Grieving what we have lost in America

The great pine tree on the south side of our house, with its intricate weave of branches and fulsome long green needles, has long been a favorite landing place for osprey whose nest is a little bit down river.  Quite often we fail to see an osprey cocooned in the tree limbs until it suddenly swoops down to the water below to seize some prey it has been observing awhile.  If it is lucky, it carries the fish back to its nest; if we are lucky, it returns to the tree for further communing, knowing that the fish that got away will be back.  And so we get to feel the closeness of the osprey a little longer.

One night this past February, during a heavy storm, the pine tree fell. We woke to find it horizontal, partially in the water, its branches as intact and majestic as they had been the day before, but lying helpless and inert. Its base had left a massive chasm, revealing rocks we had never seen before, now displaced in the uprooting. Today the tree rests like a still-warm corpse outside our south-facing window.  When my eye lands on it, I feel the deadness with a jolt. Its life is still living within me. I haven’t yet absorbed this blow. 

The downed tree draws me further into the sorrows surrounding me in our downed country.  I never felt this land was as perfect as a tree.  It has always had the capacity to jar us with its inconsistencies, and failures of empathy, and cruelty.  But we used to take some solace in the hope it was a work in progress.  We could live with the thought that human endeavors will inevitably fall short of the reassuring welcome and embrace of a full-gown tree.

I woke up the morning after our president called for the destruction of Iranian civilization, and the thud of the fallen tree was recapitulated. What had happened was not a sudden death. It was the confirmation of an incremental death we have been observing for some time, of America’s dignity and its commitment to respect for others, to the global community’s agreed norms, to minimizing of human suffering, to the preservation of a basis for future relationships of cooperation.

I grieve many things these days. The blatant self-dealing of our government, capped in the past week by an attempt to purloin $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to support those who, they claim, “suffered weaponization and lawfare.” This is a further foray in the project to rewrite the history of January 6, 2021 as a history of heroes protecting Trump’s supposed election victory. It conveniently overlooks the fact that a number of those doing time for their attack on the Capitol, whom our president has released from prison, have committed serious subsequent felonies.  It once again makes the Justice Department into Donald Trump’s personal instrument of revenge.

 Europeans are concluding that they no longer can trust in America as an ally.  “An absolute majority [of Europeans] view Trump as an “enemy” of Europe and U.S. foreign policy as “recolonization” reports Amanda Stoat in The Washington Post of April 8th, citing a recent article in Le Monde.  She continues, “Polls also reflect a growing belief that China is a more dependable partner.”

I grieve the disappearance of important institutions: the Department of Education, which went some distance to supplement locally-funded public schools’ efforts to provide education in places of social disadvantage; the US Agency for International Development, which has shared a very small percentage of American bounty with the needy of the world, undergirding development programs that are the bedrock of self-reliance. 

Of course there was already much to grieve before those currently in power took charge.  America has always been a place of idealistic words that attempted to hide its cruelty and mean-spiritedness and greed and selfishness. We have proclaimed that the land of the free would give everyone a chance to step into the fullness of life, and then persecuted a good many of our people so they would never be able to make good on this promise.

I grieve the disappearance of species, the drought, the sunburned trees, the choking air, the signals of centuries of exploitation of the earth, our most intrinsic treasure and the source of health and spiritual wellbeing. I grieve abandoned projects that were addressing these losses, and the profligate, disparaging attitudes of those who have mocked their importance.

I grieve the crass rejection of compassion, the grotesque support given to the ugliest of authoritarians by my government, the offhanded forms of international aggression that belie decades, yea, over a century of work to develop an international arena where disagreements are addressed, violence is delegitimated, and the well-being of humans is placed front and center as a goal of the human condition. 

I grieve the blatant lies and pervasive tampering with truth, the surreal capturing of media outlets and law firms that have been the American people’s guarantee that honesty and justice are benchmarks. 

I grieve the cruel treatment of immigrants and the crass dismissal of their essential value and place in the meaning of our country. I grieve the very concept of detention centers and shudder when I read about the conditions within them.

