A disturbing in-depth expos of the antidemocratic practices of despotic governments now sweeping the world.
And, like Montesquieu, he worries that the practices of Despotism are closer to home than we care to admit..
Like Montesquieu in the eighteenth century, Keane stresses the willing complicity of comfortable citizens in all these trends.
He shows how they cooperate regionally and globally and draw strength from each other\'s resources while breeding global anxieties and threatening the values and institutions of democracy.
Casting doubt on such fashionable terms as dictatorship, autocracy, fascism, and authoritarianism, Keane makes a case for retrieving and refurbishing the old term Despotism to make sense of how these regimes function and endure.
They mobilize the rhetoric of democracy and win public support for workable forms of government based on patronage, dark money, steady economic growth, sophisticated media controls, strangled judiciaries, dragnet surveillance, and selective violence against their opponents.
Drawing on extensive travels, interviews, and a lifetime of thinking about democracy and its enemies, Keane shows how governments from Russia and China through Central Asia to the Middle East and Europe have mastered a formidable combination of political tools that threaten the established ideals and practices of power-sharing democracy.
And one day, he warns, we may be more like them.
But many have hardened into something very different from liberal democracy: what the eminent political thinker John Keane describes as a new form of despotism.
That was once the West\'s complacent and self-regarding assumption about countries emerging from poverty, imperial rule, or communism.
One day they\'ll be like us.
A disturbing in-depth expos of the antidemocratic practices of despotic governments now sweeping the world
