13 quotes
Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity [...].
Twilight of Democracy (2020)
The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine.
Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017)
The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long.
Putin’s overt attempt to destroy a political opponent has a logic: If [Alexei] Navalny is showing his countrymen how to be courageous, Putin wants to show them that courage is useless.
If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.
Surely the man who did the greatest damage to anti-communism was the American Senator Joe McCarthy.
Gulag: A History (2003)
Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.
A Warning From Europe: The Worst is Yet to Come (2018)
Instead of fighting ideological battles, [Keir] Starmer wanted the party to talk about ordinary people's problems—advice that Democrats in the United States, and centrists around the world, could also stand to hear.
In the quarter-century since the fall of Communism, we’ve forgotten what a cynical, unprincipled, authoritarian Russian regime looks like, especially one with an audacious global strategy and no qualms whatsoever about sacrificing human life.
Russia and the Great Forgetting (2015)
Almost all of the men who currently rule Russia (and they are all men) were taught and trained by the KGB. Their teaching and training shows. Why would it not?
Russia and the Great Forgetting (2015)
Polarization is normal. More to the point, I would add, skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.
A Warning From Europe: The Worst is Yet to Come (2018)
Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (2012)
Before joining NATO, each country had to establish civilian control of its army. Before joining the European Union, each adopted laws on trade, judiciary, human rights. As a result, they became democracies. This was “democracy promotion” working as it never has before or since.
The Myth of Russian Humiliation (2014)