Five Dangerous Myths About Authoritarianism You Probably Believe (But Shouldn’t)

Why Authoritarianism’s Winning and Democracy’s Losing

Image Credit: Daniel A Varela

There’s a kind of battle taking place in the world today. One so omnipresent, it’s invisible. That battle is between authoritarianism and democracy. America, Britain, India, China, Russia, Turkey— I don’t need to recite the endless list of nations who’ve toppled like dominoes.

The battle, sadly, is being lost by the forces of democracy. Democracy is in hasty, battered global retreat. Authoritarianism is winning — and it is winning easily, handily, and swiftly. And that tells us something vital, if unfortunate. Democratic forces today do not really understand how to fight, much less defeat, authoritarian movements, values, agendas, and impulses anymore. Perhaps they forgot — or perhaps, as in America, they forgot to learn how at all.

So here are five dangerous myths I hear every day about authoritarianism — next to five harsh realities.

Myth: “Don’t worry!! No biggie!! We’ll just vote them away!”

I hear this one every day. Don’t you? By superstar pundits, intellectuals, academics, journalists, columnists. Unfortunately, it betrays an almost complete lack of historical context or knowledge, much less any kind of understanding of how societies really work.

Reality: Defeating authoritarianism, more often than not, takes a revolution. Not an election. Think about it. Was communism voted away in Soviet Russia? Did people vote down the Berlin Wall? Nope. It took a revolution. Why didn’t people “vote out” Saddam and Gaddafi? Why did they have to die for nations to progress? History is redolent with the lesson that once authoritarians come into power, merely “voting them out” isn’t likely to work — even if you nominally can. The story is just as true in America’s own history, too — they couldn’t simply “vote” themselves out of the British Empire. Defeating authoritarianism, once it’s set in, takes a revolution, not just an election. Why is that?