The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century

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The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century

The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century

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The Revenge of Power connects the dots between global events and political tactics that, when taken together, show a profound and often stealthy transformation in power and politics worldwide. Using the best available data and insights taken from recent research in the social sciences, Naím reveals how, on close examination, the same set of strategies to consolidate power pop up again and again in places with vastly different political, economic, and social circumstances, and offers insights about what can be done to ensure that freedom and democracy prevail. You cannot deny the existence of important power holders, but those coexistence, those forces that fragmented power coexist with the forces that concentrate power, because what happened in this nine years is that those that saw power being challenged by newcomers, micro powers, new players that are using a different script were not going to take it standing just sitting down and watching how they lost their power, they reacted and that reaction is a subject of the book, The Revenge of Power. But it’s also possible that dictators represent an ever-changing category, shaped by local specifics. In the twenty-first century, the story would be that, say, globalization produces inequality (or that immigration produces panic), and that the resulting anxiety intersects with the siloing of social media. This account has continuities with the old ones, but insists that the particulars of a moment matter, and create authoritarian leaders of a specific mold. We find ourselves using the same names—dictator, tyranny, fascism—to designate very different people and processes.

Yes, this made it much harder for him to steal our posts (and now he only does it occasionally) but more important, it made our blog better for our readers. We started getting more shares, comments and likes. Hoorah! These aspiring autocrats face a new set of options, and they have new sets of tools they can use to lay claim to unlimited power. Many of these tools did not exist just a few years ago. Others are as old as time but combine in new ways with emerging technologies and new social trends to become far more powerful than they have ever been before. Ece Temelkuran, author of Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now, has pointed out that the west has been used to thinking they’re more advanced than the rest of the world. But the recent slide towards populism shows that we’re actually behind countries like her native Turkey, and are being offered a glimpse of our near-future. In Together, she shows how resisting this rise of polarisation and hatred means adopting a new mindset – reacquainting ourselves with community, finding better strategies than anger, and learning to have faith rather than easily undermined hope. Temelkuran’s work cuts through easy reactions like cynicism and rage, and shows us how to engage again.We need a revolution. It begins with falling in love with the Earth again,” writes the Vietnamese peace activist and Buddhist master Thích Nhát Hanh in Love Letter to the Earth, a slim, powerful book that should be a new Bible. In a series of beautifully written letters toMother Earth, suggested practices for the appreciation of all living things including oneself, and other “healing steps”, Hanh has given us a practical, spiritual, poetic and life-saving guide to how to fall in love again. He explains “there is no difference between healing ourselves and healing the planet” and why “caring for the environment is not an obligation, but a matter of personal and collective happiness and survival”.

In The Revenge of Power Moises Naim, one of the most acute observers of world politics, comprehensively catalogs the threats to democracy on the part of unaccountable dictators, populists, and companies in recent years, drawing insightful parallels across disparate domains. An important and timely work." -- Frank Fukuyama, Professor, Stanford University The over-all arc that Guriev and Treisman present is in any case surprisingly positive: we learn that, in the nineteen-eighties, fully ninety-five per cent of countries with newly authoritarian rulers were alleged to be torturing political prisoners; in the two-thousands, that share fell to a mere seventy-four per cent. In 1981, the constitutions of “non-military dictatorships” enumerated an average of 7.5 liberal rights; by 2008, the number had risen to 11.2. The rights are not secured, of course, but they exist. As the level of violence in the world has decreased, the rhetoric of authoritarianism has become, worldwide, necessarily less militaristic and more consumerist. Guriev and Treisman detail the malevolent strategies that spin dictators use against their critics—having them framed for sexual and business misdeeds is a common one—and the way in which they may enlist Interpol as a bureaucratic collaborator in targeting enemies. But they also emphasize that being marginalized is not the same as being murdered, the typical recourse of fear dictators. The bayonet is blunted, though a hundred blunted bayonets pointed at a single throat is enough to silence a speaker.At times this becomes a kind of ‘lament of the technocrat’. Naim, a former Venezuelan trade minister and editor of Foreign Policy magazine, asks ‘. ‘At a deeper, more troubling level, the question is why the followers continue to support populists even after there is overwhelming evidence that their promises are empty… [and they] are bent on concentrating power at the expense of their followers’ well-being?’ i.e. why have they stopped listening to us experts, dammit? Whichever position you adopt comes with optimistic and pessimistic takeaways. If you conclude that the situation was ever thus, you will believe that it will likely be righted at last, but also that the cycle will never end. If you believe that this time is different, you can search for a durable fix—a more equitable economy, a gentler form of globalization, the tempered restoration of national identity—while knowing that the fix may not fix it. The unexciting truth is probably that authoritarians are a permanent feature of human existence, and that an array of circumstances allows them to flourish. Cancers all have a family resemblance, and each has a specific pathology. Although we refer to them by the same name, some are caused by cigarettes and some by UV radiation and many have no traceable cause at all.



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