Thread by @Yascha_Mounk

It’s been a good decade for dictatorship. But from Moscow to Caracas, people are now standing up for their freedom.

So how stable will populist dictatorships prove in the long-run?

An uncharacteristically optimistic take from me @ForeignAffairs.

[Thread]foreignaffairs.com/articles/world…

@ForeignAffairs Five years ago, I first warned that populism would pose a serious threat to liberal democracy in FA.

Back then, many thought this position crazy. Now, it is the conventional wisdom.

That’s good: We need to understand the populist threat to confront it.

foreignaffairs.com/articles/unite…

@ForeignAffairs But the astounding reversals of the past years have created a new, more pessimistic orthodoxy.

According to the new narrative, liberalism is obsolete. Once populists concentrate power in their own hands, they will likely stay in power indefinitely. It’s game over for democracy.

@ForeignAffairs This is a big misunderstanding of history.

Dictatorships have historically proven to be very vulnerable to economic mismanagement, succession crises, and so on.

Don’t forget: Virtually every democracy in the world has, at some point in time, been a dictatorship of some sort.

@ForeignAffairs Plus, “populist dictatorships” – countries with anti-pluralist leaders who were democratically elected, but then concentrated power in their own hands – are particularly vulnerable to sudden crises of popular legitimacy.

This is the core of my argument in this new article.

@ForeignAffairs In the past, many dictatorships started in openly anti-democratic fashion, like military coups.

This meant that they could live up to their story of legitimacy: The promised things like order or economic growth that they could, in principle, deliver (though they mostly didn’t).

@ForeignAffairs Populist leaders, by contrast, claim that they want to make their countries *more* democratic. That’s what makes them dangerous, helping to establish dictatorships in countries with long democratic traditions.

But once they turn autocratic, it’s also their biggest vulnerability.

@ForeignAffairs At the start, many people buy the populist story of legitimacy.

The new leaders do seem to be taking on the old elites. They are implementing policies a lot of people want.

Warnings about impending autocracy from journalists and the opposition seem self-serving, or overwrought.

@ForeignAffairs But when a scandal or external shock makes the regime less popular, it resorts to more overt forms of repression to stay in power.

Suddenly, many of the its erstwhile supporters – school teachers, rank-and-file bureaucrats, and so on – feel the repression in their own lives.

@ForeignAffairs This is the moment when the “vicious cycle of populist legitimacy” sets in:

A less popular government needs to exert more repression. More repression undermines its central narrative, making it less popular. Since it’s even less popular, it needs even more repression.

Repeat.

@ForeignAffairs Turkey is a great example for the vicious cycle of populist legitimacy:

An economic crisis made Erdogan unpopular. To stay in power in Istanbul, he had to cancel the outcome of the election. This upset a lot of his erstwhile supporters. He lost the rerun by a much larger margin.

@ForeignAffairs A few words of caution:

It can take a long time for this cycle to set it. And once it does, the outcome remains deeply uncertain: As we are seeing in Russia and Venezuela, and may soon see elsewhere, a determined regime can always choose to gun its people down.

@ForeignAffairs Even after they lose their legitimacy, populist regimes can survive a long time by oppressing their own people. So this is not a prediction for the imminent demise of populist dictatorships.

But it is a prediction that, in most cases, their legitimacy will significantly erode.

@ForeignAffairs It's impossible to do justice to this complex argument in a tweet storm.

So please do read the full article in the latest issue of @foreignaffairs. And since we’re all in need of some (moderately) good news, please do spread the word!

[End.]

foreignaffairs.com/articles/world…