The war in Ukraine is barreling toward its fifth year, and the Kremlin is clamping down even harder on dissent. This month alone, Vladimir Putin signed a new package of laws that amount to “civic death” for exiled critics; Russia’s Supreme Court upheld the banning of the country’s only antiwar party, Yabloko, from next month’s elections; and the party’s deputy chair was sentenced to more than eleven years in prison. Moscow couldn’t be clearer: As victory grows more elusive and the war more punishing, criticism will not be tolerated.
To learn more about what’s driving Putin’s war and the Kremlin’s escalating assault on dissent, read the following Journal of Democracy essays, free for a limited time.
Vladimir Putin has signed a new “civic death” law targeting the Kremlin’s critics everywhere. The goal is to intimidate Russian citizens from speaking out against Putin’s crimes.
Vladimir Putin’s reputation as a skillful leader was buoyed by years of economic good fortune. But when his regime faltered, his rule quickly descended into the fearful, repressive, and paranoid state we see today.
When Vladimir Putin launched a massive invasion of Ukraine, he expected an easy victory. Instead, the world has witnessed an object lesson in how a corrupt Russian regime crippled its own military power.
By Zoltan Barany
The War in Ukraine: Putin’s Inevitable InvasionWhy did Russia invade Ukraine? And why are Russian forces fighting so poorly? The internal logic of its personalist dictatorship is to blame.By Ivan Gomza
People obsess over where Russia’s democracy went wrong. The truth is it did not fail: Russia’s democratic transition never got off the starting blocks.
Will Russia’s war tip the Kremlin even further toward tyranny while fortifying Ukraine’s democracy? That will depend on Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky as much as on the course of the war itself.
The Russian leader declared war on his country’s independent journalists. But Russian media outsmarted him by taking their operations overseas. They are now reaching more people than ever before.
By Roman Badanin
The Journal of Democracy is published quarterly in January, April, July, and October. Subscribe now for full access to our archives.
Ukraine’s popular ex-defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov called for wartime elections on Tuesday evening, stating that the nation was facing a crisis of governance. Fedorov was dismissed last month, sparking days of protests across Ukraine. It is the first time since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022 that a Ukrainian political figure demands presidential elections.
Ukraine’s ousted Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov called for wartime elections in a bombshell address on Tuesday, arguing the nation faced a crisis of governance, in the biggest internal challenge to President Volodymyr Zelensky since Russia’s invasion.
Fedorov’s call, delivered in a video address posted on YouTube, is the first such demand by a major Ukrainian political figure since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. Ukrainian law prohibits holding elections during wartime.
“Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” Fedorov said. “We must find a legal, safe and realistic mechanism that will allow Ukraine to renew its full democratic process even in the conditions of a long war.”
The 35-year-old Fedorov was a longtime ally of Zelensky’s until his unexpected firing from the defence ministry in July, just six months after he had been appointed, vowing sweeping reforms.
Shortly after his dismissal, the tech-savvy Fedorov publicly tore into the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Oleksandr Syrsky, exposing a bitter rift between the men and their different visions for the war.
Thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets to demand the sacking of Syrskyi – an old-guard military commander blamed by his critics for heavy troop losses at the front line – and Fedorov’s reinstatement.
Although Zelensky said he had dismissed Fedorov because of his inability to work with Syrsky, the president fired the military chief shortly afterwards under public pressure.
Protests in support of Fedorov have continued for the past month, losing some of their early momentum but still regularly drawing a couple thousand attendees in Kyiv.
While Fedorov did not say in his address that he would compete in any election, a recent poll indicated the ex-minister would comfortably beat Zelensky in a runoff vote, where the top two presidential candidates go head-to-head.
Challenge to Zelensky
Fedorov’s statement came just hours after Zelensky confirmed he had asked parliament to confirm new Defence Minister Yevhenii Khmara in office on Wednesday.
In what appeared to be an open challenge to Zelensky, Fedorov said Ukraine faced a “systemic crisis of governance”.
“The old system lives by its own rules too often. It protects itself. It is scared of change,” he said.
Without providing names, Fedorov condemned official corruption, which he said hurt Ukraine’s war effort.
The ex-minister recently said he believed his reform of the defence ministry’s procurement processes, responsible for purchasing billions of dollars of equipment, contributed to his sacking.
Zelensky’s office had no immediate comment on Fedorov’s address.
Fedorov became the youngest minister in Ukraine’s history when he was appointed aged 28 as Ukraine’s digitalisation chief and spent six years in that post. He was the last remaining member of Zelensky’s first cabinet in 2019.
