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.”