Not long ago in the sweep of history, countries that had once been buried behind the Iron Curtain, and even some Soviet republics, were transformed into members of the solidly democratic club. Some of those that weren’t, such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, experienced mass revolts against rigged elections and corrupt misrule amid widespread public yearning to join the West. Free trade was again celebrated as an instrument of peace; Kant’s “democratic peace theory” enjoyed a revival.

Western democracy promotion, inept as it could be, struck fear into authoritarian corridors of power. Ever-shriller authoritarian denunciations of supposed Western conspiracies to foment “color revolutions” seemed to confirm a direction toward democracy. In the early 2010s, spontaneous uprisings rocked the heavily autocratic Middle East and North Africa. Hopes for political loosening persisted in the stubborn holdouts of China, Iran, and Russia. Large-scale demonstrations had broken out in Iran in 2009 and, in 2011–12, similar protests accompanied Vladimir Putin’s announcement that he would return to the Russian presidency after a brief stint as prime minister. Many clung to what they considered signs that Xi Jinping, who rose to become China’s top leader in 2012, would be a reformer.

In the blink of an eye, however, the authoritarians flipped the dynamic, driving the democracies onto the back foot, where they remain. Arab autocrats, Iran’s mullahs, and Putin cracked down viciously. In China, Xi elevated himself to something akin to emperor, driving an even more resolute version of authoritarianism. In well-established democracies, meanwhile, fear spread about the decay of liberal institutions and norms.

The authoritarians relied on an innovative set of tactics to suppress democratic influence from abroad or from within their societies: branding organizations that receive overseas funding as “foreign agents” (essentially, traitors) and using tax inspections to disqualify opposition candidates from running for office. These techniques were combined with the tried-and-true practice of dominating the media. And then, the coup de grâce: continuing to decry nonexistent Western plots to take them down, the authoritarians—thanks to technological innovations produced by free societies—developed new ways to meddle forcefully in democratic polities and sometimes even destabilize them. Now, the authoritarians watch as freely elected democratic leaders praise and emulate them.

And yet: beware those who once hailed “the age of democracy” and now proclaim “the age of autocracy.” Formidable as these regimes appear—and, in fact, can be—they are shot through with weaknesses. They can mobilize vast resources and personnel in pursuit of ambitious national projects but suffer debilitating incapacity stemming from corruption, cronyism, and overreach. They last far longer than generally anticipated but all the while remain prone to sudden runs on their political banks. With the right strategies, they can be jolted off balance. Democracies, despite a growing loss of confidence bordering on despair, retain innumerable strengths and deep resilience, and can get back on the front foot.

What is authoritarianism? And what—and who—is an authoritarian? Given how important this phenomenon has always been and the prominence it has recently reacquired, it might seem surprising how difficult it can be to answer those questions. At the most basic level, authoritarianism involves weak or near-absent institutional limits on executive power. Initially, authoritarians unabashedly ruled in the name of the few, but ever since the French Revolution, nondemocratic regimes have taken on the trappings of democracy: staged elections, rubber-stamp legislatures, constitutions granting nominal rights. “Modern authoritarianism,” as the political scientist Amos Perlmutter defined it, is the rule of the few in the name of the many.

Perlmutter, writing in 1981, singled out “authoritarianism/totalitarianism” as “this century’s most remarkable political phenomenon.” But the slash separating (or combining) the two terms concealed a challenge: namely, explaining the difference between them. As it happens, the sociologist Juan Linz had already taken this up, and his experience offers a cautionary tale. Born in 1926 in Weimar Germany, where hyperinflation bankrupted his father’s business, the young Linz witnessed the breakdown of democracy and the onset of Hitler’s dictatorship. Linz and his Spanish mother relocated to Spain in 1932, where Linz lived through the 1936 military putsch and the civil war that it provoked. During Franco’s dictatorship, he graduated from the University of Madrid. In 1950, he crossed the Atlantic to pursue a Ph.D. at Columbia University, where he soon began to teach. He later shifted to Yale and, in the decades that followed, became one of the world’s foremost experts on regime types and democratic stability.

