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Undated: Authoritarian capitalism, or illiberal capitalism, is an economic system in which a free-market economy exists alongside an authoritarian government. Not to be confused with state capitalism, within authoritarian capitalism individual rights such as freedom of speech and religion are repressed while economic rights such as private property and the functioning of market forces are maintained. There is a large degree of contention around the viability of authoritarian capitalism, with the viability of political repression alongside economic freedom being questioned in the long term.[1][2]
While having been a relatively unknown system due to the failure of authoritarianism within the First World during the Cold War, in recent times with the transition of authoritarian countries such as China and Russia to capitalist economic models authoritarian capitalism has recently rose into prominence.[3] While it was initially thought that changing to a capitalist model would lead to the formation of a liberal democracy within authoritarian countries, the continued persistence of an authoritarian capitalist models has led to this view decreasing in popularity.[5] Furthermore, some have argued that by utilising capitalist economic models authoritarian governments have improved the stability of their regimes through improving the quality of life of their citizenship.[3] Highlighting this appeal Robert Kragman stated: "There’s no question that China is an attractive model for autocrats who would like to be able to pursue economic growth without losing control of the levers of power".[5]
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Moreover, authoritarian capitalist regimes have experienced notable growth in their economic production, with the International Monetary Fund stating that authoritarian capitalist countries experienced an average 6.28% GDP growth rate compared to the 2.62% of liberal capitalist countries. In addition, with the global financial crisis many have argued the inability of liberal capitalism, with the slow response of the United States government, to quickly respond to crisis compared to more authoritarian systems has been bought into prominence. In fact, many argue that authoritarian capitalism and liberal capitalism have or will compete on the global stage.[1][3][6][7]
Overlap with state capitalism
Authoritarian governments often seek to establish control within their borders and as such will utilize state owned corporations. Thus, within countries that practice authoritarian capitalism state capitalism will emerge to some extent, manifesting from the ruling authorities desire to exercise control. The prominent utilization of state owned corporations and sovereign wealth funds within authoritarian capitalist regimes demonstrates such a tendency, with Russia decreasing its private ownership of oil from 90% to 50% while transitioning to a more authoritarian model under the leadership of Vladimir Putin.[7]
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It has also been noted by individuals such as Richard W. Carney that authoritarian regimes have a strong tendency utilise their economies as a method to increase their influence heavily investing in their economies through state owned enterprises. Carney describes the intervention of authoritarian states occurring through means he describes as extra-shareholder tactics, including regulations, government contracts and protectionist policies alongside the state engaging in shareholder activism.
Confusion with state capitalism
Within countries that practice authoritarian capitalism, state capitalism is generally also present to some extent and vice versa. As such, there is a widespread confusion between the terms with them at times being treated as synonymous by individuals such as Kevin Rudd.[9] However, there remains a fundamental difference with state capitalism being a system in which government owned entities engage in for-profit activities while authoritarian capitalism is a system where an authoritarian regime co-exists with, or at least attempts to adopt aspects of, a free market economy, highlighted in countries such as Hungary by the Transnational institute.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_capitalism
-- 2017 --
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February 2: Trumpocracy: Tracking the Creeping Authoritarianism of the 45th President ... Conspiracy theories, attacks on the press, praise for tyrants, and other troubling moves by the Trump administration.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/03/creeping-authoritarianism-trump-trumpocracy-300/
March: How to Build an Autocracy
The preconditions are present in the U.S. today. Here’s the playbook Donald Trump could use to set the country down a path toward il-liberalism.
It’s 2021, and President Donald Trump will shortly be sworn in for his second term. The 45th president has visibly aged over the past four years. He rests heavily on his daughter Ivanka’s arm during his infrequent public appearances.
Fortunately for him, he did not need to campaign hard for reelection. His has been a popular presidency: Big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits have worked their familiar expansive magic. Wages have grown strongly in the Trump years, especially for men without a college degree, even if rising inflation is beginning to bite into the gains. The president’s supporters credit his restrictive immigration policies and his TrumpWorks infrastructure program.
The president’s critics, meanwhile, have found little hearing for their protests and complaints. A Senate investigation of Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential campaign sputtered into inconclusive partisan wrangling. Concerns about Trump’s purported conflicts of interest excited debate in Washington but never drew much attention from the wider American public.
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Allegations of fraud and self-dealing in the TrumpWorks program, and elsewhere, have likewise been shrugged off. The president regularly tweets out news of factory openings and big hiring announcements: “I’m bringing back your jobs,” he has said over and over. Voters seem to have believed him—and are grateful.
