Meet the New Boss: Today's dictators may be different from those of the past--but they're just as dangerous.

• Author: Woodard, Colin

The New Despotism

by John Keane

Harvard University Press, 206 pp.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the "smart people" believed that we'd moved past history, that liberal democracies were destined to spread across the planet, that we lived in a unipolar world with the United States as the benevolent hegemon, spreading the fruits of globalism far and wide.

Now liberal democracies are in retreat, damaged from within by racial supremacists and authoritarian demagogues, and challenged on the world stage by autocrats, dictators, strongmen, and murderous kings. The Chinese Communist Party leads the world's rising superpower while countries that threw off Soviet Communism have embraced tyrants, from Budapest to Moscow. Three decades after the end of the Cold War, Western democracy hasn't won over the world, its opponents have. Its survival even in the United States and United Kingdom is no longer assured.

Many writers, myself included, have asked how we got here and how the liberal democratic dream--to approach as near to universal freedom as possible via power sharing, representative government, and respect for civil liberties--might be saved. An important aspect of this is to understand the enemy, and scholars have identified it in different ways. Twenty-three years ago, Fareed Zakaria warned of the rise of illiberal democracies, countries where the public elects and supports movements that promise to trample the rights of unpopular political, ethnic, or religious minorities, as well as the constitutional limits on their own power. Months before Donald Trump was elected to the White House, the Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Muller created a taxonomy of what he called "populists," the illiberal forces that claim that "only some of the people are really the people," and that traitorous elites have betrayed those real Hungarians, Germans, Americans, Turks, and Britons. Now John Keane, professor of politics at the University of Sydney and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, has taken up the baton with a more dire and sweeping assessment. Today's authoritarians, he argues, will prove more durable than the dictatorships that preceded them because they are backed by a broad, genuinely supportive middle-class base. This, in turn, makes them much more formidable competitors to liberal states. And we're sleepwalking in the face of their dangers. "Dare to imagine that in the end most people fail to realize they are being marched inch by...