Government & Governance – Ideology, Autocracy & Democracy May 2024-

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Governance and good governance
Council of Europe
Centre of Expertise for Good Governance

The Mounting Damage of Flawed Elections and Armed Conflict
International IDEA
Difference between Tyranny and Dictatorship

Autocracy in America
Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev
There are authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States. To root them out, you have to know where to look. (podcast)
How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, with Ece Temelkuran
(Carnegie Council) Ece Temelkuran: Populism is a sort of political insanity that disrupts the rationale and terrorizes the entire political mechanism. It creeps into every system, even into the most mature democracies and the strongest state institutions, and it paralyzes them in order to gain more and more power and finally to end up being an authoritarian regime.
In the book I gave the seven steps from democracy to dictatorship, and some of these steps might be invisible to people even when they are living in it, so I wanted to make sure that people of the world, especially the Western societies, including European countries and the United States, can see what is happening to them so they won’t lose time like we did in Turkey. I hope they won’t end up losing their country as we did…. 3 June 2019

10 February
The New Authoritarianism
By Steven Levitsky
This isn’t single-party rule, but it’s not democracy either.
(The Atlantic) Rather than fascism or single-party dictatorship, the United States is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition.
In his first weeks back in office, Donald Trump has already moved strongly in this direction. He is attempting to purge the civil service and directing politicized investigations against rivals. He has pardoned violent paramilitary supporters and is seeking to unilaterally seize control over spending from Congress. This is a coordinated effort to dig in, cement power, and weaken rivals.
Unlike in a full-scale dictatorship, in competitive-authoritarian regimes, opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they often seriously vie for power. Elections may be fiercely contested. But incumbents deploy the machinery of government to punish, harass, co-opt, or sideline their opponents—disadvantaging them in every contest, and, in so doing, entrenching themselves in power. This is what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and in contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey.

31 January
Friday Night Musk-acre
Seth Masket, Political scientist and director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver
Friday saw some very serious attacks on democracy and the rule of law
(Tusk) Friday was a busy day in national politics, with the media fixated on two plane crashes, a tariff order that sparked vows of retaliation and a stock market selloff, embarrassing Senate confirmation hearings for a number cabinet appointees, and more. But we need to talk about the massive assault on democracy and the rule of law that occurred this day. It occurred across several steps.
Musk’s Maneuver
…for now, this is arguably the most troubling development in a day of extremely troubling developments. Elon Musk appears to be trying to do to the federal government what he did at Twitter/X: massively disrupt its functioning and drive out experienced employees not on board with his transformations and his personality cult.
After a week of trying to push civil servants out of jobs all over the federal government, Musk set his sights Friday on the U.S. Treasury’s payment systems. Musk was particularly pushing Acting Treasury Secretary David A. Lebryk, who has a long history of nonpartisan service at Treasury, for access to these payment systems. This led to Lebryk resigning this morning. As the New York Times explained, “Mr. Musk has tried to deploy his engineers to find ways to turn off the flow of money from the Treasury Department to things that Mr. Trump wants to defund.”
This comes on top of Musk fundamentally taking over the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), where numerous former X employees have literally moved in with sofa beds to work around the clock and take over the agency
There are many disturbing aspects of this. But perhaps the most fundamental is that Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the President nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government. The “Department of Government Efficiency,” announced by Trump in a January 20th executive order, is not truly any sort of government department or agency, and even the executive order uses quotes in the title.
… Trump is orchestrating the firing or forced resignations of hundreds or thousands of employees at the Department of Justice who were involved in the investigation of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Additionally, Trump has demanded that several senior officials at the FBI resign now or be fired next week for the same reason.

29 January
Autocracy Without Borders: Hogue Report Highlights Need for Action on Transnational Repression
Kyle Matthews
(Policy) The stakes of inaction are too great to ignore. Transnational repression not only endangers individual lives but also erodes the very foundations of democracy and trust in public institutions. In her recent book
Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, author Anne Applebaum explains how authoritarian regimes, most notably China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, are targeting the fabric of our societies, undermining security, and exploiting divisions to advance their agendas.

