Introduction
The question posed offers a choice between two explanations — either liberalism as a political philosophy has proven compatible with autocratic rule, or the liberal establishment has failed on its duties to safeguard the liberal order. The thesis that I will try to defend is that we have a loaded question and that the real reason for the rise of strongmen lies in a completely different place, to which neither of the two proposed alternatives reaches. The first step is to go back in history - to recall examples of the emergence of strong authoritarian leaders long before the birth of liberalism. What follows is an analysis that establishes that the common denominator of all contemporary cases is not the rejection of liberal values, but the voter’s perception of the institutional weakness of the state and the resulting negative vote. I will then trace the causes of institutional disintegration. Finally, I will examine the question of why the same social storm sometimes gives birth to strongmen, sometimes to reformers, and sometimes passes without a lightning at all.
I. The Millennia Before Liberalism
Let us travel to Athens in the sixth century BC. The situation is grim: a debt crisis that led small farmers into debt slavery, Solon’s reforms that forgave debts but failed to end the war between aristocratic families, and nearly three decades of a series of weak and short-lived governments. Pisistratus presents himself to his fellow citizens as the victim of a political assassination, obtains personal armed guards from the Ecclesia, and with these guards takes over the Acropolis. Aristotle draws from this case a pattern we would now call “populism”: an ambitious politician rises as a champion of the wronged against a discredited elite, then converts that trust into personal power.
Rome during the late Republic follows a similar path. Octavian Augustus comes to power after a century of continuous civil wars - Marius against Sulla, Caesar against Pompey, the triumvirs among themselves. Society is so exhausted that it accepts the loss of republican freedom as a desirable price for ending the bloodshed. Indicative of the very nature of the phenomenon is that he shapes his power not as a change, but as a “restoration of the Republic”. The Senate continues to meet, traditions are formally preserved, but the content is emptied and concentrated in the hands of one man.
The same pattern is repeated independently outside the European world - in Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical theory of the rise and fall of Muslim dynasties, in the Chinese doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven.
The above brief retrospective suggests that the emergence of strongmen is not a modern phenomenon. It has a millennial history long before the birth of liberalism and is reproduced with equal ease in aristocratic, republican, Islamic, Confucian and monarchical social systems. The conditions that produce it are therefore not internal to any of them. Liberalism was constructed precisely against this process—rights, the separation of powers, and an independent judiciary were erected in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a barrier to arbitrary one-man rule. The question is why this barrier is no longer holding, why the strongmen trend seems to be gaining momentum right now.
II. The Common Denominator
The Bulgarian case, which I know best, because I was born and raised in Bulgaria, and which rarely appears in international comparative literature, is a good starting point. Boyko Borisov came to power as Prime Minister in 2009 not at a time of economic collapse, but immediately after a centrist, liberal government that, by common recognition, had stabilised state finances and brought the country into the European Union. The vote for him was a classic negative vote: a reaction against the corruption of the previous government and rooted in the deeper feeling that the state did not rule in the public interest. The judicial system had not brought to justice the powerful of the day for their abuse of power. In the administration, personal connections outweigh the law and the public interest. The voter of 2009 did not vote for a programme in any recognisable sense, but delegated to one person a task that the institutions had failed to handle. If we dig deeper, we will find that Bulgaria’s previous years of macroeconomic success are more of a pretty facade. In 2008, the European Commission froze payments to a member state for the first time in its history — about half a billion euros — due to established corrupt practices in the use of funds.
Other cases repeat the pattern, but each with its own national colouring. In Turkey Erdoğan wins the elections of 2002, after the financial collapse and the chronic corruption of the Kemalist establishment. India in 2014 raises up Modi, after a run of corruption scandals. Russia consolidates the power of Putin on the feeling of national humiliation at the enlargement of NATO. And in the United States the argument is over identity and migration. And yet in every one of these cases, we find the same thing: the voter’s perception of the institutional weakness of the state.
To this picture we will add another observation, which occurs too often to be accidental: almost everywhere the emergence of the strongman is preceded by a series of weak governments and impersonal leaders who have postponed the accumulating problems without solving them.
At first glance, the answer seems to be clearly weighted that the reasons for the rise of the strongman lie in the failure of liberal politicians. But is the failure itself a cause, or rather a consequence of something more comprehensive? Something that affects the very foundations of modern society. And if so, how far is it related to the principles of liberalism?
III. What Corrodes Institutions
The first and most tangible reason is the material one. A modern version of the materialist explanation is due to Albena Azmanova, according to whom neoliberal capitalism has mutated into “precarity capitalism”. The insecurity of work, income and housing has spread far beyond the traditionally vulnerable strata and has made citizens rationally inclined to exchange the predictable but fruitless democratic procedure for the promise of radical change, even if it is authoritarian. The thesis has the merit of making testable predictions - the strongman should appear where and when material insecurity is most tangible. But this very merit also makes it vulnerable. The Bulgarian vote of 2009 was not due to the poverty of the population, but to the voters’ demand for justice. India’s economy was growing by about seven per cent a year when Modi was elected. Sociology explains this apparent paradox: the essence of Ted Gurr’s concept of “relative deprivation” is that political violence and rebellion do not arise from absolute poverty or deprivation per se, but from the gap between people’s expectations and their actual situation. The wider this gap, the greater the sense of frustration.
