Blog
Liberal societies can be saved, but only if we decide to save them
Book Review of Autocracy, Inc.: The dictators who want to run the world by Anne Applebaum, Doubleday, 2024.
The following review was published on August 5, 2025 on the website www.WeAreOneHumanity.org.
We who grew up in the West in the immediate post-World War II world assumed that rule of law, humanitarianism, human rights, international cooperation, and norms of honesty and rectitude would be adopted more and more broadly in our lifetime and that our political future would be a matter of tidying up the picture in a world that was on the right track.
Now we find that instead of an inevitable climb to the mountaintop of inclusive governments and social betterment, a turn to authoritarianism has captured at least a third of countries on the planet.
Academics like Thomas Carothers and Ben Press of Carnegie, who have spent a lifetime studying democracy, refer to this state of affairs as “democratic backsliding.” But the term seems mild compared to the reality we are seeing.
Our current autocratic turn does not follow a pattern of previous authoritarian regimes, Anne Applebaum tells us. Current autocrats follow a new model. The authoritarians we see now are not single individuals but networks of kleptocrats taking control of countries with no appeal to a better future for their citizens.
Past autocrats believed they needed to disguise their questionable policies behind a veneer of apparent good behavior. Note, for example, the way the Soviet Union orchestrated the trappings of democracy by holding elections, even though the world knew full well that participatory politics was not part of the USSR.
Now authoritarians pursue their policies in the glare of daylight, thumbing their noses at the notion that they will be stopped. They assist each other, materially, practically, and psychologically, each helping to normalize the behavior of the others. They make use of currency manipulation, global drug smuggling networks, and cutting-edge technology, and in many cases have found common cause with the techo-corporate world.
Applebaum has the credentials to help us follow the ugly trail of these regimes. A Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Applebaum was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and has written for a host of other highly regarded magazines and newspapers. She is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic. Among her books are three about the Soviet Union: Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, 2017; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, 2012; and Gulag: A History, 2004. This series of works has prepared her well to study authoritarianism in the twenty-first century.
Applebaum describes features of these regimes that we recognize but have struggled to explain. A mark of their different approach is the tactic of destabilization. They do not have inhibitions about seeing their country become a failed state. The more chaos they sow, the more power they reap, through intimidation and confusion. Neither do they feel constraints when it comes to brutal treatment of their citizens.
These regimes do not try to offer their citizens a hope for a better world, even insincerely. They recognize that that approach backfired in the Soviet Union because people could see that the reality was different from the promises: empty promises make the citizenry dissatisfied. Instead, “Autocracy Inc.” pursues policies that make the population cynical and passive so that they will stay out of politics.
In normal cases such autocratic leaders would lose free elections. But we are seeing that even charismatic opponents have difficulty challenging them. This is because the authoritarian leader is not just one ethically compromised individual but a world conglomerate of shady financial, social media, and surveillance systems working in tandem.
If there is a core idea that binds the governments of “Autocracy, Inc.” together, it is the destruction of “liberal norms” that get in the way of their self-serving regimes.
“Liberal norms” are elements of government that guarantee the citizen freedom from tyranny. They include the assertion that the legal system must operate above politics, that courts are independent, that rights of free speech and assembly will be guaranteed, that journalism is and must be independent, that “facts” require backup, that watchdog agencies are appropriate ways to ensure that power is not misused.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a bugle call for this new autocratic world order, says Applebaum. Russia pulled in Belarus, China, Iran and North Korea in its Ukraine venture, as part of a common exercise in mutual aggrandizement and a negation of Ukraine’s attempt to find a place within the European democratic tradition.
