I had planned to update this transition blog much sooner, but I have had much more work than usual, with several other Serbia-related pieces to write along with interviews. There are several pieces of media already out. You can read my first election dispatch for UnHerd and some of my thoughts in BBC Russian. I also have done a longform interview on events in Serbia with Mark Ames over at Radio War Nerd. Much more is coming in the next few weeks.

I’m also struggling to keep up with the pace of change. Everything is moving very quickly here. There’s even an excellent new website chronicling the resignations and arrests of Serbian officials that updates every half hour. It allows you to see transitional justice unfold in live time.

Commemoration

Yesterday, I attended the two-year anniversary commemoration of the train station canopy collapse in Novi Sad. It was solemn and touching. The refusal to accept that life is cheap, that these things just happen, that shoddy construction is a fact of life, was all very powerful. It was also well attended despite bad weather. According to Reuters, tens of thousands of people were there to show their respects to the sixteen lives lost in the tragic collapse of the recently renovated canopy on November 1, 2024.

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More astounding was who he lost to and the scale of the victory. Student List (SL) won the election by a landslide, with nearly 53% of the vote, while Vučić’s SNS received just 39.2%. This means a new experimental movement is poised to take control of the country. I am in a state of shock and it’s going to take a few weeks for it to sink in. I’ve been in a daze since I heard the news, and keep forgetting what month it is. It feels like New Year’s rather than late October.

Compounding the strangeness for me is that there is currently an enormous amount of interest in Serbia. This means I have been very busy, hence the delay updating here. However, I’ve decided to keep a regular running blog of Serbia’s post-election transition, at least for as long as there is interest. The more paid subscriptions I get, the more time I can dedicate to doing this, so consider becoming a paid subscriber today.

Informer

One of the first thoughts I had after Vučić’s loss was this: what happens to the vast pro-Vučić media apparatus he built to smear enemies? Very quickly, one group of Serbs gave a possible answer to that question. The night after the election, a group of mostly men broke into the headquarters of Vučić mouthpiece Informer. For those unfamiliar with this noxious rag, Informer was Vučić’s most faithful attack dog. Among its more despicable headlines was “Blockade protesters [students] are threatening to murder and rape children”. It also regularly spread panic and ethnic hatred, sometimes in the same headline, like the time they ran the story “CROATS ARE POISONING THE WATER BELGRADE DRINKS! DANGER: THE SAVA IS FULL OF ANTIBIOTICS.” On Monday night, Informer’s reviled editor-in-chief Dragan J. Vučićević, was dragged out of the building, along with other employees. Some also gathered outside the studios of TV Pink, a pro-Vučić channel, but did not break in. Employees of Informer were roughed up but no one was injured. Still, the images of taunting and humiliation caught the eye of Andreas von Beckerath, the EU ambassador to Serbia and head of the EU Delegation. Posting on X, von Beckerath called on Serbs to refrain from violence.

But rumors quickly spread around town that Vučić’s hooligans were behind the more destructive acts of vigilantism. Indeed, concerns that SNS-linked individuals might use violence to try to discredit SL remain. This morning, the students’ X account tweeted that they “had reason to believe that tonight a certain interest group will attempt to stage incidents in Belgrade…The alleged target of the staged attack will be the Informer newsroom, and they will try to shift the blame onto the students.”

“Revolutionary Terror”

In response to the incidents against Informer and other SNS-aligned media, Vučić and other high-ranking figures from the old regime have made inflammatory statements, prompting some to worry that the struggle is not yet over. Yesterday, Vučić criticized the authorities’ purported lack of response to Informer’s calls for help:

“If the state does not respond, in the coming days we will have to make our own decisions. And don’t you dare mess with that decision. If they make that decision and continue the terror against people who think differently — beatings, assaults, destruction and everything else — while state authorities do nothing, we will be forced to organise ourselves. And let them know that they will bear full responsibility for that.

Then, earlier today, acting president Ana Brnabic posted on X: “They promised revolutionary terror, and we’re seeing revolutionary terror.”

Indeed, the outgoing government is undoubtedly both afraid of retributive violence and secretly welcoming of it. The SNS campaign tried to convince voters that SL would destroy the country if they came to power. But apparently the populace believed that SNS had already destroyed it. Vučić will absolutely seize on any extrajudicial acts of retribution to smear the students as violent and depict himself as the sober voice of reason.

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I’ve put together part 2 of today’s Serbian election blog. Hopefully I’ll be able to post here more tomorrow, though I expect to be busy from morning until late at night, and I also have a piece to write for my editors. But there will definitely be a lot more next week. The first half of this blog is free, and the second half is behind a paywall. I am immensely grateful to all who are willing to pay $5 to support my work.

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As for me, I can say that I am getting more and more nervous as tomorrow approaches. This is the most worried I’ve been about events in Serbia in all the years I’ve been visiting the country. Nothing has been this big or this important.

The Red Star Factor

There’s a Crvena Zvezda (Red Star) match against OFK Beograd tomorrow afternoon at 4pm, which some say is definitely not a coincidence. A Crvena Zvezda game on election day means football hooligans from Delije, the club’s somewhat notorious (to put it mildly) Ultras, will be out on the streets. This is significant because of Vučić’s own well-documented relationship to the club and to Delije, and because of the ignoble role that football fans have played in recent Serbian history. Since the 1990s, they have served as a kind of informal state security and have been dispatched to do various dirty jobs, from fighting in wars to beating the government’s political opponents. Their presence on the streets of Belgrade tomorrow will only add to an already polarized and tense atmosphere, and give Vučić extra muscle if he feels he needs it.

An Urgent Notice from the Belgrade Bar Association

The Belgrade Bar Association put out an “urgent notice” earlier today which has many people concerned. According to new procedures that went into effect at 7:30 am this morning, the court registry will operate outside of normal working hours. The Belgrade Bar Association writes of these modifications: “It is evident that this change in the organization of the Belgrade Higher Court’s work has been introduced because of the forthcoming parliamentary elections scheduled for 25 October 2026, and the anticipated arrests or detention of suspected persons.” The last sentence is the most concerning, as it appears that the government is planning for a large number of arrests tomorrow.

A graph showing the five largest student rallies and protests vs the biggest SNS rallies

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I’m in Belgrade for tomorrow’s elections, and have decided to keep an election blog of sorts, with various ephemera I encounter over the next few days. I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to update, as I am also covering this historic vote for publication elsewhere, so will be extremely busy. However, I will try to update at least a few times, so do check back in periodically. This first part is open for all to read. However, I’ll probably put whatever comes next behind a paywall, so consider becoming a subscriber today for $5. You’ll get on-the-ground updates: Tomorrow I’ll be at Student List headquarters, as well as at the headquarters of CRTA, the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability, which has done the best independent polling for this election. I will also be talking to voters and election monitors throughout the day.

