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The Opinions Essay The strongmen strike back

Authoritarianism has reemerged as the greatest threat to the liberal democratic world — a profound ideological, as well as strategic, challenge. And we have no idea how to confront it.

By Robert Kagan

March 14, 2019

Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these days, the one for which we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism. We are not used to thinking of authoritarianism as a distinct worldview that offers a real alternative to liberalism. Communism was an ideology — and some thought fascism was, as well — that offered a comprehensive understanding of human nature, politics, economics and governance to shape the behavior and thought of all members of a society in every aspect of their lives.

Opinions Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist for The Post. His latest book is “The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World.” This essay was conceived as part of the Brookings Foreign Policy project “Democracy and Disorder.”

Illustrations by Matt Chase for The Washington Post

We believed that “traditional” autocratic governments were devoid of grand theories about society and, for the most part, left their people alone. Unlike communist governments, they had no universalist pretensions, no anti-liberal “ideology” to export. Though hostile to democracy at home, they did not care what happened beyond their borders. They might even evolve into democracies themselves, unlike the “totalitarian” communist states. We even got used to regarding them as “friends,” as strategic allies against the great radical challenges of the day: communism during the Cold War, Islamist extremism today.

Like so many of the theories that became conventional wisdom during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, this one was mistaken. Today, authoritarianism has emerged as the greatest challenge facing the liberal democratic world — a profound ideological, as well as strategic, challenge. Or, more accurately, it has reemerged, for authoritarianism has always posed the most potent and enduring challenge to liberalism, since the birth of the liberal idea itself. Authoritarianism has now returned as a geopolitical force, with strong nations such as China and Russia championing anti-liberalism as an alternative to a teetering liberal hegemony. It has returned as an ideological force, offering the age-old critique of liberalism, and just at the moment when the liberal world is suffering its greatest crisis of confidence since the 1930s. It has returned armed with new and hitherto unimaginable tools of social control and disruption that are shoring up authoritarian rule at home, spreading it abroad and reaching into the very heart of liberal societies to undermine them from within.

Dawn of the struggle

An 1876 engraving of a John Trumbull painting depicts the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The Founders based the document on the philosophy that all humans were endowed with “natural rights.” (W.L. Ormsby via the Associated Press)

We in the liberal world have yet to comprehend the magnitude and coherence of the challenge. We do not know how to manage the new technologies that put liberalism at a disadvantage in the struggle. Many of us do not care to wage the struggle at all. Some find the authoritarian critique of liberalism compelling; others value liberalism too little to care if the world order that has sustained it survives. In this new battle of ideas, we are disarmed, perhaps above all because we have forgotten what is at stake.

We don’t remember what life was like before the liberal idea. We imagine it as a pre-ideological world with “traditional autocrats” worshiping “traditional gods” who did not disturb “the habitual rhythms” of people’s everyday life, as Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, once put it. This is a fantasy. Traditional society was ruled by powerful and pervasive beliefs about the cosmos, about God and gods, about natural hierarchies and divine authorities, about life and afterlife, that determined every aspect of people’s existence.

Average people had little control of their destiny. They were imprisoned by the rigid hierarchies of traditional society — maintained by brute force when necessary — that locked them into the station to which they were born. Generations of peasants were virtual slaves to generations of landowners. People were not free to think or believe as they wished, including about the most vitally important questions in a religious age — the questions of salvation or damnation of themselves and their loved ones. The shifting religious doctrines promulgated in Rome or Wittenberg or London, on such matters as the meaning of the Eucharist, were transmitted down to the smallest parishes. The humblest peasant could be burned at the stake for deviating from orthodoxy. Anyone from the lowest to the highest could be subjected to the most horrific tortures and executions on the order of the king or the pope or their functionaries. People may have been left to the “habitual rhythms” of work and leisure, but their bodies and their souls were at the mercy of their secular and spiritual rulers.

Only with the advent of Enlightenment liberalism did people begin to believe that the individual conscience, as well as the individual’s body, should be inviolate and protected from the intrusions of state and church. And from the moment the idea was born, it sparked the most intense opposition. Not only did Enlightenment liberalism challenge traditional hierarchies, but its rationalism also challenged the traditional beliefs and social mores that had united communities over the centuries. Its universalist understanding of human nature and the primacy of the individual cut against traditional ties of race and tribe — and even of family.

The new revolutionary liberalism, therefore, never existed peacefully side by side with traditional autocratic society. Traditional rulers and societies fought back with an anti-liberal worldview — an “ideology” — as potent and comprehensive as liberalism itself. Counter-Enlightenment thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre condemned the Enlightenment’s extolling of the individual’s will and desires, insisting on “individual abnegation” in a well-ordered, hierarchical, authoritarian society.

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The autocracies of Russia, Austria and Prussia that crushed the French Revolution during the early 19th century tried afterward to establish an order to keep liberalism at bay. The Concert of Europe so admired today by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and other “realists” fought and killed for divine-right absolutism, for the authority of the church, for the “natural” hierarchy of society. Metternich’s Austria and Alexander I’s Russia were the early prototypes of the modern police state. They engaged in extensive censorship, closed universities, maintained networks of spies to keep an eye on ordinary people, and jailed, tortured and killed those suspected of fomenting liberal revolution.

Nor did they limit their attacks against liberalism to their own lands. They intervened with force to crush stirrings of liberalism in Spain, Italy, Poland and the German principalities. Alexander I even contemplated extending the anti-liberal campaign across the Atlantic, to Spain’s rebellious colonies, prompting President James Monroe to proclaim his famous doctrine.

To 19th-century Americans, European authoritarianism was the great ideological and strategic challenge of the era. The American republic was born into a world dominated by great-power autocracies that viewed its birth with alarm — and with good reason. The American revolutionaries founded their new nation on what, at the time, were regarded as radical liberal principles, set forth most clearly by the 17th-century Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, that all humans were endowed with “natural rights” and that government existed to protect those rights. If it did not, the people had a right to overthrow it and, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, to form a new government “most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Natural rights knew no race, class or religion. The founders did not claim that Americans’ rights derived from English political “culture” and tradition. As Alexander Hamilton put it, the “sacred rights of mankind” were not to be found among “parchments or musty records” but were “written, as with a sunbeam . . . by the hand of the divinity itself” and thus could never be “erased or obscured by mortal power.”

We long ago lost sight of what a radical, revolutionary claim this was, how it changed the way the whole world talked about rights and governance, and how it undermined the legitimacy of all existing governments. As David Ramsay, a contemporary 18th-century American historian, put it: “In no age before, and in no other country, did man ever possess an election of the kind of government, under which he would choose to live.” Little wonder, as John Quincy Adams later observed, that the governments of Europe, the church, the “privileged orders,” the various “establishments” and “votaries of legitimacy” were “deeply hostile” to the United States and earnestly hoped that this new “dangerous nation” would soon collapse into civil war and destroy itself, which it almost did.

The battle between liberalism and traditional authoritarianism was the original ideological confrontation, and it remained the ideological confrontation for another century and a half. The principles of Enlightenment liberalism, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence, were the core issue over which the Civil War was fought. When the United States miraculously survived that war and emerged as a great power in its own right in the late 19th century, the autocratic challenge