I grieve mechanisms that make it more difficult for people to vote.  I grieve the fact that our Supreme Court has, in past weeks, made decisions that reverse the Voting Rights act of 1965, and effectively will close down opportunities for black people to be fairly represented in our political life.  This is the first Supreme Court since the 1950s to reject civil rights claims in a majority of cases involving women and minorities.

I grieve the corporatizing of America – the monetizing of human relations, the diminishing of the true personal encounter, the suppression of graciousness and helpfulness. 

When my eye catches the broken tree outside my window, I grieve all over again the assault on my sensibilities that I experience in America right now. I imagine there are thousands, nay millions, of Americans who feel as I do.  We are incensed, enraged, shattered seeing the inert corpse in the water that used to be the promise of America. We bear it with all the more sorrow this year when we are commemorating 250 years since our declaration of government by the people that we liked to hold up as a beacon to the world.

I grieve the underhanded ways certain people and institutions have profited by our divisions and increased the national rift. I would like to be a person who builds bridges of understanding across our national divisions. I grieve that I am placed in a dilemma about whether, in speaking my mind, I am making those divisions worse. I did not vote for Donald Trump, but I have some understanding of why some people chose to vote for him – I know the left has played a role in letting this country down. But I hope fervently that those who voted for Mr. Trump out of a sincere belief that he would do some good will have the courage to admit he betrayed them. 

We are Americans, and that means we know that a democracy only survives and thrives when we are all involved.  So much of the time these days we suppress our sadness as we attend to the business of standing up for norms of goodness we thought were unassailable. We fall back on anger, and yes, self-righteousness. We attend to the flurry of appeals and suggestions that assault our inboxes. We apply our minds to master intricacies of the law we never thought we’d need to fully understand. We feel compelled to follow the news, including our president’s offhand, vulgar tweets, putting up with that sour taste in our mouths. We applaud our humorists. We train to be effective observers of ICE raids. We contribute to candidates. 

Our heads spin with the strain of too much time on screens, of too much scrolling. And if that weren’t bad enough, if the encroach of technology weren’t biting our sensibilities even as we address our other problems, we now have the additional, overwhelming threat of AI’s forward march, diminishing our originality, threatening to squeeze out the pumping blood of human reflection with a mechanized substitute that ignores the value of actual participation in centuries of human discussion and learning.

For those of us who have devoted lifetimes to trying to make a difference in the wounded wider world, we feel right now the urge to raise our game, work harder. And we also feel tired. But I want to be sure, first, that I linger with this wilderness moment.  It is a time of grief for lost loves, lost hopes, and lost dreams. We grieve so that we find the freedom of spirit to open ourselves to new places of light, new opportunities.  

Francis Weller, who writes and teaches about grief, tells us that being willing simply to be in its presence is where the “apprenticeship with sorrow” begins. Then we can develop practices that keep us steady.  Meditation that arises out of a place of grief anchors us.  “The gift of grief is the affirmation of life and of our intimacy with the world,” says Weller. “Without it,” he says, “we would not know the heartening quality of compassion, could not experience the full breath of love, the surprise of joy, we could not celebrate the sheer beauty of the world. Grief fosters each of these capabilities, deepening them by bringing gravity to the moment.” (The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief)

I want to be the kind of person who meets our moment at the deepest level.  I am still trying to figure out how to do that. But, to start with, please join me in looking this time of sorrow fully in the eye so that our spirits can be more grounded. To grow as people, to deepen, to have access to more inner resources, the ground of our being is most available to us through grief.  

Father Richard Rohr recognizes that grief and suffering have the power to transform people because our usual defenses do not work when we are grieving. “We are pulled out of our heads and into our hearts and sobs; we are finally thrown into the belly of the whale, where all transformation and enlightenment happens." It is only the tragic experience of life, he says, that is able to change people at any depth. (A Lever and a Place to Stand)

Thus, mourning is not a matter of sinking ourselves into a morass of self-pity from which we never emerge. Mourning is, rather, a chance to make acquaintance with the things we deeply care about, which is the first step in summoning new energy for life.

