At least four wildfires tearing across Los Angeles have killed at least five people and forced the evacuation of at least 130,000 more, and have flattened about 42 square miles (109 square kilometers). The fires are being driven by unusually high winds with gusts of up to 98 miles per hour (158 km per hour). Although January is typically part of California’s wet season, conditions are terribly dry. Downtown Los Angeles has received just 0.16 inches (0.4 cm) of rain since May 6, 2024, and the summer was unusually hot.
President Joe Biden is supporting state and local responses to the fire with federal resources. Today, he approved a major disaster declaration, which enables people and towns to access funds immediately in order to jump-start their recovery. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will reimburse California for some of the costs of fighting the fires. Five U.S. Forest Service large air tankers and ten federal firefighting helicopters have been deployed to support the local firefighters; ten Navy helicopters with water delivery buckets are joining them. California governor Gavin Newsom has deployed the California National Guard, and the Nevada National Guard is standing by.
Canada, too, has sent water-dropping helicopters and a pair of planes, which are part of a firefighting contract with California that’s been in place for 14 years.
At a fire station in Santa Monica, Biden stood beside Newsom and said: “We’re prepared to do anything and everything for as long as it takes to contain these fires.”
In contrast to federal support for California under Biden, in the midst of the ongoing crisis President-elect Donald Trump blamed California governor Gavin “Newscum and his Los Angeles crew” for the fires, suggesting he had put the needs of fish over the people of California. He posted: “Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.” "Let this stand as a symbol of the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the Biden/Newsom duo,” Trump posted. “January 20th cannot come fast enough!"
Newsom’s office responded: “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration—that is pure fiction. The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.”
Trump is apparently claiming that water that could be used to fight the fires has been diverted to protect the endangered Delta smelt. But the water systems in California are complicated, and importing water from northern California would make no difference for the wildfires.
Los Angeles water doesn’t come from northern California. It comes from an aqueduct east of the Sierra Nevada, from groundwater, and from the Colorado River. Right now, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has more water stored than it has ever had before, according to Mark Gold, a board member. “It’s not a matter of having enough water coming from Northern California to put out a fire,” he told Alastair Bland of CalMatters. “It’s about the continued devastating impacts of a changing climate.”
Hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick told Taryn Luna, Liam Dillon, and Alex Wigglesworth of the Los Angeles Times that Trump’s linking of water policy to the raging fires was “blatantly false, irresponsible and politically self-serving.”
The two different responses of the current president and the incoming one reveal dramatically different approaches to the presidency.
Yesterday the Biden administration announced the finalization of a new rule that will remove medical debt from all credit reports. Until now, medical debt has meant that consumers could be denied mortgages, car loans, or small business loans. In addition, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that funds from the American Rescue Plan, passed by Democrats shortly after Biden took office in 2021, have enabled the elimination of more than $1 billion in medical debt for 700,000 Americans. Jurisdictions are on track to eliminate about $15 billion in medical debt for nearly 6 million Americans, the White House said.
“No one should be denied economic opportunity because they got sick or experienced a medical emergency,” Harris said.
While Biden and Harris are working to solve problems for regular Americans, Trump has simply gone on the offensive, attacking Democrats for what he claims is their mismanagement without offering any ideas of his own. “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA,” he posted. “THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!”
By now, we know that Trump goes on offense to hide his own shortcomings. As Judd Legum of Public Notice pointed out, “The largest wildfire in California history—the August Complex Fire, which burned more than 1 million acres—occurred during the Trump administration.”
That pattern of going on offense to hide his own behavior was also on display today when CNN’s Hadas Gold reported that someone inside the Fox News Channel (FNC) gave the Trump team the questions that Trump would be asked at an Iowa town hall last January just before the Iowa caucus. A forthcoming book by Alex Isenstadt of Politico details the close relationship between Trump and people within FNC. It says that after Trump refused to prepare for that town hall, someone inside Fox texted the questions to a senior Trump aide, enabling them to prep him with answers.