The most systematic way to test the material hypothesis, however, is to compare the longest-term economic indicator — the Kondratiev waves (according to the generally accepted periodisation) — and to see whether the periods of strongmen’s emergence coincide with their declining shoulders. The bottom of the first wave around 1848 (the connection is more suggestive than rigorously proven) gave birth to Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire. The descending arm of the third wave, between the two world wars, gives the densest cluster of strongmen in modern history — Mussolini, Pilsudski, Salazar, Vargas, Hitler, Franco. And the descending arm of the fifth wave, after the 2008 financial crisis, gives us the entire contemporary cluster from Orbán to Bolsonaro. So far, the correlation seems strong. But the fourth wave leads to exactly the opposite results: its descending arm after 1973 does not produce a single strongman in the democratic world, but quite the opposite: the fall of the southern European dictatorships in 1974–78, of the Latin American juntas in the eighties, of the Soviet bloc in 1989. The conclusion that this counterexample imposes is that the material side is a very strong basis of institutional weakness and sets the rhythm of its crises, but it is not the only one and does not act in one direction. The economic storm is hitting all political systems, and what exactly it will bring down depends on something else that economics itself cannot describe.
This “something else” begins to emerge when we move from economics to political science. Samuel Huntington, in his 1968 “Political Order in Changing Societies”, begins with a statement that shocked his contemporaries: “The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government” (Huntington 1). Institutional maturity, for Huntington, is a measurable quantity with four criteria: adaptability, complexity, autonomy and coherence. Instability occurs when public participation and public expectations, reinforced precisely by economic development, begin to grow faster than the capacity of institutions to process them. It is in this widening gap, and not in poverty, that what he first called ‘political decline’ is born. His conclusion turns materialist logic upside down. Economic growth doesn’t cure institutional weakness. When institutions are immature, growth actually deepens the weakness — it mobilises expectations no one can fulfil. The economy, in other words, is the measure of decline, but not its core — and that is precisely why the Indian voters of 2014, richer than ever, were also angrier than ever.
If Huntington argues that the decisive factor is not material, Robert Putnam shows how it can be captured in numbers. Putnam has dedicated his career to the concept of “social capital”—the network of connections, norms and trust between people that makes collective action possible. In 2000, in “Bowling Alone”, he documented its disintegration in America through hundreds of seemingly small indicators, from membership in parent associations to the iconic fact that gave the book its title: Americans are bowling more than ever, but less often in leagues and more often alone. Later, in “The Upswing”, Putnam and Shaylyn Garrett extend the measurement, constructing four independent statistical series—economic equality, political coherence, social cohesion and cultural altruism—and find that the four series swing together, like a pendulum from individualism to solidarity and back again. The peak is in the 1960s, and the two lows are, respectively, the Gilded Age and our present time. But what is crucial to our argument is that the curve does not follow the economic cycle. The Great Depression—the worst material collapse in American history—lies on the rising arm of solidarity, and the decades of unprecedented prosperity after 1980 coincide with its steepest decline. The material well-being and the spiritual cohesion of a society, Putnam shows with numbers, are two different quantities with two different trajectories—and institutions depend more on the latter.
Here we must ask a question that cannot be avoided: is the spiritual erosion itself a product of liberalism? Critics like Patrick Deneen claim exactly this. The doctrine that raised the autonomous individual into a basic principle dissolves the communities it depends on. So liberalism does not fail. It succeeds, and its success is the problem. The argument is serious, but the empirical record does not support it. The peak of solidarity in Putnam’s curve—the 1960s—is also a triumph of the liberal order, showing that liberal doctrine is compatible with high social capital. On the other hand, the most complete destruction of public trust in the twentieth century was the work not of liberalism but of its antipodes: communism and fascism.
The destroyer of communities, in my view, is not the liberal doctrine, but the direction of change in the modern world - urbanisation, mobility, mass media, social networks. Think about your recent visits to a cafe or restaurant, and whether you see people talking to each other or just bodies absorbed in their phones. The reasons for the decline in “social capital” may be very different, but liberalism is not one of them. The same applies to liberal politicians, regardless of how well or poorly they fulfil their duties to society. They do not fit into either the materialistic or the spiritual explanation for the erosion of state institutions. Rather, we can liken them to the first drops of rain in an approaching social storm.
