The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World - Hardcover

Rachman, Gideon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1635422809 ISBN 13: 9781635422801

Verlag: Other Press (NY), 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The Times (UK) and Sunday Times

From Putin, Trump, and Bolsonaro to Erdogan, Orbán, and Xi, an intimate look at the rise of strongman leaders around the world.

The first truly global treatment of the new nationalism, underpinned by an exceptional level of access to its key actors, from the award-winning journalist and author of Easternization.

This is the most urgent political story of our time: authoritarian leaders have become a central feature of global politics. Since 2000, self-styled strongmen have risen to power in capitals as diverse as Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, Brasilia, Budapest, Ankara, Riyadh, and Washington. These leaders are nationalists and social conservatives, with little tolerance for minorities, dissent, or the interests of foreigners. At home, they claim to be standing up for ordinary people against globalist elites; abroad, they posture as the embodiments of their nations. And everywhere they go, they encourage a cult of personality. What’s more, these leaders are not just operating in authoritarian political systems but have begun to emerge in the heartlands of liberal democracy.

Gideon Rachman has been in the same room with most of these strongmen and reported from their countries over a long journalistic career. While others have tried to understand their rise individually, Rachman pays full attention to the widespread phenomenon and uncovers the complex and often surprising interaction among these leaders. In the process, he identifies the common themes in our local nightmares, finding global coherence in the chaos and offering a bold new paradigm for navigating our world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times. He joined the FT in 2006, after 15 years at The Economist, where he served as a correspondent in Washington D.C., Brussels, and Bangkok. In 2010 Rachman published his first book, Zero Sum World, which predicted the rise in international political tensions and turmoil that followed the global financial crisis. In 2016, Rachman won the Orwell Prize, Britain’s leading award for political writing. He was also named Commentator of the year at the European Press Prize, known as the “European Pulitzers.” Rachman’s previous book, Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond, was published by Other Press in 2018.

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Introduction
 
In the spring of 2018, the White House was preparing for a summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. In the Old Executive Office Building, where the US president’s national security staff work, one of Trump’s aides remarked to me, with a slightly sheepish smile: “The president enjoys dealing face-to-face with authoritarian leaders.”
It was clear that Trump’s fondness for dictators made even some of his senior staff squirm. The unspoken thought, left hanging in the White House air, was that Trump himself had introduced some of the habits of a dictatorship into the heart of the world’s greatest democracy. The president’s wild rhetoric, his fondness for military parades, his tolerance for conflicts of interest and intolerance for journalists and judges are all features of the “strongman style” in politics – a style that, until recently, was thought to be alien to the mature democracies of the West.
But Trump was in tune with his times. Since 2000 the rise of the strongman leader has become a central feature of global politics. In capitals as diverse as Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, Ankara, Budapest, Warsaw, Manila, Riyadh and Brasilia, self-styled “strongmen” (and, so far, they are all men) have risen to power.
Typically, these leaders are nationalists and cultural conservatives, with little tolerance for minorities, dissent or the interests of foreigners. At home, they claim to be standing up for the common man against the “globalist” elites. Overseas, they posture as the embodiment of their nations. And, everywhere they go, they encourage a cult of personality. The Age of the Strongman began long before Trump won the White House. It will continue to be a central theme of world politics in the post-Trump era. The two emerging superpowers of the twenty-first century, China and India, have both fallen prey to strongman politics.
Although they operate in very different political systems, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi have led their countries towards a more personalized style of leadership that embraces nationalism, a rhetoric of strength and a fierce hostility to liberalism. The two most important powers on the eastern borders of the European Union, Russia and Turkey, are run by strongman leaders. Both Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdog?an have now been in power for the best part of twenty years. The strongman style has entered the EU itself through Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Even Britain’s Boris Johnson has flirted with this style of politics – in his attitudes to law, diplomacy and dissent within his own party. Latin America’s two largest countries, Brazil and Mexico, are currently led by Jair Bolsonaro and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (popularly known as Amlo). Bolsonaro is on the far right; Amlo is on the populist left. But both leaders fit the strongman template, encouraging a cult of personality and contempt for state institutions.
This international pattern underlines a central theme of this book: the strongman style is not confined to authoritarian systems. It is now also common among elected politicians in democracies. A strongman leader operating in a democracy, such as Donald Trump, faces institutional constraints that do not inhibit the likes of Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin. But the instincts of a Trump, a Duterte or a Bolsonaro are disconcertingly similar to strongman leaders in China and Russia.
The rise of strongman leaders across the world has fundamentally changed world politics. We are now in the midst of the most sustained global assault on liberal democratic values since the 1930s. From the wreckage of the Second World War, political freedom advanced around the world for roughly sixty years. The progress was unsteady, and definitions of democracy are imprecise, but the overall direction of travel was clear. In 1945, there were just twelve democracies in the world. In the year 2002, that figure had risen to ninety-two, exceeding the number of autocracies for the first time ever.
Since then, the group of countries formally defined as democracies has stayed just ahead of autocratic regimes. But a process of democratic erosion has set in. Freedom House, which reports annually on political liberty around the world, pointed out that 2020 was the fifteenth consecutive year of declines in global freedom. After the post-Cold War surge in civil and political liberties, the tide turned in 2005. In every year since then, the number of countries where freedom has diminished has been larger than those experiencing an increase in political and civil liberties. As Freedom House put it, “The long democratic recession is deepening.” The rise of strongman leaders has been central to this process. That is because the political style of the strongman puts the leader’s instincts above the law and institutions.
Today’s strongman leaders are operating in a global political environment that is very different from that of the dictators of the 1930s. Wars between great powers are no longer common. Globalization has transformed the world economy. The spread of international law has created new expectations about how international leaders behave. But the technologies of the twenty-first century are also handing strongman leaders new ways of communicating directly with the masses, as well as dangerous new tools of social control – in particular the ability to monitor the movements and behavior of citizens. As these tools are deployed, they could strengthen the twenty-first century’s authoritarian turn.
Joe Biden has made the global promotion of democracy a central goal of his presidency. But he has come to power in the midst of the Age of the Strongman. Populist and authoritarian leaders are now shaping the direction of world politics. They are riding a tide of resurgent nationalism and cultural and territorial conflict that may be too powerful to be turned back by Biden’s reassertion of liberal values and American leadership.
Even in the US itself, Biden’s victory has not definitively turned the page on strongman politics. Donald Trump did well enough in the 2020 presidential election to spark immediate talk of him running for the presidency again in 2024. Even if Trump himself pulls back from frontline politics, future Republican contenders are likely to embrace the political formula he has identified.
Chinese nationalists frequently portray Biden as an old, weak leader, presiding over an America that is facing irreversible decline. By contrast, China portrays itself as a resurgent power, under a strong and vigorous leader. In the emerging world order, the president of China may soon contest the title routinely bestowed on the president of the United States – the “most powerful man in the world.”
The central challenge for Biden as president will be to demonstrate the vitality of liberal democracy both at home and abroad. If he fails, the Biden presidency may prove to be just an interlude in the Age of the Strongman.
If political liberals are to win the battle with strongman politics, they need to understand what they are dealing with. This book will attempt to answer three central questions about the Age of the Strongman. When did the strongman tendency take hold? What are its main characteristics? And why did it happen?
 
On December 31, 1999, Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia. He was to become an important symbol and even an inspiration for a new generation of would-be authoritarians who admire his nationalism, his daring, his willingness to use violence and his contempt for “political correctness.”
But in his early years in power, Putin was keen to be seen as a reliable partner in an established world order....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Other Press (NY)
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1635422809
• ISBN 13: 9781635422801
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 278
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar