The Age of the Strongman
How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The Times (UK) and Sunday Times
From Putin, Trump, and Bolsonaro to Erdoğan, Orbán, and Xi, an intimate look at the rise of strongman leaders around the world.
The first truly global treatment of the new nationalism, underpinned by an exceptional level of access to its key actors, from the award-winning journalist and author of Easternization.
This is the most urgent political story of our time: authoritarian leaders have become a central feature of global politics. Since 2000, self-styled strongmen have risen to power in capitals as diverse as Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, Brasilia, Budapest, Ankara, Riyadh, and Washington. These leaders are nationalists and social conservatives, with little tolerance for minorities, dissent, or the interests of foreigners. At home, they claim to be standing up for ordinary people against globalist elites; abroad, they posture as the embodiments of their nations. And everywhere they go, they encourage a cult of personality. What’s more, these leaders are not just operating in authoritarian political systems but have begun to emerge in the heartlands of liberal democracy.
Gideon Rachman has been in the same room with most of these strongmen and reported from their countries over a long journalistic career. While others have tried to understand their rise individually, Rachman pays full attention to the widespread phenomenon and uncovers the complex and often surprising interaction among these leaders. In the process, he identifies the common themes in our local nightmares, finding global coherence in the chaos and offering a bold new paradigm for navigating our world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Rachman (Easternization) analyzes in this wide-ranging account the "similar playbook" used by China's Xi Jinping, Russia's Vladimir Putin, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, and other authoritarian world leaders. The shared tactics he identifies include appealing to populist nationalism (e.g., Viktor Orbán's declaration of "Hungary for Hungarians"), openly challenging the West (e.g., China's funding of infrastructure projects in developing countries and Bolsonaro's aggressively antienvironmental policies), and jailing opposition leaders (e.g., Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan's 2016 arrest of Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtas on terrorism-related charges). Contending that the world is enduring "the most sustained global assault on liberal democratic values since the 1930s," Rachman notes that even Western politicians including Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have used "bitter social divisions" as a means of rallying support. In contrast, he credits Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Emmanuel Macron with defying "the strongman model." Though Rachman de-emphasizes the differences between authoritarian leaders and doesn't fully reckon with why their criticisms of Western liberalism and globalism have struck a chord, the scope of his reporting impresses. This astute survey offers valuable perspective on a worrisome global trend.
