The New Yorker:

Xiao Gongqin thought that, in moments of flux, a strongman could build a bridge to democracy. Now he’s not so sure.

By Chang Che

When Russian and Chinese élites talk about history, they often mean “History”—the grand Hegelian march toward progress. Since the end of the Cold War, the East has lived with the undignified thesis, popularized by Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” that democracy had defeated the authoritarian alternatives of the twentieth century. That idea has not aged well. According to a European survey of more than two hundred countries, 2022 was the first time in two decades that closed autocracies outnumbered liberal democracies in the world. Americans have become unreliable underwriters of the international order. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has incited Europe’s largest conflict since the Second World War and China’s Xi Jinping is remaking global institutions in his own image, bereft of democratic values. When Xi visited the Kremlin in March, 2023, a little over a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, he told Putin that the world was changing in ways “we haven’t seen in a hundred years.” “Let’s drive those changes together,” he said. Putin, hands outstretched, nodded. “I agree.”

Donald Trump’s victory this November turned what some dismissed as an electoral fluke, in 2016, into an enduring political reality. “We have won,” Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian ideologue known to some as “Putin’s philosopher,” proclaimed on X. “Globalists have lost their final combat. The future is finally open. I am really happy.” Ren Yi, a blogger and grandson of a former Chinese Communist leader, wrote that Trump’s win, along with his chumminess with Elon Musk, has created something of a “techno-authoritarian-conservative” alliance that resembled the authoritarian cultures of East Asia. “The ‘beacon’ of the free world, the United States, will lead various countries into illiberal democracy,” Ren predicted. “There is no end to history, only the end of the Fukuyama-ists.”

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