This isn’t, in fact, all that surprising. The more capitalism shatters traditional pieties, disregards frontiers and uproots whole communities, the more strident become the defenders of family, religion and fatherland. The more narratives of God, People and Nation are spurned as outdated, the more potently they return.

Those for whom identity is flexible confront those who know who they are only too well. For every Texan CEO knocking back free booze in the VIP lounges of airports, there’s a bearded patriarch with a rifle for whom the Other is to be found just over the river. There are some glamorous nightclubs in Istanbul, while around Mardin and Diyarbakir in the Kurdish south-east of Turkey people pray on the pavements and donkeys wander through filling stations.

Tradition and modernity are complicit as well as conflicting. A world of constant flux and restless innovation is in danger of eroding the values by which it legitimates itself. This wasn’t a problem for the Victorians, who despite the pace of social change and the clamour of the marketplace still clung to certain eternal verities. They were aware that you couldn’t legitimise what you did in purely secular, pragmatic terms, not least if it included herding people into slums and workhouses. Instead, there were certain foundational principles to which they could appeal, from the laws of God to the sanctity of the family and the supreme value of the individual.

Precepts like these were particularly important if you were trying to run an empire, a discreditable affair for which you need a whole raft of high-minded rationales. It’s true that there can be an embarrassing gap between your principles and your practice, as there is in today’s United States. Having spent the week bribing officials and shafting your competitors, you gather in church on Sunday morning to celebrate the metaphysical aspect of your existence. On the whole, however, the two sides of your life peacefully coexist, rather as Jacob Rees-Mogg is Victorian toff and modern entrepreneur in a single surreal person.

There are limits, however, to this coexistence. Sooner or later, the fluid, unstable, provisional nature of life in the shopping mall and marketplace is likely to infiltrate the moral sphere as well. It’s then that people begin to talk about postmodernism. Eternal verities drop away, and along with them the stout foundations on which you used to rely for defending your way of life. Talk of God, Progress and the Destiny of the Nation starts to sound hollow in the world of Tesco and Google. It served capitalism well in its earlier, more triumphalist phase, but it doesn’t ring true in the era of Britain’s Got Talent. Instead, moral values become relative and subjective: you may object to serial killing, but personally I find it a lot of fun. This kind of thing may be harmless among friends, but it’s no way to run a country. To do that, you need a firmer framework and a tighter consensus, not least at times of political or economic crisis. Yet what if you have just relativised all that out of existence? What if modern capitalism saws off the branch on which it is sitting?

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It’s at this point that turning to nationalism, populism, religion and traditional ethics has its appeal, whether in Ankara or Washington. It’s particularly attractive if you are confronting an enemy such as Islamism, which has no trouble at all with moral absolutes and metaphysical foundations. You don’t want to be left ideologically disarmed in this struggle, even if you’ve done most of the disarming yourself. So large patches of the globe shift towards authoritarianism, which isn’t necessarily the same as coercion. In the recent Turkish elections, for instance, millions of people have just consented to be coerced, or at least consented to a political regime which works in large measure by authoritarian means.

Like any other form of government, such regimes will only survive in the long run if they can persuade enough citizens to identify with them. People must feel that their identity is at stake in supporting this power. They must find themselves reflected in the Leader, as a child may see itself in the fond look of its parents. Because power, law and the state are abstractions, it’s easier to get people to internalise them if they take on tangible form. In autocratic states, power is incarnate in a single figure; but this means that some of the people might identify not with power itself but with the individual who represents it. To avoid this happening, Nature in its infinite wisdom has made a lot of those individuals either faceless or repulsive. Erdoğan, who looks like a harassed, slightly down-at-heel schoolteacher on the point of retirement, is an example of the former. Adolf Hitler was an ill-favoured little runt, Stalin looked like a crafty walrus and Mao was in sore need of a spell in the gym.

Most of these men were dictators, not just authoritarians, and the power of a dictator is absolute. The word “absolute” means free or unrestricted, which includes being unrestricted by circumstances. To say that torturing a baby is absolutely wrong is to say that it’s wrong irrespective of any circumstances you might specify in order to justify it. Absolute power is power which is in principle unconstrained. It may rein itself in, or even show mercy and compassion, but it does these things only when it feels like it.

Nietzsche believed that the Superman should treat ordinary folk with kindness, but he saw this as an act of condescension, not as a moral obligation. It is a form of sovereignty which rests entirely on itself, and is therefore arbitrary. If it had to appeal to law or custom or tradition to validate itself, these things would take precedence over it and it would cease to be absolute. Besides, there are no laws for how the law is to be established in the first place, which means that law has a close affinity with lawlessness. Many political set-ups rely for their stability on people coming to forget the blood and tears in which they were born.

