American fans flocked to see League Two's Hollywood club face Premier League giants Chelsea and Manchester United.

Last week, at a Fox News town hall (where else?), former President Donald Trump called China’s despot, Xi Jinping, a “brilliant” guy who “runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” Lest anyone doubt his admiration, Trump added that Xi is “smart, brilliant, everything perfect. There’s nobody in Hollywood like this guy.”

Trump is not alone. Many in the United States and around the globe see the allure of a dictator who gets things done and makes the trains run on time, no matter the rules or laws that stand in the way. According to repeated polling, roughly one in four Americans agrees with the statement that a “strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress and elections” is desirable. A much higher proportion of citizens agrees with that sentiment elsewhere, including in some of the most populous democracies: 55 percent of Indians, 52 percent of Indonesians, 38 percent of Nigerians, and 31 percent of Japanese.

This grass-is-greener view of authoritarian rule tends to emerge most often where governments are failing to meet popular expectations. When democracy delivers, dictatorship doesn’t seem like a rosy alternative. Only 6 percent of Germans and 9 percent of Swedes are seduced by strongmen.

[Brian Klaas: Democracy has a customer-service problem]

Admiration for autocracy is built on a pernicious lie that I call the “myth of benevolent dictatorship.” The myth is built on three flimsy pillars: first, that dictators produce stronger economic growth than their democratic counterparts; second, that dictators, unswayed by volatile public opinion, are strategic long-term thinkers; and third, that dictators bring stability, whereas divided democracies produce chaos.  

Two decades ago, the United States and its Western allies became embroiled in Iraq and later blundered into the financial crisis, leading think tanks to begin praising the “Beijing Consensus,” or the “China Model,” as an alternative to liberal democracy. Critiques of democracy surged in popularity in the era of Trump and Brexit. In the United States, intellectual publications ran articles arguing that the problem was too much democracy. In 2018, The Times of London published a column titled “Our Timid Leaders Can Learn From Strongmen.” China’s state media, capitalizing on the West’s democratic woes, argued that democracy is a “scary” system that produces self-inflicted wounds.

But events and new research in the past several years have taken a wrecking ball to the long-standing myth of benevolent dictatorship. All three pillars of the lie are crumbling. Every fresh data point proves Winston Churchill right: “Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Let’s start with the myth that dictatorships produce stronger growth. This falsehood arose from a few well-known, cherry-picked examples, in which despots oversaw astonishing transformations of their national economy. Starting in the late 1950s, Lee Kuan Yew helped transform Singapore from a poor, opium-filled backwater into a wealthy economic powerhouse. And in China, per capita GDP rose from nearly $318 in 1990 to more than $12,500 today. Those successes are eye-popping.

But a systematic evaluation of the overall data reveals another reality. Even with these outliers of strong growth, most rigorous studies have found limited or no evidence that authoritarian regimes produce better economic growth than democratic ones. Some researchers, such as the political economists Darren Acemoglu and James Robinson, have found compelling evidence that the inclusive political institutions of democracy are one of the strongest factors in producing stable, long-term growth.

When authoritarian regimes do succeed economically, they often do so at a cost, because even booming dictatorships are prone to catastrophic busts. As the political scientist Jacob Nyrup has written: “China has within a 50-year time frame both experienced a famine, where 20-45 million people died, and an economic boom, where hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty.” The rosiest interpretation of the authoritarian economic data, then, is that autocrats may sometimes preside over marginally higher growth, but with a much greater risk of economic collapse. That’s not a wise trade-off.

However, the myth of strongmen as economic gurus has an even bigger problem. Dictators turn out to have manipulated their economic data for decades. For a long time, they’ve fooled us. But now we have proof: The reason their numbers sometimes seem too good to be true is that they are.

Every government has motivation to fudge its economic data. But democracies have institutions that provide oversight and block politicians from that impulse, ensuring accurate figures. No such checks exist in dictatorships.

