Traditional western liberal democracy is under siege from abroad and under assault at home. Its future around the world is uncertain in a way that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. It was, after all, in the afterglow of the end of the cold war when Francis Fukuyama wrote his book "The End of History and the Last Man", triumphantly declaring the final victory of western liberal democracy over communism, religious extremism, and others. Boy was that off:
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"Trump, Le Pen and Orban don't come anywhere near the depravity and violence of Putin, who is perpetrating atrocities in Ukraine on a scale not seen since at least the Bosnian war and probably since World War II.
But the tactics of many of the anti-establishment politicians stem from a similar well of political toxicity. They rely on whipping up anger over economic conditions into resentment of foreigners, Muslims and outsiders, including other minority communities.
Some concentrate on eroding the reputation of democratic systems and a free press to build power. Anything that increases the cynicism of the electorate about its rulers and the system that keeps them in place creates a new pool of anger that can be exploited.
Voter suppression eroded democracy in Russia and Hungary, and it's doing the same in the US. It's not certain that Trump's extremism will provide a path to power among a diverse general electorate. But he remains the dominant figure in his party and the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
Trump's entire political project -- one that incited an unprecedented assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 -- is now based on a big lie: that the US election was rigged in 2020.
The more outrageous the lie, the more it can be weaponized for a politician's nefarious means. Putin's rationale for invading Ukraine -- that the country is under the grip of Nazis, when in reality it has a democratically elected, Jewish President -- springs from the same well of dangerous fantasy politics."
A fresh tide of extreme populism -- feeding on economic strain, hostility to immigrants and cultural warfare -- is challenging key democracies from the inside at the same time Russia escalates the most brutal assault on the liberal Western order in decades.
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