The prospects of progressive politics are not looking good. Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere. Western democracies are now in thrall to the allure of authoritarianism. Why is this and what implications does it have for the future of progressive politics? It would seem that the best we can hope for now is the preservation of gains already made. Yet this may not be enough, since the failure of liberal democracy to pursue social justice has provided fertile ground for the rise of authoritarianism. Preserving the status quo when it was the status quo that produced much of the problems is not a solution.

The Trump-2 presidency is a major victory for the extreme right in western democracies as well as for Russia and its allies. A highly fractured Europe is now facing a long hybrid war with Russia while political tensions between the USA and China are mounting. This ‘polycrisis’ is all occurring in the context of a worsening climate emergency and intractable problems with reducing global carbon emissions. Progressive politics, already on the backfoot, is further challenged by a potential crisis of liberal democracy. The western democracies are fragile, and authoritarianism is also hardening elsewhere. Faith in democracy within countries such as the UK is at an all-time low, especially among young people.

The idea that democracy will spread to the non-democratic world also needs to be re-assessed. Dictatorships and autocratic politics are not the exception but the new normal (Applebaum 2024). It is often forgotten in recent analyses of the rise of the extreme right/right wing populism that dictatorships are the rule, rather than the exception, in the larger geopolitical context. The geographical space of progressive politics is shrinking. Since the second Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, sadly one of the main challenges for Europe today is re-armament. While this is necessary, it may detract from other important goals, such as climate change and social justice.

It is not all bad news: Western support for Ukraine until now has been at least positive and preserves the possibility of progressive politics in Ukraine, assuming it survives the war, which cannot at the moment be assumed. Spain, Ireland and Poland are examples of European countries so far successfully resisting the extreme right. Moldova has taken a stance against Russia and the student protest in Serbia beckons hope. Brazil rejected Bolsonaro and pulled back from the brink. Despite the abject failure, if not refusal, of the EU and the US to uphold humanitarian and human rights standards in face of the atrocities in the Middle East, above all those committed by Israel in Gaza, liberal democracy is still in need of protection. The post-1945 era of stability, which created some of the conditions for the flourishing of liberal democracy and progressive politics, is now long over and the cosmopolitan illusions of the 1990s need to be rethought for the present age of barbarity.

If the left does nothing more than maintain the status quo, that may be detrimental for both liberal democracy and for any kind of progressive politics.

My question in this short reflective piece, which is mostly written from a European perspective, is to what extent is the rise of political authoritarianism and the wider context of a world of autocracies closing down the space for progressive politics, such that all we can do is preserve what we have? Does the left have anything else to pursue other than to demand the rule of law? This might be a reasonable stance, but I argue that if the left does nothing more than maintain the status quo, that may be detrimental for both liberal democracy and for any kind of progressive politics, simply because many of the problems came from the status quo and are clearly not going to be solved by it. 

 

History Can Be a Poor Guide for the Present

Lessons from history can be invaluable but they can also be misleading. Analogies with the inter-war years are all too common nowadays, but such comparisons, however tempting, can be highly misleading since the world today is very different from the period 1925 to 1933 when democracy collapsed in Italy and Germany, paving the way for world war. It was a time when there were few democracies and, with some exceptions such as Britain and France, those that existed were recent ones and highly unstable. But even Britain had a Nazi King in 1936. Many of the European powers still commanded huge colonial empires which was where their sights were set. 

Capitalism is not in danger and exists in a variety of forms. It has proved to be compatible with authoritarianism… and with the new kinds of techno-capitalism.

The emergence of fascism in the early 20th century took place in the context of the global rise of communism and a very real challenge to Western capitalism. The situation today, despite the rise of political authoritarianism, is very different such that historical analogies with 1930s fascism and totalitarianism do not work well. Capitalism is not in danger and exists in a variety of forms. It has proved to be compatible with authoritarianism, as exemplified by China, Russia, and now the USA. It is of course also evident that neoliberalism is perfectly compatible with the new kinds of techno-capitalism that have developed with digitalization. There are no meaningful historical comparisons on this question, and history does not just repeat itself. 

