Vladimir Putin’s acquisition of the Russian presidency in 2000 is seen by Gideon Rachman as ushering in a new era of strongmen. Since Rachman finished his book, Putin has been laying waste to Ukrainian cities and killing their people, regardless of ethnicity or language, as (lest it be forgotten) did Boris Yeltsin in Grozny. Chechnya aside, Yeltsin maintained some basic freedoms which Putin is now comprehensively eliminating. In an apotheosis of strongman rule, he is threatening dissenters in language that could have come from the lips of Stalin.
Yet Rachman shows just how widespread is the illusion that strongman rule is beneficial, and how much the strongmen (such as Putin, Xi, Erdoan and Bolsonaro) and would-be strongmen (among them Netanyahu, Orbán and Trump) have in common. Following foreign policy expert Fiona Hill, he notes Trump’s “autocrat envy” and the even more worrying fact that a majority of Republican voters supported Trump’s efforts to subvert American democracy, most egregiously by accepting his lie that he won a “landslide” victory in an election he decisively lost.
Rachman is not the first to draw attention to the appeal of the strongman, but what he does well is show the common elements of their rule, who their shared enemies are, how intent they are on undermining institutional obstacles such as an independent judiciary, and the commonalities in their rhetoric. These include a nostalgic nationalism, conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” their love for “the people” and a disdain for elites. Their contempt for actual people was summed up by Erdoan. Speaking in 1996, he said, “democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination. And then you step off.”
