From Hong Kong to the US and Iran, this is how modern authoritarianism works

By now, the signs are familiar. They arrive quietly, wrapped in the language of order, security, tradition or national renewal. They’re rarely announced as tyranny. They are justified as necessity.

In Hong Kong, they arrived with a law and reinterpretation of the Motherland.

In the US, they arrived with anti-fear fear slogans.

In Uganda, they arrived with a switch of tradition and anticolonial liberation.

In Iran, they arrived with a morality patrol and anti-West prison gate.

In Russia, they arrived with rigged elections and Russian soul rhetoric.

In Israel, they arrived with Islamophobia and modern settler colonialism.

The uncomfortable truth is that the most dangerous threats to freedom today are not coups or tanks in the streets, but creeping authoritarian habits – the incremental erosion of democratic norms – that take root within societies that once believed themselves immune.

Hong Kong was not conquered overnight. It was regulated into submission. The National Security Law imposed by Beijing in 2020 did not abolish courts or cancel elections outright. Instead, it redefined dissent as subversion, journalism as collusion and protest as terrorism. Its brilliance – if one can use such a word for repression – lay in its bureaucratic elegance. It transformed ordinary acts of civic life into criminal risk.

Independent newspapers closed without being formally banned; editors were arrested, journalists intimidated into silence. Universities censored themselves not because curriculums were rewritten, but because students and faculty learnt the fatal costs of free speech. Elections continued, but only after opposition figures were disqualified, detained or driven into exile.

This is how modern authoritarianism works. It no longer requires the spectacle of Tiananmen Square. It operates through paperwork, licensing, legal threat and calibrated fear. Hong Kong’s tragedy is not merely the loss of autonomy. It is the normalisation of the idea that freedom is conditional – permitted only when it does not inconvenience power.

The US, of course, is not China. But that is not to say it is safe. Donald Trump did not suspend the constitution. He did something subtler and more corrosive. He trained millions of Americans to distrust it. He attacked the press as “the enemy of the people”, a phrase with a long and bloody lineage. He demanded personal, almost monarchical loyalty, hollowing out institutional democracy from within. Courts became obstacles. Elections were legitimate only if he won. Political opponents were recast not as rivals, but as traitors.

The danger is not simply Trump’s personality, but what he revealed – and legitimised – about American political culture. He showed how easily democratic rhetoric can be turned against democracy itself. How readily “law and order” becomes a justification for brutality. How fragile truth becomes when power insists that reality is negotiable.

The 6 January attack on the Capitol was not an aberration. It was the logical conclusion of years of narrative conditioning that elections are suspect, that violence is patriotic and that losing is illegitimate. America has not yet fallen into authoritarianism, but it has leaned towards it. And history suggests that leaning is rarely neutral.

What connects Hong Kong and Trump’s America is not ideology, but method – and that method is now global for tyrants and wannabe tyrants.

In Uganda, the government responds to elections by shutting down the internet and ordering human rights organisations to cease operations. The vote remains, rigged and illegitimate, and the public sphere vanishes. Democracy is reduced to ritual, stripped of scrutiny or strong opposition, which has been intimidated into submission.

In Iran, the regime fuses theology with coercion. Protests are met with bullets, imprisonment and public executions disguised as justice. Women’s bodies become sites of state control; dissenters are forced into televised confessions. When the streets erupt, the internet goes dark to erase evidence.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin perfects authoritarian continuity. Elections are staged with meticulous regularity, opposition figures are imprisoned or buried, journalists silenced or exiled. The state no longer pretends to tolerate pluralism; it criminalises memory, outlawing versions of history that threaten the imperial myth of Putin.

Across these systems, the steps are strikingly consistent: First, delegitimise independent institutions – courts, journalists, universities and civil servants. Second, recast dissent as danger. Third, insist that only the strong leader can restore order. Finally, blur the line between legality and justice, until obedience becomes the highest civic virtue.

Authoritarians no longer promise utopia. They promise protection – from chaos, from foreigners, from “illegitimate” histories that refuse to flatter power. And many citizens, exhausted by inequality and fear, accept the bargain to trade freedom for the illusion of safety from a threatening “other”.

Democracy does not usually die screaming. It erodes while people argue about something else. Hong Kong’s fall should have shattered the illusion that economic success guarantees political freedom. Iran should have dispelled the myth that repression breeds stability. Russia should have ended the fantasy that managed democracy can remain benign. America’s Trump era should have destroyed the belief that old democracies are immune to illiberal capture.

Instead, too many observers treat each case as an anomaly – cultural, historical, exceptional – rather than as part of a pattern. The lesson is simple and unsettling: freedom is not self-sustaining. It depends on norms – respect for truth, restraint in power, tolerance of opposition. This can vanish long before constitutions do.

The question facing democracies today is not whether they will be invaded or overthrown. It is whether they will recognise authoritarianism while it still speaks politely. When laws are written so broadly that they criminalise thought, when leaders insist that criticism equals disloyalty, when elections are framed as threats rather than expressions of popular will, then democracy is already in retreat.

Hong Kong shows us what happens when that retreat goes unchallenged. Iran and Russia show us what happens when it is perfected. America shows us how quickly things can turn dystopian.

The future of freedom will not be decided only in revolutions or courts. It will be decided in whether citizens insist that democracy means more than elections, more than flags, more than slogans. That it means limits on power, even when that power claims to speak in our name.

History rarely forgives societies that mistake comfort for liberty, or strength for justice. The warning signs are no longer subtle. The only question is whether we are still willing to read them. DM

Mphuthumi Ntabeni is a writer based in Cape Town who publishes in several national and international publications. He has written two novels published by Black Bird and Kwela Books.