At the beginning of the 1990s, the world seemed to be freeing itself of governments and political systems that concentrated power in individual leaders or parties. The Second World War had vanquished the fascist experiments of Italy and Germany and the military oligarchy of Japan. The end of the Cold War appeared to demonstrate the superiority of liberal democracy over the repressive communist states of the USSR and Eastern Europe. China’s leaders massacred their own citizens on Tiananmen Square, true, but they also tacitly admitted the failure of Mao’s economic policies, and they were then moving in the direction of greater openness to the West. South Africa finally brought an end to minority white rule, and dictators such as Mu’ammar Gaddhafi or Ayatollah Khomeini were isolated. Fidel Castro still held power in Cuba, but liberal-parliamentary democracies remained confident that leaders such as he and their states could be kept in check through effective embargoes and waiting for them to pass into extinction. 

Yet now, 35 years after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, strongman authoritarian regimes are making a comeback. The rhetoric of “pure blood” and “enemies of the people” has returned to political discourse around the world, even in Europe, which witnessed firsthand its disastrous consequences. Political analysts have published libraries’ worth of books and articles to explain the rise of authoritarianism, but they have said less about what happens to ordinary people in those systems. How do they survive? And why don’t they simply overthrow their obviously tyrannical governments? 

In his 1982 book, Shah of Shahs, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski describes a scene at a bus stop on a sweltering summer day in Tehran toward the end of the last Shah of Iran’s dictatorial rule. A small crowd of impatient passengers waits quietly for the bus that is, as ever, delayed. An older man, wiping his brow, breaks the silence, calling the heat in the city “oppressive.” The crowd stirs uncomfortably at his choice of words, and within seconds plainclothes police agents take the hapless man by the arms and escort him away. Was he merely a fool who failed to see the trap that he had set for himself? Or was he perhaps a provocateur, angling for a reckless soul to take up the metaphor and turn it into something more overtly seditious? The scene illustrates the peril and complexity of life in an authoritarian state. Eyewitnesses to such moments will recognize the cues, the participants, and the emotions of a society in which a single leader or party apparatus, bowing to no law above themselves, determines the rules. But they are not as obvious to those who have lived their lives free of arbitrary power.

Kapuscinski’s bus-stop scenario offers us a glimpse of an autocratic society in miniature. From a distance, we see two groups of actors: a powerful state exercising control through the threat of violence and the broader public, cowering and subdued, trying to get by without drawing unwanted attention from the first. When we look more closely, however, the picture becomes more complicated. Random arrest, torture, unjust incarceration, and execution are the fates of far too many in authoritarian states. Yet many more end up in different relationships with their governments. 

Most of us imagine ourselves among history’s “good guys,” whose firm convictions would prevent us from ever collaborating with an unjust regime. The telltale signs of such a state seem so obvious in hindsight: a controlled press, limitations on basic rights and protections, concentration of power in an individual leader or oligarchy, growth of a police force to persecute real or imagined opponents of the state, and so on. Reality tends to fly in the face of such self-assurances, however. We err on the side of personal safety whenever possible, and a powerful mix of patriotism and fear makes it all too easy for us to compromise our convictions. 

The fear that tyrannical regimes deploy is not primarily the fear of the state itself (though that does benefit them) but, rather, fear of enemies abroad and those within who would abet them. 

When revolutionary France declared war on Austria and Prussia in 1792, the threat galvanized French support for their new state and its increasingly radical leadership, who later took Louis XVI and thousands of others to the guillotine. Otto von Bismarck raised the specter of international Catholicism in the 1870s to consolidate state power in the newly unified German Reich. Communist states, despite the ideological rejection of nationalism, used the threat from the capitalist West to justify unprecedented violence against so-called “enemies of the people” (under Stalin) or “capitalist roaders” (during China’s Cultural Revolution). And though Hitler’s expansionism was the prime source of international hostility to Germany in the 1930s, the Nazis blamed internal and external enemies and ratcheted up antisemitism by portraying Jews as tools of both Western capitalists and Russian Bolsheviks. Vladimir Putin has followed his Soviet predecessors by bringing media outlets under state control and using them to paint a world that is hostile to Russia’s very existence as a state.  

Even when the trains don’t run on time, store shelves are empty, hospitals barely function, and corruption runs rampant, media in authoritarian states nevertheless deflect criticism by emphasizing the existential threats from internal and external foes. These foes make armed defense the greatest priority. Media and regimes define patriotism as the glorification of the military, sacrifice for the nation, faith in the wisdom of the leadership, and belief that the people’s “freedom” depends on unquestioned support for the state, all of which are essential to the country’s continued existence.

This formula works because few of us are willing to be identified as unpatriotic. Few of us would openly express a preference for invasion by a foreign power. And because international hostility in such instances is often a reality, the emotions with which ordinary people invest their patriotism are just as real. They may strengthen as the tensions mount, even when people’s attitudes toward the state are highly critical. 

Survival in a tyrannical regime does not require enthusiastic collaboration. Zealous elites may be necessary for basic functioning, but authoritarian states rely just as much on passive acceptance from the population, as though their domination was as inevitable as the forces of nature. Survival does demand learning basic cues—when to cheer, when to mourn, which subjects are taboo and which require a show of solemn reverence, when to wave the flag, and when to invoke the officially designated heroes of past and present. The longer the state survives and the more successful it is in driving out alternative worldviews, the more such cues become unconscious habit, behaviors intertwined to varying degrees with people’s personalities and principles. 

The passengers waiting for the bus in Tehran were thus not simply recoiling in horror at the misstep of an unfortunate with whom they sympathized and identified. Some, no doubt, felt that way. Others likely welcomed the arrest or might even have denounced the man themselves had the agents not appeared. Most, however, had probably heard of or witnessed similar moments and received this one with a degree of equanimity. It was, perhaps, a fate deserved, if not for actively supporting the enemy, then for sheer stupidity.   

There is no foolproof recipe for survival in autocratic states. The truth is that too many people do not survive them, even when they speak the regime’s language and try to play by its ever-shifting rules. Arbitrariness makes organizing opposition difficult, if not impossible, and it gives the instruments of state power an aura of omniscience and omnipotence. 

But if tyrants depend on passive acceptance to exercise their will, democratic societies must inoculate their citizens against tyranny by upholding the same principles that inspired republican revolutionaries of the past: they must ensure that media remain protected from state control or manipulation; dissent is not subject to isolation or persecution; the military, while honored, is subject to civilian control and not beatified; and no one is above the law or even criticism.