To take one example, South Korea’s Park Chung-hee had thousands of people brutally tortured and many killed during the 1960s and 1970s — not just suspected communists and democracy activists, but also those simply overheard criticizing the government. That worked for a while to keep the regime in power, but after Park was assassinated in 1979
and the United States began pressing for reform, his successors decided to rule with a somewhat lighter hand. Ultimately, they relinquished power peacefully, after being effectively ordered to do so by Washington. This gave rise to the idea that South Korea under Park had been a “liberalizing” autocracy, when, in fact, it was an autocracy that succumbed to external pressures, which limited its ability to fend off domestic opposition.
Many dictatorships simply lacked the means to oppress masses of people in ways that were both effective and affordable. If the only way to control a population was to kill and torture everyone, that was not a promising business model, even if a government did have the resources to sustain such a practice, which most did not — a lesson learned by the Chinese under Mao Zedong. Better to try to control what people said and thought, as well as frightening them with the consequences of incorrect thinking.
But, for a variety of reasons, some were better at this “totalitarian” form of control than others. The more-modern societies such as East Germany’s oppressed their people with scientific efficiency, but many other authoritarian governments had neither the skill nor the resources to control their populations as effectively. In the United States, we deluded ourselves into believing that if authoritarian regimes were not engaged in systematic brutal repression, it was because they were “liberalizing”; they were often just incapable and were responding to the disincentives in a world dominated by liberal powers.
But the structure of incentives and disincentives is now changing, because the structure of power in the international system is changing. When Orban celebrated the “illiberal state” a few years ago, he claimed that he was only responding to the “great redistribution of global financial, economic, commercial, political and military power that became obvious in 2008.”
Since the late 2000s, autocrats including Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China and Abdel Fatah al-Sissi in Egypt have given up the pretense of competitive elections or even collective leadership. Rigged elections are no longer necessary to appease liberal powers that lack either the will or the ability to complain. It has become common practice for autocrats to make themselves “president for life,” as Xi did a year ago and as Sissi has begun to do in recent weeks. This throwing off the mask, including by Sissi, a leader heavily dependent on and allegedly friendly to the United States, shows how few of the old disincentives remain, at least at the moment.
The incentive structure has changed within the liberal democratic world, as well. Twenty years ago, when European and transatlantic liberalism was stronger, Orban’s illiberalism would not have been tolerated to the degree it is today. His success is evidence of the retreat of liberalism globally.
A fateful choice
The problem is not just the shifting global balance of power between liberalism and anti-liberalism. The revolutions in communications technologies, the Internet and social media, data collection and artificial intelligence have reshaped the competition between liberalism and anti-liberalism in ways that have only recently become clear, and which do not bode well for liberalism.
Developments in China offer the clearest glimpse of the future. Through the domination of cyberspace, the control of social media, the collection and use of Big Data and artificial intelligence, the government in Beijing has created a more sophisticated, all-encompassing and efficient means of control over its people than Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler or even
George Orwell could have imagined. What can be done through social media and through the employment of artificial intelligence transcends even the effective propaganda methods of the Nazis and the Soviet communists. At least with old-fashioned propaganda, you knew where the message was coming from and who was delivering it. Today, people’s minds are shaped by political forces harnessing information technologies and algorithms of which they are not aware and delivering messages through their Facebook pages, their Twitter accounts and their Google searches.
The Chinese government is rapidly acquiring the ability to know everything about the country’s massive population, collectively and individually — where they travel, whom they know, what they are saying and to whom they are saying it. A “social-credit register” will enable the government to reward and punish individuals in subtle, but pervasive, ways. The genius of what democracy scholar Larry Diamond has called this “postmodern totalitarianism” is that individuals will “appear to be free to go about their daily lives” but, in fact, the state will control and censor everything they see, while keeping track of everything they say and do.
This revolutionary development erases whatever distinction may have existed between “authoritarianism” and “totalitarianism.” What autocrat would not want to acquire this method of control? Instead of relying on expensive armies and police engaged in open killing and brutality against an angry and resentful population, an autocrat will now have a cheaper, more subtle and more effective means of control. Recognizing this demand, China is marketing the hardware and software of its surveillance state system to current and would-be autocrats on almost every continent.
Consequently, the binary distinction between liberal and non-liberal governments is going to be all that matters. Whether a government is liberal or non-liberal will determine how it deals with new technologies, and there will be radical differences. Liberal governments will have to struggle with the implications of these technologies for individual rights — and as we have already seen, it isn’t easy. But liberal democracies will approach the problem from the bedrock premise that individual rights must be protected. The rights of private companies to sell what they want will have to be balanced against the rights of individuals to protect their own data. The need of government to provide security by monitoring the communications of dangerous people will have to be balanced against the right of individuals not to be spied on by their government.
The problems that bedevil liberal democracies, however, are not problems at all for non-liberal governments. Whether “authoritarian,” “totalitarian,” “liberal” autocracy or “illiberal” democracy, they do not face the same dilemmas: All these governments, by definition, do not have to respect the rights of individuals or corporations. Individuals are not entitled to privacy, and there are no truly private companies. As Diamond observed, there is “no enforceable wall of separation between ‘private’ companies and the party-state” in China. But the same is true in Russia, where the majority of companies are owned by Putin and a small loyal oligarchy; in Egypt, where they are owned by the military; in Venezuela, where they are owned by a business and military mafia; and in Turkey, where state capture of the economy has risen dramatically in recent years.