27 years ago the flag was taken down from the Belarus parliament building. On Lukashenka’s orders, the flag was cut into pieces and the perpetrators put their signatures on it.

Autocrats face hard choices about rewarding narrow interest groups or pursuing policies with broader benefits, using repression or persuasion against political opponents, and choosing how much to censor the media, cheat in elections, and violate human rights in order to stay in power. Rather than flowing directly from Putin’s worldview or Russia’s historical legacy, policy choices in Russia are often the result of difficult trade-offs among and between political elites and the mass public.

Third, personalist autocracies have a range of tools—all rather blunt—for managing a modern society. Much popular commentary revolves around Putin as a master of repression to keep society in check. And it is true that crackdowns on free media, intimidation of political opponents, and arrests of human rights activists are part and parcel of political life in Russia. But repression is costly, not always effective, and rarely a first choice. Influential elites and the mass public do not automatically follow the leader but instead need to be convinced to do so, sometimes via fear, yet also via persuasion or self-interest. Autocrats like Putin prefer to rely on personal popularity, economic performance, manipulated elections, and foreign policy successes to stave off elite coups and popular revolts, but these commodities are usually fleeting and beyond the control of the ruler.

From this perspective, a view of Russia emerges that is less focused on President Putin’s personality and seeming omnipotence, and less centered on Russia’s unique history and culture. Rooting Russia’s politics in common patterns of autocratic rule produces a picture of Russia that helps us see the constraints on Putin’s power, recognize the difficult policy choices before him, and better understand Russia’s politics.

—Timothy Frye, Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 23.

This really seems the thrust of Frye’s work here. I found myself rereading this passage several times because it is so at odds with the tenor of the bulk of Ukraine war coverage I see each day.

Thomas Pepinsky, Vox:

The mental image that most Americans harbor of what actual authoritarianism looks like is fantastical and cartoonish. This vision has jackbooted thugs, all-powerful elites acting with impunity, poverty and desperate hardship for everyone else, strict controls on political expression and mobilization, and a dictator who spends his time ordering the murder or disappearance of his opponents using an effective and wholly compliant security apparatus. This image of authoritarianism comes from the popular media (dictators in movies are never constrained by anything but open insurrection), from American mythmaking about the Founding (free men throwing off the yoke of British tyranny), and from a kind of “imaginary othering” in which the opposite of democracy is the absence of everything that characterizes the one democracy that one knows.

Still, that fantastical image of authoritarianism is entirely misleading as a description of modern authoritarian rule and life under it. It is a description, to some approximation, of totalitarianism. Carl Friedrich is the best on totalitarianism, and Hannah Arendt of course on its emergence. But Arendt and Friedrich were very clear that totalitarianism is exceptional as a form of politics.

The reality is that everyday life under the kinds of authoritarianism that exist today is very familiar to most Americans. You go to work, you eat your lunch, you go home to your family. There are schools and businesses, and some people “make it” through hard work and luck. Most people worry about making sure their kids get into good schools. The military is in the barracks, and the police mostly investigate crimes and solve cases. There is political dissent, if rarely open protest, but in general people are free to complain to one another. There are even elections. This is Malaysia, and many countries like it.

Everyday life in the modern authoritarian regime is, in this sense, boring and tolerable. It is not outrageous. Most critics, even vocal ones, are not going to be murdered, as Anna Politkovskaya was in Russia; they are going to be frustrated. Most not-very-vocal critics will live their lives completely unmolested by the security forces. They will enjoy it when the trains run on time, blame the government when they do not, gripe about their taxes, and save for vacation. Elections, when they happen, will serve the “anesthetic function” that Philippe Schmitter attributed — in the greatly underappreciated 1978 volume Elections without Choice — to elections in Portugal under Salazar.

Life under authoritarian rule in such situations looks a lot like life in a democracy. As Malaysia’s longtime Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad used to say, “if you don’t like me, defeat me in my district.” That this could never happen was almost beside the point; there were elections, and the ruling National Front coalition deployed the same language of democracy that American politicians do today

This observation has two particular consequences. One, for asking if “the people” will tolerate authoritarian rule. The premise upon which this question is based is that authoritarianism is intolerable generally. It turns out that most people express democratic values, but living in a complicated world in which people care more about more things than just their form of government — feeding their families, educating their children, professional success — it is easy to see that given an orderly society and a functioning economy, democratic politics may become a low priority. The answer to the question “will ‘the people’ tolerate authoritarian rule?” is yes, absolutely.

Americans need not look far to see what this kind of boring authoritarianism looks like. As University of Michigan political scientist Robert Mickey has argued, swaths of the US South were effectively under one-party rule during parts of the 20th century. These regions slipped into authoritarianism quietly, as local politicians sought to advance their careers and the interests of their supporters. It took not just the civil rights movement but also dedicated struggle to bring these pockets of authoritarianism to an end.

A second consequence involves how to tell if you are living in an authoritarian regime versus a democratic one. Most Americans conceptualize a hypothetical end of American democracy in apocalyptic terms. But actually, you usually learn that you are no longer living in a democracy not because The Government Is Taking Away Your Rights, or passing laws that you oppose, or because there is a coup or a quisling. You know that you are no longer living in a democracy because the elections in which you are participating no longer can yield political change.

It is possible to read what I’ve written here as a defense of authoritarianism, or as a dismissal of democracy. But my message is the exact opposite. The fantasy of authoritarianism distracts Americans from the mundane ways in which the mechanisms of political competition and checks and balances can erode. Democracy has not survived because the alternatives are acutely horrible, and if it ends, it will not end in a bang.

It is more likely that democracy ends with a whimper, when the case for supporting it — the case, that is, for everyday democracy — is no longer compelling.

On the night of February 21, 2014, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia. His flight followed months of protest against his government for backing out of an agreement with the European Union—protests Yanukovych had tried to repress with ever-greater force. Fearing a loss of influence and the rise of a less friendly government in Ukraine, the Kremlin ordered Russian troops to seize the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and moved swiftly to annex the territory. Moscow then sent troops and matériel to local militia groups in eastern Ukraine hostile to the Kyiv government, fueling a six-year war that continues today.

As the fighting began, three scholars asked more than two thousand Americans to locate Ukraine on a map. Just one in six were able to do so. This might just be an example of Americans’ comically weak grasp of geography were it not for the second part of the study, which asked respondents whether Russia posed a threat to the United States, and whether the United States should intervene militarily in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The scholars found that the less people knew about Ukraine’s location, the more they believed that Russia posed a threat to US interests and the more they favored military intervention.

—Timothy Frye, Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 8.

Guardian:

DeSantis signed into law House Bill 395, designating 7 November as Victims of Communism Day.

Florida is one of a handful of states to adopt the designation, but is believed to be the first to mandate school instruction on that day.

The instruction will begin in the 2023-2024 school year, DeSantis said, and will require teaching about Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro, as well as “poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence, and suppression of speech” endured under their leaderships in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba respectively.