What is authoritarianism?

Authoritarianism and autocracies take many forms. So how do you know it when you see it? Our guide to the erosion of choice, rights, truth and power is Anne Applebaum, author of several books including, most recently, Autocracy, Inc.. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Speaker 00

  Indisputable is that the government is using military courts to try civilian protesters. The opposition figures are behind bars. That the president says he wants to change the constitution in order to, quote, "restore the peace." How is that not creeping authoritarian?

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Chairman Mao may loom large here as a symbol of strength, but he's also a reminder of the chaos that can come when one leader has far too much of it.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  Iranian regime has shut down the internet all across the country as it brutally cracks down a massive protest.

• 0:39Nick Capodice?

  Increasingly hardcore autocracy, one-man rule.

• 0:43Speaker 04

  Orban successfully transformed Hungary's democracy into an autocracy.

• 0:48Nick Capodice?

  The actual framework of governance that Maduro has been able to bend to his will, to be able to stage phony elections like the one that's going to be held this weekend.

• 0:57Speaker 05

  Unless he's forcibly removed from power, Mr. Xi should now be able to personally choose for how long he will govern.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Much of that control now rests in the hands of just one man.

• 1:13Hannah McCarthy?

  Hi, Nick. Hey there, Hannah. This is Civics 101, and this is an episode about something I think a lot of us think we understand, terms that we hear a lot, perhaps, especially lately. But as with so many things we talk about on Civics 101, I had to ask myself, do we know what we are talking about?

• 1:38Hannah McCarthy?

  So, per usual, I found someone who for sure knows what Xi is talking about.

• 1:44Speaker 04

  I'm Anne Applebaum. I'm a staff writer for The Atlantic. I also teach at Johns Hopkins University, and I'm a working historian.

• 1:52Hannah McCarthy?

  I came to Anne with a question. My question was, what is authoritarianism? And right off the bat, I think I got a better catch-all term for the thing we are talking about today. So authoritarianism or autocracy is a political system in which one person or one small group of people, or sometimes one political party, rule without any checks and balances, without independent courts, without an independent media, without a legitimate opposition. They're able to rule without anything hampering them at all. They're not obligated to follow the rule of law, meaning a legal system in which laws

• 2:37Hannah McCarthy?

  are made by courts and judges separately from whoever's in power. Instead, they operate according to something that we call rule by law. That means the law is whatever the person in charge says it is. So it can change from one day to the next. That's the simplest definition of autocracy. Autocracy. That word feels both generally nefarious, but also kind of cool and removed, like kind of clinical. It does. And, okay, so I think that this will help you. That word comes from both ancient Greek and ancient Latin. It went from meaning, you know, self-power or self-control to being a word used to describe

• 3:20Hannah McCarthy?

  military commanders with a lot of power. And eventually, it kind of got smudged into being the word, sometimes, used to describe the person in charge of everybody and everything. All right, cool. That makes a lot more sense. Moving on. Anne told me that there are many autocracies on this earth of ours, and they are not identical. But they share three characteristics. People don't have guaranteed rights. So you don't have, for example, the right to freedom of speech in any kind. You can be arrested for something that you say, even if it's true, or even if it's not important or significant.

• 3:59Hannah McCarthy?

  You don't have the right to contest power or to affect or change whoever's in power. So you have a single leader or a single political party. They rule, and there is no legitimate way to be in opposition to them. There's no way to change your own government. You can't vote, or if you can vote, the vote has no significance. Some autocracies do create very elaborate, fake, essentially, systems. Of voting, kind of pretend voting. But you don't have any ability to change the regime. You don't have rights in the regime. And you also don't have the ability to, you know, make an argument based in law. You can't say, you've taken away my property,

• 4:43Hannah McCarthy?

  and that's illegal according to this particular statute. Because the law will change according to what the leadership wants it to be.

• 4:56Hannah McCarthy?

  So basically, you get no say, right? You have no protections. The rules could change at any minute. One minute, you're standing on solid ground. And the next thing you know, the floor is lava. Right. But again, these governments vary. So is a dictator, for example, an autocrat? Yes. Is an autocracy a dictatorship? Not necessarily. It's kind of a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square situation. There are many different kinds of autocracies. You know, there's Communist China, and Nationalist Russia, and theocratic Iran. And they all have very, very different rules.

• 5:40Hannah McCarthy?

