Let’s begin with a troubling truth: in many countries, hundreds of millions of people nowadays feel that when it comes to the biggest decisions affecting their lives, despite all the talk of “democracy” and “the people”, they have no control over those who decide things in their name. Their shared experience of organised powerlessness is amplified by fears that our small blue planet is spinning out of control.

People are not just annoyed and angry. They’ve grown convinced that elected governments have become so blind and corrupt that they no longer notice or even care that we earthlings are hurtling towards a future bruised and battered by more than a few perilous forces. Naked big power rivalries. Nasty genocidal wars. Hatred of immigrants. Border closures. Trade and tariff disputes. Extreme weather events. Pandemics. Corporate greed.

Polls show that millions of people are equally bothered by another unpromising political trend: the mounting anxiety that demagogues, despots and a strange new kind of Russian-style despotism with thoroughly 21st-century characteristics are gaining traction and everywhere getting the upper hand.

To speak of despotism is immediately to invite frowns and risk heated arguments. It’s an old word with a complicated and chequered history. Long out of fashion these days – “autocracy”, “fascism” and “authoritarianism” are the fashionable political buzzwords – despotism has often been dismissed as an emotionally charged and fuzzy term laden with Orientalist prejudices against non-Europeans.

But when suitably revised and carefully deployed, despotism is an indispensable keyword for making sense of the new global threats to democracy in polities as different as Russia, Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Vietnam, but also by the parallel and overlapping attacks on power-sharing democracy led by demagogues and their admirers in countries such as Türkiye, Israel and Donald Trump’s America.

This worldwide growth of a strange alliance between demagogues and despots is no coincidence. It ought to puzzle and worry every thinking person, and it needs to be understood.

Considered as a type of rule practised by both demagogues and despots, despotism is a way of handling power that defies the laws of political gravity. It’s a peculiarly fake type of democracy led by rulers skilled in the arts of manipulating and meddling with people’s lives, marshalling their support and winning their obedience.

Despotism feeds upon the voluntary servitude of its subjects. Those who think despotism is a synonym for repression, fear and raw force are profoundly mistaken. Despotic power can’t properly be understood through similes of hammers and nails; it requires thinking in terms of the attraction of metal filings to magnets.

In practice, despots are masters of seduction, deception and control. They calibrate their use of violence and manage, using a combination of slick means, including rigged election victories, to win the submission and loyalty of the ruled. Oiled by government largesse, rampant patronage, bags of money, job creation programs, legal trickery and endless talk of defending “the people” against its foes, despotism nurtures the docile subservience of its subjects, including important sections of the middle classes, skilled and unskilled workers, and the poor.

The result: the triumph of top-down pyramids of power that manage to win millions of supporters at home and acolytes and friends well beyond the borders of the states they rule.

What’s especially worrying is that the spirit of despotism is contagious. Despots and demagogues hunt in packs. Their promiscuity and wilful cooperation know no limits. Demagogues are despots in the making. Despots are what demagogues would like to be.

Consider the moment, in July 2024, when in a gilded ceremony in Moscow’s Grand Central Palace, Russian president Vladimir Putin, who faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, conferred upon his “dear friend”, Indian president Narendra Modi, Russia’s highest civilian honour, the Order of St Andrew the Apostle.

Now consider the grand showtime moment when an aspiring despot was greeted with open arms and lavish gifts by his more seasoned counterparts: Trump’s whirlwind May 2025 tour of west Asia.

In Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar, the all-American demagogue was showered with the honour and recognition he had long craved. Lavish F-15 fighter jet escorts. Lavender and red carpets, mounted camels and women’s hair-flipping welcome ceremonies. Riders on white horses and Tesla cybertrucks sporting stars and stripes. Grand marbled halls, dazzling crystal chandeliers, the highest civil decorations, including a pure gold necklace.

Then there was the world’s tallest building, more than half a mile high, lit up with an image of the American flag. A campaign-style rally at the region’s largest US military base in Qatar.

And the material deliverables: trillion-dollar business and defence contracts, signed by cupidity in the presence of greed and fame. Plans (with Saudi Arabia) to establish a joint nuclear energy program. A preliminary agreement (with UAE) to import the most advanced AI chips. A lavish gift (from Qatar) of a luxury jet Trump intends to keep whenever he leaves office – all in confirmation of the point that, in these times of turbulence, demagogues and despots must fly together in safety and solidarity.

There’s growing awareness among journalists, intellectuals and citizens that such displays of despotic pomp and bromance power are undermining the freedoms and egalitarian promises of democracy. A sense of foreboding about these trends is spreading. Pessimism is fashionable.

As I write these lines, a South African colleague is in touch to say how grim are our times. She remarks that our world feels as if it’s passing through an era of “augmented brutality” (also the name of a popular video game). With seemingly ever fewer brakes upon what established despotic regimes and demagogues can get away with, my colleague tells me, our ethical conscience, moral qualms and public outrage against abuses of power are withering away.

When I ask other colleagues where our diseased democracies are heading, they predict several conflicting but equally gloomy dystopian futures. Some argue that reality is fast catching up with a prettified version of the........

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