15 January
Ian Bremmer: The Donroe Doctrine
Trump’s worldview represents a decisive rejection of America’s postwar commitment to global collective security, free trade, and democracy promotion in favor of transactionalism. The United States is increasingly adopting a rather Chinese approach to international relations: bilateral deal-making with little regard for common values, the rule of law, multilateralism, or the global public good. With the idea being that the world’s most powerful country will play that game more effectively than Beijing. It’s called “America First” for a reason.
… His personalistic leadership style and consolidation of power – what we call Rule of Don in our 2025 Top Risks report – mean US domestic and foreign policy will increasingly depend on the decisions of one man and his inner circle, precisely what the Founding Fathers sought to prevent through constitutional checks and balances.
… This is the essence of the G-Zero world: Not just an absence of global leadership, but the deliberate dismantling of the systems and norms that have guided international relations for decades by its erstwhile lynchpin. Trump isn’t the cause – he’s its leading symptom and beneficiary. But his return to power will accelerate the trend toward a more dangerous, crisis-prone international system. The apex predator may rack up some impressive kills, but the jungle will grow deadlier and more savage for everyone – including, eventually, for the United States, too.
13 January
Editorial: The Guardian view on globalisation and its discontents: how the left was left behind
As national populist parties gain ground in the west, progressives must put social and climate priorities ahead of market interests
Different year, same direction of travel. The likely formation of the first far-right-led government in Austria’s postwar history, after the breakdown this month of coalition talks between mainstream parties, is the latest confirmation of the illiberal drift in western democracies. Only a few years ago, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary remained a troublesome outlier in the European Union. These days, variations on Mr Orbán’s ethno-nationalist approach to 21st-century politics are flourishing across the continent. And in a week’s time, Donald Trump will be back in the White House.
In an era of stagnating living standards and rising inequality, the growing appeal of national populism should not come as a surprise. The targeting of immigration, “liberal elites” and globalisation has channelled resentments felt in deindustrialised regions, where good jobs and a sense of identity were lost as capital and investment moved elsewhere. The migration of the less well-off towards parties of the far right is a symptom of times in which trust in mainstream politics has collapsed.
In a new book to be published this week, the philosopher Michael Sandel and the economic historian Thomas Piketty suggest that this landscape, though now familiar, continues to be inadequately confronted by centre-left parties. Equality: What It Means and Why It Matters is a plea to retrieve authentic social democratic principles to cope with huge challenges such as the green transition.

12 January
Ezra Klein: ‘Now Is the Time of Monsters’
Donald Trump is returning, artificial intelligence is maturing, the planet is warming, and the global fertility rate is collapsing.
To look at any of these stories in isolation is to miss what they collectively represent: the unsteady, unpredictable emergence of a different world
Much that we took for granted over the last 50 years — from the climate to birthrates to political institutions — is breaking down; movements and technologies that seek to upend the next 50 years are breaking through.
… Democracy does not die in darkness. It degrades through deal-making — a procession of pragmatic transactions between those who have power and those who want it or fear it. We have seen this termitic corruption consume democracies elsewhere, including Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which Trump and his allies cite as a model. Money and media make peace with the regime because to do otherwise is too costly. Once proud political parties become vehicles for the individual ambition they were designed to replace.

2024

Major elections NPR correspondents are watching
Elections have consequences.
2024 is an extraordinary year of global elections. Half of the global population are voting in their elections. They include people in the world’s three largest democratic countries: India, the United States and Indonesia.
This great democratic exercise takes place at a time when concerns of democratic backsliding are on the rise, with technology turbocharging the process.
Freedoms Denied as the World Enters a Consequential Year of Elections
Freedom in the World 2024 finds that global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023. The breadth and depth of the deterioration were extensive—political rights and civil liberties diminished in 52 countries and improved in only 21.

