The new interconnected breed of autocrats gains and retains power by deception, globally undermining democracies through their own institutions
By Cecilia Menjívar & Deisy Del Real, Scientific American
An autocratic wave has crept up on us in the U.S. and over the world in the last decade. Democracy and autocracy were once seen as two separate and distant worlds with little in common, and that the triumph of one weakened the other. Now, however, autocrats across the globe, in poor and wealthy nations, in established and nascent democracies, and from the right and left, are using the same tactics to dismantle democracies from within.
