2022. 279 Pages. (Paperback.).
Written by the Venezuelan/American fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace before Trump was reelected, I could not help but think that he may now be in danger of being deported back to Venezuela. He is certainly no Trump fan, but the book now feels a little outdated with Trump’s reelection, although many of the devious tricks autocrats use to obtain and maintain power have already been deployed by Trump in the last five months.
He makes extensive use of the acronym 3P autocrats, i. e. those using populism, polarization and post-truth to maintain power.
The author quotes extensively from four books that I quite enjoyed among others: Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, and Bill Browder’s Red Alert and Freezing Order.
This is a deeply researched pessimistic screed about global politics that will make many readers and committed small-c democrats despair about the future, the exact opposite of his obvious intention, of making them engage with politics. To be fair, in the penultimate 15 page chapter, he outlines five processes we must use to counteract autocracy, couching all of them in the military term Battles. But I could not think of any of them as actionable on an individual level. In the Afterword, he argues for ranked-choice voting and for wide use of citizen’s juries.
There is little humour and the book is dense with facts. One very apt quote that caught my attention: “ With the practices and institutions that protected society from disinformation in tatters, practitioners of the dark arts of post-truth find themselves kicking penalty shots without a goalkeeper to stand in the way.”
It is perhaps smug, but I take comfort in the fact that Canada is never mentioned in any negative way.
I admire the scholarship, learned a lot, but am left pessimistic without any obvious remédiable action on an individual level. I cannot recommend it except for those with political aspirations, political scientists, or those already wielding political power.
3.5/5
Thanks, Alana.
The Passionate Reader 