Ours is an age in which everyone (online) may look up everything (OSINT) for any purpose evil or good at any time. For years now and living a “life online”, I have asked myself with so much “content” available through a fancy television screen, where to dwell? Add an earnest “why?” In the coverage of conflict–or curiosity about it–from the web’s second row seat to history there are of course the dots between events and places, the inflection points newly minted in a year–or a week or day–and the things a generation may–or must–never forget, e.g., the Rubicon, Auschwitz, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 of their youth, but what is the choosing, clicking, scrolling point for the mind at the monitor?
For a small portion of the world beyond basic needs–cash flow is good, discretionary time is what we have, abundance in some measure small or great–the point becomes interesting. A modern Muslim woman, Qanta Ahmed asked me on Facebook decades ago (so it feels) after having registered her account, “What now?” My answer had been “Good influence.” I believe she has done her part–and I mine.
What now?
The answer for me has been one person’s diplomacy. The opportunity to read foreign newspapers in English, to make friends nine thousand miles away who would become better known than the neighbor in the apartment on the other side of the office wall–but for whom one could do nothing in a pinch–would build out one’s social media community. That was back in the Facebook uptake era. Then along came everything else and, well, X marked the spot!
And X has been the spot for responding to power and the tensions between the ambitions and attitudes of some wealthy, the arrangements made by power medieval–as well as brutal and unconscionable–and the aspirations and values of a nation blessed with valuing its own humanity and related dignity, freedom, and security. And then along came Donald–and DOGE–and the emergence of fuzzy philosophers dreaming of Tech Bro empires and new relationships between a plutocracy of programmers and the needs and wants of comparatively hapless consumers of “content” and other stuff.
The heady early days seem to me no longer new and novel–not even the “Tube” sites of the flesh trade–and all of the governments in attendance (I’m sure) watching decision patterns and trees for even that.
Ain’t it grand?
It turns out the “second row”–mediated–seat to history may be as well a space cordoned (almost) from life, but then even souls living through their screens have to step away and step out for fresh air and a good restaurant now and then.
Softshell Crab Sandwich, The Grille at Runways, HGR, Hagerstown, Maryland, May 2, 2026
And now what?
X has become a daily battle with bots, trolls, and indefinite fake names weighing in from their VPN locations (no doubt), and potentially for purposes as insidious as their being unknown and possibly unidentifiable. Then too, especially for me, there’s been the hash slung repeatedly toward every pair of eyeballs who didn’t get it — or believe it — on the first round: #AmericaForSale; #AmericaUnderAssault (good entry: welcome to my world!) all the way to where we really are (so I believe): #StateCapture / #StatePiracy. The epiphanies no longer leave me breathless but rather yawning it all back for having been repeated too often for too long.
Shall there be here a “Dining for Diplomats” section for the Washingtonians (who really may be diplomats)? And what happened to the sound track? America . . . Born in the USA . . . The Secret of Life . . . . Everyone of us — Americans — has his own. That’s our freedom . . . our individualism . . . our choice to choose how we grow our persons inside and out. Upstairs? Tabulation. Tell the universe what you want — Amazon will have it slipped into your shopping experience right soon.
With the #PhantomOfTheSoviet playing a fading devil and #IllTrumpolini providing an object lesson in #MalignantNarcissism — and this blog becoming weirdly hybrid with hashtags — Qanta’s “What now” has transitioned fully into two major questions, one public and an echo from history: “What is to be done!?” (Query AI on the famous Russian question). And the other personal: “What am I doing here? What’s my hunt, my role, my mission, my purpose? So I jump (virtually) in the air shaking my fists over my head before a distant, virtual, absent–from my space but not cyberspace– Michael McFaul who has posted a note on X expressing hope that the next President will be different without fully comprehending the challenges posed by having a piratical feudal-medieval mafia chief in the wheelhouse of the American Ship O’ State promising his portion of the Christian base relief from elections forever after: ““It’ll be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore my beautiful Christians . . . in four years you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
Putin is an enemy of freedom and a supporter of dictatorship. That's why he invaded Ukraine and is aiding Iran.