Americans Respond to the Attack on Iran

No turn of history occurs for only one reason. A convergence of influences made President Trump decide to join with Israel to launch an attack on Iran.

There are reasons, there are rationales, there are calculations, there are ramifications. And there is the gut. Pundits have addressed all these threads in the past days and will continue to do so. So many considerations are in the mix that the Israel-US assault on Iran will keep the talking heads busy for weeks, years, nay decades to come.

But it is hard not to conclude that the cause of this war funnels down to the gut instinct of Donald Trump.

In the first forty-eight hours after the attack, a Reuters-Ipsos poll found that only 27 percent of Americans approved of it.

Why did they disapprove?  After all, most of us felt some euphoria when the news of Khamenei’s death was announced. And we have considerable sympathy for Iranians and Iranians living abroad like Azadeh Moaveni who eloquently describe the shadow this oppressive ruler cast over their lives.

Like Trump, the American people respond with their gut, and Americans are fundamentally not interested in getting mired in an overseas war. They have had too much of that since 2002 in Afghanistan and Iraq. They know too much about the costs and the ways foreign war can enmesh Americans in a relentless grind that is hard to abandon.

When Trump campaigned in 2016 he asserted that “regime change” was  “a proven, absolute failure.” Eight years later, in his 2024 campaign he repeatedly reiterated his policy of “no new wars.” The details of these remarks might not be remembered by all, but his repeated, near comical, expression of hope to win the Nobel Peace Prize during the course of last year are hard to forget. He has created a Board of Peace, for heaven’s sake, whose task is to make Gaza into something new. Trump has tried to present himself as a peaceable leader. That idea was always disingenuous, but if it persisted before February 28, it is now in tatters.

Americans can see that their president and his team don’t know what the goal or rationale of this war is. Spokespeople for MAGA vacillate in explaining it. One day the goal is to strike down the Iranian nuclear facilities, even though Trump asserted as recently as February 24, in his State of the Union Address, that Iran’s nuclear facilities were crippled last July.  On another day the aim is to bring down the Iranian government – regime change – leaving space for Iranians to rise up and create a new political reality. On March 2, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Israelis were going to attack anyway and since the US was likely to be a target of Iranian retaliation, it needed to be part of the offensive from the start.  On March 3, Rubio dialed back on the matter of Israel’s influence, saying Iran’s buildup of ballistic missiles and drones led the US to decide to strike before Iran used those weapons on America.

Critics of the decision to attack Iran know from past experience that regime change doesn’t happen as the result of an air war.  Regime change requires boots on the ground, a move the US would surely not wish to make.  They therefore do not see regime change as a practical possibility even if it is desirable. They also look at the legal aspects. International law does not sanction “preventive” war – preemption, yes, prevention, no. Since the US’s national security was not directly threatened, attacking Iran does not meet the requirement of a preemptive war.  Domestic law calls for congressional approval for going to war. The intricacies of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which hardly wins prizes for clarity, are therefore under the spotlight. Those who strive to maintain a moral core in foreign policy decisions say that no matter how despicable a leader is, assassination or targeted attack like the one that killed Khamenei is unacceptable: it is the kind of action that comes back to bite the aggressor.

Supporters of the attack might say, as Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton did on the PBS Newshour on March 3,  it was about time someone did this.  The Iranian regime has been destabilizing the middle east region for decades and should have been taken out a long time ago.  And, said Bolton, arguments about the absence of an endgame plan are unrealistic – no action of this kind can have certainty about the endgame.  Bolton’s support for this move of Trump is particularly interesting because of the acerbic relationship between Trump and Bolton.  Trump fired Bolton in 2019; Bolton’s White House memoir, The Room Where it Happened, was critical of Trump; and Trump has taken retribution on Bolton by indicting him for unlawful retaining of documents.