To gain global support, Russia has, in addition to courting rogue states, made use of a social media discourse, subsequently picked up by other autocratic countries, to depict Ukrainians as Nazis and NATO as the culprit forcing Russia to attack Ukraine. Russian media depict Europe as chaotic and frightening, with the goal of preventing Russians from wanting to identify with Europe. They broadcast the “decline” of Western countries using words like “degeneracy” and “hypocrisy.” They find common cause with those in the US who accept the notion of Russia as a white Christian state, and who applaud Russia’s criticism of feminism and gay rights. Russia thus portrays itself as leading a campaign of strength against weak and chaotic democracies.
But if Russia’s attack on Ukraine was the bugle call, the seeds of these developments were sown decades earlier. Applebaum flags Europe’s decision in 1970 to purchase Russian gas as a significant launcher of this new world order. Europeans were blinded, she claims, by the idea that trade could normalize relations, somewhat along the lines of the impact of the Schuman Plan on Western Europe in the early 1950s. Likewise, in the 1990s, the West brought China into the World Trade Organization, again believing that open economic borders would be good for global stability.
These deals did not alter the politics of the authoritarian regimes that benefitted from them. Instead, they helped western countries get used to operating by a double standard – doing business with illiberal regimes while at the same time claiming to stand for the norms of rule of law.
Nor has technology, with its enhanced possibilities for communication, increased global understanding or advanced ideas that promote individual freedom and well-being.
China banned Facebook in 2009 and Instagram in 2014. Subsequently, the fierce opposition China’s strict covid lockdown produced showed the Chinese authorities that the population can be easily radicalized. This led China to adopt much more aggressive endeavors to scotch dissent. China has developed sophisticated tracking systems though apps that can pinpoint a person’s location, purchases, and various kinds of unusual behavior including staying offline altogether. Uigurs are required to have apps on their phones that track “ideological viruses,” in other words, forbidden messages. Millions of security cameras are already in use in China, and soon China’s data collection system will efficiently predict political resistance. These “Safe City” technology systems have been sold to Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, Serbia, S. Africa, and Turkey. Chinese facial recognition technology is being used widely in Singapore and Zimbabwe.
Complementing these developments, Pegasus mobile phone software, developed by Israeli security, tracks journalists, activists and political opponents in Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, India, Bahrain and Greece.
Of course, democracies can use these forms of surveillance in what we might call “legitimate” ways, for example to track criminals, but the truth is that using such technologies for anything at all opens the way to abuse. An obvious easy abuse would be using them against political opponents. China exports these technologies precisely, Applebaum claims, to get the world inured to them so that China can use them more easily at home.
Autocracies cooperate with each others’ social media campaigns, helping to spread disinformation. Agents of “Autocracy Inc.” register domain names that look like real domains, then post on Facebook and Twitter. In this way, conspiracy theories about Western public health initiatives get spread in Africa. Fake NATO press releases and social media posts that ostensibly come from Americans who oppose US support of the war in Ukraine are rampant. Such posts helped undermine Biden’s efforts to create a coalition and win over public opinion in the war against Russia in Ukraine.
What can be done to push back?
Applebaum points out, discouragingly, that citizens’ actions to oppose authoritarian regimes, inspired by Gandhi and King and picked up by the Otpur students in Serbia in 1999, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, and the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014, have become much more difficult now, because Autocracy, Inc. has learned how to use social media to discredit opposition forces. Zimbabwe and Myanmar demonstrate this.
The first way to push back, Applebaum says, is to spread recognition of the massive information laundering that is going on and to create institutions that pre-empt these projects.
This is not an easy lift. Such an exercise requires specialized knowledge. She cites the excellent work of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), instituted by Obama in 2016. But take note, friends, the book Autocracy, Inc. was published in 2024. The GEC was shut down by Congress in December 2024.
Applebaum therefore proposes, as a second suggestion, that watchdog research be instituted to ensure our fullest understanding of the impact social media are having. This could help create a groundswell of political support for new regulations that give users of social media more control, if legislators can be found who will sponsor them.
Thirdly, says Applebaum, the struggle for “evidence-based conversations” needs a global coalition to lead it. She calls for joint action of the most trustworthy news carriers, supported by actions of government. Subsidizing some of these carriers would, for example, help ensure that Chinese news carriers are not the cheapest option.