  And some of them have more access to freedom or to other ideas than others. Some are very tightly controlled. And all of those nations, Hannah, correct me if I'm wrong here, they all kind of work together, right? Like, I know that China and Iran, for example, they support Russia's war on Ukraine. Oh, yeah. Among many other things. Anne actually wrote a book about that. It's called Autocracy, Inc., and you should read it. It's not about all of these governments agreeing or thinking the same thing. It's more like this informal way of using your absolute power to keep someone else in absolute power. And then, Nick, there are plenty of governments that have autocracy vibes, so to speak, but aren't broadly autocratic.

• 6:25Hannah McCarthy?

  At least not yet. They're Pinch of control here, dash of restriction there. And then there are countries that actually take it even further.

• 6:34Nick Capodice?

  Further than no rights, no say, no protections, no consistency?

• 6:39Speaker 04

  There's a further step. We used to speak often about totalitarian systems. And these are systems in which the political leadership really does seek to control everything. So not just politics, but also economics, also social life, also education, culture, everything. And so everybody inside the system is meant only to read and listen and think according to a set of rules, you know, a set of ideas given by the leadership. Probably it's fair to say that totalitarianism is hard to achieve. It's hard to really prevent everybody from thinking differently from what the regime says. But the attempt to create it has been real. I mean, there have been, there have been a number of very real attempts to create totalitarian systems.

• 7:23Nick Capodice?

  So Anne here is describing utter total control, right? Like thought police levels of control or something close to that.

• 7:33Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, thought police is kind of impossible, but I think that would be the dream in a system like this, right? And again, it's not exactly an easy thing to do, but if you give a mouse a cookie, they might just tell you that two plus two equals five.

• 7:46Nick Capodice?

  All right, Hannah, here's what I have to know. How, how does a country become something like this? Is it possible, for example, for a democracy to stop being a democracy or to become an autocracy?

• 8:04Speaker 04

  So I didn't know that there's a playbook for creating autocracies. There are some countries where there has never been anything else. So there has never been democracy in China. You can't really speak of there being a playbook to achieve something that has pretty much always been there. There is a path towards authoritarianism that a number of democracies have followed. So democracies do decline. They have been declining since the time of ancient Rome, when the American founders were writing the Constitution, they had that example in mind.

• 8:33Hannah McCarthy?

  You know, it may come as a surprise, but I actually do think about ancient Rome all the time. What happened there was that a democratic system was dismantled over time by corruption, division, and military threats. We can talk about that some other time. It's a long story. But the framers were sure thinking about it when they wrote the Constitution.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  They were thinking about how to prevent democratic decline. And democratic decline usually involves the rise to power of perhaps an elected legitimate leader who begins to take apart the institutions I've been talking about. So a leader who seeks to take over state institutions that are meant to belong to everybody and instead make them work for him, either politically or financially. Or a leader who seeks to politicize the justice system. Instead of having justice be something that is neutral, that is meant to where, you know, the courts and, you know, the legal system are supposed to abide by the Constitution or by the law, an authoritarian leader will try to change that so that courts are politicized and the courts will respond to whatever, whatever

• 9:44Speaker 04

  the leader wants. Sometimes the path to authoritarianism also includes attempts to control public conversation or information. So to push hard against independent media, to silence critics first, either legally or maybe eventually using repression. Not all autocracy involves repression or jail or violence, but many of them end up doing that because in order to keep control, authoritarian leaders very often wind up relying on violence. I guess that violence is a pretty direct path

• 10:17Hannah McCarthy?

  to forcing people to give you what you want. Well, if you're trying to undo a system where citizens have power, they might not be super thrilled to just give it to you. So sometimes it's about taking. And taking is rarely peaceful.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  But in the beginning, the decline of a democracy, and we've seen, and this is, by the way, something that can happen, either Led by movements coming from the left. There's a version of that, for example, that took place in Venezuela over the last couple of decades. In 2013, the then-president Hugo Chavez passed the baton to Maduro after being diagnosed with cancer. His successor promised to continue the socialist revolution, lifting people out of poverty. But that promise is well and truly broken. Or movements coming from the right. And they're the kind of classic modern examples, probably Hungary. It's a country whose elected leader slowly took apart the state, removed rights, removed, changed, altered the situation so that a rule of law didn't really apply in Hungary.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Many Hungarians see their right-wing prime minister as this totalitarian. Many people are worried about core democratic values such as free speech or an independent judiciary. Many members of the EU parliament say the rule of law in Hungary is being threatened. It, I mean, it can happen pretty fast. Hungary is a very small country, and so it turned out to be very easy for a democratically-elected leader who had that idea in his head to capture institutions, to put people in charge of the institutions who would be loyal to him personally and not to the constitution, for example. He did that fairly quickly, over several years. Venezuela, the left-wing example, is an example of a place where it took longer. There were a series of elections.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  Hugo Chavez, who was the original, who led the original assault on the political system, was actually, you know, re-elected a couple of times legitimately. And really only it was later on when he and then his successor, Nicolas Maduro, began to break the law more systematically that you could really call Venezuela a full autocracy, rather than just a messy democracy.

