five years later, the Chinese Communist Party’s constitution was amended to reference his political ideas, whose study is now mandated for party members, students, and employees of state corporations. He has brought Hong Kong under Beijing’s control and arrested many democratic activists. He rules with a strong hand and Orwellian surveillance. To perpetuate his regime, term limits on the presidency were repealed in 2018. Xi declared that “China must never follow the path of Western constitutionalism, separation of powers, or judicial independence.”
Just before the 2014 election that brought Modi to power, Rachman wrote in the Financial Times that “India needs a jolt and Modi is a risk worth taking.” He now recognizes his error but, regarding the insidious ways of tyranny, few people can cast the first stone at him. Many thought the same about Trump. (See “You Didn’t See It Coming,” Winter 2018–2019.) Although India is known as a democratic country—the largest democracy in the world—its supporting institutions have weakened under Modi’s Hindu ethnicism and nationalism.
In 2010, Orbán became prime minister of Hungary, a member of the European Union. Since then, as Rachman notes, he has been “steadily eroding the country’s independent institutions as he brought the courts, media, civil service, universities and cultural institutions under the control of his party, Fidesz.” He forced the European Central University, a private institution financed by his former countryman George Soros, to move out of Hungary. His government is under European Union sanctions for undermining democracy. He said Putin had “made his country great again.” One interesting fact about Orbán is that he is not ashamed to say he embraces “illiberal democracy.”
Duterte, who was president of Philippines until recently, boasted of personally killing people. “While Trump once joked that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters,” notes Rachman, “Duterte actually put the theory to the test.”
Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil in 2018. He may not be as blunt as Duterte, but he defended the use of torture by the military. According to “a prominent economist” quoted anonymously by Rachman, Bolsonaro is “just like Trump, only stupider.”
Elected president of Mexico the same year, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, dit Amlo, is a leftist strongman. Just like Bolsonaro and Trump, as well as Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Amlo tends to see election fraud whenever he does not get enough votes. Rachman correctly observes that the populist right and the populist left are linked by “a shared suspicion of free trade and liberal economics”—although we still have to see what the Financial Times columnist means by “liberal economics.”
Trump tried to follow the strongman’s playbook, but he could not grab enough power to pursue his ambitions, at least so far. He and his inner circle envy those who have. Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, hailed Orbán as a “hero.” Trump’s ambassador to Hungary is quoted as saying that the 45th president “would love to have the situation that Viktor Orbán has, but he doesn’t.” Trump and Modi appeared in each other’s political meetings in India and the United States. After exchanging nuclear banter with the North Korean despot Kim Jong-un, Trump said the two “fell in love.”
Trump praised many foreign autocrats. He said he got along very well with Putin, adding, “The tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them.” He downplayed Putin’s killing of journalists and political opponents by saying, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.” With fake news, dishonest courts, and claims of rigged elections, he implied that America is not very different from tyrannical countries. He expressed admiration for Xi, calling him a “great leader” and a “very good man.” He “joked” that, following the example of the strongman in Beijing, it would be great to “have a shot” at abolishing presidential term limits in the U.S. Constitution.
The Age of the Strongman reviews many other strongmen. In Poland, Jaroslaw Kaczynski echoes his Hungarian counterpart. Bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince since 2015, had journalist Jamal Khashoggi killed and dismembered in a Saudi consulate. Some of Rachman’s strongmen recently lost power, notably Trump, Netanyahu, and Britain’s Boris Johnson, artisan of Brexit, whom Trump called the “Britain Trump.”
By including Johnson—and Trump—one could blame Rachman for an expansive conception of the strongman, but it’s not unreasonable to include leaders whose autocratic ambitions were constrained by their political systems. Describing similarities among all the strongmen is one strength of The Age of the Strongman.
Democracy and liberalism / Let’s come back to the questions related to the interface between democracy and strongmen and to the underlying political philosophies. What exactly is the regime that strongmen are replacing or trying to subvert? “Liberal democracy” or simply “democracy” is Rachman’s answer. But is “liberal democracy” a mere pleonasm or does “liberal” qualify “democracy” and how? What is liberalism? On these basic questions, The Age of the Strongman is weak.
Orbán’s claim that he is defending “illiberal democracy” should have led Rachman to address directly the meaning of “liberal democracy” and differentiate between liberalism and democracy. These two concepts are synonymous only in the American progressive conception of liberalism. In the classical conception of liberalism, even a perfectly democratic state must be submitted to strict constraints to protect individual liberty from government infringements—that is, to make it liberal. Otherwise, a democratic state can, just like an autocracy, become Leviathan.
One key to understanding The Age of the Strongman is that it defends democracy more than, or rather than, liberalism. Rachman does mention the word “liberty” (or freedom) a few times in his book, but it means mainly—if not only—political liberty, as he often qualifies the word in this very way.
