It Can Happen Here.

• Author: Whitney, Jake
• Position: The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century

In his new book, The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century, Moises Nairn contends that authoritarian power is on the rise globally, and he admonishes citizens to recognize and confront it.

The premise is striking given that it contradicts the central argument of his 2013 work, The End of Power, in which Nairn posited that globalization and mass access to information (among other factors) had caused centralized power around the world to "decay."

In that earlier book, Nairn said power had become easier to acquire but harder to retain. He now notes that the times have quickly changed.

"A backlash was inevitable," Nairn explains. Leaders who were "determined to gain and wield unlimited power deployed old and new tactics to protect their power from the forces that weaken and constrain it." In 2020, Nairn says, 4.3 billion people--more than half of the worlds population--lived in countries under regimes that were autocratic or headed that way.

In building his argument, Nairn dubs these "old and new tactics" the "3 Ps": populism, polarization, and post-truth. He points to a wide swath of global leaders, from rich and poor countries alike and from all over the political spectrum, as "3P autocrats," and he skillfully details how they've embraced authoritarian measures.

Nairn points to obvious figures such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez (Nairn is Venezuelan), as well as Hungary's Viktor Orban, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, the United Kingdom's Boris Johnson, India's Narendra Modi, Poland's Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Er-dogan, and "Donald Trump, of course."

The Revenge of Power is an unnerving read. Nairn traces how many of these leaders attained power through apparently democratic means only to set out to dismantle democracy once in power--which, in Trump's case, is an effort still underway. While Nairn strays from his central premise a bit when discussing anti-trust law and the surveillance economy (crucial topics, to be sure, but not as relevant to this discussion), the book serves as a forceful wake-up call to anyone who thinks a dictatorship can't...