The above small sampling of the national debate distracts from the underlying and determining truth that Donald Trump wanted this war.

A series of psychological factors collaborated to lead him to it. First, Netanyahu has been eager for this war for some time, and the symbiosis between Netanyahu and Trump guaranteed it would happen.  The two men share a realpolitik mindset and an awareness that they face indictment once they leave office.  Both men are shameless about adopting a military option if it can distract from their own domestic weaknesses. As far as Netanyahu is concerned, even if he has strong support within his own party, his support in Israel is not strong. The mood in Israel is “sullen” and Netanyahu faces elections this spring at a moment when his coalition is weak.

Trump, likewise, is feeling more insecure at home. Pushback in Minnesota against the crude tactics of ICE caused some in Trump’s inner circle to question his deportation methods.  He had been imagining that if the situation seemed to demand it, he could move towards use of the military to impose domestic order, but Minnesota slowed this plan. The midterm elections are looming, and midterms are never a good moment for the incumbent party. Consumer prices refuse to drop. And the Epstein files just never go away.

In spite of having had to back down over Greenland, Trump’s forays into the international arena in recent months have given him some taste of the joy of wielding military power. In Venezuela, a dramatic action apparently succeeded at low cost. He hopes that Iran will play out similarly. 

How will the Iran project affect American politics going forward? If it proves to be a rapid success, it might still serve to unite Trump’s base behind him.  Offsetting this is the likelihood that service personnel will be called upon in greater numbers than they have already to keep this action going.  It is unlikely the US will be able to pull out any time soon. This will not help Donald Trump’s popularity.

Might Trump use the fact that the US is on a war footing to place limits on election regulations in fall 2026?  This possibility has been raised and is not out of the question.

On the other hand, attacking Iran seems to play into the hands of Trump’s critics – and Democrats are pouncing to cry Shame! to a Trump administration that takes its country into war on such flimsy pretexts. The big question in this regard is whether Democrats can capitalize on this moment, to find a uniting stance.

A more serious question is whether this new demarche will help to desensitize the American population with regard to their president’s willingness to use force?  Will they become more used to the fact that he looks for no guard rails and takes upon himself the use of this delicate instrument in unnecessary ways? Will they become used to the idea that in order to secure the future for our own group, we cannot be kind, or even fair, to everyone?

A comforting thought for those who believe that Donald Trump’s presidency is bent on undermining the American project of government of the people, by the people and for the people, is that the attack on Iran is an act of hubris.  And all leaders who operate in the thrall of hubris end up misjudging: it is only a matter of time before disaster arrives. Comments Ross Douthat of the New York Times “This is the pattern of many historical conquerors: The long run of success yields the inevitable hubris, and the grand career ends with a grand debacle and would-be successors reaching for the knife.”

Minneapolis is showing us what protest can and should should look like… it also demonstrates the human cost

On January 24, as she announced the program at a packed performance of the Cape Symphony in Hyannis, Massachusetts, Maestro Alyssa Wang introduced a work by Arnold Schoenberg by describing his situation as a Jew composing modernist music in Berlin in the 1930s.  With Hitler’s rise to power, Schoenberg’s music was declared “degenerate,” and as he watched the increasing persecution of other Jewish people, he chose in 1933 to emigrate to the United States, a land that stood for tolerance and freedom of expression.  Wang urged her audience to bear in mind that Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 2, completed in 1939, was written against a backdrop of persecution and exile from a democratic state that had fallen captive to fascist thugs.

 Schoenberg’s situation speaks to our own, today, said Wang. “This morning I looked at my phone and saw…” Before she could finish her sentence, emotion overwhelmed her. Twelve hundred people waited for her to regain composure, and then the majority applauded when she likened the shooting of Alex Pretti of Minneapolis that morning to events in Germany in the 1930s. Some might argue that the world of music is one where we can and should remain politically neutral. Wang decided on Saturday that the world of music will call out fascism when it sees it.