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My first impression from being in Serbia after a long time away: I am struck by the seriousness of the opposition, something that was only partially evident to me from afar. Last time I posted about the Serbian elections here, readers will know that I was a little doubtful. I knew that this was the most important election since 2012, the vote that brought Vučić’s ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) to power (I was in Belgrade for that historic event, and my recollections of that very strange day will come later). But I don’t think I quite appreciated how sophisticated and disciplined Vučić’s main challenger, the Studentska Lista (SL), had been, or how much they’d found ways to maneuver creatively in a hostile political and media environment. In other words, Vučić finally has a formidable opponent, and his reign could be over. If that’s the case, then it has implications far beyond Serbia. If SL wins tomorrow, their organization and strategy will be studied for decades to come, and could be emulated by other “Gen Z” protests around the world, from Albania to India.

Everyone is jittery, as the stakes could not be higher. Asked what will happen tomorrow night after the results are read, one football fan and Vučić critic told me, “I’ll either be rioting or partying–there is no third scenario.”

The Latest Polling

Independent pollsters like CRTA show SL with a significant lead, with the latest poll from July indicating that SL has 44.9% popular support, while SNS has just 35.7%. Government-controlled media show SNS ahead. Meanwhile, the latest Ipsos poll, released two days ago, gave SNS 47% of the vote and SL 40%. However, some were quick to point out that Ipsos had been very wrong in Serbia before. In 2012, Ipsos had former President Boris Tadić polling at 58% of the vote and SNS’s Tomislav Nikolić with just 42% on the eve of the presidential election, which was held on the same day as the parliamentary election. Of course, SNS went on to win and Nikolić became president. So the polls cannot always be trusted.

A Note on Parties vs Lists

Since there might be some confusion, in Serbia voters select lists of parliamentary candidates rather than individual candidates, and these lists have their own names. For example, the SNS “list” (naturally number 1 on the ballot) is called “Aleksandar Vučić-United Serbia”, the SPS list is, quite hilariously, “Factor of Stability!” (2), and the Student List speaks (3) for itself.

Minorities and Serbia’s “Managed Democracy”

Regardless of what the divided polls say, we are likely looking at a tight contest. Even if SL technically wins the most votes, Vučić could still try to form a government with his longtime junior coalition partner the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), and a slew of minority parties–many of which are widely suspected to have been created by the state, or to be in cahoots with Vučić. To clarify this point: Political parties in Serbia require a minimum of 3% of the vote to enter parliament, but national minority parties need just 0.4%. As such, there are nine sub-threshold “minority” lists, most of which Vučić hopes to use to pad a theoretical SNS-led coalition with later on. While there are real minority lists representing Bosniaks in Sandžak and Albanians (Albanian List) in Presevo Valley, there are also several lists with highly questionable claims to “minority status”.

For example, there are two “Russian” minority lists, “The Russian Party-Serbia in BRICS”, and the “Party of Russian-Serbian Unity–Russia and Serbia Brothers Forever”. (As one friend observed, “that’s an electoral ‘Russian’ list whose last common ancestor with an actual Russian was in the 5th century”). There is also a Vučić-stooge “Slovak” list, “Mother Serbia – Gruda”. And there is also a suspicious joint Bosniak and “Greek” list that appears to have exactly one Greek man from Belgrade on it, while the rest of the names are Serbian. The Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians is heavily tied to Vučić as well. All of this is a fantastic demonstration of the way the multiparty system has been “gamed” by leaders like Vučić. While the system retains all the formal features of a multiparty democracy, many of the smaller parties are not in fact independent. In some cases, they have been created by the ruling party to shore up its power.

Support from Brands

The breadth of support for Studentska Lista is honestly astonishing, and I haven’t seen anything quite like it in Serbian politics. Even popular Serbian brands are openly backing SL in advertisements. Here’s Maxi Serbia, one of the largest grocery chains, promoting number “3” (SL is number 3 on the ballot):

FK Balkan Mirijevo, a football club in Belgrade:

A coffee roastery:

A health and fitness company:

The Serbian beverage company Fruvita:

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Dear readers, I’ve written a long guide to this month’s Serbian elections. The first part is free to all, but the rest is behind a paywall. If you want to read the entire thing, and would like to support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber today. At just $5, it costs about the same (or less!) as a single pumpkin spice latte. I am grateful to each and every one of my subscribers for their support.

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For the past few weeks, Aleksandar Vučić has been filmed road tripping through the Serbian countryside in a Škoda. In video clips from his tour, he stops and meets his fellow Serbs. He eats “domestic” Serbian meals in modest rural homes. He has a drink with an old friend from military service in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA). In one hallucinatory clip, Vučić has debates with a head of cabbage (edit: it’s a rock, not a cabbage). One video looks borrowed from AOC’s millennial communications handbook, particularly its section on forced relatability: sitting in the front seat of his car, Vučić tells the camera that he has “stage fright” about speaking at a campaign rally. Animals also figure prominently: Vučić pats livestock on the head and plays with village cats. In these carefully curated spots, Vučić displays an affability and disarming gentleness. It’s a picture of the man that is entirely at odds with the strongman we know, and world’s away from the image painted by Vučić’s domestic critics–many of whom have been protesting against him for nearly two years straight. With his “I’m a Normal Guy” tour through the Serbian hinterlands, Vučić is hoping to project an image of reliability and normalcy despite the unrest. It’s a message critical to Vučić’s campaign for the October 25th parliamentary elections–the most important vote since his party came to power 14 years ago.

The trigger for the past 23 months of protests was tragedy. On November 1, 2024, a train station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad, killing 16 people. Grief was transmuted into outrage, and the student-led protests that followed grew into a full-fledged movement. “The students”, as they’re known, later succeeded in transforming street protest into a viable electoral vehicle. The so-called “Student List” (SL) was created by student plenums, where 250 academics, doctors, actors, activists and athletes were selected to serve as a slate of candidates for this month’s election. At the top of that list is 56-year-old Ilija Srdanović, a cardiologist and professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Novi Sad. Srdanović has described himself as “a soldier, essentially, all my life”: he did his military service during the 1990s and has given speeches at student-led protests since the very beginning. He recently characterized the upcoming election as a question of “Serbia or the mafia”. (The head of cabbage that Vučić was debating was meant to represent Srdanović).

Vučić hopes to stay in power by swapping the presidency for the premiership. On September 27th, he resigned from his role as president and is now campaigning for prime minister. But for the first time since his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) assumed office 14 years ago, victory is not assured. According to some polls, Student List is now polling ahead of SNS. A recent survey by independent pollster CRTA had SL polling at 44.9%, while SNS received just 35.7%.