The U.S. should be a friend of freedom and a supporter of democracy.
Trump doesn't understand this basic mission for our great country. I hope future leaders will.
While true, “Trump doesn’t understand this basic mission for our great country,” he understands being a chief with his own system of private patronage (#PPS on X) and all the methods attending criminally ruthless power from blackmail, bribery, and intimidation to the promising of generous rewards in exchange for loyalty, obedience, and silence.
What Donald Trump does — and what he has done to take America down — has been as obvious as it has been ugly. Check the list for his large targets or mishaps with tariffs: American agriculture, counterintelligence, election security, health, humanitarian aid, justice, natural resources, etc.
Whine it out on X, fashion the barbs that make the snark, send hints to those who know them, perhaps, but come forward from the curtains keeping the darker realities out of sight, the reckless, unresponsive, upside-down, and surreal Trump and his Trumpian Theater will just get right on to the next dumb move, the sort now paving the way toward national financial arrest, debilitating desperation, probably related crime (we shall see), and the unholy trinity leftover from Soviet post-Soviet Russian barbarity and stupidity: enserfment, gulag, and Soviet-style totalitarian surveillance. ICE will need work; the private prison system may appreciate a little expansion money; and the technology for observing or tracking everyone at all times might well exist —
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
Archaic, Criminal, Irrelevant, Medieval
My X-ing has been for some time a routine . . . another program involving a repetitious rollout of arguments, memes, and related talking points. Let’s leave this most egregious of observations here: the above faces defend and reflect in their game-faced hardness an outlook better fit with the worst barbarities of medieval power and related treachery than with anything like modern compassionate, responsible, responsive, and trustworthy governance. Whatever the wreckage each has left or will leave behind, they are together representatives of all that belongs behind us and none of what any should want waiting in the near future.
Donald Trump’s elevation will change no truths about his authoritarian-fascist political stance, his crimes and criminality, his ignorance and his vulgarity. Moreover, he may not be expected to defend our American Constitution or any American law set against him.
Donald John Trump will rule, not govern.
Americans should have only the lowest expectations for him in relation to American National Security (what does that now mean?), Global Issues, and International Affairs. Expect greater emphasis on his own aggrandizement along with greater deceit and his customary excessive lying.
Given a decent theory of the process by which malignant narcissists become so, it follows that denial covers the initiating or repeated narcissistic mortification–whatever imparted the humiliation never happened–and false claims and other lies abet the invention of an undamaged unassailable courageous-heroic self and related projected image. That image becomes the narcissists identity and self-concept with all contrary evidence dismissible–and the same may be and must be accepted by the narcissist’s agents, associates, employees, envoys, family, and friends.
Before one starts playing, “Who’s a narcissists?”–“You’re a narcissist!”–No, you are the narcissist!” and so on, it may be noted that the malignant narcissist has rejected one social reality, that which caused him emotional damage, for another in which he may not only play the hero in his own show, but it’s he who creates the show as an illusion in which innumerable others become party to his madness. The (#)”MaligNarc”–as I refer to the type on X–creates his own theater, and that stage and his centrality in it become his reality. This differs from the normal pride on may take in one’s “powers” as defined by one’s knowledge, skills, abilities, and talents plus energies over time, i.e., the normal endowment of a healthy person. Add a few course corrections and character-shaping habits good or bad for both a normal and successful or, alas, less so but honest sense of reality.
In my first approach to “A Dark Mirror in Language”, I relayed with it the context of Russia’s war of conquest and cultural annihilation taking place in Ukraine. My intent here is to produce a short description not attached to a present–and soon to be historical–fact of life.