His role running the Ministry of Digital Transformation saw him become an early adopter of drone warfare, which has turned combat in Ukraine on its head since 2022.
However, his nationwide profile grew greatly after his appointment to run the vast Defence Ministry in January, immediately vowing a data-driven overhaul. Unlike his predecessors, Fedorov publicly laid out a strategy to defeat Russia through attrition and technological superiority.
“Our people have long been ready for a different country,” Fedorov said in his address. “Now, our state must become worthy of its people.”
People are losing faith in democracy’s ability to deliver social progress. But are democracies better than autocracies at promoting economic growth, alleviating poverty, and creating healthier, more educated, and more peaceful societies? On all counts, the answer is yes.
If democracies did a better job “delivering” for their citizens, so the thinking goes, people would not be so ready to embrace antidemocratic alternatives. Not so. This conventional wisdom about democratic backsliding is seldom true and often not accurate at all.
With illiberal forces ascendant across the globe, protecting individual liberties and the democratic process is crucial. But when institutions empower minority groups over the majority, can democracy survive?
In the decade leading up to the covid-19 pandemic, nonviolent civil resistance grew more popular than ever—but its effectiveness had already started to plummet. The future of nonviolent resistance may depend on movements’ ability to move beyond mass protests toward exploring alternative tactics and developing smarter, longer-term strategies.
Many pundits cry for a negotiated settlement to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. But they misunderstand Vladimir Putin’s motives. The only just end to the war will be in the trenches, not at the bargaining table.
Under Narendra Modi, India is maintaining the trappings of democracy while it increasingly harasses the opposition, attacks minorities, and stifles dissent. It can still reverse course, but the damage is mounting.
Young people from Peru to Madagascar to Nepal—furious with political elites reaping the spoils of privilege and corruption—are rising up to demand change. But what happens when their movements succeed?
He did the hard work of defeating Viktor Orbán. But Hungary’s new prime minister faces the harder task of undoing the damage his predecessor wrought. Can he do it while avoiding the traps Orbán left in his wake?
By Kim Lane Scheppele
The Journal of Democracy is published quarterly in January, April, July, and October. Subscribe now for full access to our archives.
Yes, the historical path of global power moved directly westward from Rome across Europe, bridged the Atlantic to the United States, and has now reached the Pacific Rim. [1, 2]
This exact trajectory is what inspired the 18th-century phrase “Westward the course of empire takes its way,” tracing a clear line of dominant global civilization shifting further west over two millennia.
1. The Historical Relay Race
The geopolitical “baton” of dominant Western power was passed sequentially to the west, with each empire expanding its frontier:
Rome to Western Europe: Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, the center of gravity slowly drifted northwest to the Holy Roman Empire, France, and eventually Great Britain.
The British Empire: Great Britain built a global maritime empire, establishing colonies further west across the Atlantic Ocean. [1]
The United States: The concept of “Manifest Destiny” explicitly drove the U.S. to conquer its own western frontier from the Atlantic to the Pacific, eventually surpassing British global influence after World War II. [1]
2. Parallel Downfalls: Rome vs. The USA
Historians and political scientists frequently compare the modern United States to the decline of the Western Roman Empire, noting striking structural similarities: [1, 2, 3]
Political Polarization: Rome’s transition from a Republic to an Empire was marked by the erosion of democratic norms, political violence, and gridlock—paralleling the hyper-partisanship facing the U.S. today. [1]
Imperial Overstretch: Rome fractured because it became too large and expensive to defend. Similarly, the U.S. maintains over 750 military bases globally, straining its domestic economy and national debt. [1]
The Barbarian Invasions vs. Outsourced Power: Rome increasingly relied on foreign mercenaries (barbarians) to fight its wars, who eventually turned on the empire. In a modern economic parallel, the U.S. outsourced its manufacturing base to foreign rivals, losing its self-sufficiency.
The Next Stop on the Westward Line
[Rome] ──> [Western Europe / UK] ──> [USA] ──> [The Pacific / China?]
(Mediterranean) (Atlantic) (Continental) (Rising East Asia)
If the course of “empire” keeps moving west, it crosses the Pacific Ocean directly into East Asia. China’s current rise represents the next logical geographic and economic step on this global loop.
However, instead of a Western-style empire built on individual liberty and democratic capitalism, the global center of gravity is shifting toward an East Asian model built on state-led capitalism and digital authoritarianism. [1]
Me:
What about democracy?
Google AI:
China’s rise presents a direct ideological alternative to Western liberal democracy, actively reshaping global governance from within by championing an authoritarian-led model of state sovereignty.
