“Although the damage is difficult to measure, the United States has lost much of its moral authority...will the coming decades bring a new Cold War, with China cast as the Soviet Union and the rest…
“For years, liberal democracies have been beset by deepening political polarization, declining confidence in the rule of law, and widespread institutional decay. With the COVID-19 crisis accelerating…
““It’s lonely being a European today,” Delattre mused. Russia is hostile. China is hostile. Emerging powers view the postwar multilateral organizations which Europe prizes as relics of a world made…
“The conclusion that populists’ shambolic handling of this crisis must be bad for populism as a whole is ultimately flawed...it ignores the fact that populism has been a permanent feature of modern…
“The economy probably doesn’t feel so great to the millions of workers who still haven’t gotten their jobs back and who have just seen their unemployment benefits slashed. The $600 a week…
“This moment is unlike any in recent Thai history. A new generation of activists has moved from expressing coded criticism of the monarchy to publicly calling for wholesale reform” (Tom Felix Joehnk…
“Two common beliefs about democracy are that it began in ancient Athens and, on spreading from there, remained peculiarly Western. David Stasavage, a professor of politics at New York University,…
“Liberal democracy per se was never the animating passion of the trans-Atlantic right — anti-Communism was. When the threat of Communist expansion disappeared, so did most of the right’s commitment…
“In other words, there is one more item to add to the constantly growing list of factors driving polarization in America: Those on the left and right appear to use substantially different cognitive…
“Hong kongers had long worried that the Communist Party would transform the territory by stealth into just another Chinese city. In the past few days, armed with a new national-security law which it…