Because absolute power is unrestrained, it can be hard to distinguish it from anarchy, even though it is often anarchy which it is out to suppress. The two are sides of the same coin. In Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic Where The Wild Things Are, the hero Max becomes king of the wild things, a phrase which contains a crucially ambiguous preposition (of). Does it mean that Max is king over the wild things or the wildest thing of all? The answer, needless to say, is both.

The absolute and the anarchic are also related in another sense. Absolutists are people who fear that the only alternative to rigid laws and precise regulations is total chaos. Unless you have a rule forbidding players to pass the ball back to the goalkeeper, then — key phrase — before you know where you are, all the players will be passing back to the goalie all the time and the game will never get started. One might call this the essence of the authoritarian mind-set. Allow people their freedom and they will abuse it. The fact that they aren’t really people without it is overlooked. How could you possibly have pavements on which people can walk in opposite directions at the same time? Everyone would obstruct everyone else and nobody would ever get anywhere.

It is logical, then, that Shakespeare’s autocratic Lear is accompanied throughout most of the play by the anarchic Fool. There is more than one sense in which the two are terrible twins. For one thing, anyone who wants to be a king must be a fool, at least in Shakespeare’s day. This is one reason why Lear is mad. Monarchs attract envy and aggression, which is why tribal chiefs in pre-modern societies are sometimes ritually beaten during their coronations. This didn’t happen to King Charles, but he still managed to look like a helpless victim throughout the ceremony, as a group of men around his throne kept doing things to him and he just had to sit there and take it.

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For another thing, the Fool’s debunkery strips the mask from his master’s authority, showing it to be just as arbitrary as his own antics. The problem with sovereignty is that, being perched on a height, it can’t see itself in the eyes of other people, and so can’t have its identity confirmed by them. This is why Lear begs for someone to tell him who he is. Without dialogue with others, selfhood simply implodes, which is another reason why Lear is mad. In one or two of his other plays, Shakespeare seeks to repair this situation by drawing on the legend of the ruler who moves incognito among the common people in order to learn about their daily lives. Today, minus the incognito, this is known as a walk-about.

Those who are driven mad by power in our own time aren’t so much kings or politicians as celebrities. Like Lear at the beginning of the play, they are told only what they want to hear, and thus see themselves mirrored everywhere they look. Only by encountering otherness can one know who one is, and thus retain a degree of sanity. Otherwise, like a certain famous entertainer, you will end up asking your assistants to stop the wind from blowing.

Still, despite the fact that Stalin was a) obviously clever and b) highly successful as far as evil despots go, the idea that he was some kind of grey nonentity persisted for decades. And I think that we still have a habit of belittling tyrants and authoritarians. It makes us feel better whenever they run circles around us at some geopolitical game or other, which is quite often these days.

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Take Putin, for instance. When he was first elected, a lot of coverage focused on this bland, faceless nonentity, an ex-KGB officer of middling rank leading a decrepit ex-superpower. They kept that up for a while, then switched to mocking him for posing shirtless. Next thing you know, he’s annexed the Crimea. Similarly, Gaddafi was barely coherent, yet he was pretty good at charming Blair and Mandelson — and might still be up waving his golden gun about if we hadn’t gone and dropped a pile of bombs on Libya.

Being a dictator is a difficult job, then, and those who succeed at it should not be underestimated. There is more going on behind those dead eyes than we think, even when they seem unhinged, weird or boring. Yet there is perhaps one exception, a dictator so profoundly mediocre that it would be difficult to underestimate him: Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the leader of the ex-Soviet republic of Turkmenistan. Recently turned 63, he is a man without qualities, and even, it seems, a bit dim. However, 13 years into his reign he remains firmly in power. So how has he achieved this feat, and what can we learn from it?

Berdymukhamedov came to power in 2007, after his corpulent, megalomaniacal predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, dropped dead of a heart attack. Niyazov, a.k.a Turkmenbashi (“father of all Turkmen”) had become famous due to his extravagant personality cult. He literally renamed the month of January after himself, and renamed bread after his mother, while also authoring a truly atrocious “holy book” that he called The Ruhnama, or “book of the soul”.

That level of totalitarian excess is quite rare, and so it seemed that the Turkmen were due a break. Surely it was time for a normal dictator, less given to erecting gold statues of himself that rotated to face the sun?

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At first Berdymukhamedov was very dull. A former dentist who had risen to the position of deputy prime minister, he was made interim president when Niyazov went to his eternal reward. This was in defiance of the constitution — the job should have gone to the speaker of parliament — so perhaps some powerful forces thought he would prove to be malleable. And Berdymukhamedov was cautious at first, making only vague statements about change, while adding that the country would walk rather than run.

