The authoritarian political agenda: beyond populism

What explains the electoral appeal of Trump and other power-hungry rule breakers?

What is Donald Trump’s “thesis”? That is, what beliefs about the world might motivate people to vote for him, support him, work for him, et cetera?

It’s a difficult question, partly because people just find thinking about Trump intrinsically difficult. It’s easier to get enraged by him. Much of that is healthy, because he is obviously a terrible person and has done many harmful things. But even if you hate all someone stands for, it is worth trying to understand them. The alternative is to assume your opponents are morons, which usually makes it more likely they’ll win.

While we are at it, what’s the thesis of Javier Milei in Argentina, of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, of Orban in Hungary and Modi in India?

All those people have won elections and governed. I’ve intentionally not included Le Pen in France or the AFD in Germany, who have never been in power. The normal label for all these would be “populist”, but I want to explore alternatives. Populism is usually described as an ideology that opposes the people to the elites, and scapegoats outsiders for the country’s problems. One problem with this interpretation is that almost everyone who uses it is against populists, and it is more pejorative than descriptive, i.e. it runs perilously close to “my opponents are morons”. Another problem is that it tells us more about how candidates get elected than of what they do when they get there. Maybe blaming elites and outsiders can get you into power, but it doesn’t much constrain the policies you then enact. I want to focus on Trump, Milei et al’s governing philosophy, their policy-making programme. Of course, this does also relate to how they get elected: I want to ask what possible coherent programme might explain these people’s electoral appeal, on the assumption that their voters are not stupid.

You could alternatively think of populism as anti-immigrant and anti-trade nationalism. But if so, these authoritarians don’t seem to be following it very consistently! Bukele, and earlier Duterte, made their name by being tough on crime, not immigration; Trump himself has now come out in favour of the H1B visa for skilled tech workers and is focusing his rhetoric on illegal immigrants and those who commit crimes. In Ron Desantis’ Florida, anti-immigrant legislation hasn’t achieved much, partly because it hasn’t really been enforced. Milei is skeptical of immigration, but strongly pro free trade. Narendra Modi has liberalised FDI.

Another label is Orban’s phrase “illiberal democracy”. That can be taken in two ways. Its proponents use it to mean democracy, but without the progressive liberal agenda of gay rights, trans ideology and so on. Their policies do reflect that: Trump has now made it US policy that there are only two genders. But it’s hardly a complete description, and I’m not sure if opposition to extreme progressivism is enough on its own to win electoral majorities.

Its opponents use “illiberal democracy” to mean a way of staying in power once you’re in. You keep having elections, but you persecute your opponents, spike the media with propaganda, stuff the judiciary with toadies, and generally trash the small-l liberal institutions that make elections work. Again, that doesn’t really say much about your governing policies, and while it may help you win elections — at least, the second and subsequent ones — it doesn’t explains these people’s appeal to the voters.

A third possible answer is that these guys have nothing in common. Populism gets them elected, and then they each do what they individually prefer. Maybe I’m even wrong to lump in Bukele and Milei with the others. This isn’t an all-or-nothing issue: obviously there are policy differences between, say, Trump and Meloni; the question is how much we gain in understanding by categorizing these people together.

My gut feeling is “they seem like they belong together”, so let’s try to cash that out. For my purposes, I’ll limit myself to “elected authoritarians”. So I’ll include e.g. Trump and Modi, but not Putin, Erdogan or other authoritarians in countries where democracy has become a sham.

I would say they all share an impatience with existing institutions, including existing political parties, democratic legislatures, lawyers and legal systems, state bureaucracies, and international organisations.

• Donald Trump bullies Republican legislators, is trying to govern by executive order, and has tasked Elon Musk at DOGE with slashing the bureaucracy.

• Javier Milei got elected on an explicitly extreme libertarian agenda — well, extreme in the context of Argentina, whose policies for the past century have been extremely not libertarian. He waved a chainsaw about on TV to show how much he was going to cut. He has described international institutions and social elites as infected by “wokeism”, and has attacked existing parties, universities and state bureaucracies as part of an incumbent “political class”.

• Viktor Orban’s attacks on democratic institutions, and quarrels with international institutions and NGOs, are well known. What’s more interesting is the ideology behind them. Here’s an interesting quote: “there is a race underway to find the method of community organisation, the state, which is most capable of making a nation and a community internationally competitive… systems that are not Western, not liberal, not liberal democracies and perhaps not even democracies, can nevertheless make their nations successful. The stars of the international analysts today are Singapore, China, India, Russia and Turkey.”

• Nayib Bukele calls himself a “philosopher king” and “the world’s coolest dictator”. Under his rule, army personnel stormed a recalcitrant legislature. He’s also strong-armed the judiciary into letting him run for re-election. He ignored the protests of various international institutions… actually, this guy only just scrapes past the “elections not a sham” criterion… for now.

