Caesarism isn't properly a regime-type, it's a characterization: the interaction of a military-inflected personalist leader ('cutting the Gordian knot') w/ mass politics governance technologies (plebiscite, charismatic legitimacy) decisively pursuing modernizing developmentalism It's too specific to be a generic regime and too bound up in a certain time period to throw around everywhere. Most importantly, it's 19th c reference categories - monarchy and oligarchic tinpot juntas - are long gone, which is why we dropped it as a term of art after the 1930s.

This is a weird book, because it almost could have been a single academic article and more importantly it doesn't want to understand what it is actually arguing. Because it basically argues anti-communist reaction in the Cold War made perfect sense in context. Ofc that's not the argument as-written. The thesis is this: the Cuban Rev led to hopes/ fears of leftist overthrow for leftists and non-leftists, respectively. This will lead to political spirals where anti-communist authoritarian regimes will take power (w/ popular backing).

I have a bunch of followers who are 'democracy skeptical' (hi guys!). I'm open to the perspective, not least b/c it's a research interest. Still, there's a tendency to portray it as 'tyranny' while missing what modern democracy really is: 'inclusive institutionalized oligarchy.' I think that's a good way to view democracy as a governance structure. Get beyond the fact that modern democracy isn't ancient democracy (yes, duh, boring - move on). Accept it's not utopian equality or people's government or whatever the textbook promised you in high-school.

It's almost the Fourth of July so a reminder that the United States is the oldest and most successfully sustained democratic regime in the world and any social scientist who says otherwise is lying to you for ideological reasons. If you react negatively or with surprise to this undisputable fact, you should think about where your mental space is at real carefully btw.

Years ago Nathan Brown and I won an award for our article on constitutional courts during 'constitutional ruptures' (i.e., periods of dispute over the political order). One of our inspirations was a great article by Epstein, Shvetsova, & Knight (2001) on "tolerance ranges."
They were looking at the Russian Constitutional Court, which was very powerful and intervened in politics heavily... until it was wrecked in the 1993 constitutional crisis for siding with the wrong institution in a political battle.

Watched this on my commute home yesterday. It remains the case that Yarvin is not a good debater (and he ranted plenty here, oftentimes ineffectively) but his interlocutors are even less impressive. I've always had a low opinion of normative democratic theory, and well...

https://twitter.com/JulianWaller/status/1923475809748005046

... this was not a performance that changed my position on the matter. There are many more capable arguments for a real democracy vs. autocracy thing, or a real engagement with authoritarian appeal, or even a philosophical discussion about Classical typologies. Skill issue.

New article on reconceptualizing the 'waves of democracy' paradigm as 'waves of democracy and authoritarianism' - and then disaggregating between left and right variants - is very interesting. Recommended, altho with some thoughts below... Dan isn't the first to the point about waves of authoritarianism (McFaul made it 20 years ago!), but it's well-stated here. The innovation is if demarcated by the Carnation Revolution (1974), the 3rd Wave only emerges in hindsight and wouldn't have been apparent at the time.

One point of interest about VOA or RFE/RL is that I highly doubt they were very effective as propaganda after the collapse of the USSR. What they were useful for was English-language reporting on underreported countries, especially for researchers and policy types here at home. Which kind of goes against both grains. They were supposed to be True Propaganda, but that ended with the communist censorship regime, and frankly I just don't think locals read or cared much after. But they did do something of use, it was just really for audiences like... me.

I've published on the causes of the war (yes, it's Putin Putin Putin, not NATO and not Democracy) but genuinely getting weirded out by the odd folk claim that NATO expansion means *nothing.* Of course it's relevant background, it's been Russian rhetoric for 20 years! NATO expansion cannot adequately explain war timing (why 2022 not 2020 or 2018 or 2014) nor war aims (why a full regime change op, not more Donbas or 'hybrid'). Mearsheimer is wrong. But that doesn't imply NATO isn't part of the strategic picture and perceptions of it...!

The Russo-Ukrainian War started three years ago today. Since then, our Russia Studies Program has put out over 30+ reports, articles, and other public research on the topic. Colleagues at RAND, RUSI, CSIS, CNAS, Carnegie, and elsewhere have done similarly.


On the one hand, we're a small team and don't produce reports at high frequency (some of our colleagues put something out every week or even day!). On the other, we're quite large as a purely Russia-dedicated analytic group. And our reports are Big.
cna.org/centers-and-di…

Ok. So I study authoritarian regimes for a living. I spend most of my time thinking about how Russia's dictatorship works. But one of my personal side-projects involves looking at authoritarian theorists closer to home. The most prominent by far is Curtis Yarvin.


