"Here are a few things I’ve learned about how authoritarians exercise power"

I feel as if I’ve spent large parts of my life reading dreary studies on authoritarian personalities. These are written by people like me, who despise authoritarianism, and they are filled with the familiar psychological diagnoses. The authoritarian comes from a loveless home; he is a bully driven by secret insecurity; he is a psychopath who does not feel others’ pain. But these studies never actually tell you how the authoritarians see themselves.

One 2022 novel, Giuliano da Empoli’s “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” narrated in the voice of one of Vladimir Putin’s advisers, helped me understand the psychology of authoritarian power as much as any of those studies — and not just inside Putin’s mind but also inside the minds of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, Nayib Bukele, Elon Musk, Mohammed bin Salman, Benjamin Netanyahu, Viktor Orban and all the rest of the global authoritarian wolf pack.

Last month da Empoli, who is an Italian Swiss essayist, followed it up with a nonfiction book, “The Hour of the Predator,” which describes both the wolves who run governments and those who run tech companies.

Here are a few things I’ve learned about how authoritarians exercise power.

Performance artists. People like Trump and Putin are not politicians; they are artists who create alternate realities. They tell stories, invent alternative facts, enact daily dramas, construct show trials and reinvent religions — they build a world. In their world, the people who felt humiliated are now dominant and doing the humiliating. Russia felt humiliated by the West in the 1990s. Many working-class American voters have felt humiliated by coastal elites for decades. In this alternative world, the snobs suffer. People support an authoritarian not because they like this or that policy but because they embrace the authoritarian’s artistic vision. Performance artists like Trump and Putin can be dishonest, offensive and outrageous, but there is one rule: They must never be boring.

Warriors and bureaucrats. In the minds of the authoritarian [coyotes], history is a Manichaean struggle. It’s not between left and right or rich and poor; it’s between the warriors and the weenies. The warriors see themselves as the strong ones, the men and women of steel, the masters of aggression. They are the kinds of men you saw at the Republican National Convention — Dana White, Hulk Hogan — the kinds of men Pete Hegseth and JD Vance are playacting at. The warriors recognize one another — the AfD in Germany; Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. There’s a hint of the wild animal to them: no rules, no limits, just the law of the jungle.

The bureaucrats, in their eyes, are the PowerPoint people, who went to law school (like every Democratic presidential nominee after 1980) — the weaklings who have segregated themselves at fancy conferences where they nibble canapés and don’t have to encounter brutal reality. They are seen as emasculated types who take paid paternity leave, admire the E.U. and get intimidated into telling you, their pronouns.

One of Trump’s political strengths, da Empoli notes in his new book, is that he is never seen reading a book. The experts understand nothing, and he scorns them. In “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” one character says of Putin: “He never mentions numbers. His language speaks of life, of death, of honor, of country.” In this way, he positions himself against “accountants looking for glory, little men who think that politics boils down to running a business council. That’s not what it is at all. Politics has just one goal: to address men’s terrors.”

Verticality. Educated-class types like everything to be horizontal. We like egalitarian manners and casual clothing and dislike grandiose, gilt-edged ballrooms. The [coyote], on the other hand, re-establishes verticality. He is above you, in a grand palace, in a big office, commanding others and dominating those beneath him.

What do people want when terrorist attacks occur, when inflation seeps into the economy, when the world is in flux? The authoritarian understands that they will rush to anyone who will re-establish order, authority, hierarchy and control. As da Empoli writes, “Vertical power offers the only satisfactory answer, the only one that can appease man’s anxiety when exposed to the world’s ferocity.”

Unpredictability. The [coyote] centralizes power and generates fear among those around him. He plays endless dominance games. His acolytes rise and fall on his whim. He never admits error. He is unpredictable because nothing reduces people to submission as quickly as the threat of random punishment. Any technocrat can do the expected thing, but the [coyote] is the master of reckless action: Putin invades Ukraine. Trump declares a trade war on the world. The [coyote] has inherited systems with procedures and norms, but the [coyote] operates on manual overdrive. The human brain is programmed to focus on the unexpected, so you can never turn away.

Clarifying acts of violence. The [coyote] needs to show he is the great protector. That means he needs to show himself savagely destroying the forces of evil, and if the forces aren’t big enough or threatening enough, he has to exaggerate them. Putin built his power by attacking Islamic terrorists from Chechnya. Trump goes after immigrants and alleged drug smugglers from Venezuela.

Stoking and managing anger. There is always a high level of anger and resentment in any society. The needs to find the right scapegoats in order to manage and direct that anger. Putin turned on the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky because the people resented the oligarchs. Trump turned on Musk because who really likes a guy who just got a $1 trillion dollar pay package? Scapegoats can range from elite universities to Democratic prosecutors to the corrupt generals in the Chinese or Saudi regimes, but they will be found. Large portions of the public want the high to be brought low.

Digital Somalia. The real world may still have some rules that preserve order. But online, it’s anarchy. It’s the conditions the U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force operators found in the movie “Black Hawk Down.” The [coyotes] support anything or anyone who will bring chaos, cyberattacks, extremists, crypto crashes, misinformation and deep fakes. Antifa, antisemites or groypers — they’re all equally useful. Anybody who maximizes chaos increases public demand for [coyote] protection.

Greatness. In the minds of the [coyotes], information-age elites have shriveled souls. They have been trained to be pragmatic, utility-maximizing drones. They offer voters materialistic snack food — a tax credit here, a student loan program there. The [coyotes] see themselves as those who have not forgotten how to be a human being. They talk about greatness. They believe that the people want to experience camaraderie and strength. They offer those people a release from triviality, dreams of glory and honor. Mother Russia. Make America Great Again. A Chinese century. God’s glory.

Throughout this column I’ve been calling the authoritarians [coyotes]. I mean it as an insult — predators who are ravaging the world. But the authoritarians take it as a compliment. They know they are [coyotes]! But they believe the world needs [coyotes] to protect the good, decent people from the ruthless fancy people who are their actual enemies. And here’s how authoritarianism feeds on itself: The more [coyotes] there are in the world, the more each nation needs to find its own.

-David Brooks, NY Times