11 December
Even in authoritarian countries, democracy advocates are worth investing in
By Fernanda Buril, Nate Grubman, and Patrick Quirk
(Atlantic Council) Freedom and democracy are in decline globally, according to the Atlantic Council’s Freedom Index. Political freedom in particular has slumped sharply since 2019, bringing the world to a twenty-four-year low. The biggest backsliders—the places with the sharpest declines in political freedom—span every major geographic region and many are particularly relevant to US national security.
There are several fundamental reasons for the United States to support strategies that aim to halt such backsliding and foster democratization, including ones that go beyond the moral obligation to support humanitarian values. For instance, research shows that democracies are less prone to enable and export transnational crime or terrorism, and democracies are better at adapting to adverse economic events and avoiding large-scale disasters, and are more reliable trading partners, offering better business opportunities by upholding the rule of law and protecting investments from the arbitrary predation of political elites. Most notably, the vast majority of people around the world continue to prefer to be governed democratically. …

Heather Cox Richardson October 26, 2024
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets titled Army Talks for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
…Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
… The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. …
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”

22 October
The Populist Phantom – Threats to Democracy Start at the Top
By Larry M. Bartels
support for populist parties depends on factors beyond the predispositions of voters. In particular times and places, populist parties succeed or fail mostly as a result of the quality of their leadership, the alternatives voters have to choose from, and the strategic incentives provided by electoral systems.
(Foreign Affairs November/December 2024) Many countries have been roiled in recent years by what is often called a “populist wave.” In the Anglophone world, this new era began in 2016 with the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.
… And yet for all the alarm that populism has generated, its nature and political significance are widely misunderstood. The metaphor of a “populist wave” reflects this error. It exaggerates the electoral success of populism around the world, which has been rather more modest than it sometimes appears. It also exaggerates the coherence of populism as a political tendency, overlooking the extent to which ostensibly populist entrepreneurs in different times and places have appealed to distinct grievances. Even more important, the metaphor overstates the implications of populist parties’ electoral successes for policymaking and for democratic stability.

Heather Cox Richardson October 13, 2024
“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.”
… Trump’s behavior is Authoritarianism 101. In a 1951 book called The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, political philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that demagogues appeal to a disaffected population whose members feel they have lost the power they previously held, that they have been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people are willing to follow a leader who promises to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again.
But to cement their loyalty, the leader has to give them someone to hate. Who that is doesn’t really matter: the group simply has to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters are suffering. Trump has kept his base firmly behind him by demonizing immigrants, the media, and, increasingly, Democrats, deflecting his own shortcomings by blaming these groups for undermining him.
According to Hoffer, there’s a psychological trick to the way this rhetoric works that makes loyalty to such a leader get stronger as that leader’s behavior deteriorates.

7 October
The Phony Populism of Trump and Musk
Around the world, fantastically wealthy people are hoodwinking ordinary voters, warning that dark forces—always an indistinct “they” and “them”—are conspiring to take away their rights and turn their nation into an immense ghetto full of undesirables (who are almost always racial minorities or immigrants or, in the ideal narrative, both).
The British writer Martin Wolf calls this “pluto-populism,” a brash attempt by people at the top of the financial and social pyramid to stay afloat by capering as ostensibly anti-establishment, pro-worker candidates.
In Britain, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson dismissed the whole notion of Brexit behind closed doors, and then supported the movement as his ticket into 10 Downing Street anyway. In Italy, a wealthy entrepreneur helped start the “Five-Star Movement,” recruiting the comedian Beppe Grillo to hold supposedly anti-elitist events such as Fuck-Off Day; they briefly joined a coalition government with a far-right populist party, Lega, some years ago. Similar movements have arisen around the world, in Turkey, Brazil, Hungary, and other nations.
These movements are all remarkably alike: They claim to represent the common voter, especially the “forgotten people” and the dispossessed, but in reality, the base voters for these groups are not the poorest or most disadvantaged in their society. Rather, they tend to be relatively affluent. … One of the pioneers of pluto-populism, of course, is the late Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a rake and a grifter who stayed in office as part of staying out of jail. …
The appeals of the pluto-populists work because they target people who care little about policy but a great deal about social revenge. These citizens feel like others whom they dislike are living good lives, which to them seems an injustice. Worse, this itching sense of resentment is the result not of unrequited love but of unrequited hate….
Who better to be the agent of their revenge than a crude and boorish magnate who commands attention, angers and frightens the people they hate, and intends to control the political system so that he cannot be touched by it?

28 September
Inside the world of Martin Sellner, millennial influencer of Europe’s far right
The Post spent time with Sellner to understand his secretive movement and how his rhetoric found its way into the Trump campaign and Austria’s election on Sunday.
Sellner, 35, a far-right Austrian provocateur, will say he is no racist — but argues that each race would be happier in its own geographic corner. His Generation Identity movement, he says, adheres to nonviolent activism to protect ethno-European culture, citing Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Arab Spring as inspiration.
As popularized by the multilingual Sellner, “remigration” envisions the systematic expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants. He has his sights on Austrian citizens with foreign heritage, too. He contends that those who insist on living within separate communities should face “economic” and “cultural” pressure to “either assimilate or remigrate.”
European intelligence officials, however, call him “dangerous” — the leading figure of a right-wing extremist group that they say is radicalizing a generation of White and angry Europeans.
Various governments have tried to constrain Sellner’s influence. Britain has barred him from entry, and Switzerland kicked him out. He says the United States canceled his travel permit in 2019, ahead of his wedding to American alt-right influencer Brittany Pettibone. German authorities this year sought to ban him — a ruling Sellner challenged in court and won.

27 September
Escaping the New Gilded Age
Daron Acemoglu
(Project Syndicate) Some individuals will always have more power than others, but how much power is too much? Once upon a time, power was linked to physical strength or military prowess, whereas now its perquisites usually stem from what Simon Johnson and I call “persuasion power,” which, as we explain in our book Power and Progress, is rooted in status or prestige. The greater your status, the more easily you can persuade others.
… While some of America’s wealthiest individuals do not use their wealth-derived status to influence critical public debates (think Warren Buffett), many do. Gates, Musk, George Soros, and others do not hesitate to weigh in on matters that are important to them, and while it is easy to welcome such contributions from those whom we agree with, we should resist this temptation. It makes a lot of sense for society to tap into the knowledge and wisdom of those with expertise on a given topic, but it is counterproductive to amplify the status of those who already have plenty of status (and are working very hard to increase it). …
The Kleptocracy Club
Autocrats dump their democratic allies and keep the company of kleptocrats.
By Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev
(The Atlantic) Since the earliest days of the republic, America’s international friendships have shaped domestic politics. And some of those friendships helped America strengthen its democratic principles. So what happens if America’s new friends are autocrats? John Bolton, former national security adviser for President Donald Trump, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island argue that if America no longer leads the democratic world and instead imports secrecy and kleptocracy from the autocratic world, American citizens will feel even more powerless, apathetic, disengaged, and cynical.

23 September
Our Own Worst Enemies
The Violent Style in American Politics
(Foreign Affairs November/December) …Political scientist Robert Pape cautions that, with public support for political violence in the United States on the rise, the country is “entering an era of intense deadly conflict.” The public’s seeming acceptance of violent action “encourages volatile people—those who may actually use force—to act on their worst impulses,” he warned. “The political climate may prompt such people to think their attacks are serving some greater good, or even that they will be glorified as warriors.”

17 September
The Global State of Democracy 2024: Strengthening the Legitimacy of Elections in a Time of Radical Uncertainty
(International IDEA) In this report, we take a close look at elections, and we find that the credibility of elections around the world was worse in more than one fifth of the countries we cover (39 of 173) in 2023 (the most recent year for which we have complete data) than it had been five years before, in 2018. The way that people engage with electoral processes has also been changing over the past several decades: turnout has been going down while the incidence of protests and riots has been going up.
Democracy declined for 8th straight year around the globe, institute finds
(AP) — Last year had the worst decline in credible elections and parliamentary oversight in almost a half-century, driven by government intimidation, foreign interference, disinformation and the misuse of artificial intelligence in campaigns, an organization promoting democracy said Tuesday.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or International IDEA, said election credibility is threatened by turnout dropping and results are increasingly being contested. One in three elections are being disputed in some way, it said.
The organization with 35 member governments said the average percentage of the voting age population who actually cast ballots has declined from 65.2% in 2008 to 55.5% in 2023.
“Elections remain the single best opportunity to end democratic backsliding and turn the tide in democracy’s favor,” said International IDEA’s Secretary-General, Kevin Casas-Zamora. “The success of democracy depends on many things, but it becomes utterly impossible if elections fail.”

6 September
The End of Democracy Has Already Begun
In the first episode of our new podcast, a look at how lies prime a society for a fall
By Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev
(The Atlantic) The corruption of democracy begins with the corruption of thought—and with the deliberate undermining of reality. Stephen Richer, an election official in Arizona, and Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman, learned firsthand how easily false stories and conspiracy theories could disorient their colleagues. They talk with hosts Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev about how conformism and fear made it impossible to do their jobs.

4 September
The West’s Stealthy Assault on Democracy
Brahma Chellaney
Regime change brought about by popular uprisings rarely leads to democratic breakthroughs. Yet Western powers have often supported coups and takeovers – regardless of the new regime’s democratic credentials – in order to advance their own geopolitical and economic interests.

Takeaways from AP’s report on JD Vance and the Catholic postliberals in his circle of influence
By Peter Smith and Michelle R. Smith
What is postliberalism?
It’s a movement primarily among Catholic intellectuals that rejects both the progressive left, with its focus on individual rights and identity, and “economic liberalism,” the ideology that favors a free market and small government.
Postliberals do share Catholic conservatives’ longstanding opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights
But Catholic postliberals want a muscular government — one that they control.
They envision people who share their views taking over government bureaucracies, universities and other institutions from within, replacing entrenched “elites” and acting upon their vision of the “common good.”
“What is needed … is regime change — the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order,” wrote Patrick Deneen, a prominent author in the movement, in his 2023 book, “Regime Change.”
JD Vance’s Catholicism helped shape his views. So did this little-known group of Catholic thinkers
(AP) His conversion also put Vance in close touch with a Catholic intellectual movement, viewed by some critics as having reactionary or authoritarian leanings, that has been little known to the American public until Vance’s rise to the national stage as the Republican vice presidential nominee.
The professors and media personalities in this network don’t all agree on everything — even on what to call themselves – but most go by postliberal. …