For the narcissist, there is a dark mirror in language. He looks at his reflection in the pond, sees the sky behind him, and he believes he is gazing up toward heaven-and he goes on living in his own reflection.
The beautiful Narcissus of Greek mythology had perhaps youthful cause to enjoy his singular existence and self-absorbed obsession, and before even the existence of the myth the storytellers the loving grace to see in the plant the poetic cause of its form.
The malignant “Narcissus”, more Dorian Gray than innocent youth, may have other cause to view his life as seen in a mirror but lived in the black cold water beneath, a literal “underworld” for fear of the hazards of the reality around him that first imparted his own traumatic humiliation and shame. How much more fit to be admired, agreed with, obeyed for possessing the power to ruthlessly destroy any detractor and richly reward the properly admiring.
Behold the malignant narcissus, criminal, degrading, and ignoble but speaking and strutting as if an admired king, appropriately groomed, wise in the world, and responsive to his cultivated portion of the world’s most responsible advisors, that is a good king and leader, a philosopher-king and an admirable son of the language and soil of his birth. The malignant would not be so lucky as to be authentic but rather presents a fraud, imposter, usurper whose chief recommendations may be ill-gotten wealth and related criminal ruthlessness.
The Malignant Narcissist Lies
As noted, the malignant narcissist needs must lie to cover the memory of his own early and traumatic instance or continuing experience of humiliation and shame. The monster has options:
-Baseless Accusations, Defamations, Slanders -Claims Without Merit -Conspiracy to Commit Crimes -Defamations, Libels, Slanders -Deflections of Attention In Relation to Crimes -Denials of Culpability -Disinformation -Disingenuous and Fallacious Arguments -Fabrications & False Framing -Incitements to Violence -Sins of Omission
Whatever awful thing happened to him . . . just didn’t. Capiche?
Whatever the crime, he didn’t do it. Someone else must have done it, don’t you agree?
Everything he does is the best, the greatest, over-the-top, platinum, and outshines the sun–bask in his beneficence, nay his glory and magnificence–or be gone!
In his own theater, the malignant narcissist has become the world, and no one else can do what he can do or even really matters much at all.
Contemporary Irrational Actors, Diagnoses and Prognoses
I have circulated on X what follows as part of the day to day combat with–call it what is is–evil.
Signal: delusional, grandiose, messianic ideation absent of normal boundaries and limits, i.e., the parameters of normal conscience.
With the advent of affordable and popular “broadband Internet”, I chose to “see” the world in English through the foreign publications published in that lingua franca. The experience has been as inseparable from the study of conflict as it has been edifying and expansive. One desktop : one mind. In relation to conflict and malignant narcissism, the theme most evident across the world’s conflicts–we have a bloody busy and busy bloody world everywhere (may most–one would wish all–avoid the worst)–has been what I characterize as “Medieval v. Modern”, i.e., politically absolute systems of power poised against systems of distributed political power–so: Absolute Feudal-Medieval Cultures v. Democratic Modern Cultures. While all private businesses are in their own way absolute, feudal, and medieval in their cultural and social structures, generally speaking, the compacts with governments and the interests of governments have become increasingly integrated and sophisticated in ways requiring greater levels of cooperation in respect to communications and trade. There are no “globalists”, and we are all well defined by where we have been born–the culture of our birth and our language–and who we have become by our own design and by the forces–cultural, financial, political, social–that are a part of our existence individually. In the world of the once mortified malignant personality–someone taught him or her a lesson, I guess–there may be only defense. Lies cover shame; money puts up barriers of all sorts and helps make friends–or hire greater defensive talent–as well. Somehow in our natural mix, we are not all so damaged, or if so have sought solace and strength elsewhere to become more contributing in life than destructive.
Note: I regard myself as reparative and blame that on isolation and spoiling, an odd combination which history I will not divulge, but I may say I’ve had a life with books, cameras, and musical instruments, and being able to say that (close to 70) and for the time being comfortable (at home in an apartment), there’s not much room for anger and complaint. Would that I could change the past with the potential natural decade or two ahead, but have for late stage wealth the ownership of my time. Discretionary time. Free time. And freedom of that sort let’s us do things we choose for our own esteem or pleasure.