Even so, no one should bet their money on Vučić’s demise. Over and over again, I’ve bought the line parroted to me by Vučić’s opponents–”he’s finished”–and every time I’ve been wrong. Vučić always manages to outsmart us all (or at least me), and it’s very possible that he’ll do the same this time.

One reason it will be difficult to dislodge Vučić is that he has powerful friends.

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I haven’t done one of these reading, watching, looking at and otherwise consuming newsletters for a few months, so I thought I’d publish one now. In this edition, I look at themes of maternal filicide in literature, eschatological futures in AI, and art from Lapland that I came across in Finland this summer. The entire newsletter is behind a paywall, so consider becoming a paid subscriber today. I am exceedingly grateful for every one of my subscribers, and at the current price of just $5/month, it costs about the same (or less!) than a single pumpkin spice latte.

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Dear readers, the second half of this post is behind a paywall. I am grateful to each and every one of my subscribers for their support. If you’d like, you can become a paying subscriber today for just $5 per month. I’ll probably raise the price soon so subscribe today to get locked into the cheap rate. It costs less than a single pumpkin spice latte.

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In recent days, there has been a dramatic increase in the breadth and intensity of psychological warfare (or “operations”) waged by media and governments, warning of an imminent European cataclysm. Here’s the BBC a few days ago:

If the UK suddenly found itself at war, would you know what to do? Do you know what would be expected of you? The government wants us all to start preparing for severe disruption to our lives. It wants us to stockpile canned food and drinking water, strengthen our civic resilience, and plan for the possibility of war. Work has begun on the government’s so-called “war book”, which hasn’t been updated in decades.

Last week, Bloomberg reported that German hospitals are preparing for war with Russia and “mass casualties”:

…the Bundeswehr calculated that as many as 1,000 wounded soldiers could arrive in Germany each day. As the country’s five military hospitals would quickly reach capacity — and the law requires that civilian hospitals help during wartime — the system would likely come under unprecedented strain, and could be forced to triage soldier and civilian care.

On Sunday, the Guardian reported:

European intelligence officials have raised the possibility of an imminent Russian test of Nato, with one saying a potential attack could come in a matter of “months, not years”.

Even neutral Switzerland’s Federal Government is getting in on the action, tweeting the following at the end of last week:

In response to the deteriorating security situation, 🇨🇭 has three objectives: strengthen resilience, improve protection and enhance defence capabilities.

Ben Hodges, the Commanding General of United States Army in Europe from 2014 to 2017, tweeted:

The rest of Europe has just experienced its last “peaceful” Summer.

Last Thursday, Polish PM Donald Tusk told parliament that intelligence indicating that Russia would soon attack Europe was “highly consistent and, unfortunately, persuasive.” Macron called Tusk’s ominous warnings “sound and well-documented”.

Czech, Swedish, and Latvian spy chiefs have all said that they expect Russian sabotage in Europe to intensify in the coming months.

What is striking about all of this is how fatalistic it is, how passive and resigned. You’d think European leaders were awaiting a big earthquake or storm. There is simply nothing anyone can do, they seem to be saying. War is inevitable. There is no alternative, and all we can do is stock up on canned beans and volunteer to die.

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Dear readers, the second half of this post is behind a paywall. I will probably have to raise the price for this newsletter soon, so consider getting locked in to the cheap $5/month rate while you can! I am deeply grateful for each and every one of you for your support.

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The first ever Tirana Biennale was scheduled to open on September 15, 2001. It was to be the first low budget European biennale, and organizers sought to capitalize on Albania’s ability to draw the dark tourism crowd. One of the biennale’s Italian organizers told an interlocutor, “I’m incredibly excited by the idea of a grand exhibition in a completely desolate and anarchic place where the only form of art is survival.”1 Tirana Mayor Edi Rama, a painter himself, had worked with international partners to bring the works of 230 artists to the Albanian capital. These works were to be divided between the National Gallery and a cavernous 4,000-sq meter hangar that China had built for Enver Hoxha in the 1950s. Two weeks before the opening of the biennale, promotional materials were printed; they featured a photo by a Moroccan artist named Hamid Piccardo. The subject of the photo was Osama bin Laden, who was still relatively unknown to the general public when the pamphlets and posters went to print. Piccardo had allegedly been christened the “bearer of jihad in the art world” by bin Laden himself.

Then, four days before the biennale was to open, the twin towers fell. Karlheinz Stockhausen famously described the attacks as “the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos”. With all flights grounded in North America, the first Tirana Biennale was only lightly attended. Even within Europe, there was little appetite to fly. Osama bin Laden, the erstwhile unknown who had served as the face of the biennale, had suddenly become known to the entire world. Who, then, was the artist Hamid Piccardo? Had he really been an affiliate of al-Qaeda and bin Laden, and had he intentionally transmitted a message to the art world? Or had he sent bin Laden’s visage out into the world like a Cassandra, warning of the entire tragedy that was to come? Or was it all just an especially tragicomic coincidence? As it would turn out, the truth was just as strange. Piccardo did not exist.

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I was in Serbia the day they caught Mladić. I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. I was sitting at the kitchen table in my Serbian ex’s small apartment off Skadarlija. We were jubilant. I was living in London then and visiting Belgrade for just a few days, and I was excited to experience history firsthand. But our happiness was tempered by the knowledge that it had been too long. Mladić had been in hiding for 16 years. The chances that the Serbian government hadn’t known where he was were next to nothing. In other words, the Serbian state had almost certainly been protecting him. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)–a spiritual progenitor to today’s beleaguered International Criminal Court (ICC)–had issued an international arrest warrant for Mladić in 1996. He was finally captured on May 26, 2011.

Sometime later that afternoon, we walked to Trg Republike, to the statue of Knez Mihailo on a horse. We assumed–or perhaps we had been told, I can’t remember–that there would be some kind of a protest there, and we wanted to see it. But as we approached the square, we were surprised to see that there weren’t many protesters gathered. My ex later noted this on his blog, writing that the size of the pro-Mladić protest wasn’t much bigger than a protest held in support of Gaddafi there a few weeks earlier. (May of 2011 was the height of the Arab Spring, and NATO had taken over military operations in Libya at the end of March). The New York Times picked up the reporting on his blog along with the video he’d taken of the protest, and published both on The Lede. That night, we drank a bottle of Vranac at a fish restaurant in New Belgrade to celebrate the day’s events. It all felt dizzying and exhilarating, like the future was still malleable.

It was easy to understand the international interest. It was a remarkable thing: nationalism, at last, looked like it might be in retreat in Serbia. A few weeks later, the New York Times ran a full piece titled “Nationalism Fading from Serbia’s Political Stage”. According to its author, the “once-fiery Serbian nationalism now seems strangely muted”:

With the 68-year-old General Ratko Mladić settling into his prison cell in The Hague, the relative silence with which Serbs greeted his arrest and extradition speaks volumes about the turnaround taken by the country’s leadership and the fading of nationalism as an issue from the political stage.

If it weren’t for the subject’s seriousness, you might be forgiven for laughing. (However, I should emphasize that I am absolutely not criticizing the writer of this piece.) The article continues:

The nationalism associated with Serbia — anti-Western, chauvinist, homophobic and violent — still exists among the same small portion of the population but now with one important difference.

“The political elite is not provoking it,” Mr. Bogosavljević [director at pollster Ipsos Strategic Marketing] said.

And now you could cry. Of course, the Serbian political elite does little else in public life besides stoke nationalism today.

Since Mladić died two weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about that brief, optimistic moment in time. Yesterday, Mladić was given a hero’s funeral in Belgrade. President Vučić’s son Danilo was there, as was Serbia’s Defence Minister Bratislav Gašić and the Minister of Justice Nenad Vujić. The funeral was led by the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church. While much of Serbian society is more apathetic than enthusiastic about Mladić, there’s no question as to what the political elite thinks.

In the lead up to this appalling spectacle, I have been asking myself: could it have been different? What could have and should have happened then that didn’t? The question took on an even heavier quality on Sunday, when the far-right AfD won the election in Germany’s eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt by a landslide. For a lot of people, Germany is the gold standard for what Adorno called “coming to terms with the past”. Serbia’s neighbors have often lamented that Serbia did not follow Germany in its forging of a memory culture and contrition for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But the massive victory of the AfD indicates that Germany has not vanquished its far-right after all; perhaps it was laying dormant all along. Of course, there are important differences between the AfD and the Nazi Party: the AfD does not appear interested in rapacious eastward expansion, for one. That'’s different, and it would be hysterical to suggest otherwise. But the party’s rise still begs discomfiting questions about German society.

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I am trying to write about the Balkans less, but I am also leaving room for exceptions. As such, I have a new piece out in the New Statesman this weekend, this time on everyone’s favorite Spring/Summer 2026 Balkan subject: Jared Kushner’s planned development projects in Albania, and the huge popular backlash to them. The piece also gets into Kushner’s designs on Belgrade, which were thwarted by popular resistance last year–a success that I don’t think gets talked about enough. On the topic of Balkan protest I can vacillate between extravagant optimism and total despair, sometimes in the space of an hour. But sustained popular opposition to Kushner’s plans really did force his firm to reconsider, so these protests can yield the desired results.

I’m especially thankful for insights from Celik Rruplli, who has a Substack where he covers IR, social and cultural issues. An important read for anyone interested in Albania.

Finally, for those who read Albanian, the independent publication Lapsi has already translated it with impressive speed.

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Dear readers, since I received a lot of new paid subscribers from my Lindsay Clancy essay about the state of psychiatry under MAHA/RFK Jr./Trump, I decided to continue in that vein this week with another post on thoughts inspired by the Clancy trial. The second half is behind a paywall, so consider becoming a paid subscriber today. It only costs $5 and I am grateful to each and every one of my subscribers for their support and encouragement.

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During the early 1970s, dead infants started appearing in coin-operated lockers at train stations in Japan. Autopsies revealed that most of the babies had been suffocated or strangled to death. The number of “coin locker incidents” increased dramatically through the early years of the decade. The New York Times reported that in 1970, there were just two such cases. But by 1973, a dead infant was being found in a locker every ten days. Police investigations soon confirmed the truth behind the horrific discoveries: the infants were being murdered by their own mothers. The coin-operated locker infanticides have been attributed in part to the post-war decline in multigenerational households. In the post-war Japanese home, the father dedicated himself to the role of “company man” while women were expected to take care of the children. Japanese media described the apparent increase in maternal filicide–mothers who kill their own children–as emblematic of broader cultural changes. As scholar Alessandro Castellini has written, “major Japanese newspapers described the 1970s as the ‘era of the loss of motherhood’ and lamented the disappearance of a maternal instinct in women.”

These were the years immediately following the student protests of 1968. Out of that tumult emerged various movements of the New Left, including Japan’s own women’s liberation movement, ribu. As Castellini has written, the movement took a highly controversial approach to the subject of maternal filicide. Ribu depicted the phenomenon as a destructive but ultimately relatable and the natural result of the oppressive gendered expectations that women experienced in the patriarchal family. As one activist put it, “‘filicide [was] located at the climax of the circumstances in which all women [were] placed’.” Another ribu member asserted that “[b]etween the holy mother and the mother who kills her child there’s a paper-thin difference”. Maternal filicide was viewed as a rejection of women’s only socially sanctioned role. However, ribu activists did not view maternal filicide as something to be celebrated, but rather understood.

Some ribu groups engaged in street protests for the cause. As Castellini writes in his book Translating Maternal Violence: The Discursive Construction of Filicide in 1970s Japan:

On May 8, 1971, ribu cells in Tokyo organized a rally “in solidarity with women who kill their children”. Held on the occasion of Mother’s Day, this demonstration saw the participation of around 100 people, with women and children marching in the rain with marguerites in their hands…. Numerous demonstrations and meetings were held on that day in support of these criminalized mothers, triggering spontaneous forms of activism across the country such as the call to organize a rally in solidarity with filicidal mothers that was circulated in Hokkaido (Japan’s northernmost prefecture) by a ribu group called Metropolitan…

In their embrace of the criminal and despised, ribu’s approach to killer mothers has some parallels with the pro-pedophile activism that flourished in Germany during the same period. Both movements were New Left mutations that emerged in the defeated axis powers, and I do not think it’s a coincidence that the most extreme rejections of societal expectations were found there. Pedophile activism in Germany was rooted in the belief that the suppression of children’s sexuality within the patriarchal family led to authoritarianism. Pedophilia was therefore seen by some activists as the antidote to a new Hitler. Adherents of this belief found inspiration in the work of Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich and his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933). “The authoritarian state gains an enormous interest in the authoritarian family: It becomes the factory in which the state’s structure and ideology are molded,” Reich wrote. Ribu likewise viewed the family system as the site of social discipline and control.