Mussolini acquired dictatorial power in 1925 having ruled constitutionally, and Hitler acquired power in 1933 through parliamentary democracy. These were weak democracies, and the military complied with the nascent autocrats. It is unlikely Trump, despite the erosion of rights and law since his second inauguration, will be able to emulate the past victories of European dictators. Moreover, it is unlikely that the US military would be compliant with such an attempt, since it is shaped for external combat, not domestic oppression. The 6th January 2021 attempted coup is an example of a failed coup. Fascism also required the organization of mass violence. Despite the dangers of the extreme right, the same degree of organised mass violence is not a feature of the current situation. 

There are no meaningful comparisons with Hitler, Stalin and Mao whose reigns of terror were unprecedented in scale and intensity of violence: the Holocaust, Stalin’s Great Terror 1936-8 and Mao’s Cultural Revolution are without comparison in world history. Yet, despite considerable progress in science and the advancement of democracy and peace since 1945, the world is today a much more dangerous place than it was in the post-1945 period, with the climate emergency and the real risk of nuclear war. To assess the new dangers and the new opportunities, we need to think without being tied to past analogies.

 

Democracies and Dictatorships around the Globe

According to Democracy Report 2024, the world is now almost evenly divided between 91 democracies and 88 autocracies. 79% of the world’s population live in the latter while only 21% live in liberal democracies.¹ The level of democracy as measured by what is enjoyed by the average person is down to 1985-levels and by country to 1998. This is particularly stark in Eastern Europe and Asia. Israel has fallen out of the liberal democracy category. There are some exceptions: Latin America and the Caribbean go against the global trend and Brazil resisted the Bolsonaro’s attempted coup. The report highlights the deterioration in the quality of democracy – freedom of association, freedom of expression, fair and free elections compared to ten years ago – and while some countries are democratizing, more appear to be autocratizing.

Against that broad global background, which challenges the notorious ‘end of history’ scenario of the world-wide triumph of democracy and the optimism of the early 1990s, there is the additional trend towards illiberalism in western liberal democracies, which are also experiencing an increase in the electoral appeal of the extreme right (and various kinds of right-wing populism). One could well pose the question whether democracies will collapse into authoritarianism or indeed if dictatorships are likely to increase (Newell 2016). According to Barrington Moore in his now classic work, The Social Origins of Dictatorships and Democracies, there were three routes to political modernity: liberal democracy, fascism and communism (Moore 1966). The second was defeated in its main historical incarnation but the latter endured. Progressive politics today is to a very large degree dependent on liberal democracy or at least the existence of civil society – setting aside the fact civil society also produces right-wing populist organizations – even within non-liberal democracies. Increased autocratization in many countries closes down the space for progressive politics while paradoxically also making it more necessary, especially as the centre ground has little to offer as it struggles to keep the extreme right at bay. 

A general assessment is difficult because of the diversity both of liberal democracies and dictatorships. In fact, the appropriateness of both labels to describe existing political regimes has been put to doubt. The People’s Republic of China claims to be a democratic dictatorship; the Russian Federation claims to be a constitutional democracy, but it is more of a kleptocracy. By some accounts, the US has been an oligarchy for some time. Many of the autocratic countries mentioned in the above cited report have similar features to the twenty-century dictatorships, and many are continuations of them. However, there are also many departures from that pattern. Perhaps the most well-known position is the thesis of ‘spin-dictators,’ put forward by Guriev and Treisman (2022) who claim that modern dictators rely more on the manipulation of information than traditional repression. The argument is compelling, but it is not the full story, as evidenced by Russia in recent years where there has been a major increase in repression. It is also difficult to fully put a spin on the deaths of up to 200,000 Russian soldiers which Putin must sell to the Russian public as somehow necessary.

Dictatorships can be long-lasting, even if they might collapse overnight.