• Narendra Modi has centralised power away from the Indian states. Simultaneously he’s pursued big, bold centralising initiatives, like banking for the poor and the flawed 2016 demonetisation of the economy. Some of these have been state-led, but others, like the wave of investments in infrastructure, involve the collaboration of the private sector — which has unsurprisingly led to accusations of corruption and oligarchy. This agenda has been combined with efforts to reform the political system: Modi described his goal as “minimum government, maximum governance”. As Chatham House put it, India has become less liberal but better governed.

In the appendix to this post, I asked ChatGPT to summarise the policies of some elected autocrats, so you can judge if my description fits its output.

Actually, this kind of impatience is not new! The libertarians of the neoliberal era also saw existing institutions as corrupt and/or incompetent. In fact, this is a perennial complaint. Modern democracies, and probably all modern states, generate inefficient monopolies and cosy protected interests, whether they are incumbent firms, Arab royal families, or education unions. There will always be room for politicians to campaign on public dissatisfaction with these issues.

These people’s difference with libertarianism, though, is in the solutions they espouse. Libertarians wanted to replace state bureaucracies and monopolies by competitive markets, to curb administrative fiat by the rule of law, and to develop a culture of liberty which would help elect sympathetic politicians. The modern elected authoritarians are much more willing to use centralised power to break the institutions they dislike. Is there anything about the world that might explain, or even justify, this change?

The economy

One reason is that contemporary capitalism is a different beast from the capitalism of the late twentieth century, when libertarianism was born.

That was a time of decentralisation and globalisation. Big, staid corporations seemed moribund. Entrepreneurs and small business owners were heroes. Small Is Beautiful was a bestseller of the 1970s. Small business owners were a loyal electoral constituency for Thatcher, Reagan and what was then called the “new right”.

Libertarianism reflected that. Competition was the driving force that would make the private sector more efficient than the state. Libertarian solutions included replacing state bureaucracies with decentralised markets, sometimes even organising these markets into being, like the privatised emergency calls satirised in The IT Crowd:

Adam Smith pointed out two great forces that made capitalism efficient. One was self-interested competition: the butcher led as if by an invisible hand to promote his customers’ welfare. The other was specialisation and economies of scale: the pin factory whose specialised workers could make many more pins together than if each made the whole pin on his own. The original libertarians focused on the first force.

But for the past two decades, economies of scale have been in the driving seat:

In particular, the internet and tech have mostly been about leveraging scale. From the startups of the dot com boom, a few massive companies have emerged. The biggest overshadow all but the largest states. This logic is closely connected to the technology. The internet let a single computer be reached by everyone on earth. That computer could host a shop front, a trading app, a social media site or a music repository. The fall of barriers to communication set up a demand for other kinds of scale. Firms that sell globally have to ship globally. So Amazon set up its distribution network and Tesla built its gigafactories.

One barrier, though, is relatively immune to these forces: national borders. Differences in legal systems mean even the biggest companies think twice before they expand into new countries. Even when they do, they will often have separate operations for each country.

These twin facts — increasing scale plus resilient national barriers — naturally align the scope of firms with the scope of nations. That, in turn, makes nations and firms’ interests more closely aligned. A local store is beneath politicians’ notice. But if Amazon delivers your country’s groceries, or Facebook provides its media, then those firms are effectively part of the national infrastructure. They may not be under political control, but policy-makers must at least be aware of what they are doing. They may need to work with them, as when politicians collaborated with tech firms to set up smartphone-based contact tracing during the pandemic.

Conversely, as firms look more national, it becomes easier to think of countries as firms. Amazon is a platform supporting an ecosystem of businesses; isn’t the UK the same thing? And even when private enterprise isn’t involved, tech can have the same nationalising effect on government infrastructure. A whole layer of local government officials may be replaced by a single central website.

There was a brief debate sparked by Curtis Yarvin making the analogy between firms and monarchies. Several people (e.g. Alex Tabarrok) pointed out that firms, unlike monarchies, are embedded in competitive markets. This is obviously true. What is more interesting and important is that the similarities between the two can change over time.

The turn of the twentieth century was another time when the force of scale outweighed the force of competition. In the US this was the time of the Robber Barons, who created great continent-wide corporations — archetypically railroads. They introduced new managerial techniques, unified markets across the country; they exploited monopolies and corrupted politicians. Outside the US, the advantages of scale were enough that, for many, socialism seemed to be the natural next stage of economic progress, eliminating “wasteful” competition. A single national management could internalise externalities and plan everything for the public benefit.

So this time, too, was a time of growing authoritarianism. That was true of liberal democracy’s fascist and communist competitors, but even in the US, Franklin Roosevelt pushed at the system’s constraints on executive power: he threatened to pack the Supreme Court judges if he didn’t get his way.

This economic backdrop, increasing alignment of scope and interest between firms and national governments, can help to clarify the Trump thesis.

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