Welcome to the season of the authoritarian wolves

I feel as if I've spent large parts of my life reading dreary studies on authoritarian personalities.

- David Brooks

A visitor stands near an art installation portraying China's President Xi Jinping, US President Donald Trump and Russia's President Vladimir Putin during an exhibition in Surabaya on Aug 2.AFP

(AFP)

These are written by people like me, who despise authoritarianism, and they are filled with the familiar psychological diagnoses: The authoritarian comes from a loveless home; he is a bully driven by secret insecurity; he is a psychopath who does not feel others’ pain. But these studies never actually tell you how the authoritarians see themselves.

One 2022 novel, Giuliano da Empoli’s The Wizard of the Kremlin, narrated in the voice of one of Vladimir Putin’s advisers, helped me understand the psychology of authoritarian power as much as any of those studies — and not just inside Mr Putin’s mind but also inside the minds of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, Nayib Bukele, Elon Musk, Mohammed bin Salman, Benjamin Netanyahu, Viktor Orban and all the rest of the global authoritarian wolf pack.

Last month, da Empoli, who is an Italian Swiss essayist, followed it up with a nonfiction book, The Hour of the Predator, which describes both the wolves who run governments and those who run tech companies.

Here are a few things I’ve learned about how authoritarians exercise power.