Like millions of Walking Dead fans, we are eagerly awaiting the show’s return later this month. Last season ended with a disturbing cliffhanger – one of the main characters (the big mystery is which one) was beaten to death by new bad guy on the block, Negan. For ex-lawman Rick Grimes and his ever-evolving band of zombie apocalypse survivors, every day seems to be more terrifying than the one before. But not just because of the zombies.
Even in a world of flesh-eaters, “hell is other people.”
Novelists, filmmakers and artists have long imagined how citizens accustomed to rules and laws would respond to the dissolution of society. In his brilliant novel Blindness, Jose Saramago envisions a rapid descent into filth, degradation and violence. Albert Camus – who chronicled the horrors of Nazi occupation first as an underground journalist in Paris and later allegorically in his 1947 novel The Plague – grew to fear two elements of human weakness above all others: inaction and action driven solely by self-preservation.
Political and societal upheaval, whether fictional or real, is fertile ground for the rise of authoritarianism. In the world of The Walking Dead, strongmen are to be feared more than zombies; in Saramago’s city of “white blindness,” the unity forged by common plight is shattered by greed and enslavement of the powerless by the newly powerful.
If only the terror of such worlds was confined to the imaginations of writers and directors.
Since the end of the Cold War, the prevalence of “personalist dictatorships” has grown to account for 40 percent of the globe’s autocracies, up from 23 percent in 1988, political scientists Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Joseph Wright and Erica Frantz wrote in Foreign Affairs last month.
This, they say, is a big problem for the United States: “A robust body of political science research shows that personalist dictatorships tend to produce the worst outcomes of any type of political regime: they tend to produce the most risky and aggressive foreign policies; they are the most likely to invest in nuclear weapons; the most likely to fight wars against democracies; and the most likely to initiate interstate conflicts.”
So who are these “personalist dictators”? Think Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, China’s Xi Jinping, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Of all of Donald Trump’s shortcomings, and even his supporters must admit he has many, it is his public embrace of Putin that is perhaps most at odds with the spirit of the nation he hopes to lead. In Putin, Trump sees a man who has “been a leader far more than our president has been a leader.” But most Americans who are familiar with Putin, at least those without business interests in Russia, see a tyrant with no regard for international law or the lives of innocent people in Syria and Ukraine – or his own country should they make the mistake of disagreeing with him. He is, as Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said, “a dictator” who “has destroyed every semblance of democracy in his country.”
In recent days, Trump has sought to distance himself from Putin after months of public fawning. But Trump’s kinship with Russia’s strongman is clear and raises important questions about how the Republican nominee would handle moments of crisis, upheaval or chaos should he be elected. Would he raise the people up or crack down on them? Would he work to restore calm or would he incite violence?
We know what Putin would do – has done – and that gives us some insight into what his admirer Trump might do.
With that knowledge, we expect the new season of The Walking Dead to be the most disturbing yet.