23 August
Is Democracy Really in Retreat?
Helmut K. Anheier , Edward L. Knudsen, and Joseph C. Saraceno
Is state capacity sufficient to deliver consistent improvements in quality of life, even in the absence of robust democratic accountability? While Westerners long insisted that the answer must be no, China and other socioeconomically successful autocracies have demonstrated that the question is far from settled.
(Project Syndicate) Liberal democracy is again under threat around the world. In many ways, we have seen such challenges before, and democracy has ultimately emerged victorious. Is a similar confidence warranted this time? Anti-democratic threats certainly do not mean the end of the system. But rather than clinging to the optimistic belief in democracy’s inevitable global triumph, its defenders must now adopt a realistic mindset grounded in empirical evidence – especially when the data challenge long-held assumptions and raise uncomfortable questions.
Evidence of a global “democratic recession” has mounted since it was first identified nearly a decade ago. Research institutes like Freedom House and V-Dem, and leading publications such as The Economist, have found that liberal democracy continues to lose ground to autocracy and illiberalism. Such regimes – which include China, Hungary, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and many others – are increasingly self-confident and promote their economic and political models as being more conducive to stability and prosperity than those of democratic countries.
…there are 36 successful democratic states in the world today, a cohort that includes Australia, most European Union countries, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Members of this group perform the strongest across all three governance dimensions. But while all have highly globalized economies and high per capita GDPs, they increasingly differ in terms of political and social stability. Estonia, for example, has continued to perform well in these dimensions, whereas the US in recent years has not. We believe the future of democracy in this cluster depends on how governments manage the global economy, and whether they build the domestic state capacity needed to achieve both social cohesion and adequate provision of public goods in a competitive international environment.
No, the world isn’t heading toward a new Cold War – it’s closer to the grinding world order collapse of the 1930s
(The Conversation) The past decade and a half has seen upheaval across the globe. The 2008 financial crisis and its fallout, the COVID-19 pandemic and major regional conflicts in Sudan, the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere have left residual uncertainty. Added to this is a tense, growing rivalry between the U.S. and its perceived opponents, particularly China.
In response to these jarring times, commentators have often reached for the easy analogy of the post-1945 era to explain geopolitics. The world is, we are told repeatedly, entering a “new Cold War.”
But as a historian of the U.S.’s place in the world, these references to a conflict that pitted the West in a decades-long ideological battle with the Soviet Union and its allies – and the ripples the Cold War had around the globe – are a flawed lens to view today’s events. To a critical eye, the world looks less like the structured competition of that Cold War and more like the grinding collapse of world order that took place during the 1930s.
… The Great Depression defined the 1930s across the world. It was not, as it is often remembered, simply the stock market crash of 1929. That was merely an overture to a large-scale unraveling of the world economy that lasted a painfully long time.
Persistent economic problems impacted economies and individuals from Minneapolis to Mumbai, India, and wrought profound cultural, social and, ultimately, political changes. Meanwhile, the length of the Great Depression and its resistance to standard solutions – such as simply letting market forces “purge the rot” of a massive crisis – discredited the laissez faire approach to economics and the liberal capitalist states that supported it.
The “Lesser Depression” that followed the 2008 financial crisis produced something similar – throwing international and domestic economies into chaos, making billions insecure and discrediting a liberal globalization that had ruled since the 1990s.

19 July
What is Catholic Integralism?
Mathew Schmalz,Professor of Religious Studies, College of the Holy Cross
(The Conversation) The basic position of Catholic Integralism is that there are two areas of human life: the spiritual and the temporal, or worldly. Catholic Integralists argue that the spiritual and temporal should be integrated – with the spiritual being the dominant partner. This means that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies.
Catholic Integralists disagree about how to achieve this integration between the spiritual and temporal. Some argue that Christians, particularly Catholics, should have advisory roles in government and lead by example. Other Catholic Integralists want a more comprehensive approach to organizing society along Christian principles.
Catholic Integralists share an opposition to liberalism. Generally, liberalism is understood as a political philosophy that supports limits on the government’s authority and constitutional protections for the rights of individuals and minorities. But Catholic Integralists argue that liberalism is incapable of establishing deep forms of human community because it values individualism and liberty above all things.

3 July
Advancing freedom, defeating authoritarianism: A democracy agenda for 2025-2029
By Patrick Quirk
(Atlantic Council) The next president of the United States, whether a Democrat or Republican, will enter office in January 2025 confronted by a world where freedom is under threat. This is a central challenge to the United States because American citizens benefit most when the world is free and open. Supporting democracy must therefore feature in the foreign policy agenda of any administration. How should the presidential campaigns think about this challenge, and what should they do about it once in office? What does the data tell us about the nature of today’s challenges and the most cost-effective ways to address them?
This paper examines the main challenges to democracy and offers nonpartisan policy solutions to them. It starts by surveying the state of democracy globally and articulates why underwriting the expansion of freedom (understood using the Atlantic Council’s Freedom Index definition) is vital to US interests.1 The second section outlines priority challenges and opportunities, from the need to supercharge countering China’s malign influence to shoring up the core institutions of democracy in strategically important countries. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations that the president and US Congress can action to address challenges to US interests.