“The benefit of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/
April 4: Theaters are screening '1984' to protest Trump ... Organizers said they hope the international event will help "foster communication and resistance against current efforts to undermine the most basic tenets of our society." ... "1984," about a government that manufactures facts, has "never been timelier," event's organizers say
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/04/us/1984-theater-protest-trnd/?iid=ob_homepage_deskrecommended_pool
-- 2018 --
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January 11: Trump Meets Every Criteria for an Authoritarian Leader, Harvard Political Scientists Warn
January 1: Why Is Trump’s Authoritarianism So Hard for Some to Recognize?
Corey Robin asks, “If authoritarianism is looming in the U.S., how come Trump looks so weak?” He has posed this question many times in the past year, and always to the same effect: Trump looks weak because he is weak, and his weakness proves that “authoritarianism” is not “looming.”
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Robin likes to take aim at the rhetoric of liberal journalists like Matthew Yglesias, who recently tweeted that Trump is “consolidating an authoritarian regime.” Robin is correct to challenge such exaggerated rhetoric. The U.S. is not (yet?) an “authoritarian regime,” much less one that is “consolidating” (as Robin knows, no political scientist worth her salt would speak of such “consolidation.”) He is also correct to note that the U.S. political system is far from the crisis-ridden Weimar Republic (formed in 1918 after a catastrophic world war and only 15 years old when the Nazis came to power); that Trump is not Hitler; and that Year One of the Trump administration has been nothing like Year One of Hitler’s “Third Reich.”
http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/01/why-is-trumps-authoritarianism-so-hard-for-some-to-recognize/
November 18: Is Donald Trump an authoritarian? Experts examine telltale signs
Are those who compare the president to anti-democratic strongmen overreacting or should we already be worrying?
With disorienting speed over the past two weeks, the US has spun from facing a fake migrant invasion, to a blue-wave election, to an attack on that election by the president. Then it was on to the appointment of a lackey attorney general, a fiasco at a first world war memorial event in Paris, and the White House disseminating a doctored video to justify silencing a CNN reporter.
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In one sense, it does not matter what political ideology Donald Trump partakes in – which label is applied to it, what historians later might call it. To summarize the views of philosophers, historians and analysts: the currents of history are flowing, and all of America is paddling; we can debate what all that was about when, and if, we make shore.
The answer that emerges through conversations with experts in the history of fascism is that rhetoric is indeed powerful, particularly from the president, and must not be ignored; but since the authoritarian style of leadership relies on intimidation and fear, there is a danger of overreaction.
“The authoritarian wants us to lose our faith in our ears and our eyes, what we read and what we observe, so that we can be more dependent on him,” Ben-Ghiat said. “‘Reality is what I say it is.
“So it’s very, very dangerous that he is doing this with regard to the biggest index of democracy, which is free and fair elections.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/18/is-donald-trump-an-authoritarian-experts-examine-telltale-signs
-- 2019 --
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April 5: Trump made two remarkably authoritarian remarks in one day
President Donald Trump made two remarkably authoritarian comments on Friday, first urging Congress to “get rid of judges” — specifically, immigration judges — and later demeaning the entire media as the “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”
But in a sign of how normalized the behavior of this president has become, neither remark amounted to much more than a blip on the news radar.
https://www.vox.com/2019/4/5/18297113/trump-authoritarian-comments-immigration-judges-media
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May 1: Reading the redacted report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller on the Russia investigation was a relief. Not because what I read convinced me that the report contained “a complete and total exoneration”—as President Trump falsely claimed—but because the Donald Trump character in the Mueller Report was exactly the same as the Donald Trump character I had seen and written about for the past 3 1/2 years.
I’m a rhetoric professor who teaches classes on argumentation, propaganda, political communication, and other subjects related to democratic practice in America. Since November 2015, when Donald Trump was still on the campaign trail, I’ve watched and analyzed his rhetoric. While Trump has marketed himself as the apotheosis of American exceptionalism—as the nation’s hero—he uses rhetorical tactics more often associated with unheroic authoritarian leaders, tactics that are designed to gain compliance (which is a kind of force) rather than to persuade. The result of such behavior and communication in a democracy is the slow – or sometimes rapid – erosion of democratic norms.
https://www.justsecurity.org/63860/mueller-report-illustrates-trumps-authoritarian-rhetorical-tactics/
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May 7: Will Trump's Authoritarian Impulses Derail His Deregulatory Successes?
Tariffs, threats to use antitrust regulations against big tech firms, and an interest in social media regulation could overshadow one of the adminstration's big victories
The only thing that's likely to stop President Donald Trump's deregulatory push is Trump himself.
