I highly, highly recommend this for its richly historical picture of authoritarianism, and how that history shapes where we are now as we see authoritarianism resurging around the world, armed with potent new tools of surveillance and control.

At the same time, the compelling narrative of this essay is complicated by some strong criticism of this essay (linked at the bottom of the piece).

The liberal democracies had overestimated the challenge of communism, and they underestimated the challenge of traditional authoritarianism. And this, too, was understandable. Throughout the years of the Cold War and during the era of liberal dominance that followed, the world’s autocracies were too weak to challenge liberalism as they had before. They struggled just to survive. The right-wing dictatorships that depended on the United States for money and protection had to at least pay lip service to liberal principles and norms, lest they lose that support. Some held elections when pressed, provided space to “moderate” political opponents and allowed liberal international nongovernmental organizations to operate within their borders, monitoring their human rights records, working with civil society and training political parties — all as a way of avoiding potentially fatal economic and political ostracism.

The authoritarians’ weakness reinforced the belief among liberal democracies that ideological competition had ended with the fall of communism. In the brief era of liberal hegemony that followed the end of the Cold War, we did not worry, because we did not notice, as authoritarianism gradually regained its power and its voice as liberalism’s most enduring and formidable challenge.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2019/03/14/feature/the-strongmen-strike-back/