Applebaum calls for the diaspora populations of countries subsumed by “Autocracy Inc.” to be more vocal and to operate in support of each other. Independent journalists must cover and reinforce their stories.
“We have to learn to compete,” says Applebaum, “while preserving and supporting our own values…Journalists who uncover corruption need to work with lawyers… Truth needs to lead to justice.”
Bottom line: smart people need to get cracking and work together.
Applebaum sums up her message on the final page of her book. “There is no liberal world order any more. But there are liberal societies…that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do…. So few of them have existed across human history, so many have existed for a short time and then failed…. They can be saved. But only if those of us who live in them are willing to make the effort to save them.”
June 14, 2025
Things in the US have taken a serious turn during the past week. On June 6, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ramped up its raids in Los Angeles, taking people off the streets without, in many cases, even knowing their names, ignoring the right of all people to be served a warrant if they are seized by the authorities, paying no heed to their right to legal representation.
Donald Trump’s campaign promise to deport immigrants was a promise to crackdown on, and deport, immigrants with criminal records. But after his inauguration, that policy quickly shifted to something much more aggressive. In response, over the past three months, the strategy of pushback that involved helping immigrants know their rights and assert them has disintegrated, because it is clear that ICE is not a respecter of rights.
One third of the population of LA was born in another country. In some sections of the city, the immigrant population is over 60%. If immigrant deportation was to become a national flashpoint, Los Angeles was a likely candidate as the place where this would happen.
A week ago, ICE raids in LA elicited enlarged citizen protests that were mostly nonviolent, though a few violent incidents occurred. President Trump used this to take the highly unusual step of calling in the California National Guard. The National Guard operates under the jurisdiction of state government, and by law the president steps in to use it only when the country is invaded, there's a rebellion or threat of rebellion against the government, or when the president’s extra clout is needed to enforce the laws of the United States. In a move that has even less legal basis, Trump also brought in 700 Marines to guard Federal buildings in LA’s downtown area.
An additional matter for concern is that Trump’s order to bring in the National Gurad can be implemented anywhere in the country – it is not limited to Los Angeles. And it does not require civil unrest for its implementation. Immigration Secretary Tom Homan acknowledged on Thursday that the administration plans to use the National Guard more broadly to respond to protests.
By early June, 51,000 undocumented immigrants were in detention following Trump’s inauguration. About 44% of these have not committed any crime. Their situation speaks to the complexity of the immigration issue in the US. The country relies on a large number of undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, abide by laws, and provide essential service in the hospitality industry, nursing homes, hospitals, construction, and agriculture. The US has, over many decades, lived with the reality that we rely on our undocumented, and they can have meaningful and useful lives in the US if they do not come up against the law.
The LA situation of this past week by no means required the extreme response President Trump imposed. Local law enforcement authorities were capable of handling it. Trump’s actions created an impression things were worse than they were and in turn raised the level of protest.
On Tuesday, June 10, the Mayor of Los Angeles imposed an 8 pm to 6 am curfew in an area of one square mile where most of the incidents of looting had occurred. People living in the area, and homeless people, are not subject to the curfew – only those coming into the area to protest. The last several nights have been quieter.
Governor Gavin Newsom
In the context of these events, California Governor Gavin Newsom took his place on the front line of public opposition to Donald Trump. He sued the Trump administration for illegally using in the National Guard. A San Francisco court quickly found in Newsom’s favor, but the administration immediately appealed. Now the appeals court has stayed the ruling, pending a hearing on June 17.
Last Tuesday, Newsom made a televised speech, calling out Donald Trump’s decision to send the military into LA as a response to protests, asserting that these actions have taken the nation a step further in the direction of authoritarianism, saying that this is a “perilous moment” for democracy and for the long-held norms of participatory governance.