Definitely a bit dull, then, and perhaps in more ways than one. Months later, I interviewed some Turkmen emigres in Moscow, and one of them said this to me:

“The new president? I know someone who studied at the medical school where he was the principal. They said he was an idiot. And that the teachers said it openly, about him, and to his face — you’re an idiot, an idiot. What can we hope for from him?”

At the time I thought this was an exaggeration; emigres can be pretty bitter about the countries they have left behind, especially when they are repressive dictatorships. But as the years rolled by, and Berdymukhamedov grew more comfortable in his new job and started to adapt the structures his predecessor had left in place to his own use, well, I started to wonder.

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Berdymukhamedov’s cult was strikingly derivative and pedestrian. Niyazov was “Father of All Turkmen”; Berdymukhamedov was “protector”. Niyazov was leading Turkmenistan into the “golden age”; Berdymukhamedov was spearheading the “renaissance”. Clearly, he did not have too many ideas. And nowhere was that more obvious than in the books that he put his name to.

While Niyazov’s cult was grotesque and obscene, it was, at least, ambitious. Similarly, The Ruhnama was terrible, but its author at least knew what ought to be in such a book — history, myth, moral teachings, God, the people and his own personal story. Berdymukhamedov’s books were a lot less complicated. One of the emigres had predicted to me that since he was a medical professional his book would follow that theme — and sure enough, a series on the Turkmen herbal remedies appeared under his name. With that out of the way, he cast around for other themes, but he didn’t cast far. Turkmen were famous horse riders, so there was a book about horses. Then he produced a book about his dad. Running low on national motifs, he eventually put his name to a tome about drinking tea. The books were strikingly literal, strikingly pointless, oblivious to their own bathos. They were unselfconscious and kinda dumb. Here was a dictator with no depth at all.

Don’t just take my word for it. In 2010, Wikileaks published diplomatic cables from a US diplomat who, after referring to the Turkmen president as a “practiced liar” and “micromanager” made this memorable observation: “Berdymukhamedov does not like people who are smarter than he is. Since he’s not a very bright guy, our source offered, he is suspicious of a lot of people.”

This lack of sophistication gives Berdymukhamedov’s propaganda an impressively transparent quality. Classic cults of personality, like those of Stalin or Mao, usually serve to efface the characteristics of the leader, who is always a universal genius and superlative leader. Even Niyazov, who built his own traumatic childhood into the cult, remained a remote, aloof figure.

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Berdymukhamedov, however, is a simple sort. He enjoys his hobbies and they are reflected in the cult. He likes horses and racing cars and shooting guns and fishing and is often filmed engaged in one of these pastimes. But most of all, it seems, he likes playing music and singing. He isn’t the first musical dictator — Kim Jong-il wrote opera librettos, while Stalin was a decent tenor who liked to sing Georgian folk songs, though only for the inner circle. But Berdymukhamedov is surely the first dictator DJ, the first dictator to bust a rhyme in public, and also the first dictator to serenade his people on New Year’s Eve.

His musical oeuvre is quite broad. In 2015 Berdymukhamedov entered the Guinness Book of Records when over 4,000 of his adoring subjects (no pressure) joined him in singing a Eurodisco number he had written himself. Berdymukhamedov enjoyed the experience and he has since performed in public many times, though without so large an ensemble to share the spotlight.

On International Women’s Day, he serenaded the ladies (and some gents) with a cover version of Karakum, a Soviet rock song about the Turkmen desert. More recently, he laid some beats on the populace during Turkmenistan’s televised 2019 New Year’s Eve celebration. He has also been filmed demonstrating to soldiers how to play guitar, though often the camera mysteriously cuts away from his face whenever it comes to difficult bit.

My favorite performances, however, are his duets with his beloved grandson Kerimguly. The themes are powerful and moving: in one song, the intergenerational duo hymn the praises of his favourite horse, while in another Kerimguly sings in English while his grandpa delivers a rap dedicated to the glory of the nation. Indeed, Kerimguly appears to be getting a mini-cult of his own. Opposition sites report that he appears on TV more often than his father, Berdymukhamedov’s only son; a state news website reports that he recently won the “Golden Age” artistic award and received a gold chain and some cash.

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So clumsy and naïve is Berdymukhamedov’s cult that it serves as a particularly potent reminder of Anthony Daniels’ famous observation that the purpose of propaganda is “not to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate”. But while Turkmen citizens, condemned to live in a repressive police state run by a dullard, have little choice but to play along with Berdymukhamedov’s fantasy image of himself, the truly impressive thing is the way in which the president sometimes succeeds in getting foreign diplomats and organisations to abase themselves before him.

