CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS...:

At the start of the Covid crisis, authoritarian leaders as a group seemed better able to avoid the public and economic backlash suffered by many governments in developed democracies. That was true regardless of whether they, like Xi, imposed tough lockdowns and restrictions, or they, like Putin, downplayed the disease's threat. (Remember the advice of Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko to fight Covid with vodka and tractor riding?)

Now, as the pandemic grinds on, that advantage is in doubt.

Russia is struggling to reduce record Covid fatalities; its households have been getting poorer, and Putin's approval ratings have fallen. China's strict Covid policies paid big dividends when its economy bounced back, with growth from a year earlier hitting 18.3% in the first quarter of 2021. But Xi's zero-case approach to battling Covid forced the continued lockdown of borders and cities that, together with his crackdown on capitalist excess, has sapped growth. Erdogan, above all, has floundered in his attempt to contain what you might call economic long Covid.

Many democratic governments are in deep trouble, too, including that of the U.S. But one advantage of democracies is coming into its own at this stage of the pandemic, says Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Bulgaria-based Centre for Liberal Strategies, a think tank: They can afford failure. When elected governments are perceived to have bungled so fundamental a task as protecting the lives of their citizens, they can pay the price at the ballot box, leaving the state bruised but intact.

That's even true for populists, the would-be authoritarians who still face the test of meaningful elections. Pandemic failures contributed to the defeat of former President Donald Trump in the U.S. and more recently Andrej Babis, the Czech prime minister. "We're seeing the end of a populist cycle," says Krastev--but there's no such cycle for leaders able to rig or ignore elections. "In an autocracy, all problems are owned by the system itself," he says.

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