A historical shift in dictators - or not (country, Americans, political)

[Cida]

Personally, I think not. But I like Adam Gopnik, and thought this was interesting.


How to Build a Twenty-first-Century Tyrant
Autocracies are resurgent, and today’s would-be strongmen are using a new set of tools.
A new type of authoritarian has learned to exploit electoral democracy and social media, turning citizens into fans.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, as the song has it—and now let us meet the new dictators and see whether they are the same as the old. Once again, there are more historical continuities here than are first apparent.
Napoleon, the very model of the nineteenth-century autocrat, ruled constitutionally and by plebiscite, however rigged the voting might have been. And he was immensely shrewd in his efforts to marginalize or co-opt his opposition—wooing a liberal philosopher like Benjamin Constant or allowing the Marquis de Lafayette to retire to the countryside unmolested, even offering him the recently invented Légion d’Honneur.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...spin-dictators

[mensaguy]

Post reported as being more appropriate for the P&OC forum.

Linked article discusses "Autocracies are resurgent, and today’s would-be strongmen are using a new set of tools. The special virtue of Naím’s book lies in the mordant detailing of its profiles, particularly those of certain second-tier autocrats—less famous than Putin and Erdoğan, but exemplary of the rise of what he calls “3P” (populist, polarizing, and post-truth) politicians. All of them follow a similar, and, to Americans, depressingly familiar route: after improbable success as loudmouth entertainers, not taken seriously by the political establishment, they attract a passionate minority and then suddenly, often by oddities of the electoral system or the management of parliaments, they’re in power. "