One is often struck by the sudden collapse of dictatorships and the hope that it gives rise to. The collapse of the Assad dictatorship on 5th December 2024 with Bashar Al-Assad’s flight to Moscow is a vivid reminder of how a regime can suddenly and unexpectedly fall. Other striking examples are those of the Arab Spring in the early 2010s and the events of 1989 in central and eastern Europe when the dictatorships collapsed one by one, as was perhaps most dramatically illustrated by Ernst Honecker’s flight to Chile in November 1989 and the end of Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime a month later. However, the reality is that dictatorships can be long-lasting, even if they might collapse overnight. The regimes of Mussolini, Hitler and Pol were short-lived, ending by external defeat, but the reality is that most dictatorships are highly durable. Franco ruled for 36 years from 1939 until his death in 1975; Stalin ruled for 29 years until his death in 1953, and the Soviet regime continued until 1991; Mao ruled from 1949 and the regime survived his death in 1976. Nicolae Ceausescu ruled Romania from 1965 to 1989; the Assad family ruled Syria from 1973 to 2024; Pinochet, the admired friend of Margaret Thatcher, ruled Chile for 17 years from 1973 to 1990; the Apartheid regime in South Africa lasted from 1948 to 1990. Europe’s so-called ‘Last Dictator,’ Alexander Lukashenko, has been in power in Belarus for 30 years.

The point is that dictatorships may be brittle, but they can last a long time, unless they experience external defeat or, and only with great difficulty, embark on the long road to internal defeat.² An exception was the peaceful end of the USSR in 1991 following the failure of Gorbachev’s reforms, which created the context for the end of the eastern European dictatorships. However, some of the post-communist regimes that replaced them have been far from perfect liberal democracies. 

Dictatorships have recourse to modes of repression that are not available to democracies, and this contributes to their capacity for endurance. Two of the world’s major dictatorships, Russia and China, show no signs of coming to an end. Democracies can morph in the direction of authoritarianism as, for example, India and Turkey (though they probably will not become fully fledged dictatorships in the twentieth-century tradition). So long as civil society exists, there is the prospect of internal transformation that goes beyond regime change. This of course can mean that new kinds of autocracy emerge, since civil society can also produce illiberal political organizations.

Authoritarian regimes work in two ways: they work through prohibition and repression – eliminating or reducing liberty – or by mobilizing people (hero worship for example, especially in the case of non-military dictatorships).³ Many dictatorships are tendentially totalitarian, a concept that is contested (Forti 2024). Hannah Arendt (1958) in The Origins of Totalitarianism distinguished between dictatorships, which seek to eliminate opponents, and totalitarianism, which aims at the total control of populations through depoliticization and atomization. She emphasized the obliteration of not just public life but also private life. Totalitarianism sought the domination of the human being from within. As Arendt also showed, totalitarian regimes were based on the power of deception through conflating truth and reality by methods such as propaganda and paranoia about conspiracies. They were obsessed with appearing lawful and many were obsessed with appearing to be democratic. Arendt’s theory is one of the most famous works on totalitarianism and in many ways is reflected in George Orwell’s 1949 dystopia Nineteen Eighty Four, but it is also a demonstration that totalitarianism ultimately fails since what it aims for – essentially control of the minds of human beings – is not possible. While the old military regimes, as reflected in the Assad Regime, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and perhaps today the military dictatorship in Myanmar, relied on total repression, others relied on the manipulation of truth for the suppression of dissent with the result that they fostered modes of rule that are distinctly dystopic.

Dictatorships and various kinds of autocracies continue to change and have developed technologies of government that display some features of totalitarianism, ultimately the erosion of society. As Anne Applebaum (2024) has brilliantly shown in a recent book, dictatorships today are part of a large, consolidated bloc based on kleptocratic financial structures, corruption and a complex of security apparatuses for surveillance and disinformation. Their tentacles spread into liberal democracies through corruption and de-stabilization. Christopher Walker in a similar vein has perceptively commented, ‘these regimes are able to monitor their own people in increasingly minute detail but are also able to choke off the opportunity for people to monitor their governments in return. Surveillance and secrecy — dominant features of important parts of today’s international operating environment — themselves create an enabling environment for authoritarian powers’ preferred modus operandi’ (2023). Understanding the changing nature of autocracy and its many forms is essential for both the protection of democracy and the advancement of progressive politics (Dirsus 2024).