The Lindsay Clancy murder trial in America has produced a torrent of public sympathy for the accused, particularly among women. This has taken various forms and degrees, from the belief that Clancy was suffering from a terrifying episode of postpartum psychosis, to inane TikTok conspiracy theories that Lindsay’s husband Patrick really did it. Most luridly, female Clancy supporters have amassed outside the courthouse in Massachusetts for weeks now, dressed in their trademark pink. These displays have been described by the right-wing commentariat as an indictment of “our society”, of “fourth wave feminism”, of “Western women today” and of “modern women”. They have been seized upon by the online right to advance notions of societal decay and modern women’s supposed depravity. But as the example of ribu in 1970s Japan suggests, sympathy for filicidal mothers is nothing new. In fact, it’s built into the very foundations of the law in some Western countries. And while in the admittedly extreme example of ribu this impulse veered into apologia, at other moments in history, it was an expression of civilization and mercy.

Indeed, support for mothers who kill their children–and calls for leniency and mercy for them–dates back centuries.

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On the evening of January 24th 2023, Lindsay Clancy sent her husband Patrick out to run a few errands. He was gone for less than an hour. During that time, Lindsay strangled her three young children to death with exercise bands. She then slashed her own neck and wrists before jumping out of her second-story bedroom window. The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down. She later claimed that she’d experienced an auditory command hallucination; a man’s voice had instructed her to kill her children, and she obeyed.

This suburban horror story has become the American courtroom drama of the moment; the trial, which began last month, is a TikTok phenomenon. True Crime influencers and “forensic astrologers” have become merchants of viral conspiracies and misinformation. A subreddit dedicated to the tragedy now gets more than 300K visitors weekly. The murders have become a fixture of social media discourse and a lightning rod for some of the most contentious issues at the dark, shriveled heart of American life: SSRIs, personal responsibility, mental illness, culture war gender politics, and the abysmal state of American medicine, psychiatry in particular.

The case was probably destined to become an object of perverse interest. The telegenic Clancy family lived in a colonial-style house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a well-to-do suburb of Boston that locals jokingly refer to as “Luxbury”. The Clancy’s three children–Cora, age 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months–were periodically cared for by a nanny. Patrick worked for Microsoft, and Lindsay was a delivery room nurse. Photos posted to social media revealed a seemingly enviable life typical of the coastal blue state middle class.

But in the months leading up to the murders, Lindsay’s mental health started to deteriorate, and she sought psychiatric help for anxiety and insomnia. In an initial telehealth appointment in September 2022, a young psychiatrist named Jennifer Tufts wrote Lindsay a prescription for the anti-depressant Zoloft, a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI). The Zoloft reportedly made her worse. Over the next few months, Lindsay was prescribed 13 more psychiatric drugs. By the end of the year, she was experiencing suicidal ideation, and she checked herself into McLean hospital. A few weeks after being discharged, she killed her children. Lindsay has pleaded not guilty, arguing lack of responsibility–the legal term for the insanity defense in Massachusetts. Her defense rests on the assertion that she was suffering from post-partum psychosis at the time of the murders, and that her condition was exacerbated by psychiatric drugs. Both Lindsay and Patrick have also filed separate lawsuits against her psychiatric team.

When Dr. Tufts took the stand earlier this month, the entire field of psychiatry was on trial. The young doctor fumbled over her notes and struggled to provide answers to Lindsay’s defense attorney, who sometimes demanded that she answer for the entire profession and its increasingly shoddy practices, including telehealth and digitized medical notes. Observing the exchange, some in the mental health field worried that patients would be even more reluctant to take SSRIs. Others have asserted that the case has set the field of psychiatry back “decades”.

Meanwhile, psychiatry has already been under sustained attack since Trump appointed Robert Kennedy Jr. Health Secretary last year. SSRIs in particular have become emblematic of everything the right hates: they are disproportionately used by women, who take them about twice as much as men. They sap patients of “vitality” by promoting weight gain and tanking the libido. When they work, they are seen as the “easy” way out, a short cut that deprives people of supposedly ennobling suffering. In recent years, Kennedy has repeatedly said that SSRIs contribute to school shootings. The administration now formally champions “deprescribing”–patient withdrawal from psychiatric drugs, which Kennedy says is harder than quitting heroin. In May, he hosted a “Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit” where he said “we will no longer treat [psychiatric medications] as the default.” Popular YouTube psychiatrist Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, an associate of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative, has launched something called the Taper Clinic to wean patients off psychiatric drugs; rates for this service begin at $30,000. Big Pharma is a racket but there is clearly money to be made in the emergent deprescribing industry too.

The anti-SSRI campaign is just one part of a broader offensive.

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I have to apologize for the inexcusably light posting. I am at a residency in Finland, rethinking my approach to writing, including this project. When I’m back in September, I hope to return to a more regular posting schedule, with some thematic and other adjustments. In the meantime, I wanted to share a few things I’ve published recently.

In the new Tribune, edited by the great Oliver Eagleton, I have a piece out about populism in Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. I began with a question that some might consider provocative: what are the real conditions that supporters of the region’s “right-wing populists” are responding to? My answer was by no means an original one, but essential, I think, for understanding recent regional politics: that supporters of Orbán, Fico, and Georgescu (along with other Romanian populists, of which there are many) are responding in part to disappointments with liberal democracy. For the region’s industrial workers, the post-1989 transition to capitalism and democracy did not usher in a new era of prosperity but rather immiseration and a loss of status. They therefore nursed resentment towards liberalism and often, its administrators in the EU. Of course, I don’t claim that post-communist resentment is the only element at play here, but I think it’s important and real.

I know some of you who’ve been reading my Substack for a while might look at this piece and think, “but Lily, I thought you said that populism was dead?” Well, that’s not really what I said. I was straw manned by a few people who claimed I said that populism had been vanquished. To be fair, it kind of serves me right, since I gave a post the title “Requiem for a Populist Decade”. Honestly, I just liked the way it sounded. What I actually said was that Orban’s loss in the most recent Hungarian elections hinted at a fatigue with MAGA populism, and that Trump was becoming an albatross for the European right (this in the wake of his threats to annex Greenland and the start of the war on Iran). I wrote that populism, as a strategy, tends to produce diminishing returns over time, and must mutate to survive.

However, it’s not only the “populists” who’ve mutated. In this week’s excellent Ideas Letter, my colleague Hans Kundnani has an essay titled “Obfuscations of Populism”. Kundnani argues that the center-right has adopted many of the far-right’s policy positions (e.g. on immigration), and has mobilized the “populist” label to differentiate and distance themselves from the far-right. This has allowed for the mainstreaming of far-right politics under the guise of “sensible” centrist technocracy. I think this is a great intervention into the discussion of populism.

The second piece I’m sharing was produced after attending this year’s NATO summit in Ankara. These very expensive annual meetings are now held largely to ensure that Trump remains onside and to rally the dejected troops into a sense of transient unity. The latter entails disseminating talking points to journalists who are then expected to repeat them without much critical thought.

