“a broader analysis of global trends shows that Harris was fighting against some pretty strong headwinds and that any Democratic victory or overperformance would have turned out to be quite the global anomaly.
By the time 2024 is done, more voters will have gone to the polls than in any other year in history. And among the half of the world’s population living in a country with a national election this year, a clear and consistent picture has emerged: Voters are extremely upset with their governments.
Among democracies* that held elections this year, over 80 percent saw the incumbent party lose seats or vote share from the last election. That includes democracies of all kinds and in all corners of the globe.”
Venezuela was almost removed from power, but he survived and then was able to sell more oil thanks to the Americans wanting more oil on the market to counter the scarcity caused by the Ukraine war.
“The United Nations (U.N.) has accused Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuelan government of committing “gross human rights violations” in the wake of July’s disputed presidential election. According to a report.., the regime’s security forces were responsible for killings, forced disappearances, and physical, psychological, and sexual torture.”
“Donald Trump’s opponents were hoping for more bombshells in Jack Smith’s final document dump before the election. On Friday, those hopes fizzled.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed portions of four large volumes of the special counsel’s evidence against Trump — but most of the materials remained redacted from public view. And the small number of materials that were released on the court docket consisted almost entirely of previously public documents.”
The Democrats, universities, and media have their faults and have been too woke, but the lies, bullshit, propaganda, and poor error-correction instincts of Trump, RFK Jr, Tucker Carlson, and others is not a better alternative.
“It is important to remember that, as dire as things are, the United States is not Hungary.
When Prime Minister Viktor Orbán came to power in 2010, he had a two-thirds majority in the country’s parliament — one that allowed him to pass a new constitution that twisted election rules in his party’s favor and imposed political controls on the judiciary. Trump has no such majority, and the US Constitution is nearly impossible to amend.
America’s federal structure also creates quite a few checks on the national government’s power. Election administration in America is done at the state level, which makes it very hard for Trump to seize control over it from Washington. A lot of prosecution is done by district attorneys who don’t answer to Trump and might resist federal bullying.
The American media is much bigger and more robust than its Hungarian peers. Orbán brought the press to heel by, among other things, politicizing government ad purchasing — a stream of revenue that the American press, for all our problems, does not depend on.
But most fundamentally, the American population has something Hungarians didn’t: advanced warning.
While the form of subtle authoritarianism pioneered in Hungary was novel in 2010, it’s well understood today. Orbán managed to come across as a “normal” democratic leader until it was too late to undo what he had done; Trump is taking office with roughly half the voting public primed to see him as a threat to democracy and resist as such. He can expect major opposition to his most authoritarian plans not only from the elected opposition, but from the federal bureaucracy, lower levels of government, civil society, and the people themselves.
This is the case against despair.
As grim as things seem now, little in politics is a given — especially not the outcome of a struggle as titanic as the one about to unfold in the United States. While Trump has four years to attack democracy, using a playbook he and his team have been developing since the moment he left office, defenders of democracy have also had time to prepare and develop countermeasures. Now is the time to begin deploying them.
Trump has won the presidency, which gives him a tremendous amount of power to make his antidemocratic dreams into reality. But it is not unlimited power, and there are robust means of resistance. The fate of the American republic will depend on how willing Americans are to take up the fight.”
There is an alliance of authoritarian countries that include Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela. They don’t have ideology in common, but they want to maintain authoritarian power over their people. China’s reach doesn’t stay in Asia; they support the autocracy in Venezuela. Russia and Iran also support Venezuela’s dictatorship.
Iran, Russia, and China have illegitimate systems and their government’s fear that their own people will want a system more like America’s. They can never live in full harmony with the United States because the U.S. represents an internal threat to their regimes even when the U.S. does nothing other than stand as another possibility for their people. Therefore, they try to undermine the U.S. and democracy in general in whatever way they can.