It was shocking to some that in the 2010s, America and Europe saw the rise of authoritarian political leaders and the serious decay of democracy.  Many of us never believed this was possible. The Russians gave up on Europe and turned instead to Ukraine. The Brexit referendum seemed like a trip into madness, but was really another case of the people asking for and getting a wrecking ball for a leader. The Americans did the same thing in 2016 when Trump was elected. When the establishment is no long trusted, the masses turn to anyone who promises to blow things up.

Russian oligarchs took advantage of the vacuum of reason and good government along with the weakness of democratic institutions, When the establishment is no long trusted, the masses turn to anyone who promises to blow things up.

to pillage their county and deposit the spoils of what were once public enterprises under communism that were sold,  into offshore bank accounts, shell companies, and engineered dark deals. It seemed that capitalism was eating its young.

After a brief flirtation with democracy, that basically ended soon after Boris Yeltsin  selected Vladimir Putin as the next leader, to succeed him, Russia went from Communism direct to predatory capitalism of the most extreme sort.

Surprising to many, political practices that found favor in the Russian oligarchic state found fertile ground in the United States and Britain. The politics of inevitability had presumed  that influence would travel from the west to the east, but reality turned the tables. We learned from Putin not the other way around. Timothy Snyder explained it this way, in his book The Road to Unfreedom:

Concepts and practices moved from east to west. An example is the word “fake,” as in “fake news.”  This sounds like an American invention, and Donald Trump claimed it, as his own, but the term was used in Russia and Ukraine long before it began it’s career in the United States. It meant creating a fictional text that posed as a piece of journalism, both to spread confusion about a particular event and to discredit journalism as such. Eternity politicians first spread fake news themselves, then claimed that all news is fake, and finally that only their spectacles are real.

Again, to many (like me) this was a shocking event. Some attributed the appearance of fake news in the west as a surprising and completely unanticipated development, but that only proves how blind the political elites were in the United States. No one foresaw the rise of fascism. That is what the politics of eternity, as Snyder called it, is all about.

This is what happens when all trust in institutions is lost.

Bedlam follows. Just what authoritarians like to take advantage of.