After Trump fell apart during his debate with Vice President Harris, he accused her of knowing the questions ahead of time and said the debate was “rigged.”
Trump apparently went on the offensive yesterday when he called Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just hours before Trump’s lawyers filed an emergency request with the court asking it to stop Manhattan judge Juan Merchan from sentencing Trump Friday in the election interference case in which a jury found him guilty of 34 felonies. Alito told reporters that they talked only about a job opportunity for one of Alito’s law clerks and did not discuss the case, but it is highly unusual for a president or president-elect to talk with a Supreme Court justice when that official has business before the court. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said such a thing was “almost unheard of.”
As legal analyst Quinta Jurecic observed, though, someone leaked news of this inappropriate contact astonishingly quickly. Such news usually “has taken a while to dribble out,” Jurecic noted, but “this happened THIS MORNING. [S]omebody was smug or pissed off enough to go to the press right away.”
Trump’s accusations that Biden committed a crime more likely to be chalked up to Trump himself—taking bribes from a foreign company—was also in the news today. Alexander Smirnov, the key witness for the House Republicans’ investigation into Biden, was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about the alleged bribery and to tax evasion.
Julia Ainsley and Carol E. Lee of NBC News today reported another way in which Trump is threatening to go on offense: by conducting a very visible raid targeting undocumented immigrants in the Washington, D.C., area as soon as he takes office. While Presidents Barack Obama and Biden have targeted employers who violate labor laws, Trump wants to demonstrate “shock and awe” by raiding workplaces and sweeping up migrants who are in the U.S. without documentation, regardless of their criminal status. His transition team has been talking with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials about the logistics of such raids.
And then, of course, there are Trump’s frequent references to taking over other countries. Don Jr. traveled to Greenland this week with right-wing activist and media personality Charlie Kirk, ostensibly to record a podcast, but Trump Sr. followed the trip with posts saying “MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!” That idea is getting traction among MAGA leaders, even though—or perhaps because—it is a direct affront to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to which both the U.S. and Denmark belong.
Over the New York Post’s map of the “Donroe Doctrine” in which Canada is labeled “51st state,” Greenland is labeled “our land,” the Gulf of Mexico is labeled “Gulf of America,” and the Panama Canal is labeled “Pana-Maga Canal,” the Republican majority on the House Foreign Affairs Committee posted today: “Our country was built by warriors and explorers. We tamed the West, won two World Wars, and were the first to plant our flag on the moon. President Trump has the biggest dreams for America and it’s un-American to be afraid of big dreams.” Journalist Jamie Dupree screenshotted the tweet before the committee deleted it.
Behind all the offense, though, things that matter deeply to the American people are going largely unnoticed.
MAGA representatives have been introducing a slew of measures to the new Congress, many of which incorporate the plans of Project 2025 into legislation. They call for turning over immigration to the states, privatizing veterans’ healthcare, and repealing the 1993 National Voting Rights Act, the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Bills call for withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization; increasing oil and gas production on federal lands; abolishing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA); allowing states to spend federal education money on private school vouchers; and removing the protection of transgender rights from schools.
Other measures would revoke security clearances for “certain former members of the intelligence community,” introduce a constitutional amendment to cap the Supreme Court at nine justices, and cut off federal funding to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (the office that successfully charged Trump with election interference) and the Fulton County (GA) District Attorney’s Office (the office that has charged Trump with criminal conspiracy).
And MAGA Republicans have proposed a bill to impose a national abortion ban, along with a bill urging Congress to support a consortium of antiabortion doctors for women because, the bill says, “health care should emphasize the whole woman, including her physical, mental, and spiritual wellness,” and “health care for women should also address the needs of men, families, and communities.”
When Donald Trump became president for the first time in 2017, resistance formed across the country. In 2025, the opposite is happening: moguls and the media are practising anticipatory obedience.
Collective genuflection out of self-interest, exhaustion or because everyone has changed their minds and views, I wonder.
I would have lost.
Quote:I would have lost.
Mencken's famous quote comes to mind...