• 12:34Nick Capodice?

  So there's no one way that this happens. It could be pretty quick, under one person. Or it can be slower under a series of leaders who have that same goal of breaking the government.

• 12:47Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, there are a lot of paths, a lot of tactics that can contribute to the decline of a democracy or some other system of government and the rise of an autocracy. So Nick, you asked me, is it possible for a democracy to stop being a democracy? And I told you earlier that it's possible for a country to have autocratic elements without being autocratic. It's also possible to be a democracy while you're losing elements of democracy. So one of the examples that Anne brought up was, you know, when people who follow the law or tell the truth are threatened.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  I mean, this was something that came up after the 2020 election. So Republicans who followed the law and understood that the election was not stolen, they found that when they spoke the truth, they were assaulted both online and sometimes in real life. And when you have a situation where people are afraid to say true things or afraid to make arguments because they're worried that somebody will murder them and their families, then you already begin to have a situation where people don't feel free. And that began to happen in the United States, very notably after 2020.

• 13:56Hannah McCarthy?

  Anne also pointed to the problem of government becoming performative. So that's like taking systems that exist to uphold the law and using them, basically, to put on a show.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  Congressman Jim Jordan ran something called the Weaponization of Government Commission in the last Congress and took it upon himself to examine the work of people who do research into disinformation, for example, into patterns of conversation online, and unfairly accused some people who had been researchers, who had been academics, of being involved in censorship, which they were not involved in. You know, this then led to a series of court cases. Eventually, they made it all the way to the Supreme Court. But the entire time, I mean, both the congressional hearings and the court cases were based on things that hadn't happened. So again, when lies or untruths become a kind of fundamental basis of political argument and become accepted by, you know, by people within the system,

• 14:54Speaker 04

  then you're also on a road towards

• 14:56Nick Capodice?

  Autocracy.

• 15:05Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, so I have to ask at this point. Are we, Hannah, are we on the road towards autocracy? Is this democracy, American democracy, in trouble? Well, we're gonna get to that after a quick break. Oh, come on, for real? But before that break, a quick reminder that Nick and I have a book that covers a whole lot of the story of this nation. In fact, it is the perfect companion for those moments when you find yourself asking, is this against the law? Is there any precedent for this? Why is this happening? It's called A User's Guide to Democracy, and it is just that. You can get it wherever books are sold.

• 15:53Hannah McCarthy?

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• 16:38Hannah McCarthy?

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• 17:13Hannah McCarthy?

  Haven't you out there ever Googled your own name, like actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing, there are companies called data brokers whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over, so your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once, and they keep working in the background.

• 17:58Hannah McCarthy?

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• 18:24Hannah McCarthy?

  We are back. We're talking about autocracy today. What it is, what it looks like, and how it happens. And just before the break, Hannah, you decided to make us all wait to hear whether this nation of ours is on an autocratic road. So is it? Well, we can't predict where this is leading, right? We can't predict the future. You're an artful dodger, McCarthy. But we know what autocracy looks like, or rather, Anne Applebaum knows, and we are learning. And Anne says that this democracy, our democracy, has had cracks in the foundation for a while now.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  There have been elements of American democracy that have been broken for a long time. You know, and we all know what they are. The amount of money, including the secret money in politics, the money that people can use to create PACs or to support election campaigns, you know, has Led to American elections becoming a kind of circus. I mean, by comparison to elections in other democratic countries. Most countries don't spend millions and millions, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on their election campaigns, and we do. And I think that's a sign of real decline. The change in the nature of information, the fact that people get information that they receive through algorithms that have been designed to to send people emotive and angry and divisive material.