For instance, the regime’s response to the coronavirus pandemic is extremely stupid, even by Berdymukhamedov’s standards. The authorities deny that Turkmenistan has any Covid-19 cases but say that there might be a problem with “dust” — and so insist that everybody wear masks and gloves and practice social distancing. Apparently there’s quite a lot of dust about. And also “pneumonia”.

The mendacity, goading in its transparency, is almost impressive. But it isn’t, not really; rather it’s ridiculous, worthy of contempt. Yet Eurasianet reports that the British ambassador, after tweeting a selfie of himself wearing a face mask and urging others to do the same subsequently denied in a Twitter exchange that he was implying that Turkmenistan had the virus. Instead he urged people to “pay attention to the findings of WHO and Turkmen government experts, who are the experts here”. That’ll be the same WHO that recently sent a delegation to the country, praised the government for its high level of preparedness, didn’t say whether Covid-19 was on the loose, but then advised the Turkmen authorities to act “as if” the virus was circulating and adopt the standard protective measures.

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Thus Berdymukhamedov, despite being a “not very bright guy” gets away with it.

Sometimes, when I read about evil regimes and go looking for small consolations, I remind myself that it is not, in the end, all that enjoyable to be a dictator. Yes, you have a lot of power, but the trade-off is isolation, paranoia, a loss of humanity and a life spent looking over your shoulder. As far as punishments go, it never fits the crime, but it’s something. Yet when I look at Berdymukhamedov, I just don’t see a whole lot of angst there. Maybe he’s worried about the economy; maybe, deep down, he’s a bit nervous about Covid-19. But he long ago started to believe in his own luck and looks as though he’s enjoying himself a lot of the time.

The only comparison I can think of for dictatorial ebullience is the footage of Kim Jong-il from years ago, when he managed to get Bill Clinton to come to North Korea and eat a shit sandwich in exchange for the release of some American journalists. Kim was really enjoying himself that day; but that was a very complicated pleasure to arrange. All Berdymukhamedov has to do to feel good about himself is call up Kerimguly and sing a few songs for the cameras and he’s happy as Larry. Not quite stupid enough to mess up the repression machine he inherited from Niyazov and his Soviet predecessors, Berdymukhamedov carries on dictating with a song in his heart, and — as often as not — on his lips too.

Nevertheless, Bolsheviks and woke militants do have some things in common. In late nineteenth century Russia, under the influence of their progressive parents, a generation of educated young people was convinced of the illegitimacy of the Tsarist regime. Dostoevsky’s Demons (1871) is a vivid chronicle of the tragic and farcical process by which progressive liberals discredited traditional institutions and unleashed a wave of revolutionary terror. Not only Tsarism but any form of government came to be seen as repressive. As one of Dostoevsky’s characters put it, “I got entangled in my data…Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.”

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The woke generation have learned a similar lesson from their elders, this time about the failings of American democracy. Rejecting old-fashioned liberal values as complicit in oppression and essentially fraudulent, they extend their power not by persuasion but by socially marginalising and economically ruining their critics. As in the show trials orchestrated by Lenin’s disciple Stalin and Mao’s “struggle sessions”, woke activists demand public confession and repentance from their victims. Like the communist elites, woke insurgents aim to enforce a single worldview by the pedagogic use of fear. The rejection of liberal freedoms concludes with the tyranny of the righteous mob.

Yet the impulses that animate the woke uprising are different from those that energised Lenin or even Mao. For the Bolshevik leader — an authentic disciple of the Jacobin Enlightenment, or so he always insisted — violence was a tool, not an end in itself. In woke movements such as Antifa, on the other hand, violence seems to be mainly therapeutic in its role.

One may abhor the type of society Lenin aimed to construct as much as the methods he adopted to achieve it, as I do myself. Tens of millions were enslaved in forced labour camps, executed or starved to death in pursuit of a repellent fantasy. Even so, Lenin attempted to fashion a future that in his view was an improvement on the past.

Woke activists, in contrast, have no vision of the future. In Leninist terms they are infantile leftists, acting out a revolutionary performance with no strategy or plan for what they would do in power. Yet their difference from Lenin goes deeper. Rather than aiming for a better future, woke militants seek a cathartic present. Cleansing themselves and others of sin is their goal. Amidst vast inequalities of power and wealth, the woke generation bask in the eternal sunshine of their spotless virtue.

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The key scenes in the woke uprising that followed the killing of George Floyd are rituals of purification in which public officials have washed the feet of insurgents, and acts of iconoclasm in which public monuments have been destroyed or defaced. These are symbolic actions aiming to sever the present from the past, not policies designed to fashion a different future.

The only concrete measure proposed has been to defund and disband the police. As some of the insurrectionaries’ placards have proclaimed, there will be no more police violence when there are no more police. Once repressive institutions have been methodically dismantled, a peaceful anarchy will prevail. As could have been foreseen by anyone with a smattering of history, outbreaks of mass looting in Chicago and other cities have not borne out this confidence.