That difference led Luis Martinez, an economist at the University of Chicago, to test whether despots were overstating their growth rate. He did so with an ingenious method. Previous studies have verified the presence of a strong, accurate correlation between the amount of nighttime light captured by satellites and overall economic activity. When economies grow, they emit more nighttime light (which is why you can clearly pick out cities on a nighttime satellite image, and why the density of light is so much lower in Africa than, say, in Europe or on the American East Coast). High-resolution images allow researchers to track changes in nighttime illumination over time, and the detailed, granular data these images produce are nearly impossible to manipulate. Martinez discovered an astonishing disparity suggesting that dictators have been overstating their GDP growth by about 35 percent.

And the more the numbers are checked, the more manipulation is exposed. In Rwanda, where The New York Times has named President Paul Kagame “the global elite’s favorite strongman” because of his apparently brilliant record of economic growth, the government claimed that it had decreased poverty by 6 percent from 2010 to 2014. Researchers found that the inverse was true: Poverty had actually surged by 5 to 7 percent. Fittingly, the notion that Benito Mussolini made the trains run on time was a lie; he built ornate stations and invested in train lines used by elites, but the commuting masses got left behind.

[Read: The undoing of China’s economic miracle]

Even China, the apparent authoritarian economic miracle, is showing signs of slowing down, its growth model no longer so well matched to the global economy. Such cracks in growth are an innate feature of autocracy. Because dictatorships criminalize dissent, normal mechanisms of economic feedback are broken, and the system doesn’t self-correct when blundering into economic mistakes. Beijing’s quixotic quest to maintain perpetual “zero COVID” was a case in point. Autocrats are adept at building ports and roads and mines. But thriving modern economies are sustained less by open mines than by open minds, of which dictatorships, by design, have a limited supply.

Advocates for the myth of benevolent dictatorship conveniently ignore a crucial fact, which is that much of the growth in autocracies comes either from manufacturing products that were invented in the more open societies of the democratic West, or from exporting goods to rich democracies. (The top destinations for Chinese exports are the United States, Japan, and South Korea.) In that way, even the outliers of autocratic growth depend for their success on the innovation and consumer wealth of democracies. Would China have lifted millions out of poverty through export-led growth quite so fast if democratic America hadn’t become an economic powerhouse first?

The myth’s second pillar turns out to be no less rickety than the first. It holds that dictators are more strategic long-term thinkers than democrats because they’re not beholden to fickle public opinion. But this lie is believable only if you don’t understand how most dictatorships actually work.

Over more than a decade, I’ve studied and interviewed despots and the henchmen who surround them. One conclusion I’ve drawn is that making decisions based on bad information is an intrinsic feature of the systems dictators run. The longer despots cling to power, the more likely they are to fall into what I call “the dictator trap,” in which they crush dissent, purge anyone who challenges them, and construct their own reality through propaganda, all to maintain control. Speaking truth to power in such a system can literally be deadly. As a result, dictators are told only what they want to hear, not what is true, and they begin to believe their own lies. Vladimir Putin’s catastrophic war in Ukraine is a tragic illustration of the dictator trap: Putin got high on his own supply, and innocent Ukrainians are the victims of his power trip.

Despots often use their power not for long-term planning, but for short-term self-glorification, as no end of examples can attest. Turkmenistan’s former dictator Saparmurat Niyazov blew millions to build, in his own honor, a golden statue that would rotate to always face the sun. In another stroke of genius, he closed all rural hospitals so that the sick could have the privilege of being treated in his pristine marble capital of Ashgabat. Most of the population lived outside the city, and countless thousands likely died because they couldn’t reach a hospital in time. His successor erected an enormous golden statue of his favorite breed of dog. Thankfully, democracies have checks and balances to suppress such narcissistic whims.

The most persistent pillar of the myth, however, is the one that holds that dictators produce stability. Some dictators have hung on to power for decades. Before his death, Muammar Qaddafi ruled Libya for 42 years. Paul Biya of Cameroon, an 89-year-old despot who had no idea where he was during a recent event, took office during the Vietnam War. Putin has been in power for more than two decades; Xi has ruled for only one so far, but he appears prepared to retain his position indefinitely.

To stay in power, authoritarian leaders face constant trade-offs. If they strengthen military or paramilitary leaders, they face the risk of a coup d’état. But if they weaken their men under arms, then they can’t protect themselves from external invasion. To keep their elites happy, despots need to make them rich through corruption—usually at the expense of the population. But a ruling class awash in ill-gotten gains could inspire a revolution, or a wild card: assassination. Autocrats appear stable, but they’re not. They’re constantly vulnerable, forced to make every decision based on what will stave off threats to survive in power.

