Fighting Autocracy

Tag: Legislative Enablers

  • The Myth of the Lone Strongman

    The Myth of the Lone Strongman

    —

    by

    Phil Anderson
    in

    Tyranny rarely announces itself. It emerges when institutions defer and constraints quietly dissolve. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes in Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, autocrats like Mussolini and Orbán didn’t act alone. They relied on courts, legislatures, and bureaucracies repurposed by enablers of authoritarianism. Modern strongmen gut democracy from within. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call…