This vignette from a small corner of the United States is significant because it captures in miniature what we are seeing broadly: the seriousness of our situation has mounted precipitously since January 1, and people who might have kept their views to themselves are becoming more vocal.

 Speaking out boldly incurs retaliation

 Throughout Donald Trump’s first year in office, judges, journalists, politicians, and civic action groups have made their voices heard in opposition.  But on the whole, pushback from the nation at large has been restrained and unfocused. No single person or even group has emerged as the clear hub of the opposition. The Democratic Party, which most would assume to be the natural carrier of the torch of defiance, has been disorganized and floundering over the matter of whether it should be moving right or moving left.

 A shift of the mood in America in recent weeks is due in part to the willingness of individuals on the national stage to be more outspoken.

Leaders who have recently critiqued Trump’s bid to assert an authoritarian regime include Senator Mark Kelly, a veteran and former astronaut who stated in November that service members “can refuse illegal orders,” a principle that is germane to military service.  Senator Kelly’s statement was backed by Senator Elissa Slotkin and four House members.  On January 5, Senator Kelly received a formal censure by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, who said he had taken steps to demote Kelly in retirement. Kelly responded:

“Over twenty-five years in the U.S. Navy, thirty-nine combat missions, and four missions to space, I risked my life for this country and to defend our Constitution – including the First Amendment rights of every American to speak out. I never expected that the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense would attack me for doing exactly that.”

On January 11, after being served with a subpoena from the Justice Department relating to trumped up charges that he was responsible for the misuse of funds in the construction of a new building for the Federal Reserve,  Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell issued a statement including in part the following words:

 “…this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration's threats and ongoing pressure…This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.”

And in Minneapolis, following the killing of Renee Good in her SUV on January 7 by an ICE agent who falsely claimed that he was in danger of being run over by Good, both Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor James Frey publicly condemned the ICE action and the federal government’s refusal to investigate it.  Walz called upon the administration to pull "violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota" and to institute an official inquiry into the incident.  Said Frey, “We're in a position right now where we have residents that are asking the very limited number of police officers that we have to fight ICE agents on the street….We cannot be at a place right now in America where we have two governmental entities that are literally fighting one another."

 In response, the Justice Department is now investigating Walz and Frey based an alleged conspiracy to impede immigration officers.

Civil protest

Articles that probe the effectiveness of civil protest cite the research of Erica Chenoweth that shows that if 3.5% of the population engages in civil protest against a regime, that regime will fail.  But this proposition must, surely, depend on the level of respect a regime has for free speech, the nature of the matters being protested, and the degree of investment the regime has in its policies.  Also upon whether all levels of government are equally involved in the oppressive behavior.  In Iran’s recent violent crackdown of January 9-12, 6,126  people died, according to National Public Radio, which gives pause to casual pronouncements about the value of protest.  A recent article in the Guardian suggested that protest is not so likely to bring immediate change as it is to give people confidence to get involved in other kinds of civic action as a result.  In other words, in the right circumstances protest raises people’s energy and excitement and sense of solidarity in the endeavor to bring change.

In the US we have seen national protests every few months – on October 18 more than seven million Americans were on the streets in a nationwide non-violent demonstration.  But 48.3% of all voters opposed Trump at the ballot box and a certain number who voted for him have expressed their regret.  61% of Americans believe ICE and Border Patrol tactics against immigrants have gone too far.  Why has the ring of national civic protest seemed so muted?

One answer to this question is that those leading protests are conscious that after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, violence and burning of buildings and calls for “defunding the police” created a backlash. Republicans have used the events following Floyd’s death to give “protest” a bad name. “Peaceful protest,” is an aspect of free speech, and the laws of the US defend it as such.  But if it gets out of hand, it can easily be used as an excuse for a violent response from the authorities.  In Trump’s America, protest that tips into violence will quickly become an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and as a result bring the military into our cities.