• 19:47Speaker 04

  This is how the internet works more broadly. It's not just about social media. You know, the advertising system rewards people who who have, you know, angry and divisive conspiracy theories, for example. And by allowing those ideas to dominate the information system and to, you know, and to help divide Americans and to create deep partisanship, those changes have been in the works for a long time, and they precede anything that's happened in the last in the last few years.

• 20:14Hannah McCarthy?

  Money and information, isn't that always the way? And not just money, secret money, hidden money. Anne says there are different types of economies at play here, one that is in the light and another in the shadow.

• 20:32Speaker 04

  We often forget that alongside the normal economy, alongside the economy where you and I pay taxes, and if we have businesses, we are subject to regulation, and if we own a company, our name is on all the documents, there is also another economy, there's where where money is kept offshore, where it flows through shell companies that are held anonymously, property can be purchased anonymously. And that world, that kind of offshore world, has been hugely beneficial, both to the autocratic world and to people inside the democratic world who who want to evade the law or evade taxes or or hide hide their wealth. It's not a subject people know much about, but it's that the growth of it, explosive growth of it, I should say, over the last decade, is another indication that our democracy,

• 21:17Speaker 04

  not just in the United States, but in Europe as well, is declining because so much money can be taken and hidden secretly and giving people power and influence secretly that that is impossible to know. And transparency and accountability are marks of democracy, and secrecy is a mark of dictatorship.

• 21:36Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay. Another thing that we need to talk about. Does it matter when our leaders use language that autocrats use?

• 21:45Speaker 04

  I worried a lot during the last election campaign about some of the language that Donald Trump was using. Because to me, it was reminiscent of language I'd heard in other times and other places. So when you call your opponents vermin, or you talk about them as enemies of the people.

• 21:59Hannah McCarthy?

  Radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country. They are truly the enemy of the people. They are.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  That's language borrowed from the dictatorships of the past. And you do that if you, like Viktor Orban, or like Hugo Chavez, if you're somebody who wants to be able to say, I have complete power and authority. My enemies and opponents are vermin. You don't have to take account of them. Or they're enemies of the state. They're traitors. That gives you license to begin to take apart the state. Remember that democracy depends on a kind of, you know, it's almost, I mean, it's almost sort of inhuman, a very difficult kind of sense of fair play.

• 22:44Hannah McCarthy?

  Anne talked about the fact that there are rules. There are systems that we are all supposed to agree on and abide by. Rules and systems that are designed to keep this country democratic.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  Once people begin to break that rule, or break that bargain, and once the, you know, there's a winner takes all system whereby if you win an election, you get to destroy everything or change everything, then it becomes much, much harder to maintain a democracy. And that language is now part of our system. This idea that one side or the other side is illegitimate and can't be allowed to rule. That level of partisanship that we reached in the US is really reminiscent only of the years leading up to the Civil War in its power and strength. And we've been divided about many things before, is profoundly worrying. I mean, just the language that people use about politics now is very, very different from the language people used a decade ago.

• 23:40Nick Capodice?

  So here's what I need to know. Does Anne think that words matter? I mean, obviously, she does. She just said that this language that calls one side illegitimate means a level of division that is profoundly worrying.

• 23:55Nick Capodice?

  But there are those who say, who have said, that Words are just words, Hannah. Bark worse than a bite, kind of thing.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  What people say and how they say it does have consequences. Words have consequences and how the language that people use to describe their opponents, describe their country, this tells you a lot about them. And so it should be at the very least a kind of warning sign.

• 24:19Nick Capodice?

  Now, we have heard politicians use inflammatory language in this country. I know we're hearing a lot of it right now, but we have dealt with it before, right?

• 24:28Speaker 04

  The language remains disturbing because if you look at the history of American politics, you know, at least in the 20th and 21st century, you don't hear people talking like that in US politics. I even looked at, I went back and read some of the speeches of segregationists from the 1960s. And even they don't talk about their political enemies as vermin. And so I thought that was a, I thought that was a real break with tradition. So it's very hard to know how to talk about someone who's broken with tradition, who's run a campaign that's notably different than anything that's gone in the past, while at the same time, you know, not sounding hysterical or hyperbolic. It's a fine line and I don't, you know, I'm not sure that, I'm not sure that we found it.

• 25:14Hannah McCarthy?