As Beijing expands its influence, the global geopolitical architecture is shifting away from a system centered on democratic values toward one that accommodates, and often protects, autocracy. [1, 2]
1. Redefining Global Rules from Within
Rewriting the Narrative: China does not explicitly campaign to destroy democracy abroad. Instead, it promotes the “democratization of international relations,” a diplomatic phrase meaning that Western democratic powers should no longer set the rules for the rest of the world. [1]
Prioritizing State over Citizen: Through new multi-lateral bodies like the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), launched in mid-2026, Beijing champions a “people-centered” but state-controlled model. This places state sovereignty and economic development far ahead of individual civil liberties. [1]
Institutional Capture: By offering economic incentives and infrastructure projects, China has successfully built voting coalitions in international bodies like the UN. These coalitions block Western-led human rights resolutions and shield authoritarian governance from scrutiny. [1, 2, 3, 4]
2. Making the World “Safe for Autocracy”
The “Authoritarian Collaboration Ecosystem”: Reports from global monitoring groups highlight a shift toward structured, routinized collaboration among autocratic states. China acts as a core anchor, providing tech-driven surveillance tools, policing expertise, and alternative financial safety nets. []
An Alternative to Democratic Conditions: Historically, developing nations seeking funds from Western institutions like the World Bank had to meet democratic milestones (e.g., anti-corruption, free media). China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) offers billions with “no strings attached” regarding governance, allowing hybrid regimes and autocracies to bypass democratic reforms. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
3. Global Democratic Backsliding
China’s alternative model is finding traction at a time when Western liberal democracy is facing steep internal challenges. [1]
The Decline of the West: Leading indices reveal a severe global democratic recession. Major Western democracies—most notably the United States, which lost its status as a “liberal democracy” in recent V-Dem Institute ratings—are struggling with deep domestic polarization and institutional erosion.
The Allure of Efficiency: Decades of political gridlock, inequality, and social unrest in Western countries have eroded global trust in the “democratic brand”. China leverages this by presenting its one-party system as a more stable, efficient, and predictable framework for long-term national growth. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ THE SHIFTING GLOBAL BALANCE │
├───────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────┤
│ Western Democratic │ Chinese State-Led Model │
│ Framework │ Framework │
├───────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────┤
│ • Focus: Civil liberties │ • Focus: Absolute state │
│ and human rights │ sovereignty & development│
│ • Rules-based order led │ • Multipolar networks │
│ by G7/Western nations │ (BRICS, WAICO, mBridge) │
│ • Conditional financing │ • No-strings funding │
│ requiring reforms │ embedding dependencies │
└───────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────┘
You can even tell her today that I said so while she’s stuffing her face in a leftovers quinoa bowl.
So, I’ve railed a bit about corn in a recent post about agriculture. And typically, people wonder how much I’m being serious.
I’m an Ohioan with a degree from the University of Nebraska. You bet your ass I’m serious about corn.
Look man, I get it. Agriculture is supposedly the “civilizing” process of humanity, the best thing since before sliced bread. But it’s also the biggest trick The Man ever pulled on you.
And I mean, The Man. The Big Man, to be precise. Because it wasn’t always this way. We used to be civilized. Actually civilized. You know, before the whole “civilizing.”
Sorry, let me back up.
Somewhere around 13,000 years ago, a man trudged across what is now Coshocton County, Ohio, carrying forty pounds of high-quality Wyandotte chert. He had walked roughly 280 miles, as the crow flies, from a quarry in southern Indiana, on foot, through a landscape that looked like northern Ontario, but, you know, not on fire. It was a post-glacial tundra, dwarf spruces dotting a landscape with the occasional giant sloth terrorizing a mammoth. He was heading back to a camp of maybe twenty people who would be very happy to see the flint and profoundly uninterested in hearing about how hard the walk was.
Because that was the rule. You did not talk about how hard the walk was. You did not suggest that carrying forty pounds of rock across Ohio entitled you to a larger share of the elk.
You shut your fucking mouth, you handed over your fucking stone, and if you so much as hinted that your contribution made you special, twenty people who loved you would roast you until your ego was medium-rare and then keep going until your ass was jerky. Sometimes, literally.
This, my friend, was communism at its most primitive (you know, without surplus, or a state, or an ideology, or anything that actually makes communism “communism.”). It is the earliest governance model in Eastern North America. And it lasted longer than every system that replaced it, combined.
So when your boss complains about you arriving five minutes late again because traffic was a nightmare, remind yourself: just about any other time in Eastern North American history, he’d be slow-roasting his chestnuts over an open fire.
