One of the things I like about blogging, as opposed to academic writing, is the freedom to try out partly developed ideas and speculative hypotheses. On the whole, I think it’s worked well for me. But it does entail the risk of getting things badly wrong, as I did in this post a few years back, predicting the end of tyranny in the historical sense “absolute rule by an individual who has seized power, rather than acquiring it by inheritance or election”. Not only did I underestimate the number of such rulers who were still around (a point made in comments by Doug Muir), but, by ruling out election, I drew a spurious distinction about the way in which such rulers come to power.

More importantly, I posted at what looks in retrospect like a turning point. Dictatorship, or at least, authoritarian personal rule, seems to be re-emerging all around the world, mostly through the suppression of opposition by rulers who originally came to power through democratic elections

I was reminded of all this by the election of Trump in the US, which happened to occur on the same day (9 November or 18 Brumaire in the revolutionary calendar) as the coup that brought Bonaparte to power in France. That was followed by the death of Fidel Castro, the last big name among the old-style Bonapartist rulers about whom I was writing.
[click to continue…]