From democracy to tyranny

According to Freedom House, a democracy and civil liberties monitoring organization, 2015 marked the 10th straight year (pdf) of declines in global freedom. The report, Anxious Dictators, Wavering Democracies: Global Freedom under Pressure observes: “The world was battered in 2015 by overlapping crises that fueled xenophobic sentiment in democratic countries, undermined the economies of states dependent on the sale of natural resources, and led authoritarian regimes to crack down harder on dissent.”

Given a decline in respect for democracy in the US and more tolerance for a more autocratic form of governance, it makes sense to consider how democracy can slide into some form of a populist autocracy, a potential precursor to dictatorship. Writing for Bloomberg Businessweek (Nov. 28 - Dec. 4 issue, pages 6-7), Joshua Kurlantzick describes the growth and nature of some recent autocracies that have arisen from democracies. In recent years, transitions toward autocracy have occurred in a number of democracies including the Philippines, Thailand, Poland, Hungary, Ecuador, Italy, Russia and Turkey.

Kurlantzick makes the following observations.
1. The new autocrats usually have little or no government experience, instead they build cults of personality centered on themselves and their personal images.
2. The new autocrats usually win elections with less than 50% of the vote.
3. Autocrat political elections are often accompanied by unusual impacts on the press-media, e.g., (i) they sometimes directly own major media outlets, (ii) they tend to bypass the traditional press via social media, (iii) they generally attack the press-media, sometimes suing for libel, and (iv) they stoke press-media distrust by their attacks on the press.
4. The new autocrats build administrations that are dependent more on the leader’s personal influence than on political operational precedents.
5. Once in office, the new autocrats tend to begin to “slowly suffocate the civil service, military bureaucracy and other government networks that are supposed to be apolitical”, e.g., they seed civil service, police and military posts with family, friends and loyalists.
6. Once in office, the new autocrats tend to attack the courts and work to undermine judicial independence.
7. By being surrounded with unqualified family, friends and sycophants, the autocrats foster corruption and graft for personal and loyalist gain by disabling oversight mechanisms that are supposed to keep corruption in check.
8. Once out of power and the personality cult collapses, autocrats can leave their countries economically weaker and with weaker legal institutions.

Some or all of that sounds quite familiar.

B&B orig: 12/3/16