For roughly ten thousand years, from the first Paleoindians through the end of the Late Archaic (approximately 13,000 to 3,000 years ago), the people who lived in what would become Ohio ran their societies with a political technology so aggressively, obstinately simple that modern political scientists barely recognize it as politics at all.
The systemwas that they made damn surenobodywaseverin charge.
Then somebody planted some seeds, and the whole thing fell apart.
The Part Where the Org Chart Is Just a Circle with a Knife Behind It
The formal name for what these people practiced is “egalitarian band-level society.” Elman Service coined the classification in 1962, slotting it at the bottom of his four-stage political evolution ladder: a band, a tribe, a chiefdom, and a state. Bands were small, kin-based, mobile groups of twenty to fifty people organized around extended families, with no permanent political offices and no formalized authority. Leadership (to the extent anyone used that word) meant a couple of senior adults whose opinions carried weight because they were good at finding food, resolving arguments, or both.
However, what Service got wrong and was roundly corrected for in the profession afterward was that these were societies whose entire political sophistication was aimed at one objective: preventing political sophistication from happening. Christopher Boehm, who spent decades studying the phenomenon across dozens of ethnographically documented foraging societies, landed on the term “reverse dominance hierarchy,” which is just what we call Femdom Night at Club Eros.
In a reverse dominance hierarchy, the group collectively dominates any individual who tries to dominate the group. Everyone gangs up on whoever had the poor judgment to start acting like a leader. The many rule the one, and “the one” is whichever poor bastard stuck his neck out. Enforcement was practical, escalating, and, when necessary, permanent. Boehm catalogued four primary leveling tools ranging from gossip, to ridicule, to disobedience, and finally ostracism.
Imagine it like your traditional high school cat fight:
Step One: people talk shit about you behind your back.
Step Two: they talk shit about you to your face.
Step Three: they stopped doing what you told them to do.
Step Four: they threw you out of the group entirely, which in a world without permanent shelter or agriculture (and less than approximately 650 people living in all of Ohio) was a polite way of killing someone.
In some documented cases, the group skipped step four and went straight to step five, which was just killing you in a less polite way. Like slow-roasting your chestnuts.
The !Kung San of the Kalahari, one of the most exhaustively studied foraging peoples on earth, applied this through a ritual called “insulting the meat.” When a hunter killed a large animal, the entire camp was socially obligated to insult the kill. The hunter was obligated to take it.
Richard Lee recorded some of the types of insults:
“You mean you walked all that way and dragged back this sack of bones? This scrawny thing?”
“My grandmother’s dog could outrun this animal and my grandmother’s dog has been dead for a year.”
The hunter who had just hauled a 200-pound antelope back to camp on his shoulders absorbed this with appropriate humility. He did not point out that the antelope would feed twenty people for a week. He did not remind anyone that half the camp hadn’t killed shit in a month. The performance existed to prevent the best hunter from concluding that being the best hunter made him more important than everyone else.
The kill belonged to the group. The skill belonged to the group. The only thing that belonged to the hunter was the obligation to shut up about it.
Among the Hadza of Tanzania, the logic was the same. James Woodburn, who began studying them in 1958, found that leadership “amounted to no more than the advice of a few respected senior men.” Camps could include a hundred people. Camps could be a single guy sitting next to a fire. The composition of the group shifted constantly. Anyone who didn’t like how things were going could leave, and nobody could stop them, because there was no mechanism for compulsion. There was no police, no jail, no legal system that would drag you back. The only authority a leader possessed was other people’s willingness to listen to him, and that willingness evaporated the instant he started acting like he deserved it.
To be clear, I’d be fucking dead in half a minute. Fuck this shit, I’d be immediately pointing out every logical reason they deserve me. Of course, in this society, ego is a killer, which is why I’m glad I live in a postmodern illiberal authoritarian democracy in a hyper-late-stage capitalist Western world. God, imagine if I had to hunt for my food.
By the way, this arrangement is not a cultural preference. It turns out, all that social Darwinism shit your douchey bro neighbor down the hall likes to rant about when talking about sheeple being blackpilled is just purely wrong science.
The Part Where Chimps Explain Why The Manosphere is Wrong
Humans share 98 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees (as my partner likes to point out about me). Chimpanzees are emphatically hierarchical. Alpha males beat the hell out of subordinate males. Beta males beat the hell out of everyone who isn’t an alpha. The dominance hierarchy is enforced through physical violence, and the payoff is preferential access to food and sex. The system is functionally identical to a middle school cafeteria, with less bowl cuts and caked eyeshadow.