I think guys like Bezos and Zuck are actually afraid of what he might unleash on their businesses. And with the big guys rolling over it makes it more uncomfortable for the little guys to take on the administration.
Widespread disgust might fire up the electorate again in time for the midterms but I ain't betting on it.
Donald Trump has shared inflammatory video content calling Benjamin Netanyahu a “deep, dark son of a bitch” just weeks after the Israeli leader claimed the two had a “very friendly, warm” discussion about hostage negotiations and Syria policy.
The president-elect posted the clip to Truth Social featuring economist Jeffrey Sachs, who accuses Netanyahu of manipulating US foreign policy and orchestrating “endless wars” in the Middle East.
In the video, Sachs – talking at a Cambridge Union event – claims Netanyahu has pursued a systematic strategy since 1995 to eliminate Hamas and Hezbollah by targeting their supporting governments in Iraq, Iran and Syria.
“[Netanyahu’s] gotten us into endless wars and because of the power of all of this in US politics, he’s gotten his way,” Sachs says in the interview, referring to the influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups.
Trump’s aim in promoting the video was not immediately clear.
The president-elect has a history of re-posting clips and images that criticize establishment policies in Washington, but the repost comes amid intensive diplomatic efforts by Egypt, Qatar and the current US administration to broker a truce deal that would include hostage releases.
Trump’s decision to amplify Sachs’s comments also comes as he assembles what Israeli settlers are dubbing a “dream team” of hardline supporters of the state.
His pick for secretary of state, the Florida senator Marco Rubio, opposes a Gaza ceasefire and has called for Israel to “destroy every element” of Hamas. His choice for UN ambassador, the New York representative Elise Stefanik, has dismissed the United Nations as a “cesspool of antisemitism” for its criticism of civilian deaths in Gaza.
Trump’s selection for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has rejected the common diplomatic terminology regarding occupied Palestinian territories. “There’s no such thing as a West Bank,” Huckabee said during a 2017 visit to Israel. Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, had previously said “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian”.
Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is also an evangelical Christian whose tattoos of crusader-associated symbols have raised eyebrows in diplomatic circles.
Trump himself has said there will be “hell to pay” if Hamas does not release its hostages before he takes office.
Roughly 100 hostages remain in Gaza after 15 months of conflict, with two-thirds presumed alive. More than 45,000 Palestinians are believed to have been killed since the war broke out, with a majority of the 2.3 million in Gaza displaced and enduring brutal winter weather.
The relationship between Trump and Netanyahu has historically been one of mutual benefit, though it has been unpredictable and, at times, transactional.
During Trump’s first term, he delivered significant diplomatic wins for Netanyahu, including recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in 2019 and supporting the Abraham accords with Gulf states. This past summer, Trump hosted Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago during the prime minister’s US trip.
But when Trump lost the 2020 elections, he blasted Netanyahu for congratulating Biden, telling an Axios reporter: “I haven’t spoken to [the Israeli leader] since. **** him.”
Trump’s return to office could, however, prove advantageous for Netanyahu’s expansionist policies, particularly regarding settlement expansion and potential annexation in the West Bank.
The Israeli government did not immediately respond to the repost.
Sachs told the Guardian that while he was not advising Trump, he hoped it signaled a shift in US foreign policy.
“I do not know Trump’s disposition on these issues, but I do very much hope that he frees US foreign policy from the grip of the cruel, ineffective, illegal and destructive policies of Netanyahu,” he said.
No one posted here already???
Today the Department of Labor released the final jobs report of Joe Biden’s presidency. The nation added 256,000 new jobs in December, a number significantly higher than economists expected. That brings the total number of jobs created under Biden to 16.6 million and makes Biden’s the only administration in history to have created jobs every month. Under the Biden administration, the nation has also had the lowest average unemployment rate of any administration in 50 years, ending at 4.1%.
Dan Primack of Axios reported that the U.S. gained more jobs during Biden’s four years than it did under President Donald Trump, Barack Obama, or George W. Bush.
