We may have thought that the age of dictators (mostly, sort of) ended with the twentieth century, but in this insightful book review of a timely book for Mere Orthodoxy, Bonnie Kristian directs us to the development of twenty-first century’s “spin dictators” of the book’s title. These dictators are not the “fear dictators” of the last century, but rather, as the example of Putin shows, “his rule has rather been emblematic of a new breed of autocrat, the “spin dictator” for whom it is almost never worthwhile to remove the velvet glove and flaunt the iron fist.”
A taste:
Guriev and Treisman have penned a compelling, well-researched, and accessible case for why “after all the brutal manias of the 20th century … we still see new autocracies rising from the ashes” (ix). Pursued through forays into authoritarian discipline, propaganda, censorship, electoral procedure, and foreign policy, their argument is that dictatorships did not all die in recent decades, but many were changed.
Where once most despots ruled through fear, employing gruesome violence to cow the populace into submission (9), now they tend to take a lighter touch. As the liberal world order developed and enlightenment values gained sway in halls of power (38, 169), spin dictators learned to ape them. These smooth-edged autocrats are willing to become, in Aristotle’s phrase, “not harsh, but dignified,” to use, following Machiavelli, “simulation and dissimulation” instead of brutality to achieve their ends (14).
The book was published just a month after the invasion of Ukraine began, and since then, Putin has moved into “fear dictator” mode.
Among the authors’ concluding advice, the most poignant and significant for Kristian is “that we “put our own house in order” — shoring up civil liberties, rejecting abuses of power — because “[s]pin dictatorships exploit the vulnerabilities of democracies” (212). That latter task seems particularly urgent with another contentious election already bearing down upon us, for vulnerabilities we have indeed.”