When Linz entered the profession, the world was seen as divided between two basic regime types: democratic and totalitarian. Where, he wondered, should one place Franco’s Spain? It was patently not democratic, but also not totalitarian like Nazi Germany or the Stalinist Soviet Union. The classic schema advanced by the likes of Hannah Arendt, as well as Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, had no room for Iberia. In 1963, Linz presented a long paper titled “An Authoritarian Regime: Spain.” Despite its banal title, it constituted a breakthrough in explicating a third type. Linz offered a mostly negative definition: unlike totalitarianism, authoritarianism didn’t have a concentrated single source of power or a pervasive ideology, and it could muster only minimal mass mobilization. The major attribute authoritarian regimes possessed, rather than lacked, Linz suggested, was limited pluralism. The distinction remained uncertain, and for all his achievements, Linz never nailed it down. He tried “Sultanistic regimes,” which fell flat, and by 2000 had come up with “chaocracy” (the rule of chaos and mobs). All the while, a consensus built around the too-broad rubric of “hybrid regimes.”

Typologies can sometimes help one grasp how such regimes sustain themselves or implode or are overthrown. For example, scholars have shown that authoritarian regimes that rely on hereditary succession tend to be more stable. But such insights do not translate into policy action. For that purpose, it is better to identify not types but constituent parts—what can be thought of as the five dimensions of authoritarianism—and their susceptibility to countermeasures. Admittedly, a policy-oriented framework will not satisfy those who prefer strict definitions and typologies. Nonetheless, it could serve as a foundation from which to push today’s authoritarian regimes onto the back foot.

The first dimension is obvious: no authoritarian regime could survive without security police and military forces capable of domestic repression. Compared with their social spending or economic investment, authoritarian regimes extravagantly overcommit funds to the agencies, equipment, and training they need for massive repression. They expend staggering resources on surveillance and censorship of the Internet, social media, and related technologies and services, often alongside paid and voluntary human monitoring of neighborhoods and workplaces. Coercive apparatuses vary widely among authoritarian countries, which inherit legacy structures from previous regimes or previous incarnations of their own regimes. Think of the Iranian shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, which the revolutionaries angrily dissolved in 1979 only to carry over many of its practices, prisons, and even personnel into a new organization, SAVAMA.

Authoritarian regimes relentlessly reorganize their repressive apparatuses, but rarely to streamline their functions. On the contrary, they deliberately assign agencies and operatives to overlapping jurisdictions, ensuring that they are, to an extent, at daggers drawn. Sometimes such agencies engage in sabotage against one another, as officials regard going on the offensive as the best defense against colleagues poised to go after them. In communist China, the jockeying for supremacy between the security police and the People’s Liberation Army has at times been decisive in power struggles. In Russia, the civilian repressive apparatus persecutes the military, which leaps at every chance for revenge. Meanwhile, anticorruption bodies—always more than one—are feared by all, including one another.

Professionals in repression, whether fingernail pullers or computer hackers (sometimes one and the same), have the means to take down not just their rivals but also their superiors and even their country’s ruler. They at once ensure regime survival and pose the greatest threat to it. That is why, for example, presidential bodyguards are almost never integrated into the main repressive apparatus. In Russia under Putin, just as it was under Stalin, the bodyguard directorate (today known as the FSO) stands alone, separate from the main successors to the KGB (the FSB and SVR), the multiple counterintelligence units, and the also self-standing National Guard. Paranoia rules.

Cronies and mediocrities might run the critical security police or armed forces, a circumstance observed in Putin’s war against Ukraine, which was planned and overseen until May 2024 by a former construction foreman with whom the dictator had spent some bare-chested time in the Siberian wilderness. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the repressive muscle or the capacity for learning and correction of these mechanisms and militaries. They monitor, disappear, imprison, and butcher. They are highly fractious, however, roiling with jealousies, resentments, and enmities, which rulers aggravate to exercise control. Intelligence agencies in the United States and other Western countries closely follow these cleavages, of course, and can sometimes recruit the disaffected or the ambitious to provide insider information.

These regimes take great pains to cultivate façades of unity and approval, which makes them vulnerable when disunity and disapproval are exposed. Many officials in authoritarian regimes chafe at the conflation of the ruler’s interests with the country’s, at cronies hoarding all the spoils, and at the concealed national debilitation that ensues. Washington and its allies should systematically call out these divisions, as well as the deep resentments felt within regimes over malfeasance and corruption, aiming to drive wedges between the elites and the ruler. Of course, naming specific disaffected individuals could cause their imprisonment or execution. Carelessness could backfire. Still, discontent, thwarted ambition, and offended patriotism are no secret, and available to exploit. When such regimes figuratively or literally push their officials out of windows—as they do without any Western pressure—democracies need to emphasize how such barbarism reveals weakness, how it constitutes a tacit admission that dissatisfaction suffuses officialdom, and how the regimes fear its spread. “Outwardly strong, inwardly brittle,” an internal Chinese critique, should be the name of a relentless public campaign that forces the Chinese regime to continually deny it.

The second dimension of........

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