Trump has presided over two years of near-record low growth in the size of the federal regulatory state, and his administration has hacked away at both the total number and the annual cost of federal regulations, rules, and so-called "regulatory dark matter" like regulatory guidance letters and notices. According to an annual report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute assessing the size and cost of federal regulations, released Tuesday, Trump has delayed or withdrawn more than 1,500 Obama-era rules that were in the pipeline, and has kept his promise to repeal two rules for every new one passed.
But there are warning signs that progress might be slowing, says Clyde Wayne Crews, CEI's vice president of policy and the author of the annual "Ten Thousand Commandments" report.
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"Despite the progress made on regulatory reform under President Trump, American consumers and businesses are still on the hook for the 'hidden tax' of federal regulation," said Crews in a statement. "And that progress is further threatened by President Trump's own regulatory impulses on issues ranging from antitrust enforcement to trade restrictions to food and drug matters, and more."
Those impulses have driven the president to impose numerous restrictions on foreign trade, including tariffs that are costing the U.S. economy an estimated $1.4 billion each month. This week, he made news by threatening to hit American businesses and consumers with a new round of import taxes on goods from China.
Elsewhere, Trump has threatened to use antitrust laws to go after successful businesses like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. He's overseen the creation of a new "technology task force" at the Federal Trade Commission to scrutinize mergers and has criticized the corporate alliance between Comcast and NBC. Trump has also suggested regulating Facebook and other social media platforms—something that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is all too eager for—and has floated the idea of nationalizing the rollout of 5G telecommunications technology, instead of letting mobile internet providers handle it.
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On all those fronts, the CEI report warns, Trump may be undoing his own deregulatory success by growing the size of the federal government and inflating its power to interfere in the affairs of private businesses.
https://reason.com/2019/05/07/will-trumps-authoritarian-impulses-derail-his-deregulatory-successes/
May 13: President Trump Meets Viktor Orbán, His Authoritarian Model
President Trump admires authoritarians like Hungary's Viktor Orbán, whom he met in the White House and praised for doing “a tremendous job ...
Imagine if President Bernie Sanders invited the left-wing Nicolás Maduro to the White House after previous administrations had shunned the Venezuelan strongman. Imagine Sanders then praised Maduro, not only as an ally to the United States but as a wise ruler, and compared Maduro to himself. Then you might begin to understand the chilling message delivered by President Trump through his friendly meeting with Hungarian president Viktor Orbán.
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The darkest nightmare haunting liberals since Trump’s rise has been the specter of authoritarianism. The most plausible fear is not a sudden, fascistic crackdown but a gradual upward ratchet of the governing party’s hold on the political system — what political scientists call “democratic backsliding.” And when they cast about the globe for a model of democratic backsliding, the one that always seemed most frighteningly plausible was Hungary.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/president-trump-meets-viktor-orban-authoritarian-model.html
May 14: How Trump's Embrace Of Authoritarian Rulers Has Impacted The World
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/14/723325835/how-trumps-embrace-of-authoritarian-rulers-has-impacted-the-world
May 21: Trump Took Another Terrifying Step Toward Authoritarianism at His Rally in Pennsylvania
Jailing one’s political enemies doesn’t seem plausible in America — until it does
One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is jailing one’s political enemies, an idea to which Trump is no stranger. He’s called for an investigation into Hillary Clinton for years now — especially at rallies, where he knows he can get the crowd lathered into a “Lock Her Up!” frenzy — but actually doing so seemed implausible, like something that couldn’t actually happen in America. This is no longer the case.
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After Trump accused Democrats and the FBI of treason Monday night, he stepped away from the podium to bask in a “Lock Them Up!” chant. When he returned to the microphone, he reminded his supporters that Attorney General William Barr is in his pocket, and that the new, compliant head of the Justice Department is going to “give it a very fair look” to jailing of those involved in the Russia investigation for treason.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-rally-pennsylvania-authoritarianism-837999/
May 21: Hickenlooper Slams Trump's 'Authoritarian Mentality' in 2020 Policy Speech
The Democratic former Governor of Colorado said he would also revive arms control talks with China and Russia and reject boycotts, divestment or sanctions on Israel
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper on Monday said there is an "authoritarian mentality" in the White House and the United States does not need its own "strongman," as he delivered the first major foreign policy address among two dozen Democrats vying for the 2020 presidential nomination.
"I think history clearly demonstrates that when you have a so-called strongman - a dictator - you don't have rule of law," Hickenlooper said when asked at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs if that was a better approach to foreign policy than multilateralism.
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/hickenlooper-slams-trump-s-authoritarian-mentality-in-2020-policy-speech-1.7269553
-- 2020 --
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