US, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela, (partly) Poland, Serbia, of course Russia, El Salvador*, Argentine*, partly Germany and Italy as well
all make/made a huge turn towards autocracy (A.). I understand El Salvador and Argentine, who were both on the verge of becoming failed states, but why are decent, reasonably well to do countries voluntarily drifting into A.
We (collectively) are better educated than ever, have better and instant access to news and information - why do so many chose to mask that out and go with easily x-checkable snakeoil autocrats, that do not even try to disguise?
I’m going with WWII was 80 years ago and people collectively are stupid.
More seriously, Russia was headed this way anyway. They’ve never seen a free press. I feel like Venezuela, the only question was whether it would a socialist autocracy or a right-leaning strongman one.
I’m shocked and appalled by the US & Germany especially.
This wikipedia article talks about various potential causes.
Also, people become more authoritarian when infectious diseases are rampant, and these effects can last decades. So Sadly, Covid-19 will probably make the world more authoritarian for another couple decades.
When infection risk is high, this ‘parasite stress’ behavior increases, potentially manifesting as attitudes and even voting patterns that champion conformity and reject ‘foreign outgroups’ – core traits of authoritarian politics.
A new study, the largest yet to investigate links between pathogen prevalence and ideology, reveals a strong connection between infection rates and strains of authoritarianism in public attitudes, political leadership and lawmaking.
IMHO, at the risk of greatly oversimplifying, many liberal democracies dawdled so long in delivering solutions to problems that people became fed-up and wanted an urgent smash-the-glass solution to problems - even if that would actually make the problems even worse. It’s not for nothing that the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany at a time when you needed wheelbarrows full of near-worthless marks in order to buy some bread.
My personal take is that everyone knows that global disaster is looming and they’re all fruitlessly turning to a Big Strong Boss to save them from the worst of it.
Actually the worst German hyperinflation occurred between 1921 and 1923. The Nazi Party didn’t really achieve any national recognition until later in 1927 (the first Nuremburg Rally was 20 August of that year). Germany experienced the effects of the Great Depression in 1929-30 as did all other industrialized nations and that certainly contributed to the rise of fascist populism, but it was never a majority party or even a major plurality until the July 1932 Reichstag elections when it garnered ~37% of the vote. It should be noted that both anti-Semitism and fascist sentiments were quite prevalent across much of Europe in this era; although France and Britain ended up being part of the Allied powers, they had long histories of Jewish persecution and explicitly fascist political movements that garnered popular support. Louis Napoleon Boneparte (later Napoleon III) is widely regarded as the leader of a proto-fascist movement although there are plenty of other figures who could be painted with the same brush in that era, and the ‘scientific racism’ that presaged Hitler’s “Final Solution” had its origins in the writings of French naturalists Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and later Georges Cuvier. If anything, Germany was kind of late to this party, and prior to the dominance of the Nazi party Berlin was regarded as the most cosmopolitan city in Europe where socially progressives and radical Marxists worked without persecution, and what we would now refer to as LGBTQ+ clubs and artists lived openly.
As for the question of the o.p., the article cited by @Wesley_Clark gives a survey, but it is really a combination of economic uncertainty, existential threats to the nation, and internal unrest combined with identity (versus ideological) politics which fractures people along cultural/racial rifts, amplified by socioeconomic stratification in which a wealthy overclass seeks not only to be ever more wealthy but to gain control over social movements by depriving them of economic and public power through a combination of undermining labor movements, depriving ‘lower classes’ of effective of political representation, spreading misinformation and (often racially-tainted) conspiracy theories, et cetera. In fact, everything we’ve seen in the last few years of American politics, including the rise of Elon Musk and the broligarchs, has distinct parallels in late Weimar-era Germany.
So, none of this should be surprising, and in fact historians like Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, and Heather Cox Richardson have been speaking about this since 2016 or earlier. The 2020 Covid pandemic has often been cited as an inciting influence but frankly the United States has been moving in this direction since the mid-1990s, and if anything the 11 September 2001 attacks, and the resulting “Global War on Terrorism” being used as a justification for all manor of authoritarian actions from the extraordinary rendition and torture in GITMO of suspected ’enemy combatants’ (the majority of whom who have never received due process of any kind) to the twin invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, neatly pincering the Islamic Republic of Iran were clear harbingers of a wholesale abandonment to any commitment to protecting civil liberties.
As for the rest of the ‘free world’, they are kind of following the American example (with some notable exceptions) while Russia has never really had a functional democracy beyond a fledgling attempt that was not supported by Western nations, and the Peoples Republic of China has always been an authoritarian state regardless of the winds of its economic ‘liberties’.
If that was true (that we were having terrible problems which liberal democracies were failing to fix), I would agree with you. But how was this true? It seems to me we (the developed world as a whole) were living our best lives in our entire history as of the early 2010s. And we decided to throw it all away in a fit of madness.
This is true, but doesn’t really tell us anything, since the disaster that is looming (or more acutely was looming since it’s already here) is the disaster of fruitlessly turning to a Big Strong Boss. If we (collectively) hadn’t done that, the only other threat is global warming, which even now is still a few decades away before we really start seeing major problems, at least in the developed world. Other than global warming, I don’t see any other disasters, although I admit that could be due to living in a bubble.
Every time there’s a global disaster (a depression, or a pandemic, etc), there’s a greater risk of a rise in autocrats who “have all the answers”.
It’s no coincidence that WW2 came out of the Depression. The Civil War was not long after a very bad banking panic in the 1850’s. The Great Recession started in 2007/2008, and we didn’t fully emerge from it until about 2014 to 2016. By then, authoritarianism was on the move.
As for the ascent of Adolf Hitler, it was turbocharged by Heinrich Bruning’s tight fiscal/monetary policies in 1930-1932. It wasn’t hyperinflation that brought Hitler to power, but it was austerity in the early 30’s that bumped him over the top.