Back to theme (my “weave”) . . . .
Take it as a trope: modernity worldwide already involves advanced complex integrated large and sensitive systems demanding interpersonal and interstate cooperation in the appreciation of their existence and related benefits.
In fact, international laws and standards apply and bear down on absolutely every facet of business and related exchange while the space left to criminals, frauds, isolationists, and marauders grows smaller by the day. On the other hand, the presence of the malignant and their role in greater conflict and desperation appears to be growing, and all that really keeps the lid on, where that is possible, are the reparative. That’s a heady thing for me to say, but take mine as a voice from the sidelines. The greater in contribution have presence as responsible academics, diplomats, executives, and researchers who help everything else connect and work. They are modern people in a world engaged not only in trading across boundaries but in addressing a full suite of basic issues and challenges involving hazards and process that have as phenomenon–contagion, earthquakes, hurricanes–only biology or physics for what they do–never conscience. And then there are the malignant who in positions of power behave similarly to natural dangers in their absence of conscience. As a breed born accustomed to punishment, denying it, and holding power ruthlessly so as not to again suffer the same themselves, some become rather their own “forces of nature” acting wholly without conscience and devoid of compassion.
Name the capitals; note the closed, criminal, and dark; consider the malignant–always attacking because always cowardly, defensive, and weak–and consider the possibility that the modern and those who would be modern engage in repairs and the securing of their work primarily to establish a greater good that is not about power and wealth so much as the encouragement and greening of a healthy planet at peace.
BUDAPEST, Hungary—When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban unleashed a racist tirade during an annual address to ethnic Hungarians in Romania on July 23, in which he argued that his supporters do “not want to become peoples of mixed race,” the international community recoiled in horror at the vitriol being espoused by the leader of a NATO and European Union member state. One of Orban’s longtime advisors, Zsuzsa Hegedus, resigned after the speech, calling it a “pure Nazi text … worthy of [former Nazi leader Joseph] Goebbels.”
Amanda Coakley’s article also covers Orban’s deliberate development of dependence on Russia for Hungary’s energy supply. His disingenuous position within the European Union suggests he has had but one outcome in mind, i.e., to become premier in Europe’s “New Nobility” as encouraged by Vladimir Putin. At the base of the autocratic feudal-medieval bond–the same “Malignant Narcissism” that has so characterized former American President Donald Trump’s careers and politics that have turned out disasters for banks, contractors, and citizens.
In late November 2022, Ukrainian special forces arrested a suspected Russian agent at the Ukraine–Hungary border. The man had been attempting to smuggle secret information into EU member state Hungary on a flash drive that he had allegedly concealed in his anus.
The flash drive contained stolen personal information about senior figures and staff at the Ukrainian domestic secret service SBU and the Ukrainian military intelligence service GUR, as well as sensitive data on Ukrainian army bases, weapons and logistics.
Global Security‘s remarks fit the brotherly love model of modern despotism in Hungary: “Orban played tough, which might not turn out well for him in the long run. His games were turning into a high wire act, threatening to keep Brussels off balance. At times Orban made half-hearted promises to uphold the EU’s policy toward Russia; at other times, he allowed himself to be flattered by Putin, his self-declared political role model. Or, when it came to economic interests, he allowed himself to be put under pressure (Global Security, “Hungary-Russia Relations” as quoted January 7, 2022).