Civil Rights organizations have therefore tried to keep the temperature low.  Organizations like Indivisible, MoveOn.org, and Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), as well as churches and other faith-based groups, are in regular online communication with their followers nationwide, have created local chapters, and have joined together to organize national standouts every few months.  They have urged people to concentrate their efforts locally by contacting their representatives in state and federal legislature to urge them to vote on particular bills, and by supporting immigrants in the face of the misuse of deportation norms and laws.  These groups underline that the most effective protests have a clearly stated target and therefore are best designed to address particular local situations.

Los Angeles and Chicago and several other cities where ICE activity has been pronounced have used these networks to push back.  But something about Minneapolis has made things qualitatively different.

Why has Minneapolis become the flash point of a much more trenchant civil opposition to Trump?

Minneapolis-St. Paul is a region well known for its ethic of social support, drawing on its Scandinavian social-democratic heritage. But in addition, the offensive nature of the ICE/Border Patrol presence is much greater in comparison to federal agents’ activities in other cities.

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul has currently 3,000 federal agents deployed since January 1 specifically to round up immigrants. The number is five times the size of the Twin Cities’ police force. Trump’s deployment of National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles last year numbered 4,200 National Guard and 700 Marines.  But the population of the Greater Twin Cities is less than a third of that of Los Angeles County. In other words, the proportion of troops per numbers of the population deployed in the Twin Cities is more than twice that deployed in LA last year. 

Large numbers of masked ICE and Border Patrol have been roaming neighborhoods, sitting in their parked vehicles outside buildings where immigrants live, forcing adult immigrants out of their cars while leaving children in the backseat, and requiring people to produce proof of citizenship on demand, which violates federal law. Many of their actions are illegal, but they also upend longstanding norms where deportation of illegals who have committed criminal acts are done with the utmost effort NOT to disrupt neighborhoods.  Many reporters have concluded in the past three weeks that the intention of these federal agents, who have been assured that they will be immune from prosecution if they resort to violence, is to strike terror into the population and further the establishment of an authoritarian regime.

But the killing of Renee Good on January 7, followed by the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti on January 24, have seriously raised the stakes in Minneapolis.  Video footage shows that while these two individuals may have been unwise in getting very close to ICE activity and taking actions that drew attention of ICE agents, they were not engaging in criminal behavior. Federal authorities have resorted to lies to defend their agents’ aggression, as amply demonstrated by video coming from a number of onlookers.

Assessments of this Moment in the American Press

“We are witnessing the total breakdown of any meaningful system of accountability for federal officials,” says David French on January 26 in the New York Times, in the body of an article headlined “We Are Creating the Conditions for a Catastrophe.”  Charles Homans writes in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine under the headline “Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis.”  Says New York Times guest columnist E. J. Dionne on January 25th, “Trump Is Engineering Regime Change, Right Here at Home.”

FoxNews.com reports that Vice President Vance has dubbed the Minneapolis situation “engineered chaos”.  Fox dismisses Pretti as a member of a “complex network of far-left organizations with a wide range of causes.”

The American Prospect declares that “Minneapolis Discovered Its Own Strength Fighting ICE Tyranny.” It highlights in addition “the Democrats’ long-awaited spine” noting that Pretti’s murder on January 24 has united the Senate’s Democratic Caucus to oppose funding the Department of Homeland Security, the owner of ICE, until “strict and enforceable limits are set.”

And Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Madel has announced he is leaving the governor’s race because he cannot support the “stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.”

Liberal societies can be saved, but only if we decide to save them

Book Review of Autocracy, Inc.: The dictators who want to run the world by Anne Applebaum, Doubleday, 2024.

The following review was published on August 5, 2025 on the website www.WeAreOneHumanity.org.

We who grew up in the West in the immediate post-World War II world assumed that rule of law, humanitarianism, human rights, international cooperation, and norms of honesty and rectitude would be adopted more and more broadly in our lifetime and that our political future would be a matter of tidying up the picture in a world that was on the right track.

Now we find that instead of an inevitable climb to the mountaintop of inclusive governments and social betterment, a turn to authoritarianism has captured at least a third of countries on the planet.

