A brief history of temporary dictatorships

The playbook for an authoritarian takeover is straightforward: Find an aggrieved subset of your society. Validate their anger. Stoke it like a furnace. Identify a scapegoat for their problems. Rise to power on the strength of that connection.

Now it's time to deliver.

But as the mass arrests of enemies begin, as undesirables are rounded up and placed in camps, as families are separated and the opposition crushed and silenced, there is a risk that some portion of your supporters might feel a rising moral nausea, hear the inconvenient voice of conscience: Oh my goodness—is this really what we signed up for? Is this the world we really want?

Fortunately for your regime, the playbook has an answer: Of course not, you say. No one wants this. It's just a distasteful but necessary means to a glorious end. Just as an emetic makes you vomit to bring up the poison, just as chemotherapy ravages your body on the way to curing it, some regrettable darkness must transpire, just for a moment, before the sun can shine on our future utopia.

First the darkness, then—I promise!—the light.

The rhymes of history

Major figures in the authoritarian movement that is now days from resuming executive power in the United States are promising the mass arrest of "enemies within" and the rounding up and deportation of as many as 14 million immigrants.

Intentionally or not, they are echoing past tyrants and fascists, right down to specific phrases and the promise that the lights will only be off ever-so-briefly.

Now is a good time for the rest of us to recognize a few historical precedents—authoritarians who framed the naming of enemies and the suspension of all moral constraints as necessary but temporary evils to secure a brighter future.

The French Revolution

Maximilien Robespierre was a central architect and driving force behind the Reign of Terror, a period in the French Revolution that instituted draconian measures to protect the gains of the revolution—16,600 tried and executed, 12,000 extrajudicial executions, and 10,000 deaths in prison in just two years. Robespierre saw the application of violent justice by the Orwellianly-named Committee for Public Safety as essential to protect revolutionary ideals from internal and external enemies.

"If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue," he wrote in his Justification of the Use of Terror (1794), "the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. [Terror] is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.”

Terror was not an end in itself to Robespierre, but a temporary and justifiable measure to rid the Republic of corruption and opposition, paving the way for the promised utopia—a virtuous, stable society.

"We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with it," Robespierre said. "Lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror."

Good rule of thumb here: Always be dividing between those deserving of protection from the violence you've unleashed and those who are not, and keep the definitions murky and shifting.

"Society owes protection only to peaceable citizens," he said. "The only citizens in the Republic are the republicans....Are the enemies within not the allies of the enemies without?"

In 1794, Robespierre's temporary dictatorship ended at the business end of a guillotine. But that didn't end the violence. The revolution itself raged on.

In 1799, Napoleon essentially achieved a "dictatorship by plebescite," temporarily suspending the Republic as an emergency measure to restore order and end the Revolution. He would rule like a king for just one year, he pledged. Just one. The Council of State agreed to the deal.

When the year expired and the chaos continued, Napoleon declared the need for a second year of dictatorship to stabilize the country. The Council of State agreed.

As political scientist Roy Casagranda puts it, "If you're ever in a situation where a dictator is asking for a second one-year term...say no."

At the end of the second year, Napoleon began to essentially racialize the Revolution. It had been possible to overthrow tyranny only because we are French, he said. A superior people. Now it is our duty to export these ideas to the rest of the world. Only I can do this.

A popular outcry demanded that Napoleon be made Consul for life. In May 1802, a plebescite overwhelmingly granted the title, and the French Revolutionary Wars spilled out across Europe. The revolutionary fervor they could not stamp out turned into a rampage that consumed the continent.

Waterloo, abdication, exile, escape, exile, death.

The Russian Revolution

After the overthrow of the Romanovs, Lenin declared a "dictatorship of the proletariat," calling it "a most determined and most ruthless war waged by the new class against a more powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie."

But this ruthless war would be temporary: "In the future society, in the communist society, there will be no need for such violence over people," he said. "Men will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social life."

By the time Stalin took the wheel, the timeline for violence and repression had expanded:

"There is not the slightest possibility of carrying out these tasks in a short period, of accomplishing all this in a few years. Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition from capitalism to communism, must not be regarded as a fleeting period of "super-revolutionary" acts and decrees, but as an entire historical era, replete with civil wars and external conflicts, with persistent organisational work and economic construction, with advances and retreats, victories and defeats."

Stalin quoted Karl Marx suggesting an actual timeline: ""You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international conflicts," he told workers, before the communist ideal could be achieved.

As of last Tuesday, 100 years after Stalin's essay, Russia is still at war, throwing darkness in every direction and preventing the United States from escaping its own.

The Third Reich

Nazi leadership offered some of the clearest antecedents to current promises of temporary dictatorship.

"We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to kill this [Jewish] people who wanted to kill us," said Heinrich Himmler in 1943, promising that it would lead to a pure and noble future for the Reich. Chief propagandist Goebbels was also adept at this juxtaposition of necessary violence and future glory.

Hitler continually made a point of juxtaposing the struggle of today with the glory of tomorrow: "The goal of our struggle must be to secure the existence and increase of our race and people, the sustenance of its children and the purity of its blood, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland," he wrote in Mein Kampf. Even though peace waited after war, he said, "peace should not be our highest goal. Struggle (Kampf) must be."

Just for a while, you understand.

Hitler's temporary dictatorship ended only when he did.

Mussolini, Franco, Batista, Marcos, Park Chung Hee—the list is long of authoritarians who pledged that their dictatorships would expire after a short period that was needed to solve a given problem. The list of those who kept that pledge is almost nonexistent. Most rose in democracies, their power freely given by the people; most only ended after years or decades of violence and repression.

When you hear the new administration talking about a suspension of civil liberties, or the dragging of political enemies through the streets, or the deportation of millions of vulnerable human beings—all temporary measures in the interest of making America great again, you understand—no worries. The once-and-future president has promised to be a dictator for only a day, which is not nearly enough time for all that.

On day two, he will go back to being just the most powerful person on Earth, surrounded by hand-picked loyalists, with a compliant, conservative Congress and Court, unprecedented immunity from prosecution, immense grievances and the judgment of a child.

Perhaps the most disorienting thing of all is that this most damaged and damaging of bad actors achieved this position not through force, but through the process of a secure and verified election. Like many before us, our democracy has eaten itself.