The Age of the Strongman (Bodley Head) by Gideon Rachman
The rivalry between democracy and autocracy promises to define much of this century. The Age of the Strongman by the Financial Times’ chief foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman attempts to explain how we got here. The central thrust is that, since the 1990s, the rise of a certain type of leader has become the key feature of “the most sustained global assault on liberal democracy since the 1930s”. By profiling 14 current-day leaders with authoritarian tendencies – from central Europe to South America to the Philippines – Rachman hopes to provide “political liberals” with an “understanding of what they are dealing with”.
Rachman begins with an outline of the “playbook” that has propelled strongmen into power. A common tactic is populist nationalism, which paints the strongman as a national saviour, pitting an ethnically and/or religiously defined nation against outside threats such as minority groups, migrants or a shadowy elite. In power, the erosion of civil liberties is a natural consequence. Rachman reminds us how strongmen have subjugated ethnic and religious communities in their countries. Whilst China’s Xi detains Uyghurs in “re-education” camps, Narendra Modi has effectively stripped millions of Muslims of their Indian citizenship. Independent institutions and organisations are neutered. While some strongmen, like Viktor Orbán, are known for hollowing out their country’s independent media, others, like Vladimir Putin, preside over countries where journalists regularly turn up dead.
Rachman refuses to explain the rise of this authoritarianism through the talents of strongmen alone, nor does he assert that certain countries are predisposed to this rule. Chapters on Boris Johnson and Donald Trump dispel the myth that the west is impervious to democratic decline. Instead, Rachman argues that the success of strongmen is a “symptom of the crisis of liberalism”, which has economic, political and diplomatic dimensions.
Driving this crisis, according to Rachman, is an “overconfidence in the power of liberal ideas born from ‘victory’ in the Cold War”. This prevented politicians and commentators from judging the true character of strongmen early in their careers. Rachman includes himself in this, going so far as to quote from one of his past articles that celebrated Modi’s “thrilling” rise. The free market’s most ardent defenders have since had to reckon with the compatibility of the system with authoritarianism.
But despite beginning what promises to be a meaningful critique of the liberal world order, Rachman never quite gets down to it. Instead, he regresses into cliché. His acknowledgement of the ills of globalisation is descriptive at best. The term “neoliberalism” is dismissed as an invention of the populist left, as if it wasn’t the object of serious academic enquiry. Meanwhile, strongman critiques of the liberal world order go unexplored. Grievances against US foreign policy, Nato and the EU – some of which may be justified – are dismissed. It is unclear what Rachman has learnt from reckoning with post-Cold War politics.
This reversion to type is finalised in the book’s conclusion, where the strongman is dismissed as a short-lived fad, and we are told to trust the US to lead a new “human-rights based world order”. Rachman fails to take seriously the US’ vulnerability to a Trump-like resurgence, or the grisly legacy of its foreign intervention since the Second World War. In the end, his pages are haunted by the same liberal overconfidence he finds complicit in the rise of the strongman. To strengthen liberalism against rising authoritarianism requires tougher questions of its historical record; perhaps even a consideration about the case for reinvention, something Rachman firmly rules out.
This piece is from the New Humanist spring 2023 edition. Subscribe here.