“California may be first, but it clearly won’t end here,” Mr. Newsom said. “Other states are next. Democracy is next…. Democracy is under assault right before our eyes — the moment we’ve feared has arrived.”
Ramping up concerns about the administration’s nonconcern for normal rights of free speech, on Thursday, California Democratic Senator Alex Padilla, asked a question at a news conference on immigration in Los Angeles held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. "I am Senator Alex Padilla I have questions for the secretary," Padilla said. Immediately several men dressed in plainclothes seized him, handcuffed him, and dragged him out of the room. He was on his knees in the hallway when someone working for Noem arrived and ordered that he be released.
Trump’s parade and citizen protests
And so, the nation awaits the coming events of June 14 with additional attention and concern. President Trump has organized a military parade in the nation’s capital, ostensibly marking 250 years since the formation of the US Army at the opening of the American Revolution in 1775, but staged on the day of Trump’s 79thbirthday. The event thus implies an authoritarian victory parade.
The citizenry will be staging the largest demonstration in opposition to the regime that we have seen since January 20. A coalition of national movements – Indivisble, the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Voters Matter, Center for Common Ground, Community Change, and over 200 other democracy-focused organizations – is leading 1,800 protest rallies in the US and seventeen other countries. Churches and other community groups that are not official sponsors are also mobilizing people to attend.
Numerous trainings have been held online during the past week to ensure that these rallies will be peaceful and that participants understand how to handle themselves if they are confronted by the authorities.
Events in Los Angeles have raised the level of commitment of these groups. In many cases, they include people who have already been active in helping immigrants to know their rights, to prepare their families in case someone gets deported, to get legal representation if they are detained, to track what happens to them when they get enmeshed in the deportation system.
All know that the plight of particular, high profile individuals helps to heighten commitment of citizen protest. The population is well aware of the cases of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Öztürk, Jeanette Vizguerra, Mohsen Mahdawi, and many others. A glaring reality is that these personalities come from the university and economic elite, and that ordinary folks in a similar or worse plight remain part of anonymous statistics.
But one case in this latter category has received notable attention, namely the 250 deported in March to an El Salvador mega-prison, who the government claims are members of the gang Tren de Aragua. Their family members dispute these gang ties: some of the detainees were arrested because of innocent tattoos. They were deported under a 1798 act that allows deportation of citizens of an “enemy” nation. The most well-known of these is the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old from El Salvador who is a Maryland resident and who was deported from the US in March. Several courts, including the US Supreme Court, ruled that Mr. Abrego Garcia was deported in error and that the government should "facilitate" his return to the US and his family. On 6 June he was returned to the US, but remains in custody. He now faces federal criminal charges in relation to an earlier dismissed indictment alleging he illegally transported undocumented migrants while still in the US.
Of course the ruthless deportation of immigrants is only one of a large number of actions of the Trump administration that arouse public concern and are the target of tomorrow’s No Kings! rallies. The elimination of US overseas aid, radical diminishing of funds for scientific endeavors, the removal of all watchdog entities within the federal government, the attack on universities and free media, abandonment of obligations with regard to the Atlantic alliance, and tariffs imposed on some of our closest traditional allies, suggest a radical departure from policies that have in the past identified our country as a humanitarian bastion.
We Are Living in a New Reality: Donald Trump 2.0
This column was posted today on the website
In the name of eradicating waste and fraud and “making America great again,” President Trump has found common cause with a highly organized 40 year project to create a “unitary presidency” and to unravel many features of the US’s regime of fairness and dignity. This project is most clearly laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a document written in part by Russell Vought, who has recently been confirmed as head of the Office of Management and Budget. President Trump has also found common cause with the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, to whom Trump has given carte blanche under the auspices of a government department created with no congressional approval - the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE - to fire federal employees and cut agencies without any discriminatory protocols. By this means, in the past four weeks, President Trump has been presiding over the dismantling of the world’s oldest and most influential democracy.
No one questions the importance of addressing the US’s trillion-dollar debt. And it would be naïve to suppose there are no areas of the federal government where waste could be cut. Nor would anyone dispute that the US system for handling matters relating to immigration is seriously broken. Over and above these premises, it is no secret that the situation of blue-collar workers in the US has been undermined by forty years of diverting industry overseas, leaving possibilities for livelihood, pride, and meaning-making in the dust. And beyond that, angst is understandably growing everywhere in the face of the world’s breakneck speed of change, leading all of us to believe deeply in the need for new approaches to governance.
The rapidity with which Donald Trump’s government has acted would be admirable if we could see that its initiatives were leading to a thoughtful reinvention of American institutions. And we can’t entirely dismiss that possibility in a few cases. But we are now seeing individuals with little knowledge and no experience of what our government does being let loose to apply a wrecking hammer. Elon Musk’s free rein allows him to eliminate all barriers to his own business interests, to be Donald Trump’s representative in challenging guardrails and checks that protect government, to blur the division between governance and politics. Some are arguing that it is now Elon Musk, not Donald Trump, who runs the US government. All these actions suggest the imposition of an authoritarian regime that takes no notice of Congress’s role in governance.
This is not conservatism, because conservatism means slow evolution, protecting existing institutions from rapid change. It is not populism, because populism operates in the interests of the non-elite, whereas many of the programs that protect the vulnerable have been placed on the chopping block in the first four weeks of this administration. These actions amount to an authoritarian takeover, where guardrails have been destroyed, and arbitrary orders delivered that require tests of allegiance or firing. A number of these actions are clearly contrary to the wellbeing of citizens of the US, and contrary to President Trump’s campaign promises to reduce inflation and increase the welfare of Americans.
Downsizing government at what cost?
Plenty of statistics are available, and the only difficulty with providing them is that they change every day. A comprehensive list of federal government layoffs as of February 19 can be found here. Some highlights: the federal government has offered early retirement to all federal employees who wish to take this offer, and so far 75,000 have signed on, though the program has been temporarily halted by a judge who is looking into the repercussions. DOGE’s layoffs will prioritize all probationary federal workers, which means anyone who has worked for the government for less than a year. Numbers involved are not entirely clear but there were 200,000 such workers as of March 2024, whose jobs are therefore immediately on the line. 1,300 of these are at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making up one-tenth of the workforce in that body. The jobs of more seasoned civil servants are also on the line: 5,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services, 1,000 from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The Department of Education is having $900 million cut from its institute that tracks student performance, and it is unclear whether the institute will continue to exist.
Many who voted for Trump applaud all of the above as a good and necessary reduction in government spending. The crucial question is at what cost does all this occur to the American people and the country’s future as a democratic government?
Some provisional answers:
Firing seventeen Inspectors General without giving Congress the required 30 day notice removes government employees who are already doing precisely what President Trump claims he wants to do: eliminating fraud and abuse in government at the federal, state and local level. The logicality of this move can only be understood as a power play, testing the willingness of the system to push back, and showing that Trump-Musk will call the shots on how things are done even if they are being done very well already.
The directive to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, will make it difficult for anyone to speak honestly in public about racism or exclusion because they will be open to accusations of using DEI language. This could end up being one place where the issue of free speech will be put to the test.
Trump’s announcement that the Gulf of Mexico will now be called the Gulf of America seems laughable, but when Associated Press continued to use the term Gulf of Mexico because it serves an international clientele, it was shut out of the White House press briefings. This is even more serious than it sounds, because Associated Press holds a unique position in the journalism pool for its highly trusted and longstanding role in global journalism. It is the US’s largest, and until recently the world’s largest, press agency, servicing thousands of other journalistic outlets. Trump’s action is a highly thought-out tactic to assert power and create precedents for limiting free speech.
