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|  | What makes an illiberal demagogue click with American voters?
That’s the billion dollar question facing supporters of democratic values after Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in last Tuesday’s election. And it’s a line of inquiry that often winds its way back to the kitchen table, with questions of inflation, healthcare, and so on.
There’s a tendency—sometimes self-conscious, sometimes disingenuous—to separate quality of life issues like the cost of groceries and healthcare from the fight to protect our democratic institutions.
Many critics allege that Trump’s opponents made a mistake in continually raising the alarm about the threat he poses to democracy. |
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| As one talking head intoned during CNN’s election night coverage: “democracy is a luxury when you can’t pay the bills.”
But it’s a false binary. Democracy is a quality of life issue. Free countries are more prosperous than their unfree counterparts. Strongmen who make snap decisions put their economies at risk on an arbitrary whim.
The problem isn’t that Vice President Harris and the Democrats talked too much about democracy, it’s how they talked about it. Harris’s campaign treated the importance of democracy as self-evident. They said that freedom mattered, but they never finished making the case as to why… |
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| | | | The word “fascism” often fails to land with Americans. It has an almost comic book-like quality: it makes sense on the big screen, but people here and in other democratic countries have difficulty grasping that it could happen here, even as politicians deploy violent rhetoric that mirrors the dictators of old. As RDI Advisory Board member Anne Applebaum wrote in the Atlantic last month: “Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters…would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not.” The missing piece, perhaps, is a recognition that many dictatorships don’t start out as dictatorships—they cannibalize formerly free societies from the inside out. No, Trump is not a dictator and America is not a dictatorship. But in order to keep it that way, we will be raising the alarm when freedom is threatened by those who claim to be its staunchest defenders. |
| | Donald Trump still has two months before he returns to the White House, but there’s already a battle brewing over foreign policy in his nascent administration between an isolationist "America First” faction and traditional conservative hawks. While Trump is set to appoint authoritarian apologist Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, he named former Green Beret and Florida Congressman Michael Waltz as his national security advisor. Waltz takes a tough line on Iran, Hamas, and China, while calling for European nations to help deal with Russia so that the US can focus on Beijing. Waltz is an interesting pick given Trump’s campaigning alongside a cast of characters who favored accommodation with America’s authoritarian adversaries. It’s hard to use history as a guide with someone like Trump, but one reliable rule is to expect the unexpected, and which camp dominates the next administration’s foreign policy is anyone’s guess. |
| | Last Friday, the Justice Department charged Iranian men operating on behalf of the regime in Tehran with a plot to murder Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad and President-elect Donald Trump on American soil. The brazen attempts to murder Alinejad is part of a broader trend of transnational repression, in which authoritarian regimes reach across borders to silence, harass, and even kill dissidents in other countries. In theory, those dissidents enjoy the freedom offered by open societies like the United States to speak their minds and criticize repressive regimes. But in practice, that freedom is limited because of transnational repression. The targeting of dissidents like Alinejad is one part of a whole-of-society approach used by dictators to attack the institutions and values that bind together open societies: free expression, free and fair markets, and the open inquiry of ideas. The United States and our allies need to send a clear signal to the regimes in Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing that such flagrant attacks on our sovereignty and our values will not be tolerated. |
| | Hidden behind the fog of the US election was a massive crack in the image of the Wagner Group in Mali. A report from the New York Times documented a devastating attack on the Russian state sponsored group that happened over the summer while they were fighting anti-government forces. The attack left 46 of its mercenaries dead. The loss was reported to be “Wagner’s largest ever on African soil and one of the deadliest in its entire history, outside Ukraine.” Wagner opportunistically uses the chaos caused by Islamist groups in Africa to upend governments in the name of securing peace. Meanwhile, the mercenaries acquire lucrative mining rights from despots to enrich themselves and fund Vladimir Putin’s war efforts in Ukraine. It creates a powerful image to recruit Russian soldiers to fight in Africa. The attack in Mali just shattered it. |
| | After the recent attacks on Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam, RDI Advisory Board member Bret Stephens painted a grim picture of antisemitism in modern democracies in a recent column for The New York Times. Why does this matter? Well, as Stephens writes, “The fate of societies that become ‘Judenfrei’ — free of Jews — has not, historically, been a happy one.” Conspiracy theorists and neo-Nazis on the American far-right, supporters of Hamas terrorists on the American far-left, and autocratic governments all degrade our society by projecting our problems onto a minority. A society that blames the Jews, or any one group, for its failings is a society that cannot face up to its challenges. |
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| | | Patriotism, Not Naivete The American people have spoken, and Donald J. Trump will again be the president of the United States.
By Uriel Epshtein — November 6, 2024 |
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| | | The Frontlines of Freedom Conference |
|  | Last month, RDI hosted its annual Frontlines of Freedom conference on combating transnational repression and foreign authoritarian influence in open societies.
In Washington, DC, we brought together dissidents, business leaders, academics, and policymakers to discuss the scope of the authoritarian threat, what America can do to defend itself, and how democracies can begin working together to reinvigorate our shared survival instinct. |
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| Conference panel topics included storytelling for dissidents, tyranny and technology, and authoritarian influence on US college campuses, among many others.
A full recap of FOFCON 2024 will be here in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
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