Thirty years ago we thought the era of the dictator was well and truly over. We were wrong. Ferdinand Mount on the worrying return of Caesarism

Caesars are back, big Caesars and little Caesars, in big countries and little countries, in advanced nations and backward nations. The world seems to be full of self-proclaimed Strong Men strutting their stuff, or waiting in the wings, or licking their wounds and plotting a comeback after their humiliating fall.

Right up to the last minute, we really believed that it couldn’t happen here, or now. How can these uncouth figures with their funny hair, their rude manners and their bad jokes take such a hold on the popular imagination? How can anyone bear to listen to their endless resentful rants?

Surely he (it’s mostly a he, but not always) can’t get away with it? People will see through him before it’s too late. He’s so obviously a con artist, a charlatan, a little corporal from God knows where. It’s not even as if he bothers to conceal his intentions. He wants to be king of the world, and he lets us know it. How on earth can we fall for his tawdry gimmicks?

In any case, surely our institutions are too strong to crumble under such a trumpery assault? Our liberties are too well dug in. The voters are educated now, and too sophisticated to be caught by any passing demagogue.

Besides – and this is the high-flown academic argument – the Caesar is a throwback. He has been consigned to the dustbin of history. The evolution of modern democratic societies cannot be reversed. Francis Fukuyama taught us in The End of History (1992) that there is no alternative to liberal democracy. We may experience setbacks and temporary breakdowns of constitutional order, unpleasant little spurts of nationalism or religious conflict may erupt here and there, but the long-term direction of travel is clear and securely established. We had reserved seats on a smooth passage to modernity, many of us in first class.

Well, that’s how the comfortable classes thought 20 or 30 years ago, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, if we thought at all. We don’t think like that any more. The road ahead now seems bumpy, unpredictable, often laden with menace. Neither the “liberal” nor the “democratic” part of liberal democracy seems quite so secure.

On the contrary, modern Caesars, ruling by rough methods and with scant regard for liberal pieties – or any pieties at all – have settled themselves in power with remarkably little resistance. Of the 91 dictators down the ages portrayed in Iain Dale’s new study, 29 have come to power in the past 30 years – that is, since Fukuyama’s essay was published.

This is an uncomfortable prospect. It was assumed that the discrediting of fascism, and then of communism, and the lack of any alternative ideology, had left the field clear for liberal democracy, because liberal democracy now had no plausible competitors. But the little Caesars of today seem to get along quite nicely without any proper ideology worth the name. For what consistent line have Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, President Xi and even Boris Johnson been operating on, beyond a shouty sort of nationalism and a carefully advertised hostility to immigrants – a mixture familiar to us from ancient times? The great Pericles himself instituted a law barring anyone who was not a pure-born Athenian from claiming citizenship (his own foreign-born wife fell foul of the law).

But why should this surprise us so much? Dictators of one sort or another have been an ever-lurking threat throughout history. They interrupted and betrayed the constitutional traditions of ancient Greece and the Roman Republic: Peisistratos, Critias and the Thirty Tyrants in Athens: Sulla, Marius and Julius Caesar in Rome. As early as the time of Thucydides and Plato, the word tyrannos had mutated from a neutral term for “king” into our modern pejorative sense of “tyrant”. Absolutist rulers broke up the constitutional city states of medieval Germany and Italy, and brought in their train time-serving sycophants who rewrote history to justify their actions. Witness Machiavelli’s craven sucking up to the Medici after they grabbed power, though nothing could be quite as repellent as Machiavelli’s adulation of Cesare Borgia. Only by smoothing history into a linear narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end can we avoid being aware of the recurring disruptive threat of the would-be Caesar.

How do these Caesars gain power? What are their vital ingredients? How do they normalise their breaches with constitutional tradition? To answer questions like these, we must free ourselves from the comforting illusions of historicism – the sort of illusion by which we have seen Cromwell smoothed into our parliamentary tradition in total defiance of almost everything he did. The first thing that every would-be Caesar understands is that patterns are there to be smashed. And we must understand that too.

This is an extract from Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall – From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson (Bloomsbury Continuum, £12.99) by Ferdinand Mount. Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Ferdinand Mount will be our guest on this week’s “A Drink with the Idler”  Thursday 25 January, 6-7pm. Free to subscribers.

Our January/February 2024 issue is available in Waitrose, Waterstones, Smiths Travel outlets, select Smiths high street branches and around 100 indie stores. Click here for your nearest stockist.