In a statement, Biden noted that when he took office, economic forecasts projected that it would take years for the country to recover fully from the effects of the coronavirus shutdown. In fact, the U.S. economy has grown faster and created more jobs than any other country with an advanced economy. Working-age women are now employed at record levels, and the gap in employment between Black Americans and their white counterparts is at the lowest level on record. The administration has brought the inflation of the early recovery back down almost to target levels, while incomes have increased about $4,000 more than prices. The administration, Biden said, has “achieved the soft landing that few thought was possible.”
CNBC economist Carl Quintanilla quoted Matt Peterson of Barron’s, who wrote: “It looks a lot like U.S. consumers are happy with the way things are...[a]nd so are the markets.... The only one who doesn’t seem to be happy with the way things are is Trump.”
Brian Platt of Bloomberg reports that Trump’s threats of tariffs against Canada already have Canadian officials drafting plans for retaliation. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau told CNN yesterday that Trump is talking about annexing Canada to divert attention from how significantly his tariff plans would raise consumer prices.
As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted late last year, MAGA was never an ideological movement so much as a vehicle to pull together different constituencies in order to get Trump elected president. Since members of those constituencies have little in common, that effort centers around creating a false world that demonizes Democrats and insists they have created a dangerous world that is biased against MAGA. The only one who can stand against them, the story goes, is Trump, who is being persecuted for his defense of his supporters. That narrative has helped MAGAs to find common ground in their defense of Trump and his cronies and their support for Trump’s vows to retaliate against those he considers his enemies.
That impulse appears to be stronger than ever after Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump today in the New York election interference case in which a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felonies for covering up payments to an adult film actress to keep her quiet about their sexual encounter before the 2016 presidential election. Merchan said that he could not impose a punishment without encroaching on the presidency, so in an unusually light sentence, he released Trump without restrictions. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained, Trump knew he would not get jail time or a fine, but wanted to avoid the sentencing itself because just a month after the sentencing, the designation of convicted felon will become permanent.
Although a unanimous jury convicted him, Trump insisted the trial was “a political witch hunt…done to damage my reputation so that I’d lose the election…. The fact is I’m totally innocent.” He seemed to think that ratings should override reality, telling the judge: “I got the largest number of votes by far by any Republican in history,” he said, “and won, as you know, all seven swing states—won conclusively all seven swing states.”
Trump’s version of the case appeared to be convincing to MAGA pundits and lawmakers, who echoed his calls for retribution. Trump’s lawyer Mike Davis warned: “Right now the Democrats think they’re the hunters. And guess what? On January 20th at noon, they’re going to become the hunted.” Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Nancy Mace (R-SC), and Ronnie Jackson (R-TX) all echoed Trump. “Trump will win in the end and America wins in 10 days when we get Trump back!!” Jackson posted on X.
MAGA supporters have embraced Trump’s attacks on Democrats and on the government, most notably with their fact-free attacks on the Biden administration's handling of natural disasters—first the terrible flooding in North Carolina, when the right wing spread the lie that government officials were stealing people’s land, and now the terrible fires in Los Angeles that have been fueled in large part by the climate change that cut rainfall since last May and brought an unusually hot summer.
While local, state, and federal officials are doing their best to battle the Los Angeles fires in raging winds and dry conditions, Trump and his allies are lying to create the belief that the Democratic government is to blame for the fires. Trump lied that there is a shortage of water because Democratic governor Gavin Newsom refused to divert water to the area. Others claimed—falsely—that Democratic Mayor Karen Bass cut the budget for the Los Angeles Fire Department, when in fact a 7% increase in funding came through negotiations outside the budget.
They have blamed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts for the blazes because the Los Angeles Fire Department is headed by Kristin Crowley, an LGBT woman who came up through the ranks in the department over twenty years. And Trump sidekick Elon Musk agreed with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that the fires are part of a “globalist plot” to trigger “total collapse” in the United States. “Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!” Trump posted.
In reality, firefighters are hard at work, with crews from both Canada and Mexico working along with Californians to suppress the fires.