So, I think today’s autocracy was made possible by the 2008 Financial crash, and now these regimes can all learn from each other much easier than the old days.
We’ve had unfettered consumption for a really long time. True, we’ve become better at manufacturing recently, but the human desire for unfettered consumption goes back as far back as the species. In the cases that it has gotten out of hand, as below, it is usually because of the a Big Strong Boss rather than individual consumers.
I won’t deny there are environmental problems in the developed world, but when we look closely at the individual problems, there are typically other causes. Take the water shortages we’re facing in my home town of Corpus Christi. Yes, there is a drought, but it isn’t the worst in the past 100 years, not even close to being the worst. The problem is that our local Big Strong Bosses gave our water away to the local refineries and other major industries, and that usage has drained our lakes. Now they are fixing to make things even worse by giving away more water to Elon Musk and the lithium plant he is building here.
ETA: To make my desired outcome clear, I believe that if we had people in charge who actually cared about the environment and were against Big Strong Bosses, say someone like Theodore Roosevelt, a lot of the problems that have come up in the past 10 years, including our water shortages here in Corpus Christi, would not have occurred.
In terms of standard of living, yeah, things were pretty good. But one of the biggest issues that many liberal democracies allowed to persist - or even encouraged - was the rise of migrants from places that many people just didn’t want migrants to be from. Now, you can call this racist. But it’s a viewpoint that was held by many voters - not even just the right, but among many centrists as well. A significant number of voters in Western Europe were alarmed by the volume of immigration from Africa and the Middle East - particularly, Muslim migrants - and felt that the liberal powers that be were perfectly fine with this letting this continue or even increase.
That was a huge factor in the energy that propelled Marine le Pen in France, the AfD in Germany, etc. - because they were the parties calling for this migration to be curtailed while the liberal parties weren’t. Without so much Muslim/African/Arab immigration, those far-right parties would have had a lot less popularity.
I can’t recall the exact quote from an op-ed article years ago - maybe the New York Times, or The Atlantic - but it was to the effect of, “If liberals say it is fascist to solve a problem, then voters will elect fascists to solve the problem.”
At least for hurricanes in the Atlantic, the recent ones haven’t been the worst. That was back during the 2004 and 2005 seasons. The problem with the recent storms is that we insist on building in areas that we know the storms will hit, and then insist on being allowed to rebuild in those same areas after they hit. I’m not as familiar with the fires, but my guess is it would be a similar story.
The more I think about it, though, I’ll consider your answer about consumption as a possible factor to be a part of the problem. From where I sit it seems like the Big Bosses (whether that be Donald Trump, the city manager of the City of Corpus Christi or some other city, or anyone in between) are the ones that facilitate, and could put a stop to if they wanted to, the unsafe consumption. Whether that be giving away precious fresh water to Big Industry, or insisting on rebuilding in storm or fire prone areas, and so on, that seems to be where the problem is best addressed.
I believe that primitive base human instinct tends to be conservative. On the other hand, the more polite, genteel, educated front that we put up externally tends to be liberal. This is why even selfish or bigoted people will often say “the right things” in public because they know it’s important to have the right appearance - lest you get in trouble with HR or be ostracized.
However, deep down, people still retain all their bigotries. And the far right and autocrats excel at appealing to this primal, base, human nature. After all, the voting booth is private and secret; nobody knows who you voted for. So even when schools and media are all screaming “Be liberal!”, many voters still are drawn to autocracy in private deep down.
Income inequality has grown since Reagan. Then along came the Newt. A brief–all too brief–moment of hope with Obama, but Congress would not go along. If only Ted Kennedy had lived a couple years longer.
a.) Migration
… and the problem is not that it was a migration of people from Germany or Illinois, but from culturally “very 1800s” countries that were objectively a poor fit (coming from intolerant cultures into tolerant and triggering → Paradox of tolerance)
b.) “Peak Capitalism”
I think we all understand that our (collective) children will not be able to easily afford their own house, etc… so for the first time in “direct” human-memory, there will be a generation that will NOT be better off than their forefathers. This might be a key factor in people not aligning with the mainstream or “the system” (that beforhand was a pretty good guarantee to move up socially - american way of life and all that). Now that this (collectively true) “automatism” has failed, there is less and less adherence to the social contract of yesteryear - and people are more and more showing their true colors, stuff like openly flying the swastika, “heil-H. gesture”, etc…
I think it’s because the authoritarians has adapted well enough to technology that it no longer gives democratic forces an advantage, and we are moving back to the natural human state of tyranny after a temporary trend towards democracy. Which is why it’s worldwide and likely permanent.
The US liberal democracy didn’t dawdle, it’s been actively opposed in any attempt solve any problem by one ideology/political party since, at the least, the New Deal. Longer than (almost?) anyone on the board has been alive.
I think the arrival of wannabe-Autocracy in the form of MAGA in 2015 also helped push the trend tremendously. When the rest of the world saw the US starting to succumb to the same dark forces that had historically been the norm, it made it more likely that it would expand.
The really sad thing is that Biden was just a bump in the road to Autocracy. We thought we had turned it back in 2020. We thought we had defeated it. But we were wrong.
2025 is the Autocratic Breakthrough in the US. We’ll never be the same. We won’t be able to turn back to a more normal time. Oh, there will be Democrats who are elected President. But what will they inherit? How broken of a country and a government will they be tasked with fixing?
It’s going to be tough to rehab a country, when we’ll be arriving on the scene with just smoldering ashes confronting us.
I always wondered that there was not more of a broad and bipartisan “thanks-god-now-we-have-a-grown-up-as-president-again” movement in the US, when Biden came and did reasonably things all around.