Can We Tame the He-Man Woman-Haters Club of World Politics?

[Judi Lynn]

The gang of macho strongmen in power across the globe—from Putin to Orban to Xi to Modi—keeps getting bigger. Getting rid of them is the tricky part.

Matt Hanson
Updated Dec. 11, 2022 3:52AM ET Published Dec. 10, 2022 11:28PM ET

To my regret, I don’t remember much of the philosophy classes I mostly daydreamed through in college. Alas, plenty of ancient wisdom floated by me back when I was too young to absorb it. Yet a quote from the ethicist Bernard Williams has resurfaced in recent years and has started to haunt me. I’m paraphrasing, but Williams pointedly asks in one of his essays just what is the philosopher supposed to do if the thugs break into his classroom, start ripping up his books, and break his glasses? In other words, what can mere thinking do in the face of brute force?

Given the widely discussed worldwide trend towards authoritarianism, otherwise known as strongmen, who literally and symbolically tend to do what Williams warned about, the question is urgent. In his new book The Age of the Strongmen, Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times, provides pithy, informed, and lucid capsule histories of the rise to power of some of today’s key strongmen. These include Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and our own Donald J. Trump, among a disturbing number of others from all over the world, from India to Israel to Saudi Arabia and the U.K.

These strongmen, Rachman argues, are “part of a continuum. At one end, there are unchallenged autocrats such as the leaders of China and Saudi Arabia. Then there are figures in the middle like Putin and Erdogan… subject to some of the constraints of a democracy, such as elections and limited press freedom; but they are also able to imprison opponents and to rule for decades. Then there are politicians who operate in democracies but who display contempt for democratic norms and who seem intent on eroding them: Trump, Orban, Modi, and Bolsonaro.” Even if there are some nominal guardrails to their agenda, it’s by no means guaranteed that they will work without being actively reinforced.

Fortunately, you can spot the tell-tale signs of the strongman if you know what to look for. Rachman suggests there are “four cross-cutting characteristics that are common to the strongmen style: the creation of a cult of personality; contempt for the rule of law; the claim to represent the real people against the elites… and a politics driven by fear and nationalism.” Unsurprisingly, strongmen aren’t too fond of a free and independent press, nor do they tend to believe in the legitimacy of elections that they don’t win, or have much tolerance for ethnic Others, boosting instead their partisan version of a “true” patriotic citizen.

More:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/can-we-tame-the-he-man-woman-haters-club-of-world-politics

or,

https://archive.ph/YmMmo#selection-1489.0-1509.639

[BWdem4life]

1. Not much help here in the article's conclusion...

What can be done about strongmen? I think one problem is that if one side is willing to be amoral and to break the rules of decorum and laws and so forth, it’s kind of hard to use the rules to try to defeat them. Of course, the temptation is to also go low, but that inevitably presents a ton of problems in and of itself. Not the least of which is that if you do that then you’re playing the other guy’s game. So, is democracy the best answer, the only answer, or is democracy problematic because after all, history teaches us that even strongman types can actually be elected?

That’s a tough one. First of all, vigilance: protect things like independent courts, free media etc. Second, attack the strongmen but do not insult their followers. Hillary Clinton’s referring to Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” was a mistake.

Finally, be aware that this is also an international fight. These leaders often support each other and imitate each other. Putin was widely admired by other strongmen, including Xi and Trump. Defeat Putin and one of the symbols of the strongman age will have been discredited—and that could have wider international ramifications.