New, ‘transformative’ systems of law enforcement will confront problems not unlike those faced by the police forces that have been dissolved.  ‘Autonomous zones’ of the kind that have been announced in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis will need to resolve disputes and enforce their decisions. Local warlords and prophets — some of them no doubt armed — will become arbiters of public safety. When they overreach themselves and fail to protect even minimal levels of security, vigilantes and organised crime will fill the void. Where this proves costly or unstable, federal government may step in and impose order. In other cases, cities may be abandoned to become zones of anarchy.

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The history of the medieval millenarians illustrates this process. They were antinomians, heretical believers who anathematised the Church and considered themselves released by divine grace from any moral restraints. While asserting their superior virtue, their signature practice was self-flagellation. Forgiveness — whether of themselves other others — was notably absent.

As Norman Cohn writes in his seminal study The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957), “in Germany and southern Europe alike flagellant groups continued to exist for more than two centuries.” Probably originating in Italy in the mid-thirteenth century, the flagellant movement reached a peak in Germany in 1348-9 when it was inflamed by the Black Death. There, as in other parts of Europe, the flagellants turned on sections of the population they accused of conjuring up the pestilence, particularly Jews, many of whose communities were wiped out.

Two hundred years later, the Anabaptist prophet Jan Bockelson seized control of the city of Munster, turning it briefly into a communist theocracy in which forcible baptisms and public executions became daily spectacles. Bockelson’s rule ended when, after a long siege, the city fell to armies acting for the Church. He was tortured to death in the town square.

For Cohn, the study of medieval millenarians was an essential part of understanding modern totalitarianism. It is also useful in understanding the woke movement. Medieval flagellants and woke militants combine a sense of their own moral infallibility with a passion for masochistic self-abasement. Medieval millenarians believed the world would be remade by God when Jesus returned after a millennium of injustice (millenarians are also known as chiliasts, chiliad being a thousand years), while the woke faithful believe divine intervention is no longer necessary: their own virtue will be sufficient. In both cases, nothing needs to be done to bring about a new world apart from destroying the old one.

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There are some differences between the two movements. Mediaeval millenarians attracted much of their support from illiterate peasants and poor urban workers. The woke movement, on the other hand, is mostly composed of the offspring of middle class families schooled in institutions of higher learning. Like their medieval predecessors, woke activists believe themselves to be emancipated from established values. But, possibly uniquely in history, their antinomian rebellion emanates from an antinomian establishment.

The rise of the woke movement has not occurred as a result of a takeover of American institutions by a dictatorial government. Key American institutions have overthrown themselves, while Trump’s attempts to assert dictatorial power have so far been ineffectual. It may be that the scenes of anarchy that are part of the uprising will work in Trump’s favour in November. At least a third of the American population is opposed to woke values, a number that could increase substantially the more the uprising involves public disorder. Equally, Biden may prevail by promising a more peaceful future and find himself compelled to rein in the insurgency in order to preserve some degree of public order. Either way America will remain more or less ungovernable.

The foundational crimes of the American regime — black slavery and the seizure of indigenous groups’ lands that followed the War of Independence—are real enough. But so, in its continuing formative influence, is the mythology from which America was born. A Lockean fusion of Protestant religiosity with an Enlightenment faith in reason was the founding American religion.

Throughout most of American history Lockean liberalism has reflected the realities of power. Locke himself helped draft constitutions for Carolina that legitimated slavery, and argued that indigenous peoples could be suppressed on the ground that they had not cleared the wilderness and made their land productive. On occasion — as in the Rooseveltian settlement that followed the Second World War and made possible the civil rights movement in the Fifties and Sixties — America’s divisions were partly transcended. For the most part a redemptive myth has gone hand in hand with repression. The record suggests this will continue. Icons will be smashed and antinomian passions ventilated, while social and racial antagonisms remain brutal and intractable.

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More than the faux-Marxian musings of postmodern thinkers, it is the singular American faith in national redemption that drives the woke insurgency. The self-imposed inquisitorial regime in universities and newspapers — where editors and journalists, professors and students are encouraged to sniff out and report heresy so it can be exposed and exorcised — smacks of Salem more than Leningrad. Saturated with Christian theology, Locke’s Enlightenment liberalism is reverting to a more primordial version of the founding faith. America is changing, radically and irreversibly, but it is also staying the same.

America’s ungovernability is morphing into a distinctive pattern of governance, with power shifting to institutions that are dismantling their traditional structures. Universities have become seminaries of woke religion, while newspapers are turning into sermonising agitprop sheets. At the same time mass unemployment and accelerating automation are stripping workers of what remained of the bargaining power they exercised before the neoliberal era.

