Authoritarianism is back, baby

Remember how we thought the world would be a better place if Saddam Hussein and  Muammar Gaddafi were  removed  from the global scene? Before that, it was Augusto Pinochet, Ferdinand Marcos (with his dear wife, Imelda), Mobutu Sese Seko, Nicolae Ceausescu and the Ayatollah Khomeini; and before that again, Pol Pot, to say nothing of Idi Amin, Leonid Brezhnev, Alfredo Stroessner and whichever white racist rascal happened to be in charge in South Africa.

So how did that work out? The shadow of dictatorship is growing longer across the world, not shorter. Consider this partial list:

Russia: Vladimir Putin; Turkey: Recep Erdogan; Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro; Syria: Bashar al-Assad; Khazakstan: Nursultan Nazarbayev; Belarus: Alexandr Lukashenko; Venezuela: Nicolás Maduro; the Philippines: Rodrigo Duterte; Saudi Arabia: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; Egypt: Abdel Fattah el-Sissi. I could go on. These are just the obvious ones that first spring to mind. And I’ve hardly touched on Africa, where Robert Mugabe has been replaced as Zimbabwe’s president-for-life by his long-time number two, known as The Crocodile.

In each of these cases, absolutism is the norm. What the leader says goes. Those who stand up to them are liable to be arrested, tortured and either imprisoned indefinitely or executed. Freedom of speech is for the birds. Journalists are routinely threatened and newspapers and broadcast outlets that defy the regime are summarily shut down.

Could we add America’s Donald Trump to the list? Some of his opponents would say yes, especially if his Republican Party does well in today’s mid-term elections. The 45th President would clearly like to rule by decree. His problem is that he hasn’t been able to get away with it – yet.  The same goes for Viktor Orban, the increasingly authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, and Poland’s equally hard-line leader, Mateusz Morawiecki. The only reason I don’t count Trump and his Mitteleuropean counterparts as full-blown dictators is that, up to now, they have respected the democratic process and must in due course face their electorates.

They are not alone. Waiting in the wings are a slew of populists who, like Mussolini, look to the common people to give them the approval they need to dispense with the usual constitutional niceties. Italy’s Matteo Salvini and Luigi di Maio are constrained, as things stand, by the nature of their coalition (Far Right and Slightly Crazy), as well as by their country’s membership of the European Union. But should they win again next time round, having successfully taken on the Brussels Establishment, who knows where they might end up? The same is true of Poland and Hungary, which, along with Slovakia and the Czech Republic, make up the Vizegrad group of former East Bloc nations that have found the transition from Communism to democracy not entirely congenial.

The irony is that Brexit – once hailed as Europe’s harbinger of doom – is likely to end up as the least of Europe’s problems. Much more pressing, as time advances, is the rise and rise of nationalism, nurtured by the atavistic fear of Islam and given free rein by the unexpected weakness of Germany.

But, as my list makes clear, Europe is in fact at the softer end of absolutism. In the Kremlin, a thousand miles to the east, Putin has become a monster, reinforcing the view, once taken as read, that Russia will always be the enemy of the West, whether ruled by Czars, the Communist Party or plain, everyday nationalists. Why this should be is something of a mystery. Wouldn’t the Russian people prefer to be part of the capitalist world, in which prosperity and freedom until recently co-existed with a minimum of rancour?

Come to that, why can’t the Turkish people, whose circumstances improved immeasurably in the years up to the 2008 recession, continue to look to the legacy of Ataturk instead of rallying to the siren-call of a man whose official residence, built at a cost of nearly three quarters of a billion dollars, makes Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome look like affordable housing?

What causes the people of the Philippines to think that the absurd blowhard Duterte cares about anything other than power and self-aggrandisment? Why on earth do voters in Brazil imagine that Bolsonaro – a self-declared Trumpian – will be any less venal or capricious than his predecessors?

And so on and so on. Soon they won’t be knocking down statues of crazed dictators, they’ll be putting them up, to the sound of trumpets.

The world is at a dangerous pass. Good sense seems to have gone out the window almost everywhere we look. Instead of reasonable men and women campaigning for reform and better conditions for all, knowing that money needs to be earned and that improvements have to be paid for out of increased productivity and taxes, we see nothing but demagogues and buffoons who have more in common with Lord Voldemort out of the Harry Potter books that they do with Adam Smith, or even Karl Marx.

And yet the world continues to turn on its axis and the sky thus far has not fallen on our heads. It’s the people, my dears, the people that we have to fear. If we didn’t let these buggers in in the first place, we wouldn’t have to live with the consequences.