Rachman as a progressive / Labels are not arguments, of course, but it is important to understand that Rachman is an American-style liberal (often called “progressive”), as his examples, his intellectual friends, and his general philosophical demeanor suggest. He claims ideological kinship with French president Emmanuel Macron: “The core voters for Macron’s En Marche [in 2017] were people whose American and British counterparts had voted for Hillary Clinton and Remain,” he writes. If Hillary Clinton is a classical liberal, then Donald Trump is the pope. Had she been elected, she may not have tried to be as autocratic as Trump did, but she had the potential to come close. In my opinion, Rachman does not necessarily improve his case by invoking “Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis.” (See “Fukuyama: Interesting Books, with Some Baggage,” p. 48.)
Rachman shows little understanding of the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and even less of Friedrich Hayek or James Buchanan. His liberalism may not go much further than the pro-immigration values that “were standard in the liberal London” where he says he and Boris Johnson moved when the latter was mayor of London from 2008 to 2016. To Rachman’s credit, however, he does criticize Johnson for his willingness to use any tactic and lie necessary to “get to the top.”
By invoking the mirage of “excessive deregulation of finance”—a claim that is a virtual membership card in the progressive crowd—and the “intoxication with globalization,” Rachman sides with the illiberals, who have dominated public debates and policy for several decades.
Even if labels are not arguments, they can help identify useful concepts. Rachman probably considers “American liberal” as a badge of honor. But he is not an absolute villain. He shows some real liberalism—that is, classical liberalism—when he defends cosmopolitanism against nationalism. But he misses the fundamental split of our time, which is between individual liberty and state authority. The crucial fact is that, whether on the left or right, strongmen value state authority and collective choices, as opposed to individual choices.
Like his fellow progressives, Rachman wants very powerful government, but only to do good things—which is to say that he wants government to deliver what he and his political comrades want. He does not see that the soft democratic tyranny à la Tocqueville that he espouses lies at the heart of the discontent to which he attributes the rise of strongmen. A state that claims to be responsible for everybody’s destiny cannot help but sow discontent and confrontation. Ordinary people have too long been considered the children of the state. Many of them now (wrongly) think that a strong parent is better than a weak one, and they vote for strongmen.
It is this confused socialist liberalism, not liberalism in the classical sense, that has been taken over by populist strongmen.
An easy path / Rachman does not appreciate how the strongmen’s path to power had already been traced for them. The 21st century, so far, has continued what Mussolini hoped the 20th century would be: “the century of the state,” as he wrote in the Encyclopedia Italiana of 1932. The plan was recently aided and abetted by the 2008–2009 recession and by the COVID pandemic that demonstrated the extraordinary power that has been acquired by so-called liberal-democratic states. That individual strongmen and would-be strongmen tended to deny the dangers of COVID-19 tells us more about their general ignorance than about their liberating pretensions. At the beginning of the pandemic, Trump declared, “The authority of the President of the United States having to do with the subject we’re talking about is total”—an authority that can’t be found in the U.S. Constitution or in liberal thinking.
There is not as much difference between an individual strongman and strong-arm democracy as it is commonly believed. An unlimited numerical democracy is a collective strongman regime. If an individual strongman wants to stay in power without Chavez- or Maduro-like continuous open violence, he must satisfy a “democratic” majority or plurality. It seems that large parts of the respective populations support Putin, Orbán, and Xi. An important qualification is that an individual strongman can more easily obtain this support when his control of information is tighter, which explains strongmen’s attacks on independent media.
It should not be surprising that the age of strong democratic states, supported by an unconditional and nearly religious belief in the sanctity of democracy, has been followed by the age of the strongman. In his introduction, Rachman gives an example that has a significance that he does not seem to grasp. “The technologies of the twenty-first century,” he writes, are “handing strongmen leaders … the ability to monitor the movements and behavior of citizens. As these tools are deployed, they could strengthen the twenty-first century’s authoritarian turn.”
In Western countries, the surveillance state was not invented by strongmen but by the democratic regimes that preceded them. It is true that new technologies dramatically decreased the cost of mass surveillance, but the political and judicial rules and institutions allowing their use by governments were the product of poorly limited democracies. A man only has to take over an already strong state to become a strongman: the path is straight and easy to follow. Who were the figures of the “liberal” establishment that opposed the surveillance state and growing state power in general? They certainly did not include Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau (a “liberal stalwart”), or George Soros, all personalities embraced by Rachman.
We should note that, although Soros was on the side of liberty in his conflict with Orbán over the Central European University, he should not be mistaken for a classical liberal. On the contrary, he may be as far on the authoritarian left as Orbán is on the authoritarian right.
When we look at democratic states as they stood circa 2010, it is as if all political parties and elites had agreed to make them an efficient and attractive tool for future strongmen. The strict constraints that classical liberalism or libertarianism wants to impose on state power had been abandoned. That some establishment intellectuals like Rachman now discover our perilous situation, even without a clear view of its origins and its alternatives, is a good development, albeit a bit late.