The system that seems to be emerging is a high-tech variation on feudalism, with wealth creation concentrated around new industries and most of the population disenfranchised and dispossessed. While this metamorphosis gathers speed, the American media are manufacturing fictional narratives of national redemption.

America is on the way to becoming a semi-failed state. Its soft power has collapsed, probably irrecoverably. Yet it does not follow that it will cease to be a globally powerful actor. In a competition with totalitarian China, an American regime that mixes authoritarian control with zones of anarchy may have a comparative advantage. Classical totalitarianism is as obsolete as classical liberalism, and American mercantilism may be more resilient and innovative than Chinese state capitalism. A ruling elite shaped by figures like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk may prove more capable of deploying new technologies than a communist emperor who has put China into a deep freeze. One of the most surreal moments during the insurrection occurred when Musk’s SpaceX, almost unnoticed, launched astronauts into space.

As the woke movement spills over into parts of Europe and the UK, it should be clear that this is no passing storm. Here, as in the US, woke militants have few, if any, definite policies. What they want is simply the end of the old order. The paroxysm we are witnessing may be remembered as a defining moment in the decline of the liberal west. Perhaps it is time to consider how to strengthen the enclaves of free thought and expression that still remain, so they have a chance of surviving in the blank and pitiless world that is being born.

Meanwhile, in the US, we have Donald Trump. What is there to say about this would-be Caesar that The Washington Post did not encapsulate in the slogan it adopted in 2017: “Democracy Dies in Darkness” (T-shirts available in S, M and XXL)? A tad histrionic, you might say, but what about the enormous gold statue Trump recently erected to himself on the National Mall? And the new lines added to the pledge of allegiance “At the moment of my betrayal to Donald the America-Father let my breath stop”?

Well okay, there is no statue and the pledge hasn’t changed. Yet Google “Trump dictator” and you’ll get 15,000,000 results. Switch “dictator” for “Hitler” and the total rises to 65,000,000. The facts – that in the US we have a chaotic, disorganised administration that lurches from one crisis to the next, while in Britain the Government can’t get a single act through Parliament – make little difference. Many, many people are highly agitated and prone to making overheated comparisons, completely untethered to any observable reality.

If more people knew about actual dictatorships, would they be less slap-happy about constantly invoking the monsters of the 20th century whenever they got a bit upset by a politician? Probably not, but in his How to be a Dictator: the Cult of Personality in the 20th Century, Dutch historian Frank Dikotter provides a primer that would do the job, if anybody were willing to listen.

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Dikotter has written extensively on Mao’s China and knows a thing or two about totalitarian excess, but here he expands his scope to cover eight appalling regimes across four continents, ranging from Mussolini at the start of the 20th century through to Mengistu at its end. His emphasis is on the phenomenon of the personality cults, the establishment of which is, in his view, “the most efficient” way for a dictator “to claw his way to power and get rid of his rivals”, beating out even purges and the principle of divide and rule – though they certainly have a role to play.

Mussolini established the template that many dictatorial cult-builders would subsequently follow. Although he was less interested in establishing a coherent ideology than his Marxist-Leninist peers, he shared their desire to concentrate as much power as possible in his own hands, to establish himself as a supreme and unquestioned leader, and duly forced himself into his subjects’ consciousnesses via photographs, posters, slogans, books, radio broadcasts and newsreels, while also turning up in person to dig ditches or inspect things. He was also highly attentive to detail: “In the middle of the war he found time to change the colour of a woman’s magazine from purple to brown,” writes Dikotter. Then it all collapsed, and Mussolini’s cult crumbled overnight.

Dikotter also explores the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-sung who, despite their ideological and personal differences, all managed to find a lot of common ground with their Italian predecessor, sharing such passions as self-glorification, terror, war, books with their names on the spines, and the act of naming lots of streets, avenues and cities after themselves. (They did, however, have limits: while Stalin was big on erecting statues to himself, Hitler would not permit them; monuments were for the past, and he was a leader of the future. Mao was okay with statues, but he did not want parks or cities to be named in his honour.)

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Then there are the rarely discussed regimes of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. Here, things get weirder. The Voodoo-obsessed Duvalier, who declared himself as the “personification of God” and liked to wear top hat and tails, was clearly operating in a very different cultural context from the despots of Europe and Asia, yet he had enough in common with them that Dikotter proclaims him “a dictator’s dictator, a man who wielded naked power without the pretence of ideology”. Mengistu, meanwhile, moved into Haile Selassie’s Grand Palace, had the emperor’s corpse interred underneath his office, kept the cheetahs on chains, and then caused the famine that inspired Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to write Do They Know It’s Christmas?