Yet that 2% seems to matter a lot. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but humans are the dominant species on the planet, not chimps. That is because Marshall Sahlins, in his foundational 1963 essay “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief,” proposed that the critical difference between ape politics and early human politics was a reordering of priorities. Chimps organize around sex first, food second, and defense third. Males fight over mating access, and then they grudgingly share food and protect the troop when it suits them.
Human foragers flipped the order: we start with food, then defense, and finally sex. For example, marriage (or some versions of long term partnerships) replaced promiscuity as an organizing principle in human societies. Two Paleo husbands could share a wife without tearing each other’s arms off. Two male chimps could not. That reprioritization freed up an enormous amount of social energy that chimps burn on dominance competition and humans redirected toward cooperation and food-sharing.
Boehm’s contribution was that egalitarianism was itself adominancebehavior, not a recessive one. The same wiring that makes a chimpanzee fight for alpha status made humans form coalitions to suppress alpha status in others. Instead of the strongest individual dominating the group, the group dominated the strongest individual. Stupid monkeys.
William Laughlin actually lived this. Laughlin, who lived with 78 Inuit hunters in Alaska’s Anaktuvuk Pass, ran blood antigen studies and discovered that the camp’s senior male, a gifted caribou hunter, had fathered seven children who produced ten grandchildren, or roughly 20 percent of the group’s population. By every biological metric, this man had won. He was, by the manosphere’s terms, the alpha. He had reproduced more successfully than any other male in the camp. But he had no title, gave no orders, and controlled nothing. He was a guy who happened to be excellent at killing caribou, and people trusted his judgment about where to find them.
In evolutionary terms, he had won the game. In social terms, the game did not exist. The social system didn’t care how many caribou you could kill. It cared whether you were going to be an asshole about it.
And as sociologists like to remind everyone else, culture is swiftly supplanting natural selection as the evolutionary process of humanity. Take notes, incels. Turns out, if you want to get laid in Anno Domini 2026, it’s less about the looks and more about your character (just like momma told me before she gave me my first CeraVe bottle).
The Part Where the Richest Guy in the Valley Turns Out to Be FedEx
Now, at this point the skeptics in the back are screaming: “How the fuck do you know this from a bunch of rocks in Ohio?!”
Well, the archaeological record for Paleoindian and Early Archaic Ohio looks exactly like you would expect if nobody was in charge.
First, to be clear, the sites are tiny. Most Paleoindian camps yield a handful of fluted points and almost nothing else. Paleo Crossing, in Medina County, is one of the few well-dated Clovis sites in eastern North America that is about 13,000 years old, with stone tools made from chert hauled 280 miles from Indiana. The assemblage is consistent with three to five nuclear families moving together, maintaining seasonal ranges the size of a mid-Atlantic state, and carrying their best tools because the next decent outcrop might be weeks away. These people did not accumulate things like modern people would. They carried what they needed and left the rest, often cached somewhere in case they came across it again (the paleoenvironment of Ohio was constantly changing seasonally, and there was no guarantee they could find it again).
More importantly, the first Paleo burials are democratic. By the Middle and Late Archaic, when we finally get substantial numbers of human remains, the grave goods track with age and sex, not with rank. At the Read site in Kentucky, infants got the fewest artifacts, while adult males got atlatl weights and fishhooks. People over forty-five got less than younger adults. It seems that by the Archaic period, worth to the indigenous Ohioans was calibrated to your productive contribution. Older people and those with debilitating conditions received fewer goods because, well, they produced less. Meriwether Lewis noticed the same logic among the peoples he encountered two centuries later during his expedition. He noted that a community treated its elders well when those elders could still help get food. When they couldn’t, the community’s generosity adjusted accordingly.
In Ohio, Archaic camps scatter across river valleys and uplands, reflecting a wide-ranging foraging circuit that moved people through different ecological zones as different foods came into season. The thickest middens (trash heaps that become archaeological sites) sit at especially productive spots: the shell heaps along the Green River in Kentucky, for instance, are where people cracked mussels and buried their dead over thousands of years. But there is no architecture like fortifications or granaries, certainly no monuments until very late in the Archaic, when mound-building starts in the lower Mississippi Valley around 3500 BCE at Watson Brake. For most of this ten-thousand-year span, the built environment of Eastern North America consists of fire pits, trash heaps, and graves.
Thus, the exchange networks are what reveal the social and political structure of Archaic Ohio. By 4000 BCE, copper from the Great Lakes, marine shell from the Gulf Coast, banded slate, and exotic cherts were moving hundreds of miles between locations. But most people buried with these non-local items had only a few pieces. Some had thousands. Milner interprets this as evidence that certain well-connected individuals served as nodes in intergroup trade, accumulating more of the goods because more of them passed through their hands.