Putin’s realpolitik, plain old mafia leverage, came through for Russia this past year. From The Guardian—
Hungarians voted in general elections just weeks after the invasion, in April, and it seems reasonable to assume that the war next door had an influence on the result. Given the climate of fear that the devastating “special military operation” created, Hungarians voted to keep Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in power rather than risk an untested six-party coalition. This assumption also underlies Orbán’s response, which is to stay out of the conflict to the point of being “exempted”, a position that has been condemned as a betrayal by Hungary’s western allies. Hungary refuses to allow arms shipments destined for Kyiv to transit Hungarian territory and blocks the extension of EU sanctions against Russia to the energy sector. This latter stance is intended to enable an already controversial Russian-Hungarian project to build a nuclear power plant on the Danube (Paks II) to go ahead unaltered.
György also notes the “similarities between the two leaders: authoritarian posturing and illiberalism underlying their respective concepts of the state.”
Since then, Orbán has been accused of fostering resentment. Tensions flared in 2018 over a video that apparently showed diplomats illegally issuing Hungarian passports to people in Transcarpathia. Later, in 2019, Hungary was accused of trying to influence the outcome of elections in the region, and blocked Ukraine’s NATO membership negotiations over the row. |
Today, from the Donbas to Kosovo, events are again proving the potency of nationalist narratives over lost territory and peoples separated by the claimed injustices of history. Yet, in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the simple fact that many Hungarians have negative views of both Russians and Ukrainians is pertinent.
The wholly reactionary New Nobility (a member of which Orban might wish to be counted) rather like the old, appears fascinated by its own super-duper bloodline and culture, enough so to demonize hosts beyond their own boundaries, engage in passportization, and when possibility arises, redraw maps by way of wars driven by the conviction of racially-based cultural supremacy.
Comparing Orban to Putin might once have been hyperbole. But when Fidesz seems determined to expel a high-quality educational institution from the country on the grounds of political views of its funder, it is hyperbole no longer.
The attack on CEU, furthermore, is not happening in isolation. It is part of a broader effort to squeeze out “Soros and the powers that symbolize him,” to use Orban’s own words.
While #PutinFullTonto strives to return Russia to some version of the KGB revisits the Russian Imperial mode, few believe the Phantom of the Soviet will restore a monstrous near past; however, he has well succeeded in leveraging cooperation from malign and piratical personalities similar to his own–in power Viktor Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdogan most notably–and thereby weakening the political cohesion and coherence of the Atlantic Alliance and the European Union.
This list is neither comprehensive nor fully representative of related content on this blog, but each post also conveys three computer-generated suggestions for related reading, not that anyone suffers for lack of reportage obsessed with Donald John Trump. Still, as I’ve repeatedly relayed some of these via Facebook and Twitter (welcome back, Don, you should see yourself in the mirror that is the World Wide Web), I thought to put a dozen blogs from January 6 to this November on one page as a potential and helpful (I hope) contribution to what lies ahead.
How sweet this victory for the most archaic, medieval, narcissistic, and selfish of human political minds across cultures.
The Afghan People, the Afghan Military, the United States of America, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been not only humiliated by the Taliban’s guerrilla putsch made possible by corruption within the Afghan government — or money would have reached its troops and those troops would have been more appreciated, moved, and better defended when most needed — the same have been looted by Moscow, more or less, and left to do their “lessons learned” back home, which from today may become less safe in relation to the deeply retrograde Islamic Revolution in Afghanistan.
Keys
–Rightful CIA intercession on behalf of the mujaheddin during the Soviet Army’s invasion of Afghanistan (see “Operation Cyclone” for the details).
— While both the CIA and Russian interests appeared to mirror one another in retreat from Afghanistan and leaving the state to its own devices, BackChannels believes Moscow directly influenced Ayman Al-Zawahiri during a 1996-97 detention in Russia and through him the compact with Osama Bin Laden that would produce Al-Qaeda and lead to 9/11 and successive acts of Islamist terror worldwide. Conspiratorial? Delusional? Look again at whose embassy is not only staying put in Kabul but which has Taliban guards keeping it secured.
–Today, “Moscow-Kabul” may be added to “Moscow-Tehran”, another block-and-goad nexus against western culture, democracy, humanism, and liberalism.