IV. The Lightning
But does every social storm lead to the emergence of strongmen? America’s Gilded Age—the first trough in the Putnam curve—had all the ingredients of the strongman scenario and yet did not produce a strongman, but rather the Progressive Era. In more recent times, Southern Europe after 2008: Greece, Spain and Portugal suffered the same economic blow with equally compromised ruling parties—ideal conditions for the perfect storm. Discontent everywhere found an alternative—SYRIZA in Athens, Podemos in Madrid, a leftist majority in Lisbon—but never a strongman of the Hungarian or Turkish type. What might be the possible explanations?
David Easton distinguishes two layers of public support: specific, referring to a particular government and its specific policies, and diffuse—the deeper reservoir of loyalty to the state order and institutions. His key claim is that society survives crises painlessly as long as the diffuse reservoir is full: specific dissatisfaction topples governments but does not provoke revolution. When the diffuse reservoir is empty, however, any crisis, even a small one, has direct systemic repercussions—a scandal no longer brings down a minister but calls into question the very public order. Easton’s theory provides us with a satisfactory explanation for the anomalies in the fourth Kondratiev wave described above. The storm of economic stagnation hits all countries around the world, but a change in the political order takes place only in societies with an empty diffuse reservoir, such as the Latin American juntas and the Soviet bloc. Western democracies got Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but this only led to new policies, not to a change in the political regime.
But there are other examples where the above explanation is not enough. In Southern Europe, after 2008, the diffuse reservoir has almost been emptied, and there are no changes in the political order. According to Peter Turchin, the key factor here is the elite choice. Within the framework of his structural-demographic theory, Turchin studies long historical eras and proves that long periods of instability are systematically preceded by the same phenomenon - the overproduction of elites. Society produces more ambitious, educated and materially secure contenders for power than it is able to offer them positions, and the surplus turns into an embittered counter-elite. The counter-elite is looking for a figure through whom to break into power. Whether the accumulated discontent will receive a reformer or a strongman depends to a decisive extent on what kind of candidate this divided elite presents to it: the American elite of the early twentieth century produced the reformer Theodore Roosevelt; the German elite of the early thirties decided that it could use Hitler and control him. The results of these decisions are known to all.
There remains one factor absent from all historical parallels: the transformation of the media environment. Today’s strongman candidate can build a parallel audience on social networks, completely bypassing traditional institutions. It is naive to think that the mass media alone are sufficient to change the political system. The basis always remains the institutional weakness of the state, caused by material or spiritual reasons. The new moment, however, is the elimination of the need for intermediaries between the strongman candidate and the electorate in the form of traditional political parties. If Levitsky and Ziblatt are right that democracies survive to the extent that parties guard the entrance to state governance, then the fragmented media environment is the first factor in the entire history of the phenomenon that weakens the very possibility of guardianship through an entirely new architecture.
Conclusion
The rise of strongmen is a recurring political process with a millennial history, which requires the coincidence of two independent conditions and one trigger.
The first condition is institutional decomposition: the emptying of the diffuse reservoir of trust, in which each crisis no longer brings down governments, but questions the political order itself. It is preceded by long sequences of weak governments, accelerated by material collapses, but deeply fed by the erosion of social cohesion.
The second condition is the configuration of the elite at the moment of discharge: the overproduction of elites gives birth to an embittered counter-elite, and the counter-elite seeks a figure through which to break into power. It does so, moreover, in an increasingly fragmented media environment, one that lets it bypass the traditional guardians of the entrance to state governance. Whether the accumulated discontent will receive a reformer or a strongman depends on the kind of candidate presented to it.
The trigger, in the end, is the only place left to chance. It determines when and where the lightning will strike — when and where the next strongman will take power. Statistics, chaos theory, and seismology today study precisely the limits of this predictability — how far accumulating tension can be detected before it is released. But their application to political crises remains a matter for future research.
In this framework, the answer to the original question crystallises as follows. The rise of strongmen is not a failure of liberalism as a doctrine, nor is it the fault of individual liberal politicians. It is, strictly speaking, a failure of the elite as a whole: of its inability to keep institutions mature during the years of calm and to produce a reformer in the hour of the storm. The strongman does not defeat liberalism or liberal politicians—he moves into the vacuum left by an elite that has failed to fulfil either of its two tasks.
Works Cited
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Azmanova, Albena. Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia. Columbia UP, 2020.
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Easton, David. A Systems Analysis of Political Life. Wiley, 1965.
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Ibn Khaldun. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Translated by Franz Rosenthal, abridged and edited by N. J. Dawood, Princeton UP, 1969.
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018.
Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Putnam, Robert D., and Shaylyn Romney Garrett. The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. Simon & Schuster, 2020.
Sen, Kunal. “How India’s Economy Has Fared under Ten Years of Narendra Modi.” United Nations University, 7 May 2024, unu.edu/article/how-indias-economy-has-fared-under-ten-years-narendra-modi.
Turchin, Peter. Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History. Beresta Books, 2016.