The ball smacked the net. Germany had just scored for the fourth time in 26 minutes, brutally exposing the Brazilian squad. As I watched the match in my father’s São Paulo apartment, I heard a woman outside shriek, an understandable reaction. Ours was silence. Germany would score three more times before the referee’s merciful final whistle. Brazil—the only team to have qualified for every World…
After years of corruption and democratic erosion under Viktor Orbán, Hungary must rebuild its institutions. Its new Prime Minister, Péter Magyar, faces questions about how he’ll do it.
In his first substantial conversation with a foreign journalist since being elected, the new Prime Minister promised, “We don’t want to build a power machine.”
Carmen Navas holding a poster with information about her son.
After last month’s No Kings protest, Indivisible, the group that describes itself as a pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian people-powered movement, joined May Day Strong’s actions to take a page out of Minnesota’s one-day strike playbook from this past January. On its surface, Indivisible’s participation appears to be a slight pivot, engaging in more disruptive labor-directed actions. But […]
Palantir CEO Alex Karp
“Corruption is the Achilles’ heel of autocrats. It’s not a bug in the system. It’s the model,” the New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer says.
Many people in the country had trouble imagining that Viktor Orbán could be defeated. But a philosopher also warned that defeatism can abet authoritarianism.
Hungary’s much-watched national election—a competition between Trump and Putin-aligned authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and centrist opposition leader Peter Magyar—has ended with a devastating rebuke to the right-wing leader. Orbán conceded his party’s defeat before midnight today. Already sixteen years in power, Orbán was looking for another four-year term and a renewed majority for his…
No sitting American president has ever put his name on US currency. That will change later this year when bills bearing President Donald Trump’s signature start to roll out. Trump is engaged in a personal branding campaign unlike anything in the history of the American presidency. More than a dozen symbols of national life now […]
Three images of Trump layered across a red background
I’ve covered all the No Kings protests in New York City since the start of Trump’s second presidency. What has struck me about all of them is how they fuse people’s fears with their hopes. The fear is what drives people onto the streets: threats to democracy, the war in Iran, attacks on LGBTQ Americans. […]
In recent months, we’ve reached the stage of President Donald Trump’s second term where some of his greatest problems are the result of misguided solutions to his previous screwups. We are spending millions on farm bailouts to cover Trump’s devastating tariffs. We’re in a war with Iran to reopen a shipping lane that was open before we started the war. And we are lifting sanctions on the oil…
The United States is in a period with a “persistence of diminished democracy,” according to a report that will be released on Tuesday. It’s the third study released in the last week that concludes that American democracy is eroding under President Trump. Collectively, these studies show definitively that those of us warning of Trump’s authoritarianism aren’t just crazy liberal partisans. Experts…
Photos of President Donald Trump, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and Justice Neil Gorsuch against a backdrop of the Supreme Court building
In recent weeks, Trumpian excesses have—finally—provoked some visible setbacks: These include his firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; the scaling back of the grandiose “regime-change” goal of his Iran war; and the grudging acquiescence, at least purported, in repeated judicial rejections of unlawful planks of his policy and political agendas.
This is all good news, but let’s…
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President Trump is taking all the steps that autocrats and dictators typically do: getting charges filed against his political enemies, invading other nations, sending the military into areas that resist him. But he’s been blunted in a number of ways. Charges against former FBI…
When I interviewed historian Timothy Synder, author of On Tyranny, on my podcast at the end of January, he said the current state of American politics is best understood as a system of competitive authoritarianism. A democratically elected leader erodes checks and balances, attacks institutions, and weaponizes the justice system against his opponents. “There will still be elections, but you…
Tony Gilroy
Barbie Kyagulanyi’s ordeal reveals how love can become a powerful, non-violent force driving resistance, courage and conviction in Uganda’s struggle for meaningful democracy and good governance
President Donald Trump at a White House press conference
The Washington Post’s recent layoffs and censorship mark a significant decline in American press freedom as the Trump administration intensifies legal and physical pressure on journalists.
People are always asking, “Do you think that the world is moving toward an authoritarian system of government? Do you think that philosophy is moving toward a new anti-idealistic realism ? Do you think that art is moving toward futurism or dadaism or “hermitism”? and so on.
I call this kind of question “meteorological”: it is like asking, “Do you think that it is going to rain today? Had I…
Jimmy Lai
In the late 1970s, after building a small airport hotel into one of the biggest names in hospitality, the Pritzkers of Chicago joined forces with an ambitious young developer to convert an unfashionable hotel on New York’s 42nd Street into a sparkling Grand Hyatt. The building would have five restaurants, a signature atrium, and even—if […]
Last year, shortly after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation on January 31 to mark the start of Black History Month the next day—just as presidents before him had done, beginning with Gerald Ford in the bicentennial year of 1976. He invoked “heroes such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Thomas Sowell, Justice […]
The new year is no longer so new, and we’re 10 months away from the midterm elections. Let’s take stock of where things stand in this country by acknowledging five central points that combine to tell us that we are at an unprecedented and chilling place in our history: We have a corrupt and incompetent president whom we are, for the time being, powerless to rein in; and on top of that, we have…
Japanese culture has long valued the aesthetic of silence. We are a society that prides itself on 空気を読む, directly translated as “reading the air” or reticence and reserve, which is a form of high-context communication that prioritizes harmony over loud, confrontational debate.
However, as an ethnic Chinese, born and raised in Japan, I see the virtues of reticence and reserve being…