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World

Welcome to the end of democracy

8 January 2022

6:00 PM

8 January 2022

6:00 PM

We bemoan autocracies in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and China but largely ignore the more subtle authoritarian trend in the West. Don’t expect a crudely effective dictatorship out of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: we may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the nosiest of dictatorships.

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This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2022 World edition


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