At this year’s summit, I sat in the basement of Erdoğan’s vast Presidential Complex and listened as a senior NATO official described alleged cracks in the Kremlin matrix. The new line was that spectacular Ukrainian drone strikes inside Russian territory had not only “turned the tide” in Ukraine’s favor, but were probably prompting segments of the Russian elite to turn away from Putin. I found this fascinating. I don’t discount the spectacular nature of Ukrainian drone strikes, or doubt at all that there is fatigue with the war in Russia. But the fundamentals of the conflict have not changed–Russia has Ukraine vastly outmanned–and the idea that Putin might be overthrown soon struck me as completely delusional. I wrote about my discomfort with the narrative for New Left Review’s Sidecar, with generous support from the Alameda Institute (special shout out to Benjamin Fogel). The other point I made was that while Kremlinologist types look for fissures in the Russian elite, there were very serious divisions opening up in Ukraine.

This became impossible to ignore with Zelenskyy’s dismissal of Palantir-backed tech wunderkind Mykhailo Fedorov from the position of defense minister last month. The decision triggered protests in major cities and calls for Fedorov’s reinstatement. Earlier this week, Fedorov went so far as to demand elections, provoking backlash from erstwhile supporters who say that it would be impossible to organize a vote in wartime Ukraine…

…Anyway, I suppose I should just let you read them for yourself. See you in September.

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After the frenzied NATO summit in Ankara, I had to log off and take my brain offline for a few days. Therefore, I’m a bit late in sharing my piece for UnHerd from the summit, which is about the Trump administration’s new concept of “NATO 3.0”. This was one of the summit’s main themes, at least as far as the Americans were concerned. NATO 3.0 is an attempt to move beyond the “long 1990s” of “NATO 2.0”–liberal internationalism, humanitarian intervention, out-of-area operations, democracy promotion and so forth. I was a bit surprised at how ideologically-driven the concept of “NATO 3.0” is. I’ll admit that I’m often so distracted by the sheer chaos and unseriousness of Trump that I’ve periodically lost sight of the fact that there are other people in the administration thinking about US foreign policy in terms of grand strategy. It probably won’t surprise many to learn that the author of the NATO 3.0 idea is Elbridge Colby, Under Secretary of War for Policy, who is reviled by many Atlanticists for being a conservative realist/”restrainer”.

The administration has repeatedly pitched NATO 3.0 as a partial return to “NATO 1.0”, i.e. the Cold War-era NATO whose main purpose was to deter the Soviet Union (and crush internal left-wing subversion, but we’ll leave that for another time). As such, “NATO 1.0” had right-wing authoritarianism built into its very foundations. For example, Salazar’s Portugal was a founding member of NATO; the country employed a brutal secret police and banned all opposition parties. But it had immense strategic value and was ideologically aligned, so it was embraced. The idea that NATO is an “alliance of democracies” was therefore always a polite liberal fiction. I think the Trump administration’s concept of “NATO 3.0”–as a reboot of NATO 1.0–asks us to look at Cold War continuities, which is what I tried to do in my piece. I’m sure liberal Atlanticists will hate it, so I must apologize in advance. A final point I tried to drive home in my piece, and which I will repeat here, is that the administration surely sees European acceptance of NATO 3.0 as a rare win at a time when it’s losing on other fronts.

More about the summit over the next few weeks…

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I was recently invited on the Istituto Affari Internazionali’s (IAI) InCLUDE podcast, a huge honor. It’s the latest episode and it’s titled The Theory of Change: Is the Trump Administration Making It Harder for Countries in the Western Balkans to Join the EU? I thought it was a great discussion, and it was nicely framed by host Dušan Reljić’s first question: is the US now a malign influencer in the Western Balkans? Of course, when people use the term “malign” in the Balkans they are most often referring to countries like Russia, China, and perhaps Turkey. I really liked the provocation and I thought it was entirely warranted. We went on to discuss a range of Trumpian interventions in the region, from Jared Kushner’s garish real estate projects to the transient resurrection of the dreaded “land swap” proposal for Kosovo that everyone hates, to the Trump administration’s lectures about personal responsibility (“solve your own problems”) and how Turkey’s concept of “regional ownership” attempts to answer it. There’s a lot of competition and tension in the US-EU relationship that gets expressed in the Balkans, so I think the conversation might be of interest to anyone following the evolving state of trans-Atlantic relations.

Thanks so much to Dušan, Matteo Bonomi and everyone at IAI and Open Society Foundations Western Balkans for the opportunity to have this discussion.

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At a hallucinatory rally in Belgrade this weekend, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić told supporters that he would resign “within weeks”. It was widely reported as breaking news, but it’s actually something he’s been promising for months. If Vučić does resign as president–big emphasis on the word “if”–it does not mean it’s the end of his political career. It means that he intends to become prime minister again, a role he already served in from April 2014 to May 2017. The rotating dance between president and prime minister, an executive shuffle favored by leaders in this corner of Europe, would thus continue on.

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Trump’s self-destructive war is supposedly over. Last night, the US and Iran announced that a peace deal had been reached, though it leaves the most difficult questions for the weeks and months ahead. The so-called “memorandum of understanding” allocates the next 60 days for intensive negotiations on the fate of the Iranian nuclear program, effectively kicking the can down the road in much the same way that the April 8th ceasefire did. The MoU therefore represents another reprieve more than a decisive peace, the termination of the current battle within a much longer campaign.

Despite the remaining questions and lack of finality, it’s worth taking stock of the past 107 or so days since the war began. Even by the debauched standards of the Trump administration, wherein inflicting short-term shock and awe and sending ratings and stocks soaring matter more than any durable strategic objectives, the war achieved less than nothing. There’s no question that Iran’s military and nuclear program have been hobbled somewhat, but they can be rebuilt. And having been attacked twice by the US and Israel in the middle of peace talks now, they’ll have much more incentive to do so than ever before.

Trump recently described the war as having achieved a regime change “of sorts” owing to the numerous murders of high-level Iranian officials by the US and Israel during the conflict. But such a claim will not satisfy the dejected regime change fanatics in Israel, nor the truly loathsome Pahlavists in the Iranian diaspora, the latter who’ve now permanently discredited themselves before the eyes of the world.

It’s also possible that by picking off individual Iranians one-by-one, Trump again achieved less than zero: rather than a simple return to status quo ante, what Trump has actually done is far more damaging. The US and Israel assassinated diplomats who, with zen-like calm, had recently given interviews to CNN; they killed moderate philosophy PhDs and Islamic scholars and religious leaders. Even critics of the current Iranian leadership could see that there was something abhorrent here, something cowardly that made the skin crawl. The surprisingly erudite representatives of the Islamic Republic, who’d entered the war looking like leaders of yet another sclerotic, repressive regime, grew comparatively sympathetic to many observers in the conflict’s first weeks, appearing steely and calm as they gave Goliath a black eye. Thanks to its dizzying output of Lego propaganda videos, Iran was able to connect with a 21st century global audience like never before. There’s little doubt who won the global propaganda war with this one. In the end, not even America’s closest allies would give their full-throated support for Trump’s war.