Trump’s false version of reality has been a potent weapon against the Democrats, and he is promising to continue constructing that false reality: this week he has said he would replace the head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), who is responsible for collecting the documents that establish the historical record of the actions of the national government. The archivist’s predecessor was the person who pursued the classified documents Trump took from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, and Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt he would make sure that he had a loyalist in that position.
But it is an open question whether Trump’s false reality will be as convincing when he is back in the White House as it has been when he was sniping from outside. Trump has promised a number of conflicting things to the different constituencies in MAGA, and it is not clear that he can deliver them. And if he does, it’s not clear the American people will want what he is delivering.
Trump says he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services; more than 18,000 physicians have signed a letter warning that he is “unqualified” and “actively dangerous” to the health of Americans. Trump’s plan to elevate him to a position that impacts Americans is “a slap in the face to every health care professional who has spent their lives working to protect patients from preventable illness and death.”
Trump has vowed mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and the reinstatement of Title 42 to close the border to migrants, but as Biden and others repeatedly pointed out when Trump complained about Biden’s ending it, Title 42 is part of a 1944 public health law that can be invoked only to stop disease from coming into the U.S. Once the government declared the coronavirus pandemic over, Title 42 had to go. Yesterday, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that Trump’s advisors, led by Stephen Miller, are searching for a disease to invoke to reinstate Title 42. They have even considered invoking the old trope that immigrants might bring an unknown disease.
But, unlike non-emergency immigration law, Title 42 does not impose penalties for those who try to cross the border repeatedly, a reality Trump used to great effect against Biden as border encounters soared when people made multiple attempts. Now those numbers will be on Trump’s account if he uses Title 42 going forward.
In the meantime, the Biden administration today extended temporary protected status for about a million immigrants from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela who meet certain criteria. Their protection will be extended for 18 months under a 1990 law that stops the deportation of immigrants to countries at war or suffering from natural disasters. The new protection does not cover immigrants from 13 other nations who currently have protected status.
Nick Miroff, Maria Sacchetti and Marianne LeVine of the Washington Post noted that when he was in office before, Trump tried to end protections for Salvadorans and others, saying they came from “sh*thole” countries, and that he is expected to let protections expire during his second term.
When he was running for office, Trump pledged he would end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 24 hours, a vow Russian president Vladimir Putin has dismissed. Yesterday, Trump told reporters that Putin wants to meet with him and that they are setting that meeting up; the Kremlin denied that statement was true and noted it would be more appropriate to meet after Trump takes office.
Today the Treasury Department under Biden imposed new sanctions on more than 180 vessels, many of them in Russia's “shadow fleet” that carries oil, as well as on dozens of oil traders, oilfield service providers, insurance companies, and energy officials in an attempt to reduce the money Russia can realize from energy exports. The United Kingdom and Japan also imposed additional sanctions.
According to U.S. Ambassador to China R. Nicholas Burns, the Biden administration is also making a last effort to try to stop China from supplying Russia with equipment that it can use in its war against Ukraine. The U.S. is warning China that it is aligning “with the most unreliable agents of disorder in the international system.”
Trump may or may not be able to turn his promises into reality, but it is clear that some of his supporters’ plans will not go over well with the majority of Americans, especially as Trump fills his Cabinet with billionaires and spends his time next to the richest man in the world, who spent more than $250 million on Trump’s election.
Today, Ben Leonard, Meredith Lee Hill, and Kelsey Tamborrino reported in Politico that the Republicans on the House Budget Committee, chaired by Representative Jodey Arrington (R-TX), have made a list of more than $5 trillion in budget cuts they could make to fund Trump’s deportation plans as well as his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Options include cuts to Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (more commonly known as Obamacare), the Inflation Reduction Act’s investment in combating climate change, and the supplemental nutrition programs formerly known as food stamps.
For decades now, there has been enough wiggle room in our system to paper over the gulf between image and reality. That slack may continue.