If you don't know who he is, you're about to find out. It's inevitable. Total vibe shift, as they say. The intellectual cordon sanitaire is gone. Yarvin is an authoritarian theorist - he believes democracy is bad (also not real) and a 'CEO-monarchy' is a better governance model.

The Romania situation is unorecedented. If *everything* in this report is *entirely true* it still amounts to canceling an election b/c of social media. Not ballot falsification. Not voting irregularities. But a messaging campaign on TikTok whose actual reach is not measured.

https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1865073582113456345

And given the two-round setup, which is explicitly designed to give voters a second chance to review the top candidates, it's really not the normal institutional move. I don't mean unprecedented as a euphemism for 'it's weird!' but a new justification for a major intervention.

Every now and then there's a popular thread about how the RU economy is collapsing. And everyone forgets we did this 3 months ago. And 6 before that. For almost 3 years. The underlying points are the same (high inflation! tight labor market! 'supercharged' economy!)... ... The steelman is that things are getting worse, there's a temporal dimension to compounding wartime economic damage, and the dam will eventually break. The first two are definitely true, the last is a maybe plausible speculation...

Noticed ppl are misinterpreting a statement from N. Patrushev, Putin's quasi-vizier. Because of American self-absorption, it's being read as a comment on Russian interference. This is likely wrong, but to know why you need to be familiar with the "parasitic empires" thesis. ⏬🧵 Patrushev's statement is banal. He says DJT "relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them" and "very often election pledges in the US can diverge from subsequent actions"
tass.com/politics/18707…

I saw one of those history influencer guys say something like 'what we learned from WWII is that people go along with authoritarianism.' He meant the Interwar-era (20s/30s) presumably but I understand the impulse. This idea is misleading though. Let me explain... 🧵⬇️ FWIW, the sentiment is correct in a general sense - people absolutely do 'go along' with authoritarian rule all the time. And the Interwar was the last great era of authoritarian institutional creativity. Out of it we get party-states, corporatism, the movement-regime, etc.

Do you know the story of @CNA_org's Soviet studies group and the USSR Navy? I only learned when I joined - it's a real banger. Tl;dr is that we figured out what the Soviet sub strategy during the height of the Cold War entirely through open sources. But no one believed us. The knowledge was passed down as an annotated slide deck, which was publicly released in 2018 as "Hidden in Plain Sight: CNA and the Soviet Navy." It's a presentation given by Brad Dismukes reflecting on his experience on the issue. You can find it here:
cna.org/archive/CNA_Fi…

Stephen Kotkin is an historian who often thinks like a (comparative) political scientist, which makes his foreign policy essays always worth reading. This one is no exception, although admittedly it's a little weird! A few thoughts...

foreignaffairs.com/russian-federa… The text maps out five long-term future trajectories for a post-Putin Russia, in principle: Russia as France (i.e, lib-democ), Russia Retrenched (auth-nationalist, Russia as Vassal (re: China), Russia as North Korea (also re: China), and Russia in Chaos (separatism/partition).

All of these things are obviously true.

lawliberty.org/archetype-of-i…
And suddenly we go from is to ought. That's not an actual theory of the world!

Twitter is commenting on the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin's death. My contribution is this: V.I. Lenin was a uniquely talented thinker and political activist, whose thought and actions had deeply demonic impacts on the world we live in. I asked Bing AI to help illustrate. You shouldn't need to be convinced, but three points stick out.

1) Lenin was directly responsible for the overthrow of the Russian Provisional Government in a coup and its replacement with an extremist, hyper-violent ideological sect that managed to capture total power.

Gm. If you're following Russian politics and aren't tracking the public academic fight over the future use of nuclear weapons, I suggest you take a look - although not quite for the reasons you might expect. 👇🏻 The briefest of backgrounds is that the major Russian historian Sergei Karaganov wrote a piece in Russia in Global Affairs last week which claimed that the use of nuclear weapons might be necessary in the fight against the "new fascism."
globalaffairs.ru/articles/tyazh…

Some years ago I lived in Saint-Petersburg as a study-abroad language student, hosted by an older Russian woman who had lived in the city all her life. One morning, I asked her who she thought was 'Russia's best leader.' An anecdotal thread🧵👇🏻 1/ She was in her late 70s, and had survived the Nazi blockade of Leningrad as a child. Her father had been of aristocratic stock (Baltic German), but had somehow survived under communism as a rare engineering talent running a critical chemical factory in the region. 2/