This is an excerpt from our post-election symposium, “On the Return of Trump.”
Since about the beginning of the present century, authoritarianism has been on the rise the world over. In China, Xi Jinping has positioned himself as the country’s ruler for life, ending what had been a halting, fitful movement toward the rule of law; in Russia, Vladimir Putin has consolidated absolute power and tried to destroy or control an independent Ukraine that had been developing democratically; in India, Narendra Modi has had wide latitude to enact his Hindu nationalist agenda; and a host of autocratic rulers have come to power, some by more or less democratic means.
The triumph of Trump and Trumpism in the United States will do much more than add this country to the authoritarian roster. It will also add legitimacy to the rule of autocrats such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Kais Saied in Tunisia, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, the Shinawatras in Thailand, Paul Kagame in Rwanda, Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia, and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, as well as to the path that Prabowo Subianto will likely follow in the world’s third-largest democracy, Indonesia. After all, if the leader of the world’s preeminent democracy openly admires autocrats—from Orbán, Putin, and Xi to Kim Jong-un—and threatens his political opponents with prosecution and imprisonment, who is to object to Erdoğan sentencing the philanthropist Osman Kavala to life in prison without parole for his charitable support for minority rights and for peaceful protests? Why raise a fuss over the sudden death in prison of Putin’s political nemesis, forty-seven-year-old Alexei Navalny, without an independent autopsy to ascertain the cause?
Unfortunately, other prominent Western democracies currently lack the leadership necessary to counter the rise of authoritarianism. Angela Merkel was able to exercise salutary global influence during her tenure as Germany’s chancellor, but no European leader has filled her shoes since she stepped down three years ago. Nor is there a leader who is up to the task in the United Nations or any other intergovernmental body, such as the European Union. As is now widely recognized, some members of Trump’s administration—especially former military men—managed to restrain him during his first term. He has made it clear that he will not tolerate such limits again. It is not only democracy in the United States that will be under severe threat in the next Trump era, however, but the future of democratic governance around the world.