The stability that does exist in autocracies is, ironically, derived partially from the trappings of democracy. Recent research has made clear that dictators have developed mechanisms to “mimic democracy to prolong autocracy.” Most authoritarian leaders now hold elections, but rig them. Some use parliaments or courts to enact unpopular decisions while avoiding blame.

[From the December 2021 issue: The bad guys are winning]

Eventually, though, dictatorships tend to fall apart. And when they collapse, they really collapse. Elections in democracies change governments, not regimes. Personalist dictatorships, by contrast, often implode. When Qaddafi was killed, Libya disintegrated. He had deliberately designed the political system to function only with him at its center. The same could be true of Putin’s Russia. When he is toppled or dies, the country won’t have a smooth, peaceful transition.

The often-disastrous demise of autocrats creates a negative feedback loop. Nearly seven in 10 leaders of personalist dictatorships end up jailed, exiled, or killed once they lose power. While in power, many despots are aware of this grim fact, and so they use violence to stay in power, often growing more extreme as they lurch toward their downfall. The effect can hardly be called “stability,” even if the same person occupies the palace for decades.

For anyone who still clings to the illusion that dictatorships are likely to be prosperous, strategically wise, or internally stable, I propose a simple test. Imagine that someone wrote down the names of all the countries in the world on little slips of paper and then separated them into two hats: one for democracy, one for dictatorships. You would select one of the two hats, draw a slip of paper from it, look at the name, and then spend the rest of your life living in that country. Who knows, maybe you’d get lucky and end up in an authoritarian regime that seems stable and is producing steady growth. But I know which hat I would choose. And even if you fantasize about finding the unicorn that is a benevolent strongman, I suspect you do too.

When I was growing up in a conservative evangelical community, one of the top priorities was to manage children’s consumption of art. The effort was based on a fairly straightforward aesthetic theory: Every artwork has a clear message, and consuming messages that conflict with Christianity will harm one’s faith. Helpfully, there was a song whose lyrics consisted precisely of this aesthetic theory: “Input Output.”  

Input, output,
What goes in is what comes out.
Input, output,
That is what it’s all about.
Input, output,
Your mind is a computer whose
Input, output daily you must choose.

The search for the “inputs” of secular artwork sometimes took a paranoid form—such as the belief in subliminal messages recorded in reverse, or in isolated frames from Lion King where smoke allegedly forms the word sex. Most often, however, the analysis was more direct. Portraying a behavior or describing a belief, unless accompanied immediately by a clear negative judgment, is an endorsement and a recommendation, and people who consume such messages will become more likely to behave and believe in that way.

[Read: Defining evangelical]

This theory underwrote the whole edifice of Christian contemporary music, which aimed to replace a particularly powerful avenue for negative messages. One of my running jokes for many years has been that all Top 40 music is effectively Christian contemporary music now; American Idol confirmed the hegemony of the “praise band” vocal style. More clear is the fact that all mainstream criticism—especially of film and television—is evangelical in form, if not in content. Every artwork is imagined to have a clear message; the portrayal of a given behavior or belief is an endorsement and a recommendation; consumption of artwork with a given message will directly result in the behaviors or beliefs portrayed. This is one of the few phenomena where the “both sides” cliché is true: Left-wing critics are just as likely to do this as their right-wing opponents. For every video of a right-wing provocateur like Ben Shapiro decrying the woke excesses of Barbie, there is a review praising the Mattel product tie-in as a feminist fable.

Here, however, I am more concerned with the critical practices of my comrades on the left. Among leftist publications, Jacobin stands out for its reductive and moralizing cultural coverage. Addressing the other major movie of this past weekend, for instance, the critic Eileen Jones worried in a recent column, “If you’re already convinced of the dangers of nuclear war, superseded only by the ongoing end-times series of rolling climate catastrophes that now seem more likely to kill us all, this film is going to lack a certain urgency.” Sadly, instead of an educational presentation on nuclear war, film audiences will instead find a biopic that takes some liberties with its subject’s life and character for the sake of creating a Hollywood blockbuster. Jones finds more to like in Barbie, despite “the familiar, toothless, you-go-girl pseudo-feminist pieties that Mattel has been monetizing for decades, alongside the nostalgic how-can-our-consumer-products-be-bad affirmations of Barbie as some sort of magic, wholesomely progressive uniter of generations of mothers and daughters.”