 

The Allure of Authoritarianism

Western democracies may not all be in danger of autocracy, but the allure of authoritarianism persists within liberal democracies, which have produced major internal counter-movements. Why is this? 

One reason is that the old kinds of emancipation based on industrial male labour have ceased to offer a credible vision of the future. The historical support basis of the left, the industrial working class, has not perished but it is not the primary basis of progressive politics and the new support basis, the middle class, is divided between the right and the left. One of the key developments in the last ten years or so is that the centre right has lost ground, having in many cases made ill-fated alliances with the extreme right. This is evident today in the alliance of the new strongmen of techno-capitalism (Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg) with Trump. The UK still remains paralyzed by the disaster of Brexit.

The success of the extreme right is due in no small part to its capacity to take over identity politics from the new left and convert it into reactionary forms of identification. Progressive politics requires belief in collective action, but the right has only anger and resentment to offer. These do lend themselves to organised mass politics, such as extreme forms of nationalism, racist and neo-fascist movements, but they are highly amorphous and ephemeral.

The left has arguably been weakened by the greatest political challenge of our time, namely climate change. Green policies are often seen as coming with a high price tag beyond the means of working people, which dampens their enthusiasm for progressive politics. Climate politics requires a frame of thinking that is beyond what the majority of people living precarious lives can think about. To say this is not to deny that significant gains have been made with the transition to green energy, especially in Europe, but it does not lead to a mass support for progressive politics. It is also of course highly questionable that green politics actually translates into higher taxes, as the costs are borne by central governments, which have a tremendous capacity to absorb such costs, as the Covid pandemic demonstrates. 

Perhaps a bigger problem is the perception that climate change, for many people, seems less urgent than coping with everyday challenges of inflation and affordable housing (see some contributions to the symposium, e.g. Azmanova and Shapiro). Instead, a popular culture of doom pervades the contemporary political imagination (Delanty 2024). All of this is favourable to authoritarianism. 

The extreme right and right-wing populism more generally capitalizes on emotional responses to the widespread sense of uncertainty and unfairness that is a feature of contemporary society.

The right claims to offer a vision of the future but it is in fact a nostalgic, past-oriented one. Hall and Meyer (2024) and Azmanova (2020) make the important point that the extreme right and right-wing populism more generally capitalizes on emotional responses to the widespread sense of uncertainty and unfairness that is a feature of contemporary society. This is in line with Appadurai’s argument that while the left has only reason to offer, the extreme right has the more powerful force of emotion (Appadurai 2024, and Graetz and Shapiro (2020) also make this point).⁴

While the extreme right invokes nationalism, the notion of the nation they espouse is far from the familiar inclusive idea of a national political community, which was once based on a shared notion of citizenship and a common public culture. In this respect the extreme right joins forces with neoliberalism. A regressive feature of the present day is that the inclusive notion of the nation based on citizenship and a shared public culture has been abandoned in favour of a closed one (see also Turkin 2023). 

Collective action based on hope for the future is difficult in the context of a time when the everyday lives of most people, including the old support basis of the left, are characterized by abandonment and alienation. This leads towards depoliticization and despair. Lack of hope was almost certainly a factor in Trump’s re-election. Digitalised politics appears to reinforce this trend, since its main interlocutor/target is often the atomised individual. For this reason, so far the extreme right have been able to capitalise on the political advantages of digital technology, which is by its nature less favourable to collective action and feeds directly into the politics of fear and illusion, as fully embraced by Meta’s recent abandonment of fact-checking. 

Another reason for the spread of authoritarianism is simply that democracy provides opportunities for anti-democracy. As Ben Ansell argued in Why Politics Fails (2023) and David Runciman in How Democracy Ends (2018), liberal democracy is prone to crises deriving from public discontent and also from the simple fact that democracy cultivates opposition, which can also express itself as illiberalism. 

 

Alternatives

The future of progressive politics begins with resisting the allure of authoritarianism. The temptations of authoritarianism have already been to the detriment of the mainstream right in some countries, with the mainstream centre right parties being challenged by the extreme right and in some countries creeping into government. The next President of France may be an extreme right candidate.

