The Dictators’ Last StandSeptember/October 2019 139
democracies in the world. And the rapid erosion o democracy in coun-
tries such as Hungary and Venezuela has shown that populists really
can turn their countries into competitive authoritarian regimes or out-
right dictatorships. The controversial argument I made ¿ve years ago
has become the conventional wisdom.
But this new consensus is now in danger o hardening into an
equally misguided orthodoxy. Whereas scholars used to hope that it
was only a matter o time until some o the world’s most powerful
autocracies would be forced to democratize, they now concede too
readily that these regimes have permanently solved the challenge o
sustaining their legitimacy. Having once believed that liberal democ-
racy was the obvious endpoint o mankind’s political evolution, many
experts now assume that billions o people around the world will hap-
pily forgo individual freedom and collective self-determination. Na-
ive optimism has given way to premature pessimism.
The new orthodoxy is especially misleading about the long-term
future o governments that promise to return power to the people but
instead erode democratic institutions. These populist dictatorships, in
countries such as Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, share two impor-
tant features: ¿rst, their rulers came to power by winning free and fair
elections with an anti-elitist and anti-pluralist message. Second, these
leaders subsequently used those victories to concentrate power in
their own hands by weakening the independence o key institutions,
such as the judiciary; curtailing the ability o opposition parties to
organize; or undermining critical media outlets. (By “populist dicta-
torships,” I mean both outright dictatorships, in which the opposition
no longer has a realistic chance o displacing the government through
elections, and competitive authoritarian regimes, in which elections
retain real signi¿cance even though the opposition is forced to ¿ght
on a highly uneven playing ¿eld.)
According to the new orthodoxy, the populist threat to liberal de-
mocracy is a one-way street. Once strongman leaders have managed
to concentrate power in their own hands, the game for the opposition
is up. I a signi¿cant number o countries succumb to populist dicta-
torship over the next years, the long-term outlook for liberal democ-
racy will, in this view, be very bleak.
But this narrative overlooks a crucial factor: the legitimacy o pop-
ulist dictators depends on their ability to maintain the illusion that
they speak for “the people.” And the more power these leaders con-