Left-Wing Authoritarianism: Origins, Evolutions, Decay

Dan Slater, University of Michigan
Kai Thaler, UCSB

More than thirty years after the end of the Cold War, when the world was sharply divided into communist and capitalist camps, does it still make sense to differentiate authoritarian regimes by their right-wing or left-wing orientation? Given the authoritarian regimes literature’s turn away from ideology and toward institutions, the much-touted “extinction” of Marxist-Leninist regimes across Eastern Europe and the global South, and the practical conflation of “authoritarian” and “right-wing” orientations in the political psychology literature, one might think the answer is no. We argue in this Element that dictatorships originating behind left-wing ideology are fundamentally different from those born with a right-wing bent, and that these differences tend to outlast the exhaustion of these regimes’ founding ideologies. After distinguishing left-wing regimes from right-wing regimes by their gains-oriented rather than threat-oriented ideology, we argue that Machiavellianism has always been and remains today a more fundamental and enduring feature of left-wing authoritarianism than Marxism, Leninism, or Maoism. We trace the origins and variants of left-wing authoritarianism to the three great social revolutions of the first half of the 20th century: the Mexican, Russian, and Chinese. Although left-wing dictatorships have certainly evolved and typically decayed since the Cold War’s end, we argue that they still carry important marks of their origins as mass-mobilizing regimes seeking to destroy traditional hierarchies through a monopoly on political organization and power.

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 Presented in Session 217. Red Flags and Colonial Frontiers: Ideology, Insurgency, and the Politics of Revolution