AUTOCRACY NOW
populist authoritarian, he has become
the country’s longest-serving and most
signicant leader since Ataturk.
Rodrigo Duterte o the Philippines is
comfortable shooting people and wants
you to know it, notes Sheila Coronel.
He made his name as a tough mayor
bringing order to a crime-ridden city,
and as president, he oers that experi-
ence as a national model—“Singapore
with thugs instead o technocrats.”
And Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Paul
Lendvai explains, started o as a liberal
activist before cynically switching to
populist nationalism when the political
winds shifted—and as prime minister,
he has proceeded to dismantle demo-
cratic institutions and undermine the
rule o law.
There is no scholarly consensus on
what role individuals play in history,
relative to broader structural forces in
their environment. You can tell any
political story you want through the lens
o the people involved, making it appear
that their choices mattered greatly. And
you can tell the same story with abstract
trends doing the work and human
particularity washed out o the picture.
So how much do details about these
men’s lives and characters matter? How
would history be unfolding without
them, and how much o what happens
next will be determined by their per-
sonal whims? Good questions.
—Gideon Rose, EditorH
istorical eras tend to have
characteristic leadership types:
the edgling democrats o the
1920s, the dictators o the 1930s and
1940s, the nationalist anticolonialists o
the 1950s and 1960s, the gerontocrats o
the 1970s, the edgling democrats
(again) o the 1980s and 1990s. Now
we’re back to dictators.
The leading gures on the world
stage today practice a brutal, smash-
mouth politics, a personalized authori-
tarianism. Old-school strongmen, they
do whatever is needed to grasp and hold
on to power. Here we prole ve to see
what makes them tick. All fought their
way from obscurity to the throne and
then took a hard authoritarian turn. But
how, and why?
Susan Glasser says that Russia’s
Vladimir Putin sees himsel as a latter-
day Peter the Great. He fetishizes
strength, dreams o restoring imperial
grandeur, and rules by the old tsarist
doctrine o “Orthodoxy, Autocracy,
Nationality.”
According to Richard McGregor,
China’s Xi Jinping is driven by paternal
hero worship and devotion to the
Chinese Communist Party. Having
concluded that the party’s rule was
under growing threat, he has devoted his
time in o¥ce to restoring its dominance.
Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan is
harder to pin down, writes Kaya Genc.
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