This is the last of a series of three posts, each titled, “Playing with Fire.” What’s the fire to which I allude? Autocracy. As I wrote in Part II of the series, leaderless groups – such as those recently demonstrating in Europe – never stay leaderless for long. Why? Because if they do, they will fail. They will fall apart – to be replaced by another group that is better organized because it is more hierarchically structured. To repeat… first anarchy, then autocracy. To put it differently, too much democracy, like too much of most things, is counterproductive.
It’s impossible to convey to those who have not experienced it, or maybe closely monitored it, what it’s like to live in an autocracy, especially if that autocracy is extreme. So autocratic that it’s a dictatorship.
China: President Xi Jinping has become more tyrannical each of his years in office. (Since 2012/2013.) His appetite for total control is insatiable. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that Xi’s crackdown on what he deems disloyalty “has pruned the party elite so much that the governing Central Committee” has been reduced “to its lowest attendance at a policy-seeing meeting since the Mao Zedong era.”
Uganda: Uganda is worse – a “reign of terror” grips the country. Specifically, that of General Muhoozi Kainerugaba who brags on social media about his torture chambers. For Ugandans there is no place to hide. “Welcome to our menacing new world,” writes Megan Stack about Uganda. A world where authoritarians “enjoy tolerance from the international community; wield cheaper, quieter, and far more powerful surveillance tools at home; and reach across borders to help one another hang on to power.”*
Russia: Like China’s Xi, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who has been in power since 2000, is far more dictatorial now than he was earlier in his tenure. An indicator is the closure, announced just last week, of Novaya Gazeta. For three decades the newspaper represented resistance to regime repression. For three decades its staff survived physical attacks and death threats, police raids and interrogations, censorships and seizures of its printing press. For standing against persecution and for press freedom, its editor-in-chief, Dmitri Muratov, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (in 2021). Ultimately none of it was enough – the paper succumbed. In announcing that it was finally forced to shut down, Muratov said: “Destroying Novaya Gazeta is part of establishing a dictatorship.”
Far from me to diminish the importance of context. France is not China, nor is Spain Russia, or Albania Uganda. Still observers of the protests in Europe report that for now at least the political center has been gravely weakened – and that leaders on the far right and far left are rapidly gaining ground.
The protests are easy to understand. The demonstrators have lost faith. All I’m saying is buyer beware. Beware of replacing democracy with anything that smacks of autocracy. For unless it is stopped or at least slowed, leadership that is bad invariably gets worse.
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* https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/opinion/surveillance-autocrats-uganda.html?eafs_enabled=false