"Authoritarians are indeed trying to destroy democracy."

Only one degree of separation between US and Ukraine: Paul Manafort

Yesterday, Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, in which she detailed the full beginning of the invasion of Ukraine by the military controlled by President Putin, an authoritarian, with the backing of Russian oligarchs, ended her letter this way: “Today’s invasion of democratic Ukraine by authoritarian Putin is important. It not only has broken a long period of peace in Europe, it has brought into the open that authoritarians are indeed trying to destroy democracy.”

One thing that has been frustrating to me in recent years is the utter failure of mainstream media to connect the dots and provide context in its reporting, a task that Richardson has stepped up to do. (And it’s hard to figure out how to talk about this failure of the media without seeming to reinforce the right’s undermining of traditional media sources and full flight away from evidence-based reality.)

It’s especially frustrating because it’s not like there are a lot of dots. As Richardson explained on February 21: “In 2010, a pro-Russian politician, Viktor Yanukovych, won the Ukraine presidential election with the help of American political consultant Paul Manafort. Pro-democracy protesters forced Yanukovych from his post on February 21 in 2014, a date whose significance Putin’s actions today reinforced. Since then, Ukraine has turned back toward Europe. . . .

“It seems worth noting the similarities between the work Manafort did for Yanukovych’s campaign and his work for Donald Trump in 2016, right up to calls to imprison Yanukovych’s pro-NATO main opponent, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was imprisoned from 2011 until 2014, when she was released following Yanukovych’s ouster from power. And, once in office, Trump did, in fact, let Putin act much as he wished, especially with regard to Ukraine. According to Russia analyst Julia Davis, Russian state television last night said of the former president: “Trump gave us a 4-year reprieve.”

So, I would amend Richardson’s statement in the following way: “[The invasion of Ukraine] has brought into the open [AGAIN] that authoritarians are indeed trying to destroy democracy.”

Here’s another dot: I’ve been reading How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. They’re two scholars who have extensively studied circumstances where authoritarians try to take over and win, and those where they try to take over and fail.

One key factor is that there must be “mutual toleration, the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals” (8). According to them, “the erosion ofour democratic norms began in the 1980s and 1990s and accelerated in the 2000s. By the time Barack Obama became president, many Republicans, in particular questioned the legitimacy of their Democratic rivals” (9).

Disturbingly, this was on vivid display yesterday, when Elise Stefanek used the occasion, not to decry the invasion and the planned overthrow of a democratic government, not to revile Russias’s absurd claims that a democratic government whose President is a Jew are Nazis, but to attack President Biden.

What’s interesting about this is that Republicans are the party that launched a war based on lies. But the Democratic administration isn’t launching a war, or sending troops. And the Republicans aren’t arguing that the Russians aren’t trying to overthrow democracy — they’re arguing that it’s President Biden’s fault.

There’s a strange kind of truth to this — the way the situation has played out is because President Biden is president, and he’s not Neville Chamberlain or a pawn of the Russians, whose movement benefits from Russian-backed misinformation.

One thing about Buddhism that speaks to my condition is the notion that everything is connected. It certainly is. Ukrainian democracy, US democracy — it’s all connected, and not just philosophically. Richardson’s statement bears repeating, “authoritarians are indeed trying to destroy democracy.”

I’m still looking for better ideas about how to work to protect it.

Here’s a preview of one idea for an upcoming letter: one thing the authors of How Democracies Die point out is that some democratic governments end with a bang, as Ukraine’s seems poised to, for the moment. More commonly now, though, they end with a whimper - - which is why we who love democracy can work on the elections Trumpists are now targeting - those for the offices that control how elections happen.