In bulldozing Federal agencies through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has brought in a group of young people with no experience or understanding of the role played by government workers who now have to access government records and private information. The highly prized “right to privacy” is thus also being threatened. This situation plays out in its most acute form with regard to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), where Musk and his people initially attempted a level of access to information – through the Integrated Data Retrieval System - that even the head of the IRS does not have, because the need to protect this elaborate system is so prized. Fortunately, yesterday the Treasury Department cut across the White House’s acceptance of this and forbad DOGE from accessing individuals’ personal tax information, though DOGE is persisting in its bid to get access to medical files of the Social Security Administration.
With regard to the US’s stance on the global stage, the decision to cut over 800 existing programs from the US’s foreign assistance agency , USAID, and to lay off approximately 10,000 people employed by USAID, removes one of the most important means by which the US reinforces good relations with the rest of the world, quite apart from the substance of the work it does. This action is a brutal removal of humanitarian aid in numerous areas.
Abandoning Ukraine’s fight for freedom
Blaming Ukraine for the war it is fighting is a blatant untruth and a declaration that the US is no longer the world’s ultimate defender of freedom. US actions in the past week in relation to Ukraine have raised questions for Europeans about whether the longstanding Atlantic Alliance still stands. And the Trump administration’s criticism of the EU because “it has too many rules” and thus interferes with the goals of American tech companies has reinforced concern about the demise of trans-Atlantic ties. Comments one columnist, “The era of international gangsterism has arrived.”
In addition, Trump’s government has placed our justice system under assault. A series of examples of this are available, but consider, as one case, the offer made to New York Mayor Eric Adams to have his corruption indictment removed if he cooperates with the Federal Government’s immigration agenda as it relates to New York City. The prosecutor who was ordered to drop the case, a Republican who had, in her early career, clerked for two of our most far-right Supreme Court Justices, resigned immediately, and seven other prosecutors have followed suit. Now four deputy mayors of New York City are threatening to resign as a vote of no-confidence in their Mayor. People are taking a costly stand against Trump’s Justice Department, because they see a blatant attempt to introduce political manipulation into the legal system.
In sum, these actions and others threaten to endanger us all if they alienate us from our allies, undermine our dedication to truth, freedom and global humanitarian solidarity, and produce an apathetic population that is amenable to a power grab.
Highlighting the courageous actions of individuals who have found ways to push back is one valuable service we writers can provide. Another is to help our readers keep perspective on the larger significance of this turn of events.
Can we grow to meet our global challenges?
The emergence of so many democratically elected far-right governments that are questioning long-held assumptions about fair, just and inclusive politics, underlines that humanity is at a turning point. “Turning point” language has been used many times before but has never been more true. This moment of truth is prompted by the coalescence of a number of mounting challenges: pressures of immigration, climate change, shifts in understanding of the nature of morality and values, disrupted economic patterns caused by the pandemic, failures over the past forty years to address the economic realities of the hardest working people in a number of countries, not least the world’s wealthiest country, an overly intellectualized university-educated elite that lacks attunement to core economic needs of people not like them, accumulating power of a small number of the very wealthy, and a shifting international security picture that allows older assumptions to be called into question.
A large body of people exists globally who believe very significant changes are needed for us to be able to function on the planet both within our countries and in our relationships to others. Tensions between realism about a range of economic considerations, and concerns about justice, dignity and fairness, underlie the debate for even the most sincere and least self-serving people.
We, the residents of this planet, don’t have fully developed answers to these large conundrums. But we have many of the raw materials to create answers, if we will choose to use them. This is a moment of deciding who we are. It is not an academic matter, it is an existential matter. It is a time for those who believe we can grow to meet our challenges to find common cause by embracing essential honesty about our situation and truth in our discussions.
For Americans the future has arrived
The events of the past week force Americans to pull out of hibernation and get to grips with what is to come. Please see my post on the website of We Are One Humanity.
https://www.weareonehumanity.org/contributing-writers/kti0y21isenomhtk97iylsiu50brdo