Academics like Thomas Carothers and Ben Press of Carnegie, who have spent a lifetime studying democracy, refer to this state of affairs as “democratic backsliding.”  But the term seems mild compared to the reality we are seeing.

Our current autocratic turn does not follow a pattern of previous authoritarian regimes, Anne Applebaum tells us.  Current autocrats follow a new model.  The authoritarians we see now are not single individuals but networks of kleptocrats taking control of countries with no appeal to a better future for their citizens.

Past autocrats believed they needed to disguise their questionable policies behind a veneer of apparent good behavior.  Note, for example, the way the Soviet Union orchestrated the trappings of democracy by holding elections, even though the world knew full well that participatory politics was not part of the USSR. 

Now authoritarians pursue their policies in the glare of daylight, thumbing their noses at the notion that they will be stopped.  They assist each other, materially, practically, and psychologically, each helping to normalize the behavior of the others.  They make use of currency manipulation, global drug smuggling networks, and cutting-edge technology, and in many cases have found common cause with the techo-corporate world.

Applebaum has the credentials to help us follow the ugly trail of these regimes.  A Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Applebaum was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and has written for a host of other highly regarded magazines and newspapers.  She is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic.  Among her books are three about the Soviet Union: Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, 2017;  Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, 2012; and Gulag: A History, 2004. This series of works has prepared her well to study authoritarianism in the twenty-first century.

Applebaum describes features of these regimes that we recognize but have struggled to explain.  A mark of their different approach is the tactic of destabilization.  They do not have inhibitions about seeing their country become a failed state.  The more chaos they sow, the more power they reap, through intimidation and confusion. Neither do they feel constraints when it comes to brutal treatment of their citizens.

These regimes do not try to offer their citizens a hope for a better world, even insincerely.  They recognize that that approach backfired in the Soviet Union because people could see that the reality was different from the promises: empty promises make the citizenry dissatisfied.  Instead, “Autocracy Inc.” pursues policies that make the population cynical and passive so that they will stay out of politics.

In normal cases such autocratic leaders would lose free elections.  But we are seeing that even charismatic opponents have difficulty challenging them. This is because the authoritarian leader is not just one ethically compromised individual but a world conglomerate of shady financial, social media, and surveillance systems working in tandem.

If there is a core idea that binds the governments of “Autocracy, Inc.” together, it is the destruction of “liberal norms” that get in the way of their self-serving regimes.

“Liberal norms” are elements of government that guarantee the citizen freedom from tyranny. They include the assertion that the legal system must operate above politics, that courts are independent, that rights of free speech and assembly will be guaranteed, that journalism is and must be independent, that “facts” require backup, that watchdog agencies are appropriate ways to ensure that power is not misused. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a bugle call for this new autocratic world order, says Applebaum. Russia pulled in Belarus, China, Iran and North Korea in its Ukraine venture, as part of a common exercise in mutual aggrandizement and a negation of Ukraine’s attempt to find a place within the European democratic tradition.

To gain global support, Russia has, in addition to courting rogue states, made use of a social media discourse, subsequently picked up by other autocratic countries, to depict Ukrainians as Nazis and NATO as the culprit forcing Russia to attack Ukraine.  Russian media depict Europe as chaotic and frightening, with the goal of preventing Russians from wanting to identify with Europe.  They broadcast the “decline” of Western countries using words like “degeneracy” and “hypocrisy.”   They find common cause with those in the US who accept the notion of Russia as a white Christian state, and who applaud Russia’s criticism of feminism and gay rights. Russia thus portrays itself as leading a campaign of strength against weak and chaotic democracies.

But if Russia’s attack on Ukraine was the bugle call, the seeds of these developments were sown decades earlier.  Applebaum flags  Europe’s decision in 1970 to purchase Russian gas as a significant launcher of this new world order. Europeans were blinded, she claims, by the idea that trade could normalize relations, somewhat along the lines of the impact of the Schuman Plan on Western Europe in the early 1950s.  Likewise, in the 1990s, the West brought China into the World Trade Organization, again believing that open economic borders would be good for global stability. 

