The first lesson, then, is not to obey in advance.
Modern authoritarians rely on repression, intimidation, corruption and co-optation to consolidate their power. Good citizens will then ask: "but what should we do?" History provides an answer: civil resistance.
Civil resistance works by separating the authoritarian ruler from pillars of support, including economic elites, security forces, and government workers. It attracts diverse groups in society, whose collective defiance and stubbornness eventually elicits power shifts.
Unarmed civilians using petitions, boycotts, strikes, and other nonviolent methods have been able to slow, disrupt and even halt authoritarianism. Civil resistance has been twice as effective as armed struggle.
The dictator’s handbook mastered by Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Maduro in Venezuela, Putin in Russia, Zuma in South Africa, Duterte in the Philippines (and being flirted with by Trump in the US) provides the traditional tactics:
- attack journalists
- blame dissent on foreigners and “paid protestors”
- scapegoat minorities and vulnerable groups
- weaken checks on power
- reward loyalists
- use paramilitaries
- reduce politics to a question of friends and enemies, us and them.
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