Even in Dictatorships, Dictators Are Not Necessarily the Only Game in Town

Back in 1983, I scored a summer fellowship from my law school to research the plight of Cambodian refugees in Thailand. On the way back home, I stopped off in the Manila for a few days to see an old friend who was on his first overseas posting for the State Department. I mainly recall reconnecting with my pal and dealing with the aftermath of some bad oysters. But one discussion stands out…

It was in my friend’s apartment, with a few of his fellow junior embassy staffers, debating the Philippines’ future. One professed no love for then-dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who’d controlled the nation since declaring martial law in 1972. But he viewed the autocrat as securely in place and thus “the only game in town.”

Marcos was gone less than three years later, deposed by the country’s People Power revolution.

That conversation came back to me the other day when I read Yascha Mounk’s hopeful Atlantic article, “We Might Have Reached Peak Populism”. His thesis is that the anti-democratic worldwide wave, which seemed to surge just a few years ago, may finally have crested. He points to populist/authoritarian parties or rulers seeing recent setbacks in such countries as Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, India and Turkey.

I don’t quite share Mounk’s faith in the populist wave cresting. I instead suspect the coming years will bring the world’s democrats a mix of victories and defeats, and that progress will ebb and flow from time to time and country to country.

I do welcome his point, though, that extremism and autocracy are not quite on the march they way they were not so long ago.

I also hark back to that 1983 Manila conversation. It was not just Marcos who proved to not be “the only game in town.” It was the Soviet Union in 1989. It was South Africa’s apartheid regime in the early 1990s. It was Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1998. It was Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. It was Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

All of these ruthless rulers and regimes seemed securely in power…until just a few weeks, months or years before they weren’t.

The point merits equal mention in view of current attempts to despoil democracy, not least those of the Republican Party today via its voter suppression and election-rigging legislation in dozens of states.

The triumph of such efforts is never inevitable, as long as we don’t cave to them. As one indication of this, look to the success of a supposed political has-been in securing the U.S. presidency against a budding autocrat right here last year.

That’s something to bear in mind even if authoritarian populism hasn’t peaked, the Republicans ram through more democracy-gutting laws or our 2022 elections see setbacks. I don’t want to downplay the threats our democracy faces. The future may sometimes appear bleak in the months and years to come. But as a product of blood, sweat and tears, it is never written in stone.

And, as in many other nations, even in America’s darkest times there is never just one game in town.