These deals did not alter the politics of the authoritarian regimes that benefitted from them.  Instead, they helped western countries get used to operating by a double standard – doing business with illiberal regimes while at the same time claiming to stand for the norms of rule of law.

Nor has technology, with its enhanced possibilities for communication, increased global understanding or advanced ideas that promote individual freedom and well-being. 

China banned Facebook in 2009 and Instagram in 2014. Subsequently, the fierce opposition China’s strict covid lockdown produced showed the Chinese authorities that the population can be easily radicalized.  This led China to adopt much more aggressive endeavors to scotch dissent. China has developed sophisticated tracking systems though apps that can pinpoint a person’s location, purchases, and various kinds of unusual behavior including staying offline altogether.  Uigurs are required to have apps on their phones that track “ideological viruses,” in other words, forbidden messages.  Millions of security cameras are already in use in China, and soon China’s data collection system will efficiently predict political resistance.  These “Safe City” technology systems have been sold to Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, Serbia, S. Africa, and Turkey.  Chinese facial recognition technology is being used widely in Singapore and Zimbabwe.

Complementing these developments, Pegasus mobile phone software, developed by Israeli security, tracks journalists, activists and political opponents in Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, India, Bahrain and Greece.

Of course, democracies can use these forms of surveillance in what we might call “legitimate” ways, for example to track criminals, but the truth is that using such technologies for anything at all opens the way to abuse.  An obvious easy abuse would be using them against political opponents. China exports these technologies precisely, Applebaum claims, to get the world inured to them so that China can use them more easily at home.

Autocracies cooperate with each others’ social media campaigns, helping to spread disinformation.  Agents of “Autocracy Inc.” register domain names that look like real domains, then post on Facebook and Twitter.  In this way, conspiracy theories  about Western public health initiatives get spread in Africa. Fake NATO press releases and social media posts that ostensibly come from Americans who oppose US support of the war in Ukraine are rampant. Such posts helped undermine Biden’s efforts to create a coalition and win over public opinion in the war against Russia in Ukraine.

What can be done to push back?

Applebaum points out, discouragingly, that citizens’ actions to oppose authoritarian regimes, inspired by Gandhi and King and picked up by the Otpur students in Serbia in 1999, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, and the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014, have become much more difficult now, because Autocracy, Inc. has learned how to use social media to discredit opposition forces. Zimbabwe and Myanmar demonstrate this. 

The first way to push back, Applebaum says, is to spread recognition of the massive information laundering that is going on and to create institutions that pre-empt these projects.

This is not an easy lift. Such an exercise requires specialized knowledge.  She cites the excellent work of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), instituted by Obama in 2016.  But take note, friends, the book Autocracy, Inc. was published in 2024. The GEC was shut down by Congress in December 2024. 

Applebaum therefore proposes, as a second suggestion, that watchdog research be instituted to ensure our fullest understanding of the impact social media are having.  This could help create a groundswell of political support for new regulations that give users of social media more control, if legislators can be found who will sponsor them.

Thirdly, says Applebaum, the struggle for “evidence-based conversations” needs a global coalition to lead it.  She calls for joint action of the most trustworthy news carriers, supported by actions of government.  Subsidizing some of these carriers would, for example, help ensure that Chinese news carriers are not the cheapest option.

Applebaum calls for the diaspora populations of countries subsumed by “Autocracy Inc.” to be more vocal and to operate in support of each other.  Independent journalists must cover and reinforce their stories.

“We have to learn to compete,” says Applebaum, “while preserving and supporting our own values…Journalists who uncover corruption need to work with lawyers… Truth needs to lead to justice.”

Bottom line: smart people need to get cracking and work together.

Applebaum sums up her message on the final page of her book. “There is no liberal world order any more.  But there are liberal societies…that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do….  So few of them have existed across human history, so many have existed for a short time and then failed…. They can be saved. But only if those of us who live in them are willing to make the effort to save them.”