Can We Tame the He-Man Woman-Haters Club of World Politics?
To my regret, I don’t remember much of the philosophy classes I mostly daydreamed through in college. Alas, plenty of ancient wisdom floated by me back when I was too young to absorb it. Yet a quote from the ethicist Bernard Williams has resurfaced in recent years and has started to haunt me. I’m paraphrasing, but Williams pointedly asks in one of his essays just what is the philosopher supposed to do if the thugs break into his classroom, start ripping up his books, and break his glasses? In other words, what can mere thinking do in the face of brute force?
Given the widely discussed worldwide trend towards authoritarianism, otherwise known as strongmen, who literally and symbolically tend to do what Williams warned about, the question is urgent. In his new book The Age of the Strongmen, Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times, provides pithy, informed, and lucid capsule histories of the rise to power of some of today’s key strongmen. These include Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and our own Donald J. Trump, among a disturbing number of others from all over the world, from India to Israel to Saudi Arabia and the U.K.
These strongmen, Rachman argues, are “part of a continuum. At one end, there are unchallenged autocrats such as the leaders of China and Saudi Arabia. Then there are figures in the middle like Putin and Erdogan… subject to some of the constraints of a democracy, such as elections and limited press freedom; but they are also able to imprison opponents and to rule for decades. Then there are politicians who operate in democracies but who display contempt for democratic norms and who seem intent on eroding them: Trump, Orban, Modi, and Bolsonaro.” Even if there are some nominal guardrails to their agenda, it’s by no means guaranteed that they will work without being actively reinforced.