Democracy

We are used to a tidy taxonomy of regimes. There are democracies, where power changes hands by election and is restrained by law, and there are dictatorships, where a single man or clique rules without restraint and the population has been stripped of any means of resistance. Most of the world fits somewhere on that line. But the United States has slipped into a condition for which the taxonomy has no ready word — a condition that, to my knowledge, has no real historical precedent. Here is a country that remains, at its core, a functioning democracy: it has independent courts, a parliament that can say no, a press nobody can silence by decree, fifty states with real sovereignty, and a citizenry that is armed. And this democratic country is led by a man and a faction whose views and methods can only be described as fascist — supported, it should be said plainly, by something close to half the population. The result is not a coup and not yet a dictatorship. It is a live, ongoing battle between a still-free nation and a clique that would very much like to make it unfree. And the most honest thing one can say is that the outcome of that battle is genuinely undecided. ...

When people search the map for the force that will ultimately stop Vladimir Putin, their eyes drift to the obvious places. To Washington, where the most powerful military on earth could in theory end the war with a stroke of the pen. To Beijing, the rising giant some imagine might one day inherit America’s role. To the negotiating tables in Istanbul and the choreographed summits where diplomats perform the rituals of peace. I want to argue that all of these are the wrong places to look. The real growth-point of resistance — the place where the future is actually being decided, quietly and unglamorously — is Europe. Not the flashy Europe of communiqués and photo opportunities, but the Europe that is, brick by brick, building an iron hedgehog against which the Putin regime will eventually break itself. ...

Every few weeks a reader writes to me with some version of the same hopeful question. Tell us, they say, what does the ideal electoral system look like? Which country has solved the problem of government? Sketch us the perfect constitution and we will fight for it. I understand the impulse completely. After living under a regime that is lawless to its marrow, you crave a blueprint — a finished design you could lift off the shelf and bolt onto your own ruined country once the tyrant is gone. But I have come to believe this craving rests on a mistake, and a dangerous one, because the search for a universally perfect system is structurally identical to the search for a perpetual-motion machine. Both promise something the world does not permit. There is no ideal electoral system, no ideal state structure, no ideal model of government, for one stubborn reason: none of these things can be separated from the society it is supposed to serve. ...

Whenever I am asked what should be done with Russia after this war, I notice that the question itself contains a hidden assumption I no longer share. The question assumes there will still be a Russia to do something with — a single, intact state, stretching across eleven time zones, that we will somehow steer toward decency once the present regime is gone. Replace the leader, hold honest elections, draft a good constitution, and the country will at last take the European path it missed in the 1990s. I have come to believe this is a comforting illusion, and a dangerous one. The hard truth is simpler and far less reassuring: an intact Russia will keep reproducing the empire, because empire is not a policy this state pursues but the form this state takes. You cannot reform your way out of a shape. You can only break it. ...

There is a small irony buried in the Russian calendar that almost nobody notices. The country keeps a generous collection of press holidays. One marks the appearance, three centuries ago, of the first issue of a state gazette under Peter the Great. Another, inherited from Soviet times, commemorates the day in 1912 when the first issue of Pravda rolled off the press. And somewhere in between sits the imported World Press Freedom Day, observed with a kind of polite confusion, as if it were a foreign saint nobody in the house actually prays to. The accumulation is telling. A culture that has to multiply its festivals of the press is usually a culture compensating for something it never had. ...

There are years that the textbooks compress into a single date because everything that mattered happened at once. Nineteen forty-five, when the unconditional surrender of Germany was signed in a Berlin suburb and a bipolar order settled over the world for the next four decades. Nineteen ninety-one, when the Soviet Union dissolved and an interim, improvised order took its place. I have come to believe we are living through a third such date right now, in real time, without the comfort of hindsight. The transatlantic order assembled after the Second World War — built largely by the United States, with the United States at its center — is coming apart in front of us. This is not a crisis within the order. It is the dissolution of the order itself, a tectonic shift on the scale of the two that preceded it. And the most important thing to understand about it is that despair is the wrong response. What is ending was always going to end someday; what matters now is what we choose to build in its place. ...

There is a question I keep hearing from thoughtful, frightened people, and it always arrives in roughly the same shape. Liberal democracy, the argument goes, is constitutionally too soft. It grants a platform to every voice, including the voices openly committed to its destruction. It plays by rules its enemies cheerfully ignore. We now live in a post-truth world where authoritarian regimes flood the public square with so much falsehood that the truth cannot keep pace. So how can such a permissive, slow-moving system possibly survive the onslaught? Surely, the despairing conclusion runs, the West is writing its own death sentence, and the only honest thing left to say is farewell to it. I want to answer that question directly, because I think the despair behind it, however understandable, rests on a misreading of how history actually moves. ...

When a French court found Marine Le Pen guilty of misusing European Union funds and barred her from running for office for five years, the most revealing thing was not the verdict. It was the reaction. Within hours, a chorus rose across half a dozen countries, all singing the same note. Viktor Orbán posted the old Solidarity slogan, refitted for the occasion: “I am Marine.” Matteo Salvini sneered that those who fear the voters’ verdict reach for the courts instead, and told her to march forward. Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy echoed the sentiment. Geert Wilders chimed in from the Netherlands, Santiago Abascal from Spain, Nigel Farage from Britain, George Simion from Romania. From across the Atlantic came Elon Musk, blaming the radical left for jailing its opponents when it cannot beat them at the ballot box, and Jair Bolsonaro, who diagnosed “leftist judicial activism.” A single court ruling in Paris had set off a continent-wide reflex of mutual defense. That reflex has a name worth using plainly: the Brown International. ...

There is a lazy reflex, common to people who consider themselves sober, to file every new political ugliness under a familiar heading. We say “populism,” we say “the right turn,” we say “the usual demagoguery,” and having named the thing we feel we have understood it. I want to resist that reflex here, because I am convinced that what we are watching in the United States is not a louder version of something old. It is a genuinely new political organism, and like any new organism it deserves to be looked at directly rather than translated back into the vocabulary we already had. My claim is blunt and I will defend it slowly: Trumpism is a form of fascism. Not a metaphor for fascism, not “fascism-adjacent,” but a real, postmodern variant of the disease — one that has discarded the old machinery of violence and replaced it with an engine of lies, and one that, for the first time in history, has seized control of a country that is genuinely free. ...