For peace, Asian powers as well as EU/NATO have with half-measures navigated what they have believed to be an “East-West Rivalry” sustained on business and political accommodations and tensions, and as much would seem in the natural course of diplomatic and international affairs. However, BackChannels has long noted a much different axis in conflict, and that has been the tension between Feudal-Medieval Personalities and States, the chief representatives of “Political Absolutism”, and the Modern of Mind devoted to universal dignity and freedom in the address of common and global challenges to human well-being and the survival of Earth herself.
Moscow and Company (lately Beijing as well) have been most interested in Power and Wealth benefiting select elites as determined in each respective absolutist and feudal-medieval framework while much of the rest of the world now cries for deliverance from them with hopes for modern improvements in Qualities of Living wherever life has planted them.
The deeply archaic and medieval Taliban were not welcomed yesterday in Kabul nearly as much as dreaded and feared.
Modern universal moral revulsion will now oppose the Taliban’s primitive narcissism, rigidity, and violence, and however disorganized it may be, it will by way of species-wide intellectual evolution emerge naturally and implacably — no less so than what mankind has done to create the culturally interwoven complex machinery that delivers the modern world in materials and services — and yesterday’s “victory” (over millions determined to flee it and now subject to living beneath the lowering shadow of the fear of it) may yet prove but the beginning of the Islamists own end.
Crowds of people desperate to escape Afghanistan stormed Kabul’s international airport, rushing onto the tarmac.
Perhaps all that separates Presidents Putin and Trump are America’s still-intact Constitutional checks and balances and related authentic cultural precepts, tenets, and values having to do with equality, freedom, and justice bound to a modern and spacious appreciation of universal human character and potential.
"I came here to support the people of Khabarovsk and their demand for Putin to resign… a person who hasn't fulfilled a single one of his promises," this man says in Pushkin Square, Moscow. "I think he's a typical windbag," he adds. pic.twitter.com/CqH4PYcgrb
The tapped popular perception of both of these heavy handed and extraordinarily wealthy politicians is that each exists to protect his image, his power, and his cronies and may be otherwise concerned with the needs of their respective nations overall to only a minimal extent.
The democracy of the United States of America requires — as do others — a soundly educated population on one hand and (it is this one on the other that’s tough) highly experienced and well educated statesmen on the other. The Republican vote coming for Biden, an “old school” politician with a manner familiar from far better days, will represent a mass of voting against the incumbent Donald Trump, but that will not hack it for American democracy except to forestall its dissolving into another shitty pseudo-democratic dictatorship.
Whoever wins 2020, it will be America’s 2024 election that will spell whether Americans will be governed by a fully responsive and responsible leadership or one bent by measures of dogma, excessive narcissism, and greed.
Donald Trump falsely accused Democrats of trying to “steal” Tuesday’s special election in California amid the Covid-19 pandemic by adding a polling place in one of the most diverse sections of a district.
But the county actually added the polling location at the request of the area’s Republican mayor.
The announcement that Russian President Vladimir Putin won last week’s national vote to rewrite the country’s constitution and allow himself to run twice more for president was not exactly a surprise. Putin has a long track record of winning elections through a mix of genuine popularity, electoral skullduggery, and—most important of all—ensuring that no real alternatives are allowed on the ballot. This most recent plebiscite took Putin-era elections to new depths of meaningless.
Posted to YouTube by Guardian News, July 16, 2018.
If HE hadn’t stepped off blasting away at America’s mainstream media and stable Federal agencies involved with all matters from environment to national security, HE and we might be fine, for BC believes he’s telling some truth these days. However, he has also had his indelible “Helsinki Moment” (above) and his regime (is that too strong a word?) may mirror known authoritarian governments integrated with their own state financial and political elites. The spectacle made by black clad troops herding nonviolent protesters from Lafayette Park (adjacent to the White House) may become a part of the memory of a liberal American generation for whom that kind of White House implemented thuggery — and show and tell with the Bible and Church photo-op — would seem to have been out of step with modern American political norms and values.
