I don’t know what the events of this past weekend mean for Russia. But I have been thinking a lot about the message they should send to the rest of us about the dangers of illiberalism.

Even in America, a beacon of liberal values for over two centuries, commitment to liberalism waxes and wanes. Recently, it has been waning on both ends of the political spectrum. In its zeal to protect minorities, a significant fraction of the left has abandoned free speech and religious liberty in favor of speech codes, “disinformation” crackdowns and cancel culture. Meanwhile, as people on the right have grown more alarmed by critical race theory and gender ideology, some have embraced the idea that only a strongman such as Donald Trump — or Hungary’s Viktor Orban or, yes, Putin — can hold back the Rainbow Horde.

Readers will have strong opinions about the moral differences between these two positions. Logically, though, both sides make the same argument: Our opponents are dangerously wrong, maybe existentially wrong, and must be stopped. At this critical historical juncture, we cannot afford dissent or procedural niceties. They must be drummed from the public square, their views must be made anathema, and any institutions they control must be discredited or destroyed.

What happened in Russia over the weekend illustrates just why this way of thinking is so flawed. Illiberal regimes are not merely unpleasantly oppressive; they are at constant risk of catastrophic failure.

Energetic suppression of dissent creates apparent harmony, but this is an expensive fake. Fake because, as the aphorism goes, “one convinced against their will is of the same opinion still.” Expensive because it becomes impossible to know what people believe; if you ask them, they will simply parrot the officially approved answer.

Editorial cartoon by Michael Ramirez: Stabbed in the back

Initially, this might work, because no one knows which parrots actually believe the party line, and this makes it hard for any opposition to organize. But if the opposition grows to become a secret majority, the country becomes vulnerable to a sudden preference cascade: Ffolks realize that their neighbors agree with them, and the official narrative collapses.

Nominally, Putin controls a massive army, a substantial police force and a population that returned him to office in 2018 with a resounding 77 percent of the vote. But when push came to shove, those same folks were indifferent between him and a murderous warlord — or, at least, didn’t care enough about the distinction to risk getting shot. Putin survived, but the risk to his regime has risen now that it is clear how little actual support he has.

Dictators understand this problem, which is why their regimes tend to get worse over time: The more thoroughly you suppress dissent, the greater the risk that even a tiny expression of defiance will trigger a preference cascade.

The inherent fragility of authoritarianism does not mean liberalism is destined to always win out; this is a dangerous delusion that, in the years after the Berlin Wall fell, helped lay the groundwork for Putin and his ilk. Liberal institutions, and the social trust that undergirds them, are hard to build from scratch, so when one authoritarian regime is torn down, it is easily replaced by another.

Which is precisely why it is folly for liberal societies to flirt with illiberalism: Even a temporary resort to repression is apt to be permanently catastrophic for everyone.