Chuck Darwin<p>A couple of years ago, in the Atlantic magazine, journalist <a href="https://c.im/tags/Anne" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Anne</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Applebaum" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Applebaum</span></a> wrote an era-defining cover story called “The Bad Guys Are Winning”. </p><p>Her argument was not only that democratic institutions were in decline across the world, <br>but that there was a new version of old threats to them: <br>⭐️rogue states and dictatorships were increasingly linked not by ideology, as in the cold war, but by powerful currents of criminal and mercenary interest, often enabled by western corporations and technology.⭐️</p><p>“Nowadays,” Applebaum wrote, 💥“autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. 💥</p><p>🔥The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources – the troll farms… [that] pound home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.”🔥</p><p>The article took as examples the relationships between <a href="https://c.im/tags/Russia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Russia</span></a> and <a href="https://c.im/tags/Belarus" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Belarus</span></a> and between <a href="https://c.im/tags/China" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>China</span></a> and <a href="https://c.im/tags/Turkey" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Turkey</span></a>, <br>♦️ad hoc alliances created specifically to preserve their leaders’ authoritarian power and vast illicit personal wealth, ♦️<br>🔷and to undermine the chief threats to it: <br>🔸transparency, <br>🔸human rights, <br>🔸any pretence of international law. </p><p>Three years on, with wars in Ukraine and Gaza further fomenting those forces, <br>with the real prospect of a second Trump presidency, <br>Applebaum has published a book-length version of her thesis: <br>👉Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. 👈</p><p>It is a necessary, if anxiety-inducing read.</p>