Posted to YouTube by The Independent, June 1, 2020.
For the United States with an Administration somewhat mirroring the authoritarianism and white nationalism associated with Moscow, one may wonder if collusion may not be found in aspects of convergence: how different does Trump’s Washington look from Putin’s Moscow?
Posted to YouTube by Guardian News, July 27, 2019.
By any sociological or financial measure, it’s good to be us. It’s even better to be our kids. In our health, family life, friendship networks, and level of education, not to mention money, we are crushing the competition below. But we do have a blind spot, and it is located right in the center of the mirror: We seem to be the last to notice just how rapidly we’ve morphed, or what we’ve morphed into. Related Story
The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. We are not innocent bystanders to the growing concentration of wealth in our time. We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy. Our delusions of merit now prevent us from recognizing the nature of the problem that our emergence as a class represents. We tend to think that the victims of our success are just the people excluded from the club. But history shows quite clearly that, in the kind of game we’re playing, everybody loses badly in the end.
Has the bottom layer of the upper crust, which may be quite Up There in fluff and light, the need for institutionalized nobility even if without title?
For the purposes of cultural and political stability, such a need may be functional, good, and open to entry across America’s colorful quilt, but one may question whether it needs chicanery in the process.
Several EU/NATO states have slid into anti-democratic authoritarian political management, albeit in different ways for different reasons. Hungary, Italy, Poland, and the United States have created cause for doubting the authenticity of democratic processes in their respective domains. While I’ve cherry picked the above links, one may evaluate each independently. With regard to the United States, Evan Osnos, writing for The New Yorker, notes the following:
The latest edition was published last week, and, as you might expect, it recorded the fourteenth straight year of deteriorating freedom around the world; sixty-four countries have lost liberties in the past year, while only thirty-seven registered improvements. (India, the world’s largest democracy, has seen some of the most alarming declines.) Its assessment of the United States is also disturbing. In 2009, the U.S. had a score of ninety-four, out of a hundred, which ranked it near the top, just behind Germany, Switzerland, and Estonia. In the decade since, it has slipped eight points; it now ranks behind Greece, Slovakia, and Mauritius. Looking at the United States, Freedom House analysts note the types of trends that they more customarily assign to fragile corners of the globe: “pressure on electoral integrity, judicial independence, and safeguards against corruption. Fierce rhetorical attacks on the press, the rule of law, and other pillars of democracy coming from American leaders, including the president himself.”
Osnos goes on to more broadly explain the decline of democracy in select states worldwide. For the United States, the broader view takes in Administrations prior to Trump’s.
Nonetheless, the political picture looks grim for Americans facing up to what increasingly looks like the necessity of casting a negative vote in the coming 2020 elections, i.e., voting for a so-so candidate in order to deny the incumbent a longer stay.
Threats posed by Beijing and Moscow to America’s governing principles and way of life should not be dismissed as somehow attached to Mr. Trump who has taken appropriate measures to deal with each, even if ineffectually. The sanctioning of some of Putin’s inner circle, for example, may not have the leveraging effects wanted given the ability to move money and persons around despite the reach of American power, but the status is visible worldwide and unflattering. With Beijing and jousting over trade, there may come the reminder that in a mutually pugnacious negotiation, one’s own side might lose — but that doesn’t make the other side’s position (in this context, Beijing’s) right. In addition to the large maneuvers the public cannot avoid, there are equally large issues involving communication signals and satellites that are more known to specialists than to the public at large.
Such issues will not go away with a Biden win in the coming election and may be exacerbated by it. What may recede are the authoritarian and malign narcissistic bullying, chaos, flailing, and lying — now imagined or real — associated with the incumbent President’s previous actions and current presence, reputation, and style.
BackChannels 