It would be a mistake to assume democracy is our default state, or to underestimate the power and reach of authoritarianism
It’s troubling to hear the political commentariat describing Trump’s and Farage’s actions as ‘unprecedented’. It suggests they are observing individual pieces of the jigsaw instead of the broader authoritarian context.
Authoritarian systems differ on such parameters as religious vs secular, left (Communist China) vs right (Orban’s Hungary); blatant vs faux democratic. But, as Anne Applebaum observes, authoritarians are now shelving these differences to attack a perceived common enemy: democracy itself.
To acquire and retain power and funding, modern authoritarians have to dismantle democratic infrastructure: accountability, transparency, veracity in political, financial and media institutions, the separation of judicial and executive powers, and free elections which, together, enable us to choose our leaders.
Previously, authoritarian governments were restrained by their exclusively national focus. However, increased global trade and the internet have driven the proliferation of complex international networks for co-ordinating anti-democracy campaigns.
Belarus now maintains its authoritarian regime with “Kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services including paramilitary, and disinformation” (Autocracy Inc.) provided by Russia and Iran. Maduro’s Venezuala is similarly kept afloat by Russia, Iran, China, Cuba and Turkey.
The authoritarian toolkit: word theft
The core authoritarian weapon, I’d argue, is narrative theft, i.e. the seizure of democratic narratives to legitimise their ideology. This dark art has many masters. Echoing Russia’s anti-European diatribes, Vance criticises Europe for abandoning the “democratic principle that the voice of the people matters”. In his 2025 conference speech, Farage describes Rayner’s tax issue as “screaming entitlement” and ignoring ‘the interests of the British people’. Whilst commemorating Charlie Kirk‘s death, Trump accuses the “radical left of being directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today”. The point of these massively hypocritical narratives is to seed conspiratorial doubt about the motives behind ordinary politics.
Beyond the rules: the manosphere and culture wars
These stolen narratives are framed by the patriarchal ‘strong man’ principle. Authoritarians view democracy as not only strategically obstructive but feminised, weak and ‘violating the natural order’. Contempt and control-freakery drive the paranoia of Trump’s and Farage’s brutal deportation programmes and the intensity of their invectives: democracy, though weak, is seductive and must be repeatedly and noisily destroyed through the manipulation of citizen rage and fear.
Additionally, the ‘strong man’ as the idealised white, heterosexual male leader, explains the authoritarians’ weaponization of culture wars and their support, now rapidly normalising in the UK and US, for national racial purity.
It also underpins the ‘quasi-aristocratic divine power’ that authoritarians award themselves. This entitlement to govern, deemed essential and natural, is unconstrained by ‘specious democratic laws’ and obviates the need for integrity and honesty.
Trump and Farage’s ‘firehose of falsehoods’ becomes a necessary, means-end part of their armoury for overthrowing ‘illegitimate, harmful systems’. Trump is likely, for example, to strengthen his grip by holding rigged elections which retain an appearance of democratic protocol.
Spreading the word
The links traced here are only small threads in a network which, as a whole, has an enormous capacity for anti-democracy campaigning designed to “connect democracy with degeneracy and chaos” (Applebaum). Key players are Breitbart founder, Steve Bannon, and conference outlets like US CPAC which now enjoys an international presence in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Poland and Hungary.
Other conduits are satellite television companies like China’s StarTimes, now expanded across Europe, Asia and Africa. Meta and X’s refusal to regulate online content has created further sprawling global arenas for authoritarian messaging.
In the UK, Paul Marshall’s takeovers have magnified right/far-right content in our mainstream media considerably. Farage’s own media role now spans GB, the BBC and US Fox News and, on social media, his international Tiktok following alone is bigger than all the UK’s other MPs combined.
As Liam Byrne’s research on populist networks shows, there is now a “complete fusion” between UK far-right media and politics, with GB news acting as an organisational locus. Through algorithmic amplification, the curious can be introduced to the entire ecosystem within hours.
Meanwhile, the UK’s tenuous progressive majority is, conveniently for Reform, being scattered by the emergence of new left-wing parties frustrated with Labour.
Dosh: the financial ecosystem
Reform support climbs in line with its grip on propaganda outlets. Now a self-described ‘government in waiting’, it attracts significant donations from home and abroad, recently receiving funding from international donors such as Heartland, the Israeli embassy and Nova Venture Holdings, a company controlled by US-based oil and gas investors.
Like the rest of the intricate global authoritarian ecosystem in which it sits, Reform is able to massively amplify its messaging by exploiting the lack of regulation in international finance. Funding flows from Russia, China and the US are sustaining European and UK far-right populism using shell companies and crypto, a currency associated with money laundering and illicit finance. Farage recently announced that Reform will start accepting crypto donations.