This trend is not limited to one publication. It is pervasive in online culture, above all on social media. For instance, over coffee on the morning after the epic Barbenheimer Friday, I learned some disturbing facts about Oppenheimer on Twitter. At least one viewer was worried that the film about the man who created the nuclear bomb did not include any Japanese characters. Indeed, it did not even directly portray his invention’s horrific consequences. Surely this aesthetic choice was meant to minimize his actions by rendering his victims invisible. (An article in New York magazine drew attention to the same absence.) I also learned that the area surrounding Los Alamos was actually cleared of Indigenous and Hispanic residents, another bit of history that is effectively erased by the film.

[John Hendrickson: Oppenheimer nightmares? You’re not alone. ]

Let’s imagine, though, that those complaints had been anticipated and addressed. Let’s imagine an entire subplot of a family going about their business in Hiroshima. We get to know and like them, to relate to them as our fellow human beings. Then, shockingly, they are incinerated by a nuclear blast. One can already hear the complaints. If the family were portrayed as too morally upstanding, it would be a dehumanizing portrayal that idealizes them as perfect victims. If they had moral flaws, the film would be subtly suggesting that they deserved their fate. And either way, the film would be attacked for offering up their suffering as a spectacle for our enjoyment. The same would go for the displaced population of Los Alamos—by portraying them as passive victims with no agency, critics would surely complain, the film would be reinscribing white authority.

Obviously leftists do not have to be as paranoid in their quest for messages supportive of the status quo as Christians playing their records backwards in the hopes of finding satanic content.  And of course we are a long way from having anything like the real-world thought police of Stalinism. During that dark era of Soviet history, writers and artists were expected to subscribe to the standards of socialist realism—which, instead of portraying the sordid and brutal reality of the present, anticipated the future reality of socialism by showing heroic workers building a utopian society. Those who fell short of those ideological expectations could expect a personal phone call from Comrade Stalin, if not worse. By contrast, it seems relatively harmless to hope that films and TV shows might reflect one’s own politics and to lament when they fail to do so. Yet the very fact that the demand is so open-ended that it is impossible to imagine an artwork meeting its largely unstated and unarticulated standards shows that something has gone wrong here.

To be clear, I don’t want to defend Oppenheimer in any way. I have not actually seen the film. Nothing anyone is saying is necessarily wrong; it’s just not interesting. Like most film and TV viewers, I read reviews because I want to decide whether or not to see a given movie or show, or else to think it through from a fresh perspective. For example, I note that Oppenheimer is very long—how is the pacing? Does it maintain a clear focus throughout, or does it indulge the common vice of biopics by trying to cram too much in? The type of critical literature that concerns me does not address such basic aesthetic questions, or does so only incidentally.

Even more insidiously, though, the logical goal of such very narrow standards could be to create artwork that is straightforward political propaganda. We’ve seen how badly that turned out for the evangelicals (and, indeed, for the Stalinists). Even if we are unlikely to face the scourge of a Leninist equivalent to VeggieTales, however, this style of criticism infantilizes its audience members by assuming they are essentially ideology-processing machines—unlike the wise commentator who somehow manages to see through the deception.

Political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level. And it’s much more likely that people are consuming politics as a kind of aesthetic performance or as a way of expressing aesthetic preferences than that they are somehow reading their politics off Succession, for example (“Welp, I guess rich people are good now. Better vote Republican!”). Just as the reduction of art to political propaganda leads to bad art, the aestheticization of politics leads to bad, irresponsible politics. That’s because aesthetics and politics are not the same thing. They are not totally unrelated, obviously, but they are also and even primarily different. A political message can be part of an aesthetic effect, just as a political movement can benefit from an aesthetic appeal. But we get nowhere if we confuse or collapse these categories.

This story was adapted from a post on Adam Kotsko's blog, An Und Für Sich.

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