Global pandemics, cyberwarfare, information warfare – these are threats that require highly motivated, highly educated bureaucrats; a national health-care system that covers the entire population; public schools that train students to think both deeply and flexibly; and much more.
As in nature, so in politics: Every action has a reaction.
After Trump became president, it was really too late to investigate his dodgy investments in Azerbaijan or his links to Russian money laundering. Those stories should have eliminated him from business, and from public life, long before 2016.
Epidemics, like disasters, have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.
Rare is the election campaign that truly hinges on a single issue.
If Reagan and John Paul II were linked by anything, it was a grand, ambitious, and generous idea of Western political civilization, one in which a democratic Europe would be integrated by multiple economic, political, and cultural links, and held together beneath an umbrella of American hegemony.
We don’t live in a culture of censorship, such as the Soviet Union’s; we live in a culture where there is too much information, where words are drowned out, not banned, and important ideas and events are ignored.
One knows, of course, that Donald Trump behaves differently from the leaders of other countries, especially the leaders of other Western democracies.
Americans might not want to intervene in the outside world, but the outside world will still want to intervene in America.
Trump Tower is a beacon of aesthetic appeal by comparison to what the oligarchs build in their so-called cottages outside of Moscow. So he fits right into their aesthetic, he fits right into the way they think and the way act. Except of course they’re more powerful than he is.
There is nothing new about the sudden enthusiasm for aggressive government intervention during a health crisis. Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state.
There is nothing inevitable about this secret offshore world. It is not a fact of nature: Our laws created tax havens, and our laws can also end them. We could forbid Goldman Sachs from owning opaque offshore vehicles. We could prevent companies such as Cadre from accepting anonymous investments.
The U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state in which judges and prosecutors were controlled by the ruling party. The result was injustice, oppression and corruption.
Americans, as a rule, rarely compare themselves with other countries, so convinced are we that our system is superior, that our politicians are better, that our democracy is the fairest and most robust in the world.
We now expect Google, Facebook, Twitter and other companies to police the Internet for dangerous and illegal material – violent, terrorist, criminal – and some democratic governments require them to do so. But what if they did decide to repress material for political reasons? How would we know?
The behavioral scientist Karen Stenner has written very eloquently about people who have what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a personality type that is bothered by complexity and is especially enraged by disagreement. Trump has made himself into the spokesperson for precisely these American authoritarians.
Because journalists of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty – the former broadcast into Eastern Europe, the latter into the Soviet Union – accurately depicted daily life in communist Europe, in the local languages, using native journalists, millions of people tuned in to them.
If we can’t have a public debate because the information space is so polluted, or because people are afraid of the reactions of organized trolls, then we can’t really have meaningful elections anymore, either.
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