The most recent book by Moisés Naim, “The revenge of the powerful” (Debate, 2022), perfectly analyzes, portrays and documents the profile of politicians and governments determined to destroy the checks and balances that limit their power, as is the case of President López Obrador.
The formula used by these anti-democratic characters to gain and consolidate their power is through populism, polarization and post-truth. Naim calls them “3P autocrats”.
“3P autocrats are political leaders who come to power through reasonably democratic elections and then set out to dismantle checks and balances to their executive power through populism, polarization, and post-truth.”
They use the classic instruments and mechanisms of power, but resort to new tools such as social networks.
The would-be 3P autocrats consolidate their power through opacity such as the infrastructure agreement, bureaucratic confusion such as republican austerity, pseudo-legal subterfuge such as mandate revocation, corrosion of the rule of law, manipulation of public opinion, attacks on critics and opponents.
Moisés Naim, also the author of “The End of Power”, warns that when society realizes it, it is too late. What are the tactics of would-be 3P autocrats?
1. Manichaeism. Populists (understood populism as a strategy to obtain and exercise power) are Manichaeans because politics is divided into only two groups: the corrupt elite or mafia of power and the good, pure people, betrayed and aggrieved by those corrupt.
2. Catastrophism. The 3P autocrats are pessimistic, the world is corrupt, previous leaders and governments (such as those of Salinas, Zedillo, Fox, Calderón and Peña) are failed, and the past (Spain, neoliberalism) is guilty of all the ills of the present.
3. Criminalization of political rivals. The adversaries are not treated as people with different positions but as criminals who must be punished (such as the former governor Cabeza de Vaca or the PAN presidential candidate, Ricardo Anaya).
4. Use of external threats. For the populist leader and the aspiring 3P autocrat, the nation is always threatened by a foreign government (such as US interventionism) or by ambitious foreign companies that exploit the homeland (such as the Spanish energy companies or the Oxxos that do not pay electricity). .
5. Militarization. One of the most dangerous, because they glorify the Army or use the armed forces for civil activities, such as the militarization of the National Guard or the construction of the Felipe Ángeles International Airport by military engineers.
6. Contempt for experts. Technicians, scientists, academics and specialists belong to an intellectual elite in collusion with the corrupt of the past, accomplices in the humiliation of the good people, such as the 31 Conacyt scientists accused of organized crime, the specialists of the regulatory bodies of the past neoliberal or the pseudo environmentalists from UNAM who oppose the Mayan train. In this regard, Nain warns that “populism lives in a world of faith and instinct, not data and science.”
7. Attacks on the media. The media, television stations and journalists hostile to the policies of the 4T are equally corrupt, hypocritical, conservative and enemies of the national regeneration movement.
8. Erosion of the system of checks and balances. Contempt for and attack on the institutions that balance and control presidential power, such as the INAI, the independence of the ministers of the Supreme Court, all autonomous bodies, and the unbridled attacks on the National Electoral Institute and its advisers.
9. Messianism. The solution to all the problems, the enemies and the corruption falls on a charismatic leader, morally irreproachable and who raises the fight against the elites and the mafia of power like AMLO.
Added to all these populist tools is the second strategy of the aspiring 3P autocrats, polarization, one of the specialties of President López Obrador, devoted to relentlessly disqualifying and demonizing all historical adversaries (the conquerors or the neoliberal ex-presidents) and new (media, academics, specialists, opponents, actors, institutions and a long etcetera).
Naim emphasizes that both populism and polarization are old resources of power and politics, but to them is added the third strategy, the most novel and innovative so far in the 21st century: post-truth.
3P autocrats lie and cheat, construct false narratives, blatantly deny even verifiable reality, have other facts, disregard objectivity, and are emotionally driven. They reject the true understood as verifiable, they deny the facts while proposing alternative facts, they degrade knowledge and science and exalt opinion, beliefs and ideology.
“The main objective of post-truth -explains Naim- is not to accept lies as truth, but to muddy the waters until it is difficult to distinguish the difference between truth and falsehood.”
Populism, polarization and post-truth are strategies to increase and preserve power with anti-democratic costs, outside legality and without institutional checks and balances. They pretend to be democracies but stealthily undermine them from the inside, dismantling controls and demonizing the critical press. All this and more is happening today in Mexico.
Twitter: @beltmondi
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