The first 80 percent or so of Anne Applebaum’s short new book, Autocracy, Inc., is perhaps the saddest story I’ve ever read. I had to force myself to keep going. Her crisply written account of how autocrats around the planet are getting better and better at controlling, confusing, and disheartening their own people — while using increasingly sophisticated techniques to win the battle of global public opinion — rests like a heavy weight on the reader’s heart. Yet those who make it through that first part are rewarded with a faint glimmer of hope at the end.

The author explains how the propaganda of the last century’s dictatorships — which tended to make outlandish claims of superiority about the dictators’ states — has been mostly supplanted by the modern disinformation campaign. This noxious brew of exaggerations, decontextualized half-truths, and outright fabrications doesn’t so much try to persuade as disorient and discourage. The ultimate target is truth itself, because autocrats know that without an agreed-upon reality, there are no principles around which to organize an opposition. All that’s left is an animal fear, a free-floating anxiety from which a strongman can offer protection — at the price of liberty. 

You can tell a writer has formed a clear vision of an important idea when, as here, the building blocks of her thesis keep tumbling neatly off the textual assembly line, clean and strong.

One of those ideas is that autocracy now transcends ideology. The Russian regime is nationalist, using the Eastern Orthodox religion as one tool to maintain its power. North Korea’s is an atheistic, ostensibly communist state that’s actually an absolute monarchy of the House of Kim. Venezuela is supposed to be a socialist paradise. And Iran is an Islamic theocracy. Yet their leaders all share the essential characteristic of denying governing power to the governed, and that’s enough for them to support each other, learn from each other, and even collaborate at times.

Consistent coordination among them would of course represent a significant increase in the danger they represent individually. Applebaum makes clear that one aspect of the current global struggle that distinguishes it from the Cold War is that, unlike in that past battle, there aren’t two neatly defined blocs anymore, each with its own headquarters. (But there are the worrying beginnings of an autocratic coalition in something called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.)

Other important points: Western finance facilitated the rise of Putin and other autocrats by making it easy to transfer (and hide) huge fortunes looted from their countries; the complex carnage of the Syrian civil war — in which several autocracies have intervened for their own purposes but no democracies for humanity’s sake — has made large-scale war crimes consequence-free; and “autocratic information operations” opportunistically exacerbate existing political tensions in targeted nations rather than create new ones.

A clear writer produces spare, profound lines of quotable text. Applebaum recalls that after the Cold War, Western leaders assumed “democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy would spread to the democratic world instead.” It’s a simple statement that nonetheless foments a growing terror in the reader’s mind as the full implication of that last sentence emerges. 

Another example, this time on over-the-top propaganda: “Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie; it’s to make people fear the liar.” Chilling. And on the struggle for hearts and minds: “No democratic government should ever assume that arguments for democracy or for the rule of law are somehow obvious or self-evident.” Sobering.

That last fifth of the book offers remedies. We should let the sunlight in on shadowy international financial transactions that make both larcenous autocrats and their enabling bankers richer at the expense of the rest of us. We need to better regulate social-media platforms where autocratic ideas and propaganda thrive because — despite yelps from the Right — there is no “free market of ideas” in a system controlled by algorithms and polluted with disinformation. It’s time, says Applebaum, for a more energetic and focused collaboration among the anti-autocrats. She also recounts an inspiring meeting of brave dissidents from around the world who all recognize the commonality of their struggle.

So that’s something to work with. I was cheered, too, by recent international political news. Election campaigns in both Iran and Venezuela showed signs of life among opponents of the oppressive regimes in power. And in one of the planet’s remaining democracies, France, populist right-wingers were resoundingly rejected. Far from problem solved, but it may be that despite autocrats’ best efforts, it’s hard to keep the people down for good.

William Rice is a writer for political and policy-advocacy organizations.

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