Honestly, I’ve been worrying about it for a while now. Rove made it abundantly clear that when he spoke of making the Republican Party the “permanent governing party,” what he was talking about was a Putinized sham democracy supported by plutocratic vassals and cowed, if not entirely subservient, media and a bit of vote rigging. When that all fell apart for them, after Katrina, my concern eased. But when Putin shoved Medvedev aside and took back the reins, it became a matter of growing concern for me again.
As with so many things, Romney grasped a tiny corner of the truth and used it as a platform to be utterly wrong because he just didn’t know dick about history or foreign affairs and thought his brilliant business brilliance was equivalent to foreign policy expertise so he didn’t have to bone up. Russia is, as Obama said, a regional problem, not a global strategic peer competitor the way it used to be. But the way Putin runs the place has become a model and a laboratory and a cancer.
After the Berlin Wall fell, the last great ideological challenge to democracy collapsed and the Soviets ceased supporting their authoritarian shitholes and our authoritarian shitholes lost the communist bogieman as a prop. After a couple of centuries where democracy was an often-beleaguered yet morally ascendent force, we entered into a period when we saw democracy finally triumphant as it took root in country after country during the 1980’s and 90’s.
And now, here we are as the second generation that has known no other world than that one enters adulthood and a new ideological threat has arisen. It hides in plain sight by severing democracy’s moral ascendance from the institutions that created and sustained it and using that moral force to cloak the same old authoritarian structures–state controlled media, secret police, aristocracy, and a half-sane autocrat at the top–we faced throughout our history.
Overtly anti-democratic xenophobic hypernationalist parties are on the march in democracies–functioning, faltering and failed–across the world. And still, we persist and looking at them as local phenomena, attributable to local conditions, rather than as a trans-national interconnected movement.