Are the Authoritarians Winning?
Russia’s and China’s strategic visions may draw on different historical experiences, but the messages they take from their histories are similar. Both dwell on the humiliations they have received at the hands of the West. Both explicitly refuse to accept liberal democracy as a model. Both insist that their twentieth-century experience of revolution and civil war necessitates centralized rule with an iron fist.
.. The new authoritarians offer the elites of Africa and Eurasia an alternate route to modern development: growth without democracy and progress without freedom. This is the siren song some African, Latin American, and Asian political elites, especially the kleptocrats, want to hear.
.. Were the US to cut its defense spending back from 4.5 to 2.5 percent of GDP, he argues, America could force its allies to defend themselves and set free $75 billion a year to spend on rebuilding America at home. This is a surprising recommendation coming from a conservative realist, but it indicates just how much the critique of bloated military spending and hubris overseas now unites conservatives and progressives alike.
.. The only way for liberal democracy to respond to the authoritarian challenge from without and rising discontent from within, they argue, is for the state to slim down, to do less but do it better.
.. Far from reducing inequality, the modern state is making the problem worse. As Micklethwait and Wooldridge observe, “If you put spending and taxes together, including all the deductions, the government lavishes more dollars overall on the top fifth of the income distribution than the bottom fifth.”
.. By focusing on government innovation, Micklethwait and Wooldridge assume that the problem is improving the efficiency of government. But what is required is both more radical and more traditional: a return to constitutional democracy itself, to courts and regulatory bodies that are freed from the power of money and the influence of the powerful; to legislatures that cease to be circuses and return to holding the executive branch to public account while cooperating on measures for which there is a broad consensus; to elected chief executives who understand that they are not entertainers but leaders.
.. A polemical but persuasive analysis of this problem is to be found in the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s new white paper for the Roosevelt Institute. Stiglitz argues that the fiscal crisis of the liberal state is to be attributed squarely to three interrelated phenomena: rising income inequality, money power in politics, and systemic tax avoidance by the superrich and globalized corporations.