In other words, these few brokers had greater access to exotic materials. They had nothing else. Remember, this is the Archaic. There are no bigger houses. There is no better food. There is no special burial treatment. They were the richest people in their community, and the only evidence of their wealth is a pile of shell beads they happened to die with.
Now to be clear, the Eastern Woodlands after the glaciers retreated were, by foraging standards, absurdly generous. The Pleistocene-to-Holocene transition, roughly 11,700 years ago, converted the landscape from a cold, patchy tundra and boreal forest into one of the most diverse temperate ecosystems on the planet. Deciduous forests dropped mast crops of acorns, hickory nuts, and walnuts every fall to the extent that the primary foraging strategy was waiting for something to knock on your head. River systems swarmed with fish, mussels, and waterfowl. Deer, elk, turkey, and dozens of smaller species occupied every habitat from floodplain to ridgetop. And then there were the wetlands. Northwest Ohio was basically the Everglades of the Great Lakes. Backwater lakes, oxbow ponds, seasonal marshes, alluvial bottomlands. Ohio was an embarrassment of ecological riches that replenished itself through high reproductive rates every single year.
Now, an egalitarian band organization works when the environment delivers a specific combination of conditions. Resources have to be dispersed and variable enough that no single spot supports a permanent settlement year-round, but abundant and diverse enough that mobile groups can always find food by moving through a seasonal circuit. Eastern North America delivered both conditions simultaneously and kept delivering them for ten thousand years, especially in Ohio where three climate systems meet. Therefore, there was no reason to sit still permanently, because no single location had everything. And there was no reason to panic, because the next good spot was a few days’ walk in any direction.
Under these conditions, any aspiring strongman faced an unsolvable problem: the people he wanted to lead could walk away (or rather, banish you). And they would be perfectly fine when they got wherever they were going. You cannot build a power base when your entire constituency can tell you to go fuck yourself and then relocate to a creek twenty miles south where the mussels are just as good and the company is better.
An exit strategy is the ultimate check on authority, and in the Eastern Woodlands, the exit strategy was always open.
The Part Where Somebody Plants a Goddamn Seed
Elman Service’s band-tribe-chiefdom-state typology imagines political evolution as a ladder, each rung replacing the one below it as societies get more “complex.” The metaphor is almost entirely full of shit. Egalitarian band society is not a primitive stage that more complex societies grow out of, like political baby teeth. It is a stable system that runs on our human neurology and functions beautifully under the right ecological conditions.
The Big Man does not “evolve” into chiefdoms. It is murdered, and the murder weapon is always the same: storable, controllable, redistributable surplus.
That’s right. It’s capitalism, baby! (if capitalism didn’t have a state, or an ideology, or anything that actually makes capitalism “capitalism” besides surplus)
Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus explained this pretty clearly. The Big Man model, which originates in the ethnography of Melanesian horticultural societies, is the transitional political form between pure egalitarian bands and hereditary chiefdoms. Marshall Sahlins defined a Big Man as someone who acquires influence through personal achievement (like skill in warfare, or success in competitive feasting, the ability to redistribute resources to followers, etc.), not through inheritance or divine right. His power lasts exactly as long as he keeps producing, and his son gets nothing except a role model. The position is achieved, not ascribed, and it can vanish as fast as it appeared
Among the Enga of New Guinea, Big Men were called kamongo. They earned it by mediating disputes, giving speeches, and manipulating trade in shells, feathers, ceremonial drums, and pigs. But what caused Big Man to emerge in New Guinea to begin with? The sweet potato, which arrived in Enga territory roughly nine to twelve generations ago and blew the population from 20,000 to 100,000 in about 220 years. Women grew the sweet potatoes. Pigs ate the sweet potatoes. Big Men redistributed the pigs. The competitive feasting, the prestige economy, the elaborate trade networks, and the political careers, the whole goddamn edifice, rested on a tuber.
They were others in the Oceanic region. For the Siuai of Bougainville, the biggest Big Men were called mumis. A mumi climbed the social ladder by throwing pig feasts specifically designed to humiliate his rivals. The strategy was to give someone a gift so enormous that he cannot reciprocate, publicly demonstrating that you have access to more resources than he does. It’s like when your rich aunt and uncle throw their annual Wet Hot American Summer marathon and blow more money than you’ve seen in all your birthdays combined on a Paul Rudd appearance. The Siuai described this as “fighting verbally,” because the colonial authorities had made the previous version, which involved collecting enemy heads and lining your men’s house with their skulls, somewhat less convenient. When a mumi died, his shell valuables were burned, and his son started from zero. Prestige was not heritable.