The US dominates this ecosystem: 33 million dollars pa are currently fed into the European populist network from the US Christian Right alone, and “80% of the most important influencers in the UK network are US populists”. Imported US propaganda dominated the interventions of far-right activists Musk, Bannon and Joey Mannarino, (of ‘rape is “a fake”’ fame) at the recent London anti-immigration rally.
What do we do? Rationalism and its limits
One progressive response extends Fukayama’s Panglossian notion of democracy as superior: we should see democracy as inherently rational, truth-based and pre-ordained. Once experienced, it will naturally and inevitably be adopted and progress in a linear way towards ‘better’.
This view encouraged the idea that global trade would increase democratisation through closer alliances. Willi Brandt’s acceptance of Russian gas pipelines to Germany, later extended across Europe, was seen, like increased trade relations with China, as a way of ‘teaching democracy to others’.
Democracy, sustained by truth and rationality, means that Trump’s and Farage’s incompetence and corruption have only to be exposed for their supporters to grasp that they’ve been lied to. When the veil is lifted they will be repelled and vote elsewhere. Hence the worthy focus on, say, showing Reform ‘messing up’ in local councils.
Silos and double standards
This progressive view doesn’t fit history comfortably though. Victims of authoritarian propaganda become radicalised into cult thinking and eventually fully silo’ed. It isn’t simply that they lack access to the truth but that ‘truth’ is relativised to their own unshareable ‘realities’. However many ‘truths’ are thrown at MAGA cultists, they see US Democrats, just as Farage encourages his supporters to see Labour and other left-leaning parties, as degenerate, false, corrupt, and dangerous.
Anti-democracy becomes “immune to just about everything that the establishment throws at it” (Matthew D’Ancona).
This doesn’t mean authoritarian narratives completely immunise their victims, only that we underestimate the tenacity of the alternative realities they inhabit. And every time democracy ‘slips up’, which is regularly (the list of corruptions from Watergate to Partygate and beyond is long and turgid) the cultists have their own world view forcefully re-confirmed.
Putinesque dictators are well aware of democracy’s double standards. Kleptocratic shell purchases are tolerated in the UK, US and elsewhere. Corruption infects democratic governments in their willingness to be lobbied by powerful corporates whose interests are served by inequality and by the unequal distribution of wealth.
This ‘corruption’ allows authoritarians to reason from moral equivalence: ‘Since all states are corrupt, corruption is normal (and inescapable). But only some states are strong. Therefore, you are better off in our strong (corrupt) state’.
Authoritarian regimes can fall. Spain and Portugal recovered. But resilience is built in. Russia, China and North Korea are unlikely to democratise in the foreseeable future. Project 2025 is aligned with global authoritarianism and won’t stand or fall with Trump. And, given Reform’s embedded place in the global authoritarian ecosystem, it’s naïve to think the party’s survival depends on Farage. The drive to crush democracy and, with it, our citizen rights, will outlive them.
The moment for realism
Another response is to view democracy, not as progressively linear, but locked into an ongoing emotive, tribal battle with authoritarianism, without a natural or rational guide for who wins. On this view, authoritarianism acts less like a stage of human ignorance, and more like an inherent disease susceptibility.
In the post-war period from 1945, democracy gained the upper hand, reaching its zenith in the 1990s but, despite constitutional guardrails, proved weaker than hoped. The ‘good chaps’ premise underpinning our democratic institutions turned out to be flimsy and no match for the internet. It’s relatively easy now for authoritarians to win propaganda wars with helpful algorithms, angry citizens and supine governments.
Democracy isn’t a given. Whether it can be fortified against authoritarian takeovers in robust and enduring ways is an open and now desperately urgent question. We can’t wait for ‘sheer reason’ to either preserve or restore democratic normality.
Trump’s rapid dismantling of US democracy ‘everywhere, all at once’ means the US may well already be lost. The global network backing Reform UK, and so contemptuous of European democracy, is keen to continue providing funding and propaganda to undermine it here.
Governments have a fundamental duty to protect their citizens from attack. This, by definition, includes the assaults described here on our democracy. Their ferocity is conveyed in Stephen Miller’s eerily mirrored use of narrative theft to describe our democratic world (not his) as a “vast, organised ecosystem of indoctrination” with the power to “deeply and violently radicalise”.
Since a Reform win is now a realistic possibility, frankly we have an emergency. Starmer’s ‘homeopathic’ response to Reform has failed. Our democratic future hangs on Labour changing course, radically and rapidly. As citizens, we must pressurise Labour to find its moral backbone, co-ordinate with other progressive parties, and harness economic delivery to an emotionally compelling counter-vision powerful enough to pull us back from the brink.
Claire Jones writes and edits for West England Bylines and is co-ordinator for the Oxfordshire branch of the progressive campaign group, Compass
Image credit: House of Commons – Creative Commons
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