ABOUT AUTOCRACY, INC.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Economist, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, The Times
“A masterful guide to the new age of authoritarianism… clear-sighted and fearless.” —John Simpson, The Guardian
“Especially timely.“ —The Washington Post
We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: there is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators and maybe some brave dissidents.
But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.
Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, this group doesn’t operate like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies: Autocracy, Inc. Their relations are not based on values but are rather transactional, which is why they operate so easily across ideological, geographical, and cultural lines. In truth, they are in full agreement about only one thing: their dislike of us, the inhabitants of the democratic world, and their desire to see both our political systems and our values undermined.
That shared understanding of the world―where it comes from, why it lasts, how it works, how the democratic world has unwittingly helped to consolidate it, and how we can help bring it down―is the subject of this book.