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Opinion Fifty years after Emergency, the new threats to democracy

Now beset by a rising tide of strong-armed rulers and demagogues worldwide, democracy is also the best check on their unrestrained power. Those who resisted the Emergency understood this

Despotism feeds upon the voluntary servitude of its subjects. Those who think the word despotism is a synonym for repression, fear and raw force are profoundly mistaken

John Keane

June 25, 2025 06:52 AM IST First published on: Jun 25, 2025 at 06:15 AM IST

Amidst the worsening global commotions, triggered by factors ranging from imperial power rivalries, unending wars, border closures and trade and tariff disputes to pandemics, genocides, extreme weather events, collapsing banks and citizen disaffection, a sinister trend is everywhere gaining traction and seemingly getting the upper hand: A new kind of despotism with thoroughly 21st-century characteristics is everywhere on the rise.

To speak of despotism is admittedly to invite confusion and controversy and to risk mental confusions. It’s an old word with a complicated and chequered history. Long out of fashion — these days “autocracy” and “authoritarianism” are the fashionable but mistaken political buzzwords — despotism has often been dismissed as an emotionally charged and fuzzy word laden with Orientalist prejudices against non-Europeans. But when suitably revised and carefully deployed, despotism is an indispensable keyword for making sense of the new global threats to democracy posed not only by polities as different as Russia, Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Cuba, and Vietnam, but also by the flourishing attacks on power-sharing democracies led by demagogues and their admirers in countries such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Claudia Sheinbaum’s Mexico, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel and Donald J Trump’s America.

This worldwide growth of despotism ought to puzzle and worry every thinking person. Considered as a type of rule, as a way of handling power, despotism defies the laws of political gravity. It’s a peculiar type of pseudo-democratic government led by rulers skilled in the arts of manipulating and meddling with people’s lives, marshalling their support, and winning their obedience. Despotism feeds upon the voluntary servitude of its subjects. Those who think the word despotism is a synonym for repression, fear and raw force are profoundly mistaken. Despotic power is not solely understandable through similes of hammers and nails; it requires thinking in terms of the attraction of metal filings to magnets.

In practice, the aspiring architects and established rulers of the new despotism are masters of seduction, deception and subjugation. They calibrate their use of violence and manage, using a combination of slick means, including rigged election victories, to win the submission and loyalty of the ruled. Oiled as well by government handouts, rampant patronage, bags of money, legal trickery, and endless media talk of defending “the people” against its foes, despotism nurtures the docile subservience of its subjects, including important sections of the middle classes, skilled and unskilled workers and the poor. The result: The triumph of top-down pyramids of power that manage to win millions of supporters at home and admirers and friends well beyond the borders of the states they rule.

What’s especially worrying is that the spirit of despotism is contagious. Despots and demagogues hunt in packs. Their promiscuity knows no limits. Consider the recent grand show moment when an aspiring despot was greeted with open arms and gifts by his more seasoned counterparts: Donald J. Trump’s whirlwind May 2025 tour of West Asia. In Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar, the all-American demagogue was showered with the honour and recognition he has long craved. Lavish F-15 fighter jet escorts. Lavender and red carpets, mounted camels and women’s hair flipping welcome ceremonies. Riders on white horses and Tesla cybertrucks sporting stars and stripes. Grand marbled halls, dazzling crystal chandeliers, the highest civil decorations, including a pure gold necklace connoting luxury and appreciation, the world’s tallest building, more than half a mile high, lit up with an image of the American flag. A campaign-style rally at the region’s largest US military base in Qatar. The deliverables? Trillion-dollar business and defence contracts signed by cupidity in the presence of greed and fame. Plans (with Saudi Arabia) to establish a joint nuclear energy programme. A preliminary agreement (with the UAE) to import the most advanced AI chips. A lavish gift (from Qatar) of a luxury jet — all in confirmation of the point that in these times of turbulence, despots must fly together in safety and solidarity.

There’s growing awareness among journalists, intellectuals and citizens that such displays of despotic pomp and bromance power are threatening the spirit and substance of the freedoms and promises of democracy. In these troubled times, this raises the old question: What’s so good about democracy? The shortest answer: To be a democrat is to believe that democracy is much more than popular self-government based on free and fair elections. It is to recognise the need to rein in any form of power that harms lives by bringing hardship, sorrow and indignity. Democracy is a shape-shifting way of protecting humans and their biosphere against the corrupting effects of unaccountable power. This is its radical potential: Democracy is the defiant insistence that people’s lives are never fixed, that all things, human and non-human, are built on the shifting sands of space-time, and that no person or group, no matter how much power they hold, can be trusted permanently, in any context, to govern the lives of others. This was surely the wisdom and sentiment motivating those people from many walks of life who bravely resisted Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule between June 1975 and March 1977. They understood that democracy is a means of damage prevention. It’s an early warning system, a way of enabling citizens, and whole organisations and networks, to sound the alarm whenever they suspect that others are about to cause them harm, or when calamities are already bearing down on their heads.
The German anti-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously complained that democracy stands for the disbelief in rule by elites. It does, and for good reason. Democracy brings things back to Earth. It serves as a reality check on unrestrained power exercised by strong-armed despots and demagogues backed by “the people”. It is the best means so far invented of ensuring that those in charge of organisations don’t stray into cuckoo land, wander into territory where misadventures of power are concealed by lies, silence and weaponised nonsense.

The writer is professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. His latest book is Thinking About Democracy in Turbulent Times: Sorbonne Lectures (2025)