Book review: Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman, by Charles Dunst
In this book, Charles Dunst demonstrates why democracy is essential to all people’s well being and fulfillment. The author also points to how restoring democracy can be accomplished—in a world where authoritarianism is advancing in both world and domestic politics, and in the psyche of too many populations. Dunst dashes any illusions that autocracy is necessarily the drab oppressive cinder block world of the former Soviet Union or the starvation of Mao’s China—the book opens with a first person description of the opulence of tiny Singapore on the tip of Malaysia, an autocratic realm whose per capita income dwarfs that of the US.
The failure of democracies to meet the needs of their people has weakened the incentive for them to defend democracy—and made some people susceptible to the siren song of autocrats such as Orbán, Bolsonaro, and Trump. It’s in this situation of economic hardship that persons who are wired for the “strict father model” (as defined by George Lakoff) clamor for strong men to alleviate their suffering—the problem with that is the autocrats eventually abandon their supporters’ needs (once they’ve seized power) and attend only to their own whims, whether productive for their people or not. In cases such as Singapore, the autocratic government there has been attentive to keeping their people prosperous—even though they are under threat of severe penalties for frivolous offenses. It’s also axiomatic that autocracies never produce innovation, as their very nature suffocates creative thinking—the best they can do is to steal it from innovative free countries.
Dunst advises that democracies need to up their game in the following ways: They must abandon their slavish devotion to discredited free market ideology, which has resulted in untenable wealth and power inequality—this situation is unsustainable, and will result in the fall of society one way or the other. The government has a proper and necessary role in providing a functional safety net and a fair taxation system, which does not currently exist especially in the US. Advocates of this essential approach must more effectively communicate its benefits, including to those parts of the population that are most susceptible to the lure of autocracy.
The solution is in regulating democratic capitalism so as to outright nurture entrepreneurship and artistic creativity, while also maintaining a no-nonsense safety net for when some of those projects inevitably fail. This is the sweet spot, to which all societies must go, now—the alternative is autocratic dystopia.