  This hyperbolic thing, I think this is important to think about. How do you talk about hearing words in this country that were used by autocrats in the past? Ideas and actions in this country that look autocratic. If you say, well, that language sounds like language used in countries where democracy has eroded, where autocracy rose, and we should worry about that. There are those who would say, you need to relax. And Anne says, the language you use to talk about this kind of language, that really matters too.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  I've actually been very careful about using the word fascist.

• 25:57Hannah McCarthy?

  Donald Trump is lashing out at his former chief of staff for calling him a fascist. It certainly falls in the general definition of fascist, for sure.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  I know it was used by General John Kelly. Who had worked for Donald Trump, you know, that's his right. Partly because it immediately makes people think of Nazi movies. And I didn't think that America is going to become a Nazi movie. You know, it's not going to look like that.

• 26:24Hannah McCarthy?

  There's one last thing I want to get to here. Yes, we are talking about autocracies. We are talking about the kind of words and actions that can guide a democracy into an autocracy. But ultimately, Anne says, the decline of democracy is not just about a politician or an anti-democratic movement.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  Democracies succeed when their citizens are engaged. When people are engaged in politics, when they run for office, when politics isn't a thing that is done by some kind of separate caste, you know, that it's something that belongs to everybody. When people are engaged in political parties, when they join movements, when they express their ideas, when they're part of the system. And one of the things that modern authoritarian propaganda does is it tries to disengage people. One of the effects, for example, I mean, this is you can see in Russia, of a politics with this constant stream of lies, you know, when people are lying, openly lying about things that everybody knows is not true.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  When you see people doing that, that's something that political leaders do because they want to make people exhausted. You know, they're not lying because they think you're going to believe everything that you're lying about. They're lying because they want to make people say, oh, gosh, I have no idea what's true and what's not true. Politics is a dirty business. I better stay home. And so it's very important for ordinary people to not be phased by that and to seek to remain involved. I mean, really, once democracy loses, it's, once people aren't participating, then it's very easily taken over by cliques or by the very wealthy or by people with ill intent. So staying engaged and being an active citizen is, you know, it's really the responsibility of everybody who lives in a democratic society.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  As I said, again, it's not, it's not something that like a special group of elites or fancy people, you know, do. It's something anyone can do.

• 28:18Nick Capodice?

  Now, I really appreciate that point, Hannah, because we say all the time that staying engaged is the way to keep our democracy alive. But I'm not always sure that that lands with people. And I'm not even sure it'll land with people now. But here, at least, we have an historian who knows what it takes for democracy to die because she's been studying it for a long time. So if you don't take us at our word, maybe you can take Anne at hers.

• 28:48Hannah McCarthy?

  Basically, don't let the people with money and power let you believe that you are not allowed into the club because you don't have money or you don't have power. Because when we start believing that, it's the most straightforward, the best way for us to eventually be banned from the club. And even though autocracies rely on secrecy, lies, and hiding things from people, they also have clear tells. So what is an autocracy? It is no one thing. But what does an autocracy do? It keeps the power away from the people.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  It's important to remember there are different kinds of authoritarianism. It's not like there's a huge alliance of autocracies and they all think the same thing. Autocracy can take different forms. China is a one-party state. The Chinese Communist Party is the leadership, and the Chinese Communist Party is a big and complex organization with many different kinds of people in it. By contrast, Russia is really a one-man dictatorship. There is no equivalent of the Chinese Communist Party. Iran is a theocracy that's run by religious leaders. Venezuela is a kind of oligarchy run by a group of very wealthy people connected to Nicolas Maduro and his security and army chiefs. The forms of autocracy and the language of autocracy can look different and sound different.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  But pay attention to the fundamentals. What kind of rights do people have? How does the legal system work? What kind of information are people allowed to have access to? And what kind of influence do ordinary people have on the way the government works? And that's how you know what level of autocracy you're talking about.

• 30:33Hannah McCarthy?

  That does it for this episode. It was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy, with Nick Capodice. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Music in this episode by Anna Moya, Otto Hacker, Amber Jean, Dylan Sitz, King Sis, Andrea Stahlback, Lennon Hutton, and Craig Reber. If you want more Civics 101, we've got it for you. You can follow us on Blue Sky at civics101pod. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And you can go to civics101podcast.org to access everything we have ever made and get in touch with us. Don't forget, if you like us, leave us a review. Nick and I used to be actors, so without feedback, we're kind of at sea. Civics 101 is a

• 31:17Hannah McCarthy?

  production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 31:25Speaker 00

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