And so it happened, again and again. Millions would live and die in the nightmare worlds constructed by evil men, only for it all to disappear as these despots fell or died; the 20th century’s own lunatic, appalling “eternal return“, an epoch of murder, torture and degradation inspired by absurd utopian fantasies.

All of which underscores the radical stupidity of comparing controversial and/or unpopular elected leaders with Hitler and Stalin. Yes, I’ll admit that Trump straws and the unedited Trump rallies I see on Fox when I’m at the gym seem a bit odd, but CNN is running concurrently on another screen and it’s non-stop Trump-bashing. As for Boris Johnson, aside from his books and some swag sold at the last Tory conference, he has nothing at all in terms of personality cult.

Both men will also, whether or not they win their next elections, be gone very soon in the grand scheme of things. Would Stalin or Mao have allowed themselves to be voted out? Obviously not. Dikotter sees this as a sign of weakness – that they were not willing to put their ideas and regimes to the test of a plebiscite – but this is naive. There are many reasons not to hold elections if you can get away with it, and, indeed, the overwhelming majority of leaders throughout history have not bothered to ask the masses what they think.

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In fact, even when you turn your attention to actual, successful contemporary authoritarians, you’ll see little like the horrors of the recent past, aside from a handful of places such as North Korea or Turkmenistan. Today’s tyrants, while unquestionably awful, pale in comparison to their 20th century antecedents. Yes, Putin is sinister and repressive, but he is more liberal than almost every Russian leader before him bar the occasional drunk and naif.

Erdogan is an appalling thug but he was patient enough to wait decades to advance his goals through elections, constitutional reform and a long march through the institutions. And then there is Xi Jinping, a man guilty of many sins, but no Mao. As Dikotter points out: “hardly a month goes by without a new book announcing ‘the Death of Democracy'” yet “even a modicum of perspective indicates that today dictatorship is on the decline when compared to the twentieth century”.

So why do so many people feel the need to pretend that we are living on the edge of a new era of totalitarian horror all the time, when they are not only trivialising the sufferings of those who lived under terrible regimes, but also concealing the true nature of the problems we face?

After all, honest language would bring clarity of thought, and with it, a merciless focus on the weakness and confusion of our leaders, the desperation of our elected representatives, and the pitiful sadness of their squabbles. It would also denude excitable journalists and all keyboard warriors of the fantasy that they are engaged in a battle between forces of light and darkness, replacing it with a sense that they are witness only to intractable squabbles over things which are very complicated, which no-one will win, and where everyone will feel disappointed in the end. It would also point to the fact that even second and third tier despots regularly outwit the leaders of the democratic West.

Hmm, I can see why they don’t want to do that. But still.

Most Western liberals view growing tensions with China only in economic terms. They lament the intensifying trade war waged by the Trump Administration and still believe that more globalisation will somehow integrate China into the liberal world order. For them, history really did end in 1989, when they expected a global convergence towards Western market democracy.

The surprise about setbacks – from Iraq in 2003 to the 2008 financial crisis – has since morphed into a state of denial. Brexit, Donald Trump, and China’s assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea are misunderstood as just headwinds that will not blow the ship of liberal globalisation off course for long. For liberals, low wages, deindustrialisation, and job-exporting trade deals are seen as inevitable in the forward march of progress, when, in reality, this programme favours China at the expense of the West.

Worse, liberals do not grasp that China’s fusion of Leninist state collectivism with totalitarian tech control represents a threat to Western civilisational norms, notably a commitment to the dignity of the person enshrined in fundamental freedoms, rights, and mutual obligations.

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It is not just that Beijing views political liberalism as a source of weakness and corrosion of its hard-won authority. The Chinese leadership also rejects the principles of liberality on which Western civilisation depends, such as free inquiry, free speech, tolerance for dissent, respect for political opponents, freedom of religion, and the fair treatment of minorities.

The West needs to do much better to live up to its own ideals; but contemporary China is fast becoming a totalitarian system under a new guise. This includes a crackdown on domestic opposition, the internment of up to a million of Uighur Muslims in the restive region of Xinjiang, as well as the persecution of Christians and other religious groups across the country.

What is new is a surveillance state that manipulates minds and creates a climate of fear and self-censorship, combined with the aggressive promotion of Chinese ownership of key strategic assets as part of the Belt and Road initiative of infrastructure investment. Neo-Confucian ‘global harmony’ and China’s supposedly peaceful rise are a cipher for the country’s hegemonic ambitions.

Few, if any, Western governments have taken a stand. But if the West does not speak up for the persecuted Muslim minorities in China, and for the freedoms of all the Chinese, then Western values mean nothing.