For now, liberal democracies need to protect themselves against political authoritarianism as well as the direct threats to their existence by the world’s dictatorships. One way is to address the very real grievances that many people have about economic insecurity and precarity rather than play the script of the extreme right. 

No progressive change ever comes about without resistance. The autocratic world is not united despite nefarious deals and alliances.

As mentioned, the situation is now more complicated in that, at least as far as Europe is concerned, there is a major issue around national security since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has ramifications for Europe as a whole.⁵ The danger of nuclear war is also great. The conditions of war are never propitious for progressive politics.  Europe now needs to re-arm urgently to protect itself from Russia. Sweden is currently preparing for the possibility of an armed attack. There is only one thing that dictators understand and that is resistance. Dialogue has its place, but resistance is key and the condition of the possibility of the political. Until recently, Europe deceived itself into believing that it had no external enemies and that it could rely on the protective wing of the US military, which is effectively what NATO is. It is time to adjust to the new geopolitics. 

One lesson of history that is still pertinent is that no progressive change ever comes about without resistance. The autocratic world is not united despite nefarious deals and alliances. While democracy is not an unstoppable force in the world and democracies are fragile, the desire for it is arguably a strong force as is the desire for justice and solidarity. So, while it might seem that protecting the gains already made may be all that can be hoped for at present, this defensive attitude is not enough. If it is to have a future, progressive politics needs a new ambition.

 

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Albena Azmanova, Pavlina Tcherneva, and Tyler Emerson for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper.

Endnotes

1. See also the report of Freedom House and data at Our World In Data.

2. I am somewhat simplifying a more complex situation (see Geddes 2018, Chapter 8).

3. Arguably there is a third way, as reflected in for example the Gulf states and Singapore, through the seduction of wealth.

4. I have made similar arguments in various publications since the Brexit Referendum in 2016. See for example, Delanty (2020).

5. I am aware that some commentators are of the view that Russia will be satisfied if it takes Ukraine in whole or in part. It is a high-risk position that if put to the test and it proves wrong it will be too late for many countries. In any case, it was evident since the first Russian invasion in 2014, when no effective resistance was made, that the Kremlin wanted more.

Citations

Appadurai, A.  2024. ‘Polymorphous Populism.’ Post-Neoliberalism | Polymorphous Populism

Applebaum, A. 2024. Autocracy, INC: The Dictators who want to Rule the World. New York: Doubleday.

Arendt, H. 1958. [1951] The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian Books. 

Ansell, B. 2023. Why Politics Fails. London Penguin.

Azmanova, A. 2020. Capitalism on Edge. New York: Columbia University Press.

Delanty, G. 2020. ‘The Crisis of the Present: Authoritarianism and Social Struggles.’ In: Delanty, G. Critical Theory and Social Transformation. London: Routledge.

Delanty, G. 2024. Senses of the Future: Conflicting Ideas of the Future in the World Today. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Dirsus, M. 2024. How Tyrants Fall and How Nations Survive. London: John Murray.

Forti, S. 2024. Totalitarianism: A Borderline Idea in Political Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Geddes, B., Wright, J., and Francis, E. 2018. How Dictatorships Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Graetz, I. and Shapiro, I. 2020. The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight it. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Guriev, S. and Treisman, D. 2002. Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hall, P. and Meyer, H. 2024. ‘The Emotional Underpinnings of Populism.’ Social Europe. https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-emotional-underpinnings-of-populism 

Moore, B. 1966. The Social Origins of Dictatorships and Democracies. Boston: Beacon Press.

Newell, W. 2016. Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice and Terror. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Runciman, D. 2018. How Democracy Ends. London: Basic Books.

Turchin, P. 2023. End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration. London: Allen Lane.

Walker, C. 2023. ‘The World has Become Flatter for Authoritarian Regimes.’ The Journal of Democracy.

 

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Gerard Delanty is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His most recent publication is Senses of the Future: Conflicting Ideas of the Future in the World Today. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024).  https://gerarddelanty.com