The lessons from Melanesia map directly onto Eastern North America. Big Man politics require surplus. You cannot throw a humiliation feast if you and your rival are eating the same deer and the same mussels in roughly equal quantities. You cannot build a following through redistribution if there is nothing to redistribute. And you absolutely cannot convert generosity into political leverage if everyone in the camp can walk into the woods and feed themselves with a repeat of Chicken Little. The whole system depends on a gap between what people can produce and what they need. That gap did not exist in the mobile foraging economies of the Eastern Woodlands.
Bruce Smith demonstrated that eastern North America was one of only nine places on earth where plants were independently domesticated. It started in the Middle to Late Archaic, when people coming back to the same camps noticed that weedy plants thrived in the disturbed, nitrogen-rich soil of old campsites. At first, they tolerated the plants. Then they encouraged them. Then they started actively tending them. By the beginning of the second millennium BCE, at least four species had crossed the line into domestication: goosefoot, marsh elder, sunflower, and cucurbits. The cucurbits survive today as acorn squashes, crooknecks, and fordhooks, which your grandmother grows in her garden. The goosefoot and marsh elder survive as weeds nobody would eat on purpose.
They were “shitty crops,” by today’s parlance. They were just weedy annuals that produced small, storable seeds. But “small and storable” is the whole ballgame. Because seeds can be accumulated. Seeds can be counted. Seeds can be withheld. Seeds can be redistributed in ways that create debts, obligations, and dependencies.
Seeds are the raw material out of which ambitious people build political careers and destroy egalitarianism.
The domestication process took centuries. It was not a revolution. It was a long sequence of individually rational decisions made by people trying to cushion themselves against bad winters, each decision inching the economy toward the point where surplus became possible.
And with surplus, for the first time in ten thousand years, some asshole had something the group could not easily walk away from.
Some fucking corn.
Works Cited (For People Who Stick it To the Big Man)
Anderson, Timothy G. and Brian Schoen, eds. Settling Ohio: First Peoples and Beyond. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2023, pp. 18-19.
Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 35-50, 64-89.
Drooker, Penelope Ballard. The View from Madisonville: Protohistoric Western Fort Ancient Interaction Patterns. Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, No. 31. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997, pp. 76, 88, 270.
Flannery, Kent and Joyce Marcus. The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012, pp. 35-40, 95-121.
Lee, Richard B. The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 244-48.
Milner, George R. The Moundbuilders: Ancient Societies of Eastern North America. 2nd ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 2020, pp. 1-2, 19-31, 39-50, 52-56.
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Sassaman, Kenneth E. The Eastern Archaic, Historicized. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2010, pp. 56, 116-55.
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Picture Credit: Early Archaic people fishing in the Cuyahoga River, National Park Service.
Home / Connect / Ring the Alarm Bells: The Ten Rules of Trump’s Authoritarian Playbook
Authoritarianism isn’t down the street or around the corner — it is here right now. We are at the most perilous moment for our democracy since the Civil War.
We now have all three ingredients of a strongman state in the United States:
a rubber-stamp Congress doing the President’s bidding
a Supreme Court finding “invisible ink” in the Constitution to enhance the President’s powers; and
a power-hungry president behaving like a king, breaking the law and violating the checks and balances of our Constitution.
People think of democracies dying at the hands of men with guns. But, in the modern era, they more often die at the hands of elected officials who erode the separation of powers to solidify a strongman state.
That will require robust citizen action and an unmistakable rejection of authoritarianism at the next election. Both are essential to restore and revitalize our democracy.
Our mission is clear: Let’s save our “We, The People” republic!
RULE ONE: Fire the Referees RULE TWO: Pack the Government with Loyalists RULE THREE: Demonize the Enemy Within RULE FOUR: Disregard Due Process RULE FIVE: Silence Free Speech RULE SIX: Steal Congress’ Power of the Purse RULE SEVEN: Abuse Government Authorities RULE EIGHT: Weaponize the Justice System RULE NINE: Use the Military to Suppress Dissent RULE TEN: Rig the Next Election
Your Power as a Citizen
1: Join an organized, nonviolent protest or demonstration. 2: Write and call your elected officials – and share personal stories! 3: Join an organized, nonviolent general strike or boycott. 4: Host a monthly friends meeting to discuss policy and political issues. 5: Help someone running for office. 6: Run for office! 7: Join an affinity group that organizes around issues. 8: Train as an observer of ICE operations. 9: Help turn out the vote. 10: Show support for vulnerable communities.
