Ukraine War: Air raids continue as counteroffensive picks up pace

It's the second Russia-Africa summit since 2019. But on the eve of the event the number of attending heads of state had shrunk from 43 to 17, a drop that the Kremlin blamed on Western interference.

Surge of wounded soldiers coincides with major counteroffensive Ukraine launched against Russia in June.

Ukraine's recent push to tackle corruption is part of a decade-long battle that only accelerated after Russia’s full-scale invasion and its formal application to join the European Union.

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 Megan Nolan published her first novel, fellow authors warned her in “ominous tones” about the website Goodreads. The young Irish writer looked at the book’s listing there in the winter of 2020, the day the first proof copy arrived at her house. “Nobody but me and the publisher had seen it,” she wrote recently. “Despite this, it had received one review already: two stars, left by someone I had inconsequential personal discord with. It was completely impossible for him to have read the book.”

The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry. The review site, which Amazon bought in 2013, can shape the conversation around a book or an author, both positively and negatively. Today’s ostensible word-of-mouth hits are more usually created online, either via Goodreads or social networks such as Instagam and TikTok.

Publishers know how important these dynamics are, and so they send out advanced reading copies, or ARCs, not just to independent booksellers who might stock a title, but also to influencers who might make content about it. “There’s an assumption that if you receive an ARC that you will post about it,” Traci Thomas, host of the literary podcast The Stacks, told me—“whether that’s on your Goodreads, on your Instagram, on your TikTok, tell other people in your bookstore, or whatever. And so that’s how it ends up that there’s so many reviews of a book that’s not out yet.”

Many book bloggers are conscientious about including a disclaimer on their posts thanking the publisher for giving them an ARC “in exchange for an honest review.” But disclosing freebies is far from a contractual requirement or even a social norm. So you can’t easily discern which early reviewers have actually read the book, and which ones might be reacting to social-media chatter (or, as Nolan suspected in her case, prosecuting a personal grudge).

That matters because viral campaigns target unpublished books all the time. What tends to happen is that one influential voice on Instagram or TikTok deems a book to be “problematic,” and then dozens of that person’s followers head over to Goodreads to make the writer’s offense more widely known. Authors who reply to these attacks risk making the situation worse. Kathleen Hale—who was so infuriated by a mean reviewer that she tracked down the woman’s address—wrote later that the site had warned her against engagement: “At the bottom of the page, Goodreads had issued the following directive (if you are signed in as an author, it appears after every bad review of a book you’ve written): ‘We really, really (really!) don’t think you should comment on this review, even to thank the reviewer.’” Most authors I know read their Goodreads reviews, and then silently fume over them alone. Because I am a weirdo, I extract great enjoyment from mine—the more petty and baffling the complaints, the better. “I listened to the audiobook and by chapter 3 it started to annoy me the little pause she made before the word ‘male,’” reads one review of my book, Difficult Women.

When the complaints are more numerous and more serious, it’s known as “review-bombing” or “brigading.” A Goodreads blitzkrieg can derail an entire publication schedule, freak out commercial book clubs that planned to discuss the release, or even prompt nervous publishers to cut the marketing budget for controversial titles. Last month, the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert withdrew her upcoming novel The Snow Forest from publication because of the backlash she received after revealing it was set in Soviet Russia. The Goodreads page for The Snow Forest, which has since been taken down, accused her of romanticizing the Russian soul. “I’ll cut the job for you—they don’t have any,” wrote one reviewer. Another wrote: “Just like her characters in this nover [sic] are unaware of the events of WWII, Elizabeth Gilbert herself seems to be unaware of the genocidal war russia is conducting against Ukraine RIGHT NOW, because I’m sure if she knew, she’d realise how tone deaf this book is.”

[Read: Eat, pray, pander]

The book had been scheduled for release next February, but in a video announcing that it was “not the time for this book to be published,” Gilbert essentially endorsed the Goodreads criticisms: “I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are all continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”

Now, I don’t know whether The Snow Forest romanticized the Russian soul or would somehow have caused “harm” to Ukrainians. Like my colleague Franklin Foer, I find the allegations hard to believe. But the plain fact is that neither of us know, because—and this should be obvious, although recent events suggest it is not—you don’t know what’s in a book you haven’t read. You also don’t know what’s in a film you haven’t watched, an album you haven’t heard, or an article you haven’t clicked on. That used to matter. It no longer does, because we live in a world where you can harvest likes by circulating screenshots of headlines and out-of-context video clips, and where marketing campaigns are big enough that they constitute artistic statements in themselves. (Barbie, I’m looking at you.)

Unfortunately, the artworks most likely to run into trouble in this viral hellscape are those that explore complicated, incendiary topics such as sex, race, and identity. Another Goodreads drama played out recently over Everything’s Fine, a debut novel written by Cecilia Rabess and published on June 6. Its plot centers on a young, progressive Black woman who falls in love with a conservative white man in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s election. “It obviously tackles some lightning-rod issues about race, class, and politics and identity in America,” Rabess told me, and so she expected strong reactions on Goodreads and similar sites. “But I think people certainly hadn’t read the book. And so I don’t know how they came to the conclusions that they did—that the book didn’t handle these topics carefully or thoughtfully or intentionally.”

Chalk that characterization up as writerly understatement. “It’s not enemies to lovers if you use it to excuse racists,” a typical one-star review read, referencing a common romance-novel trope. “Some authors shouldn’t be authors bc wtf is this!?” another offered. “i haven’t read this book nor do I plan to but having read the synopsis, I’m rating it 1-star,” a third confessed.

