To succeed as an autocrat, you might spend a lot of time talking about democracy.

Sometimes the point is to feed the illusion that your regime actually is a democracy,

even if elections are a sham and dictators

stick around as long as they want. But often in the 21st century, the point of talking about

democracy is to convince everybody that it's always an illusion, or at least a bad deal,

and that the source of real stability is a strong man leader. From KERA in Dallas, this is think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

The other big trend in modern authoritarian rule is that the people who sees power expect much more than power.

They're going for wealth, squeezing every last drop of personal profit from their position

atopoeckocratic regimes.

And like captains of industry in the Gilded Age, they are often open to colluding with one

another as long as all the dictators involved get something out of the deal.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at the Atlantic and author of the new book Autocracy, Inc.

The Dictators Who want to run the world.

And welcome back to think.

Thank you.

We can all point to examples of authoritarian leaders historically driven by extreme ideologies,

willing to kill for some misguided principle of how the world should be organized.

But what you describe here is maybe more chilling.

These guys care less about political philosophy than about what's in it for them.

So some of them do care about political philosophy and some of them have ideas.

Certainly, for example, Vladimir Putin believes that he deserves to recreate a Russian empire, that he's allowed to conquer

...