The New Despotism by John Keane

The New Despotism
By John Keane
Harvard University Press, 2020

It’s so tempting to think of governmental systems as a limited menu, a static series of categories that can be swapped out file extensions. Representative government leads to oligarchy which leads to autocracy which leads to dictatorship, for instance, or absolute monarchy leading to constitutional monarchy leading to parliamentary democracy, with each category neatly defined and distinguishable from all the others. 

It’s subtly terrifying to think governmental systems as semi-aware viruses rather than block categories, and just such a view is the bedrock of The New Despotism, a brilliant re-interpretation of tyranny from University of Sydney Professor of Politics John Keane, who seeks to repurpose the quaint old word ‘despotism’ and use it to describe an ongoing evolutionary change in thuggish, self-interested government of the very many by the very few. In a concise survey of recent and current “vaudeville governments,” Keane outlines some of the defining characteristics of his “new” despotisms, including their surprising willingness to adapt. “Their resilience stems in part from their recombinant qualities. Recombination breeds strength,” Keane writes. “By drawing together seeming opposites - plutocracy with talk of ‘the people,’ periodic elections with lawlessness and targeted violence, tough media censorship with toleration of digital publics - the new despotisms become earthquake-resistant polities.”

 The earthquake in question, of course, is revolution. And Keane’s new despotisms hope to avoid such earthquakes by avoiding the outward trappings of explicit tyrannies. Their architects steer clear of the resentments generated by “sultanisms,” avoiding what Keane refers to as “the tyrant trap.” “These are not systems of government by one person whose concerns are merely self-interested, concentrated on their own material desires or those of family and friends.” 

There’s scarcely a reader anywhere in the Western world who won’t read Keane’s description of this new form of tyranny without a cold chill of recognition and perhaps the fear that all this insight comes too late to help formerly free peoples prevent “vaudeville governments” from strengthening in their midst. And the book has an even more unsettling undercurrent: the suspicion that a significant portion of the world’s adult population might actually prefer this new evolutionary strain of despotism. In the past, Keane notes, despotism was a “foghorn concept,” a loudly indefensible vision of a world “shaped and defined by forms of power that protect concentrations of wealth, manipulate communications media, and encourage people to behave like pusillanimous subjects of rulers who are both deeply corrupted and hostile to the ideals of power-sharing democracy based on the dignity, freedom, and equality of citizens.” 

But now? Now stupid, belligerent, and openly divisive demagogues can come to power in major Western nations by promising their ‘base’ of hard-core followers not participation in a just system but membership on a winning team. Such promises are made with an open hand and a closed fist: I will give you, my followers, the feeling of vindication for all your basest instincts, these new despots say, but I will also take: your social care programs, for instance, or your standing in the eyes of the world, and certainly your domestic tranquility, since a winning team requires the existence of losing teams. 

In illuminating this recombinant new governmental virus, The New Despotism stands out at once as a vital book for the times. In a moment of authorial hubris, Keane compares his book to Machiavelli’s The Prince, and it must be said, in sorrow and something close to despair, that this may be justified.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.