Speculating a cabal of authoritarians planning to change the world order is strictly in tinfoil hat territory. It is much more boring than that. Democracy is a

Speculating a cabal of authoritarians planning to change the world order is strictly in tinfoil hat territory. It is much more boring than that. Democracy is an unstable way of ruling societies and generating value out of people. Keeping it healthy requires not only elections but lots of "undemocratic" powerful institutions with unelected well-educated people in it (courts, agencies, foundations, bureaucrats). Those institutions need to have actual power to coerce. The goal of the democracy should be generating quite a bit people who will hold those positions. Managing economics such that there aren't any too big organizations that can significantly affect individuals' independent decision making is also required. That's the antitrust laws and unions for ya. When educational, scientific and social organs are undermined, the public becomes more susceptible to strongman figures that provide easy solutions to the degradation. When economy is mismanaged undereducated people are easily swayed, more educated people are easily coerced. It is statistical common human behavior to support autocrats, especially under stress. Autocrats themselves have a strong inherent understanding of power and great skills/intuition to detect the weakest. If you encoutered bullies in your life, you may have observed how their brain and the cult of personality works. It is fascinating that they can pick out the weak so easily. Like the bullies, the autocrats understand each other since they understand themselves. Our crappy happenstance is not a result of a strategy but the systematic behavior of bullies and, bullied and oppressed people. The Republicans pick on Venezuela and Europe and Canada since they know that those societies are weak and they are separated. They know from years of backstabbing experience that if they play the game right, they will get to enjoy one more praise, one more success, one more sadistic dopamine rush. They will get to enjoy eating one separated bison from the herd at a time. They know that attacking a strong bully like themselves will be hard and it will probably hurt. They won't get the same feeling of accomplishment. Without attacking the system itself, it is really hard to win against it. There needs to be strong external factors for established autocratic regimes to collapse by letting them be. Attackers need to be smart and nimble and more importantly systematic. Moreover the lines of defense are not uniform. There are many smaller bullies even in the weak. They have lots of economic incentives to keep their small serfdoms.