The Dictators’ Miscalculation: How Undermining American Democracy Created Their Worst Nightmare
On Minneapolis, mass strikes, and why authoritarian regimes are watching American resistance with terror
In October I asked: What time is it?
Not “are we in crisis?” Obviously we are. Not “will democracy survive?” It depends.
The question was: are we in 1923, when resistance still seems optional? 1930, when the choice still matters? Or 1933, when consolidation is complete?
I argued we were in 1930. The moment when recognizing what time it is becomes essential to determining what time it becomes.
Three months later, I have an answer.
And Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are not going to like it.
Xi and Putin spent years undermining American democracy. Not as a side project or opportunistic meddling. But as their core geostrategic priority.
They wanted a paralyzed America. Divided, ineffective, consumed by internal conflict. Too fractured to project power globally. Too dysfunctional to coordinate democratic alliances. Too distracted by domestic chaos to constrain authoritarian expansion.
They got Trump.
And they found more than willing partners. Not assets they themselves developed, but a domestic oligarchic class that has found some degree of convergent interests with these foreign menaces to the free peoples of the world. America’s Gilded Age 2.0 has produced its own anti-democratic movement: a cohort of tech accelerationists, right-wing reactionaries from Silicon Valley. Thiel, Musk, Andreessen—not Russian puppets, but American oligarchs who share with Putin and Xi a common vision: a world where capital operates free from democratic constraint.
A convenient evolution towards compatible goals. At least for now. There is no honor among thieves, after all.
But these enterprising state-breakers are more pernicious than the economic royalists whose hatred Franklin Roosevelt welcomed. Those were merely national predators. These ones have somewhat more global ambitions. They would rather pay protection money to a Putin or a Xi Jinping—tributes to operate their transnational empires—than suffer the indignity of democratic regulation by the popular will of uppity citizens of lower vibrations. How dare these human resources deign to suggest they are qualified to opine on matters of national policy?
This is the psychology driving the convergence. Not only ideology or strategy. Also wounded pride. The democratic expectation that billionaires answer to the same laws as everyone else is, to them, an intolerable insult. Autocrats don’t impose such indignities. Autocrats can be paid off. Autocrats understand hierarchy.
And so the project isn’t just capturing America. It’s dismantling democratic constraint everywhere.
