INTRODUCTION: THE PERIL
Free societies all around the world face an implacable new enemy. This foe has no army, no navy; it comes from no country we can point to on a map. It is everywhere and nowhere, because it is not out there but in here. Rather than threatening societies with destruction from without, like the Nazis and the Soviets once did, this foe threatens them from within.
A peril that is everywhere and nowhere is elusive, hard to discern, to pin down. We all sense it, but we struggle to name it. Torrents of ink are spilled describing its components and features, but it remains elusive.
Our first task, then, is to name it. Only then can we grasp it, fight it, and defeat it.
What is this new foe that threatens our freedom, our prosperity, even our survival as democratic societies?
The answer is power, in a malignant new form.
Every era has seen one or more forms of political malignancy. What we’re seeing today is a revanchist variant that mimics democracy while undermining it, scorning all limits. It is as if political power had taken stock of every method free societies have devised over the centuries to domesticate it and plotted to strike back.
That is why I think of it as the revenge of power.
In this book, I look at the rise of this malignant new form of political power, noting the way it has developed around the world. I document how it stealthily eats away at the fundamentals of a free society. I show how it has arisen from the ashes of an older form of power, devastated by the forces that spelled its end. And I argue that wherever it develops, whether in Bolivia or North Carolina, in Britain or the Philippines, it relies on a compact core of strategies to weaken the foundations of democracy and cement its malignant dominance. I also sketch out ways of fighting back to protect democracy and, in many cases, to salvage it.
The clash between those with power and those without it is, of course, a permanent fixture of the human experience. For the vast bulk of human history, those with power hoarded it for their own benefit, passing it on to their children to found dynasties of blood and privilege, with little regard for those without. The tools of power—violence, money, technology, ideology, moral suasion, spying, and propaganda, to name just a few—were the domain of hereditary castes, far outside the reach of most people. Yet beginning with the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century, a seismic transformation took hold of power relations, making power contestable and placing new constraints on those who wielded it. That form of power—limited in scope, accountable to the people, and based on a spirit of lawful competition—was at the center of the great expansion in prosperity and security the world saw after the end of World War II.
But at the turn of the twenty-first century, unsettling transformations began to shake that postwar settlement. In a previous book, The End of Power, I examined the way power was decaying across a whole range of human institutions. Technology, demography, urbanization, information, economic and political change, globalization, and changed mindsets conspired to fragment and dilute power, making it easier to gain but harder to use and easier to lose.
A backlash was inevitable. Those determined to gain and wield unlimited power deploy old and new tactics to protect their power from the forces that weaken and constrain it. Those new behaviors are designed to stem the decay of power, to allow power to be reconstituted, concentrated, and wielded without limits once more—but with twenty-first-century technologies, tactics, organizations, and mindsets.
Put another way, the centrifugal forces that weaken power called forth a new set of centripetal forces that tend to concentrate it. The clash between these two sets of forces is one of the defining characteristics of our time. And the outcome of that clash is far from predetermined.
The stakes couldn’t be higher, and nothing is guaranteed. What’s at stake is not just whether democracy will thrive in the twenty-first century but whether it will even survive as the dominant system of government, the default setting in the global village. Freedom’s survival is not guaranteed.
Can democracies survive the attacks of aspiring autocrats bent on wrecking the checks and balances that limit their power? How? Why is power concentrating in some places while in others it is fragmenting and degrading? And the big question: What is the future of freedom?
Power is seldom ceded voluntarily. Those who have it naturally try to contain and counter the attempts of their rivals to weaken or replace them. The newcomers who attack the incumbents are often innovators who not only use new tools but also follow a very different playbook. Their political innovations have deeply altered the way power is conquered and retained in the twenty-first century.
This book identifies and scrutinizes these innovations, showing their possibilities, inner logic, and contradictions—and then identifies the key battles democrats will need to win to prevent them from destroying freedom in our time.
A limited, contingent form of power will not be enough to satisfy aspiring autocrats who have learned how to leverage trends like migration, the economic insecurity of the middle class, identity politics, the fears globalization gives rise to, the power of social media, and the advent of artificial intelligence. In all sorts of geographies and under all sorts of circumstances, they’ve shown they want power with no strings attached, and they want it for keeps.
These aspiring autocrats face a new set of options, and they have new sets of tools they can use to lay claim to unlimited power. Many of these tools did not exist just a few years ago. Others are as old as time but combine in new ways with emerging technologies and new social trends to become far more powerful than they have ever been before.
That’s why, in recent years, we have seen the success of a new breed of power-seekers: unconventional leaders who witnessed the decay of traditional power and realized that a radically new approach could open hitherto untapped opportunities. They have arisen all over the world, from the richest countries to the poorest, from the most institutionally sophisticated to the most backward. We have in mind here Donald Trump, of course, but also Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, India’s Narendra Modi, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and many others. This book dissects their approach because one cannot defeat what one cannot understand.
These new autocrats have pioneered new techniques for gaining unlimited power and then keeping it for as long as they can. The ultimate goal—not always attainable but always fought hard for—is power for life. Any trends that weaken their power are seen as vital threats, things to be contained. Their success is emboldening others to try to emulate them all around the world. They’ve enjoyed many successes along with some notable failures. And more turn up seemingly every other week. These leaders—and this style of leadership—are at the forefront of The Revenge of Power.
Copyright © 2022 by Moisés Naím
