If you can keep it

The first play in the autocratic playbook is not to attack everyone at once.

Rather, it’s to go after one. One law firm. One judge. One university. One journalist. The strategy isn’t just to silence the immediate target — it’s to make others watch and learn. To convince them that resistance is dangerous, costly, and futile. To make them believe that if they just keep their head down, it’ll happen to someone else instead.

The strategy works. It’s why Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were able to consolidate power in Hungary, Russia, and Turkey without needing to bulldoze the entire system at once. They didn’t need to. It was enough to pick off a few key targets, watch everyone else retreat into fear and complicity, and let the structure collapse under its own weight.

But the strategy fails — and it has failed — when societies recognize the game early enough and refuse to play along. When institutions that would normally compete or stay in their lane realize that they rise and fall together. That’s what collective action is. And that’s why it’s so dangerous to autocrats.