But at least in some places, reality is catching up to the fake stories. During the 2016 presidential campaign, right-wing media spread the lie that leading Democrats were operating a child sex-trafficking wing out of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. Those lies convinced a man to drive from North Carolina to the restaurant with an assault rifle to stop the crimes, only to discover the story was a hoax. He pleaded guilty to carrying a gun across state lines and assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to four years in prison. This week, two North Carolina police officers shot the same man after he pulled a gun on them during a traffic stop. He later died from his injuries.
Yesterday a New York State appeals court refused to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the electronic voting systems company Smartmatic against the parent company of the Fox News Channel for the lies that channel’s hosts told about Smartmatic rigging the 2020 presidential election. Smartmatic is suing for $2.7 billion.
And today the figure the “Pizzagate” conspiracy was designed to put into the highest office in the land, and that the Fox News Channel hosts’ lies were intended to keep there, officially became a convict.
Yesterday a New York State appeals court refused to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the electronic voting systems company Smartmatic against the parent company of the Fox News Channel for the lies that channel’s hosts told about Smartmatic rigging the 2020 presidential election. Smartmatic is suing for $2.7 billion.
MAGA supporters have embraced Trump’s attacks on Democrats and on the government, most notably with their fact-free attacks on the Biden administration's handling of natural disasters—first the terrible flooding in North Carolina, when the right wing spread the lie that government officials were stealing people’s land, and now the terrible fires in Los Angeles that have been fueled in large part by the climate change that cut rainfall since last May and brought an unusually hot summer.
While local, state, and federal officials are doing their best to battle the Los Angeles fires in raging winds and dry conditions, Trump and his allies are lying to create the belief that the Democratic government is to blame for the fires. Trump lied that there is a shortage of water because Democratic governor Gavin Newsom refused to divert water to the area. Others claimed—falsely—that Democratic Mayor Karen Bass cut the budget for the Los Angeles Fire Department, when in fact a 7% increase in funding came through negotiations outside the budget.
They have blamed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts for the blazes because the Los Angeles Fire Department is headed by Kristin Crowley, an LGBT woman who came up through the ranks in the department over twenty years. And Trump sidekick Elon Musk agreed with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that the fires are part of a “globalist plot” to trigger “total collapse” in the United States. “Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!” Trump posted.
In reality, firefighters are hard at work, with crews from both Canada and Mexico working along with Californians to suppress the fires.
Trump’s false version of reality has been a potent weapon against the Democrats, and he is promising to continue constructing that false reality: ...
Democracy, it is often heard these days, is in crisis.
The election of Donald Trump and news of political turmoil in many other democracies has created the impression that liberal democracy is everywhere in retreat in the face of authoritarians feeding on discontent over economic woes, rapid social change, mass migration, disinformation and general malaise.
Austria could get its first far-right chancellor since World War II. France is on its fifth prime minister in three years, Germany is headed for elections the chancellor is sure to lose, the deeply unpopular Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada quit under pressure from his own party, a post-fascist government runs Italy, Viktor Orban of Hungary continues to proudly stomp on democracy, and populist parties seem to be making inroads in every corner of Europe. Elsewhere there’s always more troubling news — from Israel, India, South Korea.
It’s easy to perceive a global trend: workers of the world losing faith in the established order and dismayed by globalization, rushing for the extremes and rallying behind populists.
“It is hard to travel in Europe these days, or even to live in Washington, without recognizing that liberal democracy is now in serious trouble in the world,” a Times columnist once wrote in these pages. “We are living in a time of widespread doubt about the capacity of free societies to deal with the economic, political and philosophical problems of the age.”
Many readers would agree. In fact, many did in June 1975, almost a half century ago, when James Reston wrote those words. But democracy did not founder then, and while there is no question that it is facing serious challenges today, it is another question whether they amount to a universal democratic backsliding or worse: liberal democracy in danger of collapse.
