Strongman circus
Are Putin, Erdoğan, Netanyahu, Modi, and Trump swapping notes?
The strongman once dazzled us with his ability to lift things—stones, dumbbells, large kitchen appliances. In his small tights and big mustache, he wasn’t hard to spot.
This week at Public Seminar, our authors find that the strongman act in politics is similarly distinctive: a few costume changes can’t disguise the fact that the moves are the same around the world.
In Russia, Putin promotes nostalgia for a lost Russian “retrotopia” to justify military invasions, writes Alex Rossen; meanwhile in Israel, messianic-nationalist forces energize a pernicious right-wing argument for violent “self-orientalization,” Assaf David and Arie Dubnov report.
In a panel convened by Mark W. Frazier, Senem Aydin-Düzgit, Jeffrey C. Isaac, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta track shared authoritarian currents in the supposedly democratic regimes headed by Trump, Erdoğan, and Modi.
And Madeleine Adams reviews Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence (New York Review Books, 2024), a book that undermines the ideologies that degrade reality with laughter. As Monterroso’s hapless protagonist explains: “Intelligence tends to engender the sort of foolishness that only foolishness could possibly correct.”
The Self-Orientalization of Israeli Politics
Why “the only democracy in the Middle East” is cozying up to authoritarian regimes
Assaf David, Arie Dubnov
Israel has often been described as the only democracy in the Middle East. This perception—flawed and problematic as it is—has been central not only for Israel’s defenders abroad but also for many Jewish Israelis’ self-perception. The power consolidation of an extreme coalition of right-wing political parties in recent years, coupled with the judicial reforms pushed forward by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government before and during the war on Gaza, call Israel’s democratic identity into question. While external observers focus on the widespread protests in Israel or the transformation of its image in the US, much less attention is given to the ominous dynamics of the Israeli public discourse.
Vladimir Putin, Man of Yesterday
While the global community dreams of the future, the Kremlin fixates on a retrotopia
Alex Rossen
In September 2024, the United Nations convened for the Summit of the Future. In it, diverse global communities came together to dream of the utopia tomorrow might offer. Yet as the Russian state declares its desire to restore the territorial holdings of the old Russian empire, these same global communities face a difficult quandary: Why is the past more tantalizing than the future?
Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence
Under the author’s microscope, the affectations of the literati come into focus
Madeleine Adams
It’s difficult to write about The Rest Is Silence (trans. from the Spanish by Aaron Kerner, New York Review Books 2024) without sounding like Eduardo Torres, the puffed-up literary critic and protagonist of Augusto Monterroso’s metatextual satire—but I will do my best. The novel, originally published in 1978, is the only one by Guatemalan-born Monterroso (1921–2003), whose archly elegant, politically barbed microfiction earned him the praise of Italo Calvino (“the most beautiful stories in the world”) and comparisons to Jorge Luis Borges, but never a wide readership. He remained a writer’s writer.
What Is Illiberal Democracy?
Scholars discuss Trump, Modi, and Erdoğan
Senem Aydin-Düzgit, Mark W. Frazier, Jeffrey C. Isaac, Pratap Bhanu Mehta
Mark W. Frazier: The year 2024 has been called a “global election super cycle,” as over 70 countries held general or national elections. In spring in India and Turkey, opposition parties performed somewhat better than expected against incumbent governments, which held onto power but offered some hope for opposition politics in these countries. The US election results have continued a global pattern of punishing incumbent governments for their countries’ economic conditions. But the US elections signal much more than that. The return of Trump to the American presidency raises questions about authoritarian trends within democratic regimes.