Finally, the world cannot and will not unsee the fact that Iran managed to threaten the entire global economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz. The fact that they could has revealed a fundamental weakness in the organization of the global American empire, something now laid out for all to see. The US has suffered big defeats–the Vietnam War, the more recent disastrous retreat from Afghanistan–but this feels like a more global loss. Besides, neither the Vietnamese nor the Taliban ever occupied quite the same obsessive function in the neoconservative American imagination as Iran; after all, they matter far less to Israel.

The Trump administration will try to bounce back from this by going after low hanging fruit, which probably means the government of Cuba. But it won’t be enough to restore the already flatlining global confidence in the US to pre-war levels, or to Make the American Empire Great Again. More disturbing, we can be assured that the full ramifications of what Trump’s done will only reveal themselves later, in the months and years to come. But the current round of the US-Israel war on Iran has undoubtedly created new fissures and cracks that will someday fully break.

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Most of you know me from the Balkans–from my writing about Serbian politics, from my time running the website Balkanist, from my many years living in Belgrade (with stints in Sarajevo and Zagreb). But few are aware that before all of that, I had a perfectly quiet and self-contained Scandinavian life with a Swedish-Danish husband whose father worked for Lars von Trier and summers spent drinking elderflower saft and swimming in the Baltic Sea. In recent years, I’ve found myself gravitating towards that part of Europe again, though it wasn’t initially deliberate. New Left Review’s Oliver Eagleton plucked me from Balkan obscurity in 2022 when he asked me to cover Sweden and Finland’s accession to NATO. I figured I could do it: I’d been married to a Swede, which meant I’d experienced all of their strange little national neuroses firsthand. I had taken classes at the Scandinavian department at Berkeley, so had a (very) basic grasp of the language, enough, at least, to understand what was being written about in the newspapers. Besides, it was striking that the rhetoric around joining NATO in the Nordic countries was so similar to what it had been in the Balkans a few years prior: some Swedish commentators, just like Montenegro’s then-President Milo Đukanović in 2015, were describing NATO accession as a Huntingtonesque “civilizational choice”–as “joining the West”.

As it would turn out, that piece changed my entire career. It was one of the most well-received articles I’ve ever written, and it freed me from the shackles and tedium of Balkan correspondence. These days, I get asked to write about everything from JD Vance to Silicon Valley to elections in Estonia: truly a dream career for a novelty seeker with crippling ADHD.

My personal history with Scandinavia is only part of why I was so thrilled to be contacted by the editors of the Norwegian daily newspaper Klassekampen earlier this year and asked if I would be open to writing a regular column. The paper puts out great writing and interviews and is beautifully designed. With my new rotating “Horisont” column, I’ll also be in excellent company: I’ll be alternating with Francesca Borri and William Shoki, among other greats. The focus of my column should mostly be trans-Atlantic affairs, though for my first, I wrote about the fissures opening up in MAGA since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran–a contest we might describe crudely as unfolding between the “America First” and so-called “Israel First” factions. Scandinavian friends can read it now. Coincidentally, on the day that Klassekampen reached out to me about writing a column, I also got news that I’d been accepted for a writing residency in Finland for the month of August. I’m looking forward to once again spending summertime in the Nordic countries.

In other euro news, you can also read my “Requiem for the Populist Decade” in Spanish over on Spain’s El Salto. The paper is taking stock of ten years of Brexit and Trump, as I imagine many others will be doing this year.

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Dear readers, this is another free post for all, but I will likely need to start paywalling more of them. That said, I am grateful to all of my subscribers, both free and paid, and I appreciate each and every person who reads, likes, and shares my work. If you haven’t already, subscribe today and never miss a thing.

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Tomorrow, right-wing svengali Janez Janša will become prime minister of Slovenia for the fourth time. Janša has been a stubborn barnacle on Slovenian politics since 1989, and served as Minister of Defense during the brief war with Yugoslavia in 1991. His return to power, engineered in part by Israel, has sent a collective groan through certain swaths of the tiny Alpine country, whose post-independence politics have been dominated by the man. There is no one more furious about the entire state of affairs than members of the outgoing center-left coalition, who appear to be making good use of their final hours in power to convey some rather strong messages.

The most apparently dramatic signal today was directed at Israel. Readers who’ve been following my coverage of the “Slovenia affair” either here or in Le Monde diplomatique will be aware that Israeli intelligence officers have meddled extensively in the internal affairs of the country in recent months, particularly in the March parliamentary elections. Earlier today, the government decided to prevent a plane flown by the Israeli charter company Israir from landing at the airport in Ljubljana. The aircraft was instead forced to divert to Croatia. Predictably, the move drew immediate condemnation from Israir CEO Uri Sirkis, who described the decision as “political” and rooted in the Slovenian government’s “clear opposition to the policies and direction pursued by Israel.” The Slovenian government maintains that the plane did not have clearance to land. Last-chance show of defiance or mere coincidence, the decision and the irate response it provoked in Tel Aviv were yet another expression of the outsized role Israel now plays in Slovenia’s affairs.

But there were also messages about Israeli interference in Slovenia that were conveyed by individual factions within the outgoing coalition. Readers will be aware that the focus of much of my reporting on Israeli meddling in Slovenia has concerned the government’s surprising decision not to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The announcement that Slovenia had reversed course and would not join the case as expected was made just days before the election. Much of my own research involved trying to understand how this decision had been reached, what kinds of pressure Israel had exerted, and which Slovenian ministers had ultimately caved in and decided against joining. However, much critical information remained out of view of the public at the time of my investigation: the vote on whether to join the ICJ genocide case was made in a closed government session on March 12th, meaning no one, including very well-placed journalists and relative insiders in Slovenia, had access to concrete knowledge about how individual ministers voted. The information was classified as “secret” and its disclosure labelled a threat to state interests.