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But as The Times’s Berlin bureau chief Jim Tankersley suggested in a recent analysis of Germany’s plight, “not all malaise is the same.” Popular discontent in Western democracies may have broadly similar sources, but the political consequences are as different as the leaders and systems in each country. And it is ultimately leaders who shape the outcomes, argues Larry M. Bartels, the author of “Democracy Erodes From the Top.” Public opinion, he suggests, is less an active wave than a passive reservoir to which leaders respond — or which the less principled exploit. “I think there’s always a tendency on the part of observers to see deep meaning in terms of shifts in public opinion,” Mr. Bartels said in an interview. “It turns out that it’s more country-specific than outside observers are likely to grant.”
Scanning the global political storms separately reveals their unique characteristics and challenges, and the way many are rooted more in a backlash against incumbent leaders than in a new embrace of the far right.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron was first elected in 2017, determined to upend French politics, and so they’re upended. And if Marine Le Pen, the perennial far-right contender, has made inroads, it arguably owes as much to her success in detoxifying her National Rally party as to a growth of far-right sentiment. In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party finished first in elections on Sept. 29 in a reaction against the mainstream parties, but it also had to moderate its tone to get there, and it may yet fail to find the coalition parties it needs to form a government.
In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s decline reflects the failure of the three-party coalition he led to cope with the country’s economic funk. But that’s politics, not democratic backsliding, and the much-feared, far-right Alternative for Germany remains officially branded as “suspected extremist” and shunned as a potential federal ruling coalition partner by all major parties. Up in Canada, voters largely grew tired of Mr. Trudeau and his progressive politics after nearly a decade.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, once feared as an ultranationalist, has managed to establish herself since her election in 2022 as someone with whom Europe, and now, even more, America, can do business. Mr. Orbán, today the poster-boy of illiberalism, was far less radical when he first came to power in 1998, and changed his stripes in the confusion of post-Communist power struggles. At the same time, Poland, once twinned with Hungary as a study in democracy gone awry, ousted the conservative nationalist Law and Justice party and brought back the centrist Donald Tusk.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s politics in Israel, and Narendra Modi’s in India, have less to do with discontent than with distinctly national factors. And in South Korea, the efforts to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol after his aborted bid for emergency powers can actually be chalked up as a victory for — not a blow to — democracy.
The roots and dangers of each of these cases can be disputed, and collectively they do represent a swing away from progressive politics. But to view them as a broad democratic retreat is to limit the historical horizon to the era since the collapse of the Soviet empire, an event that briefly fueled illusions of liberal democracy’s final and irreversible triumph: an “end of history.” In fact, democracy has been sorely challenged throughout its history.
“If compared to the 1990s, then yes, things are getting worse,” said Liana Fix, an expert on Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations. But looking back as a historian over the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, she said, “The picture looks quite different. So what is the benchmark? Yes, globalization doesn’t hold the same promise it did in the ’90s, and we’re back in a more contentious age, but the era of liberal democracy is not over.”
The history of the United States — the lodestar of modern democracies — is hardly one of unity and harmony until the rise of Trumpism. The country has endured repeated crises, Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman write in their book, “Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy.” In each one “political combat escalated to a point where Americans feared that the government might collapse, that the Union might dissolve, or that unrest, violence, or even civil war might break out.” Some of which, of course, did happen.
That does not mean there’s nothing to worry about in America today. On the contrary, Ms. Mettler and Mr. Lieberman see a serious danger to the United States in the current confluence of the four recurring threats they identify: polarization, tribalism, economic inequality and excessive executive power.
But if the second election of Mr. Trump does hearten authoritarians abroad, that does not mean the malaise they thrive on in their countries is the same as the malaise in the United States. While right-wing movements on both sides of the Atlantic bash immigrants, the context is often quite different. Mr. Bartels, who is co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt, said that despite the rhetoric of far-right politicians, polls showed that Europeans are more favorable to immigration today than they were 20 or 25 years ago. Similarly, the culture wars in Europe are far less pronounced than in the United States, Ms. Fix noted.
That the threats to democracy are diverse may not be a great consolation to those worried about where it is headed, and there’s every reason to remain vigilant. But it should be reassuring that democracy is not facing a global extinction event but more a patchwork of storms, and that democracies have usually found a way to weather them.