18 June
The Specter of Neo-Fascism Is Haunting Europe
Slavoj Žižek
With mainstream parties and politicians already preparing to accommodate the far right following this month’s European Parliament election, the axiom of post-World War II European democracy has been quietly abandoned. “No collaboration with fascists” is being replaced by a tacit acceptance of them.
(Project Syndicate) The surprise in this month’s European Parliament elections was that the outcome everyone expected really did come to pass. To paraphrase a classic scene from the Marx Brothers: Europe may be talking and acting like it is moving to the radical right, but don’t let that fool you; Europe really is moving to the radical right.
The message of this election is clear. The political divide in most EU countries is no longer between the moderate right and the moderate left, but between the conventional right, embodied by the big winner, the European People’s Party (comprising Christian democrats, liberal-conservatives, and traditional conservatives) and the neo-fascist right represented by Le Pen, Meloni, AfD, and others. The question now is whether the EPP will collaborate with neo-fascists. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is spinning the outcome as a triumph of the EPP against both “extremes,” yet the new parliament will include no left-wing parties whose extremism is even distantly comparable to that of the far right. Such a “balanced” view from the EU’s top official sends an ominous signal.

28 May
The New Propaganda War
Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.
If people are naturally drawn to human rights, democracy, and freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned.

By Anne Applebaum
(The Atlantic 24 June issue) While we were still rhapsodizing about the many ways in which the internet could spread democracy, the Chinese were designing what’s become known as the Great Firewall of China. That method of internet management—which is in effect conversation management—contains many different elements, beginning with an elaborate system of blocks and filters that prevent internet users from seeing particular words and phrases. Among them, famously, are Tiananmen, 1989, and June 4, but there are many more. In 2000, a directive called “Measures for Managing Internet Information Services” prohibited an extraordinarily wide range of content, including anything that “endangers national security, divulges state secrets, subverts the government, undermines national unification,” and “is detrimental to the honor and interests of the state”—anything, in other words, that the authorities didn’t like.
Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society.

11 May
The West’s multi-racial societies cannot survive woke doctrines being promoted on campuses (Pay wall)
Intolerant and illiberal, the identity politics that has taken root in our universities will ultimately have to be stamped out
Daniel Hannan (Lord Hannan of Kingsclere)

7 May
Putin sits at the heart of the West’s illiberal axis
(WaPo) Vladimir Putin’s sympathizers share an aversion to the West’s perceived liberal establishment, and see a positive vision in the Russian president’s rejection of it.

5 May
Just How Dangerous Is Europe’s Rising Far Right?
Anti-immigration parties with fascist roots — and an uncertain commitment to democracy — are now mainstream.
Roger Cohen
(NYT) Across Europe, the far right is becoming the right, absent any compelling message from traditional conservative parties. If “far” suggests outlier, it has become a misnomer. Not only have the parties of an anti-immigrant right surged, they have seen the barriers that once kept them out crumble as they are absorbed into the arc of Western democracies.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has political roots in a neo-fascist party, now leads Italy’s most right-wing government since Mussolini. In Sweden, the center-right government depends on the fast-growing Sweden Democrats, another party with neo-Nazi origins, for its parliamentary majority. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, who has called Moroccan immigrants “scum,” won national elections in November at the head of his Party for Freedom, and center-right parties there have agreed to negotiate with him to form a governing coalition.
… This year the far-right surge across the continent looks dramatic. The latest polls show the National Rally with a clear lead, set to take some 31 percent of the vote in France compared with about 16 percent for the centrist Renaissance coalition of President Emmanuel Macron. Mr. Bardella is the only politician among France’s 50 “favorite personalities,” according to a recent ranking in the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.
The result is that anti-immigrant parties may win as many as a quarter of the seats in the 720-seat European Parliament. This could lead to a hardening of immigration regulations Europewide, hostility to environmental reform, and pressure to be more amenable to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

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