Today, that all changed. In a decision reportedly taken by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, information detailing which ministers voted to join the lawsuit has been made public for the first time. There are political reasons for this: the outgoing MFA is Tanja Fajon, who has been especially vocal in her support of Palestine, as has her party, the Social Democrats. And as the newly released document detailing the vote makes clear, it was Svoboda (“Freedom”), the liberal party of outgoing Prime Minister Robert Golob, that was ultimately against joining the ICJ genocide case. Indeed, only one Svoboda minister voted in favor of doing so. Meanwhile, Fajon’s Social Democrats all voted “yes” to Slovenia joining the ICJ genocide case. Perhaps most disappointing of all were the two ministers from Levica (“the Left”) out of three who were absent for the vote. Levica is the Slovenian party that purports to be the furthest left and also fashions itself the most pro-Palestine. According to Levica supporters, one of the party’s ministers who was supposed to vote was on a trip during the session, while the other was present but stepped outside into the hall to talk on the phone and ended up missing the vote entirely. You could hardly write a more comically damning account of leftist negligence.

And just like that, the center-left government of Slovenia exits stage left. Janša is back, Israel is happy, and Slovenia can go back to being a pretty postcard country where nothing ever happens.

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Last weekend, there was a brief, imperfect symmetry between events in Serbia and Turkey. Since I’ve been offline for weeks, I only learned about it when I got a message from a friend in Belgrade asking me what was happening in Istanbul. The city’s privately-owned Bilgi University, known for its liberal-leaning politics, had been shuttered by presidential decree. (President Erdoğan then abruptly reversed this decision on Monday morning without apparent explanation). That news came just one day after an Ankara court’s provisional decision to remove Özgür Özel as the head of the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), the main opposition outfit here. The directive clears the way for the return of former CHP chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, now widely derided as Erdoğan’s “controlled opposition”. Police forcibly entered CHP headquarters in Ankara last Sunday, firing off teargas and rubber bullets.

Then, on Sunday night, a journalist friend in Turkey sent me a message asking about what was happening in Serbia. Some 1,400 km away, tens of thousands of people had been on the streets of Belgrade demanding early elections and protesting against the government of Aleksandar Vučić. The Serbian police responded with stun grenades and tear gas.

It was, as one commentator here put it, “a bad weekend for democracy”. All week, I felt like I should comment on the imperfect symmetry that a few people had pointed out, but every time I tried, I failed. I could not force myself to use the rote language, which read like bullet points on a grim NED report. Indeed, I couldn’t put the words together without experiencing profound distress. I should have lamented the erosion of “democratic norms”, and the parallel process of “democratic backsliding”. I should have invoked the “rule of law”, the decline in media freedoms, and appealed to the US or EU to “do something”. But I find this language strangely lacking, so much so that it actually makes me feel ashamed to use it. To be clear, I am not disparaging anyone who does; in the past, I have used this language myself. It’s possible that this is the only conceptual framework currently available to us. But that doesn’t change the fact that something is off about it, that something is wrong. And I want to try to understand why.

Most commentators on foreign affairs acknowledge that the liberal order is in trouble, dying, or perhaps even already dead. There was a time when this would have been treated as some kind of fringe Duginist conceit; now it’s approaching mainstream consensus. Funeral orations and laments for the liberal order have been delivered everywhere from the Financial Times to the Atlantic Council to podcast interviews with Yuval Noah Harari in Davos. Sometimes people call the liberal order by other names: the rules-based order, the US-led order, the Western-led order, Western hegemony. But a rose by any other name would be the same rotting organic matter: the precise name we use for it isn’t important; what is important is what we mean when we talk about it and the fact that we’re calling it dead. When we invoke this dying liberal order, what we mean, at least in part, is the project of globalized liberal democracy, and the underlying assumption that the rest of the world would eventually adopt our system. After the events of 1989, we were told, Western liberal democracy was triumphant and history was over. But we all laugh at this “end of history” idea now. How foolish Fukuyama was; how naive. We know better.

But we’re not just calling time on the liberal order. The fundamental assumptions of that order are now being questioned in unprecedented places. Once again, there was a time when such talk was confined to anti-imperialist reading groups and associated more with the rantings of seemingly unhinged taxi drivers in places like Serbia or Uganda. But lately, many mainstream commentators, scholars and even liberal political leaders like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (of all people!) have been wrestling publicly with the reality of what the US-led order was and what it meant. They are acknowledging that it was, at a minimum, highly flawed, hypocritical, and unequal. Some go much further in their criticisms, as I do. But whatever your personal evaluation of the liberal order, you probably agree that it has become acceptable to dissent from it in polite company and in respectable newspapers.

How does this relate to Vučić and Erdoğan? The problem is that when we criticize leaders like them, we immediately default to the rhetoric of liberal democracy–the legitimation ideology of the supposedly defunct liberal order. And this, for me, creates a terrible discordance. When those of us who prognosticate about the demise of Western liberal hegemony abruptly start sounding like Vaclav Havel in 1989, we are attempting to have it both ways. So which one is it? If the liberal order is dying and was always horribly unequal (or worse) anyway, then why are we judging leaders according to its criteria? Can we declare the Church an archaic institution riven with superstition and reaction and then continue chastising any misbehavior as “sin” and demand perfect obedience to God?

I don’t think there’s any better evidence that we’re in a transition than this. There is an emergent, acknowledged crisis of faith among the liberal democratic brethren, and yet, we still lack an alternative system of belief or normative framework for navigating the world. When we encounter leaders whose behavior we dislike, we still describe it in terms of deviance–from a model we no longer fully believe in ourselves.

I’m guessing that some will try to counter this argument by saying that the reason the liberal order is in trouble is because of external attacks from its opponents–men like Erdoğan and Vučić. But I don’t think that’s true. I think they are very much a product of that order, and, in a way, represent a kind of crude culmination of it. After 1989, the Western liberal democrats who came to observe elections and otherwise administer democracy in states “transitioning” from communism prescribed plural elections as the apex of political progress. All that mattered were market economies and plural elections; everything else, it would turn out, was negotiable.

There was also another chink in the liberal democrats’ armor. While they claimed to venerate the sanctity of the “free and fair” election, they never really believed in absolute openness. Their “get out the vote” campaigns were always intended to bolster a specific candidate or party, and they took great care to engineer the desired electoral result. They provided extensive training and PR for their chosen candidates, and funded the “free and independent media” that boosted them and excoriated their opponents. In short, the liberal democrats believed that elections should be “free and fair”, but never so free and fair that a real left-wing or anti-systemic challenger could win. In this way, “electoral authoritarianism”–plural elections without a level playing field, the kind of system that Vučić and Erdoğan have cultivated–constitutes a mutated, degraded form of US-led liberal democracy rather than a radical break with it.

I have no new verbiage to dispense nor any particular prescription for what to do here. Like everyone else, I will have to continue employing solemn NED democracy report jargon, but I will not be surprised when such outmoded, uninspired language continues to yield uninspired results. Meanwhile, I think it’s important to remember: liberal dissonances are always heard and exploited, even when they are not acknowledged or even considered in the West.

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