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The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seems to recognise this when sounding the alarm about worldwide Chinese influence. During his visit to London last week, he criticised Theresa May’s government for allowing the Chinese company, Huawei, to participate in Britain’s new 5G mobile phone network. The threat exceeds, by far, the potential theft of intellectual property and even national security. It is about the control of technology that is capable of redefining what we mean by freedom of conscience and free speech.

“I think we have to take the rose-colored glasses off and get real about the nature of the threat,” Kiron Skinner, the director of policy planning at the US State Department, said last week at a security conference in Washington. “This is a fight with a really different civilization.”

Skinner’s intervention matters because of the key position she holds within US foreign policy-making. Her office is responsible for developing US grand strategy. It was from this office that 60 years ago the US diplomat George Kennan implemented the policy of containment to counter Soviet expansion.

Skinner’s remarks about the civilisational nature of Chinese power have caused a major uproar. She has been accused of racism, for calling China the first “non-Caucasian” power to threaten the USA – even though she is one of the few senior US policy-makers who is African-American. The choice of words was perhaps unfortunate, since imperial Japan was arguably the first non-Western country to defy the West. But blunt language is needed to wake up a sleepy elite. Skinner is right that Beijing poses a unique challenge because it is not part of the tradition of Western philosophy, history, and culture, and she deserves credit for calling this out.

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Her language has also invited comparisons with the idea by the American academic Samuel Huntington about a “clash of civilizations“, which suggested that after the end of the Cold War, conflicts would be predominantly between civilisational traditions rather than ideological systems. But Skinner does not say that the battle between the West and the rest is inevitable, as Huntington (or rather a simplistic reading of him) implies. Instead, she maintains that “we also have to give a kind of respect for what the Chinese seek to accomplish”.

She’s right, though, about rival civilisational norms. The West is committed to the intrinsic worth of each and every person. Contemporary China, by contrast, is concerned with the collectivity. The West believes in personal rights and obligations set out in constitutions that constrain state power. China, on the contrary, believes in obedience to an omnipotent state that overrides constitutional boundaries.

The West promotes a market economy based on private ownership and free enterprise. China is building a model of state capitalism based on Communist control of property and state-owned corporations. The West seeks to uphold a free space of human association independently of the state, whereas China views all intermediary institutions as a conveyor belt between the party and the people. This fundamentally different outlook is at the heart of growing tensions between the West and China.

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Western concerns with the dignity of the human person enshrined in human rights rest on Christian humanism and its focus on the common good. This is not a collective ‘public good’ imposed by experts, but rather a good pursued by all, which exists only in reciprocal relationships and the constant striving towards both individual fulfilment and mutual flourishing. The liberty of each and the equality of all are important principles, but even more important is lived fraternity. It redeems freedom devoid of social solidarity and provides trust and cooperation. What binds people together is what makes us free and society more just.

By contrast, the Chinese leadership defines harmony in terms of collective utility – the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers. This is brought about by the central state and enlightened elites who have been carefully selected to enforce the will of both party and army. China’s ruling Communists are deploying high-tech facial recognition and algorithms to control individual behaviour. The system of social credits rewards obedience and compliance. The fusion of a Leninist ‘administration of things’ with neo-Confucian collectivism replaces the Western idea of a government of the people with a tyranny by numbers. All this – combined with large-scale Chinese investment in Artificial Intelligence, robotics and genetics – suggests that Beijing is more interested in the power of the strong over the weak than the equal dignity of all.

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Against this background, Skinner’s warning is one the West should heed. If China continues to deny its citizens religious freedom and the right of political dissidents to emigrate, then Western countries have a duty to act.

Skinner is leading work to develop a concept of US-China relations on the scale of Letter X, the seminal essay by Kennan that laid the foundations for Western containment policy against the Soviet Union. Such an effort is now required to be clear about the threat posed by China but also about the potential to bring about a proper balance of power anchored in respect between different civilisations.

The West needs to develop a strategy of how to confront China in the case of human rights abuses, while at the same time encouraging the country to renew the legacy of Confucian and Buddhist social virtues, such as hospitality, benevolence, and trustworthiness. The damage of Mao’s Cultural Revolution needs to be repaired and not plastered over by Xi Jinping’s increasingly atavistic nationalism.

But the West also has to uphold its own best traditions and practice the principles it inherited from Greco-Roman philosophy and law as well as Judeo-Christian religion and ethics – the unique value of the person and free human association independent of the state, which are under threat everywhere.

Above all, what is missing is meaningful dialogue between civilisations for the benefit of mutual understanding and cooperation based on shared interests. A ‘clash of civilisations’ is neither necessary nor normative.

When the Iron Curtain fell 30 years ago, Vaclav Havel – the Czech dissident turned President – said that “we are concerned for the destiny and the values that brought down Communism – the values of Western civilisation”. Havel was right. The renewal of Western civilisational norms is vital for the West and the world.​