In the case of Everything’s Fine, the pile-on appears to have started on TikTok, where a handful of prominent creators criticized the book. The swell of anger then migrated to Goodreads, where those creators’ fans could register their disapproval. “i didnt and will not even read this i came from tiktok to say i hope the sales are so bad the bookstores have to throw away all inventory because it refuses to sell. anyone who gets an ARC of this should be ashamed,” noted another one-star review.

For Rabess, the experience was brutal. “As an artist, you’re prepared for people to not resonate with the work,” she said. “But I think it feels different when people decide that you yourself are problematic, or you yourself are causing harm, or whatever language they use to describe it. It feels a little bit surreal.” The backlash might have flourished on Goodreads, but it soon escaped to the wider internet. Rabess, who is Black, received angry direct messages and emails, as well as abusive comments under any social-media posts she made. “They said nasty things about me, about my children. Called me coon, other really unpleasant slurs. Told me that I’d be better off dead.”

The anger was scattershot. The commenters using racial slurs clearly knew Rabess’s race, but she wondered if some other online critics assumed that she was a white author intruding on territory they felt should be reserved for writers of color. While authors are sensibly told not to read the reviews—and certainly not to engage with critics—that’s harder when the critics come right up in your (virtual) face and shout their opinions at you.

[Read: The companies that are killing creativity]

As it happens, the podcaster Traci Thomas was among those who disliked Rabess’s book—albeit after reading an advance copy, back in January. “It’s an icky book,” she told me. She objected to what she saw as the moral of the story: Love conquers all, even being a Trump supporter. “The boyfriend in the book, Josh, is wearing a MAGA hat and, like, saying racist shit to [the female protagonist]. And she’s like, It’s fine. And the big revelation for her is that she can still choose to love him. And I’m just like: Okay, cool, go off—and I’m gonna tear this book to shreds.”

Ultimately, Thomas concluded, “I don’t know that the book needs to exist.”

Despite her own strong feelings, Thomas told me that she sometimes felt uneasy about her own reviews being surrounded by knee-jerk reactions and “performative allyship,” even by people whose politics she shared. “There are people who are new to anti-racism work or supporting LGBTQ people, or disability activism or whatever. And they feel it is their job to call out things that they notice without perhaps understanding the bigger historical context.” To illustrate the point, she gave an example: Imagine an author writes a book about Black children riding tricycles, “and then I’ll see a review that’s like, ‘This book didn’t talk about Black preschoolers who ride bikes, and they’re also at risk.’”

That dynamic explains one of the most initially counterintuitive aspects of viral pile-ons: that many seem to target authors who would agree with their critics on 99 percent of their politics. A strange kind of progressive one-upmanship is at work here: Anyone can condemn Ann Coulter’s latest book, but pointing out the flaws in a feminist or anti-racist book, or a novel by a Black female author, establishes the critic as the occupant of a higher moral plane.

The net effect of this is to hobble books by progressive authors such as Gilbert, and by writers of color such as Rabess. The latter is philosophical about the controversy over Everything’s Fine, seeing the backlash as representative of the political moment she was exploring in the novel—of “people feeling a dearth of community and connection, and just wanting a way to connect, a way to express themselves or express their anger.”

Of course, if Goodreads wanted to, it could fix the review-bombing problem overnight. When services that rely on user-generated content are only lightly moderated, it’s always a conscious decision, and usually a cold commercial one. After Gilbert pulled her novel from publication, The Washington Post observed that Amazon, which reportedly paid $150 million for Goodreads, now shows little interest in maintaining or updating the site. Big changes to a heavily trafficked site can be costly and risk annoying the existing user base: Reddit has recently faced down a moderators’ revolt for changes to how developers can access its tools, and Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter—or whatever it’s now called—will one day be taught at business schools on a slide headlined “How to Lose Advertisers and Alienate People.” A purge of duplicate accounts might sweep up some fanatically devoted Goodreads users—people who can’t bear to share their opinion only once—and make the site feel less busy and exciting.

Goodreads spokesperson Suzanne Skyvara told me by email that the site “takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously.” She added that Goodreads is working to “stay ahead of content and accounts that violate our reviews or community guidelines” and has “increased the number of ways members can flag content to us.”

The main Amazon site has several measures in place to stop review-bombing: Reviews from verified purchasers of books are flagged as such to bolster their credibility, while the star rating is the product of a complicated algorithm rather than simply an average of all the review scores. Goodreads could adopt even more stringent measures—but then, it isn’t in the company’s interests to reduce volume in favor of quality, because its entire appeal is based around being a grassroots voice. “Goodreads really needs a mechanism for stopping one-star attacks on writers,” the writer Roxane Gay tweeted after Gilbert’s statement in June. “It undermines what little credibility they have left.” Traci Thomas agrees. In an email, she told me that she would like to see “verified users or reviews that get a check (or something) in exchange for proving they’ve read the book.”

If Amazon will not put the resources into controlling the wrath of Goodreads, then what fairness requires here is a strong taboo: Do not review a book you haven’t read. We should stigmatize uninformed opinions the way we stigmatize clipping your nails on public transport, talking with your mouth full, or claiming that your peacock is a service animal. A little self-control from the rest of us will make it easier for writers to approach incendiary topics, safe in the knowledge that they will be criticized only for things they’ve actually done.

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