Demagogues and Despots

Description

We live in troubled times, marked by a sinister trend threatening democracy everywhere: the triumph of despotism not only in countries like Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia, but also in states run by popularly elected demagogues—Orbán and Erdoğan, Netanyahu and Trump.

Leading political thinker John Keane shows why this new despotism defies the laws of political gravity. Instead of relying exclusively on fear or force, it fosters a strange, pseudo-democratic type of government, led by rulers skilled in winning public loyalty through election-rigging, legal trickery, corruption, weaponised lying and talk of enemies. And alarmingly, the new despots hunt in packs.

But what’s so good about democracy? In bold, energetic prose, Keane explains that it’s much more than popular self-government based on free and fair elections. Democracy is the collective insistence that unaccountable power is always dangerous—and that democratic institutions are our best weapon against demagogues and despots.

Reviews

‘Vividly describes the greed, ambition and political cunning that underpin the world’s new age of despotism. Unsparing in his analysis, Keane nevertheless holds out the hope that the spirit of true democracy will eventually prevail.’ — Victor Mallet, award-winning correspondent for the Financial Times and Reuters, and author of Far-Right France: Le Pen, Bardella and the Future of Europe

‘In a field choking on academic jargon, Demagogues and Despots reads like a blast of cold air—urgent and merciless in its clarity. Keane writes in images that cut, but the real force is in what they reveal: “Demagogues are despots in the making. Despots are what demagogues would like to be.” The diagnosis is bleak, but Keane will not let the book end there. Democracy’s last line of defence, we’re told, is not its hollowed-out institutions but the civil societies that refuse to stop making trouble. This is the book the field needed and did not know how to ask for.’ — Umut Özkırımlı PhD, Senior Research Fellow, Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, and author of Theories of Nationalism

‘An urgent book stunning in its sweep and depth, Demagogues and Despots flags a frightening possibility: despotism may no longer be something that’s happening to other people. What if you are living in a version of it? Is despotism becoming the only political game in town, and are demagoguery and despotism our planet’s future?’ — Debasish Roy Chowdhury, journalist, researcher and co-author of To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism

‘Keane exposes a world confronted by a new despotism spreading across the globe, feeding on democracy itself, seducing citizens while hollowing out its core. A bracing, indispensable guide to how it works and how to resist it.’ — Olivia Stokes Dreier, Senior Research Fellow for Global Challenges to Democracy, Toda Peace Institute

Author(s)

John Keane, Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney, is renowned globally for his creative thinking about politics, history, media and democracy. His books include The Shortest History of Democracy; The Life and Death of Democracy; the bestselling Tom Paine: A Political Life; and the acclaimed biography Václav Havel. Photo © Angel Sanchez