Why Putin and Xi-and half of Americans see our Socialist Democratic Party weakness and how they are dividing our nation by race sex-gender and not protecting our own borders. Much of the rest of the world does not want to live In a democracy If this Is what they end pp with. The Biden experimentation on controlling social policy by force and political correctness is wearing thin for most of us.
Democratic recession
Political scientists have been warning for several years that democracy is in decline around the world. Larry Diamond of Stanford University has described the trend as a “democratic recession.”
Freedom House, which tracks every country in the world, reports that global political freedom has declined every year since 2006. Last year, Freedom House concluded, “the countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began.”
A Russian takeover of Ukraine would contribute to this democratic recession in a new way: An autocracy would be taking over a democracy by force. Ukraine is a largely democratic nation of more than 40 million people, with a pro-Western president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who in 2019 won 73% of the vote in the election’s final round. That victory and recent polls both indicate that most Ukrainians want to live in a country that resembles the European nations to its west — and the U.S. — more than it resembles Russia.
But Putin and his inner circle believe that liberal democracies are in decline, a view that Xi Jinping and other top Chinese officials share. They know that the U.S. and Europe are now struggling to lift living standards for much of their populations. Putin and Xi also know that many Western countries are polarized, rived by cultural conflicts between metropolitan areas and more rural ones. Major political parties are weak (as in the case of the old center-left parties in Britain, France and elsewhere) or themselves behaving in anti-democratic ways (as with the Republican Party in the United States.). These problems have given Putin and his top aides confidence to act aggressively, believing that “the American-led order is in deep crisis,” Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Moscow Center wrote in The Economist this weekend.
In the view of Putin’s regime, Gabuev explained: “A new multi-polar order is taking shape that reflects an unstoppable shift in power to authoritarian regimes that support traditional values. A feisty, resurgent Russia is a pioneering force behind the arrival of this new order, along with a rising China.” The situation in Ukraine remains highly uncertain. Putin may still choose not to invade, given the potential for a protracted war, a large number of Russian casualties and economic turmoil. An invasion would be a spectacular gamble with almost no modern equivalent — which is also why it would be a sign that the world might be changing.
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