A quarter of the world’s governments — from China, Iran, and Russia to smaller states like Rwanda and Turkey — are pursuing dissidents across the globe, using threats, intimidation, physical assault, and even murder to suppress dissent and maintain power. Democratic host states must not turn a blind eye. As Siena Anstis and Marcus Michaelsen write in our new issue, “The failure to provide consistent protection and meaningful accountability will, over time, erode the credibility of democratic institutions and the authority of the rule of law.”Read their article, “How to Combat Transnational Repression,” along with other Journal of Democracy essays examining the rising danger of transnational repression, free for a limited time.
Authoritarians actively threaten, intimidate, and murder exiles and opponents wherever they find them. While justice for victims is hard won, it is possible. Here is how democracies can push back.
By Siena Anstis and Marcus Michaelsen
The Journal of Democracy is published quarterly in January, April, July, and October. Subscribe now for full access to our archives.
NBC News Sep 1, 2022 Biden calls out threats to democracy in ‘soul of the nation’ address During his prime-time address on the “soul of the nation”, President Joe Biden called out former President Donald Trump and “MAGA Republicans”, saying that they “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic”, adding that “MAGA Republicans” are “destroying American democracy”.
Beijing relies on digital surveillance to detect and stamp out budding opposition before it spills into the streets. But rather than conduct this massive undertaking itself, Lynette Ong explains in the new issue of the Journal of Democracy, the CCP hires “corporations to sniff out ‘sensitive’ words with detection software, to flood the internet with propaganda, and to deal with troublesome posts and posters.”
Read Ong’s essay along with other Journal coverage of digital surveillance in authoritarian regimes, free for a limited time, plus our entire July issue before it goes behind the paywall on July 30.
Beijing knows digital surveillance of the world’s most populous nation is technologically demanding. So the Party has hired corporations to occupy the “public-opinion battlefield” and spot the trouble before it spreads.
The Chinese Communist Party is dreaming an authoritarian techno-dream that is a democrat’s nightmare: ever more fine-grained state control made possible by using AI networks to pry and spy everywhere. But human unpredictability remains a force the party-state cannot tame.
Chinese authorities are wielding facial-recognition software, big-data analytics, and other digital technologies to control China’s citizens by monitoring and assessing their activities, both online and off.
By Xiao Qiang
The Journal of Democracy is published quarterly in January, April, July, and October. Subscribe now for full access to the Journal of Democracy archives.
One assumption that has guided generations of interpreters is that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and their collaborators meant a lot more than they said. Photo: John Trumbull, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” — The Declaration of Independence, 1776
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“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” Walt Whitman wrote, but the nation was conceived in prose. Other countries have national holidays that commemorate feats of revolutionary or military glory. This one celebrates a document. The Declaration of Independence was a charter and a manifesto, yes, but in essence it was a memo, a hastily drafted, feverishly edited, hand-copied piece of committee work. A masterpiece too.
It’s poetry, philosophy and polemic, all in a little more than 1,300 words and all represented in its second and most famous sentence.
No matter how many times you’ve read it before, it’s worth reading again. Each idea flows from the previous one, and a comprehensive argument takes shape.
We are equal. We have rights. Those rights describe the very essence of our humanity.
That’s a lot. Pages and pages have been written on this passage, seeking out its ideological subtext, its historical context and its intellectual pretexts in classical and early modern thought. But the plain English of the first 35 words — from “We” to “happiness” — is still remarkable in its sweep and radical in its implications.
It moves from a theory of knowledge to a vision of the good.
We — putting aside for a moment just who this “we” might be — don’t appeal to precedent, tradition or any other external authority, but to the evidence of our own eyes. Human equality is not aspirational: It’s obvious.
Furthermore, this equality isn’t just a formal, mathematical axiom. It has a specific moral and metaphysical content. A human creature is defined by the possession of rights, by a divinely granted entitlement to live, to act and to prosper.
This is remarkable writing — and also a slippery and variable text.
English grammar was a more fluid enterprise in 1776; punctuation and capitalization were irregular.
In the first printed version, for example, there was no period after “happiness.” The sentence kept going, swelling to paragraph length and encompassing all of human nature in a chiming succession of clauses.
Even the simplest gloss — the near-heretical attempt to put the language of the declaration “in other words” — hints at the complexities rippling through the crystalline clarity of the prose. Every word is a fighting word, begging to be contested. What exactly did they mean by “equal”? By “Creator”? By “Liberty”? By “We”?
Over the years, writers of various scholarly, literary and political temperaments have proposed answers.
One assumption that has guided generations of interpreters is that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and their collaborators meant a lot more than they said. Their simple words reflect deep learning and complicated agendas. Some historians have highlighted the influence of John Locke and other philosophers of the Enlightenment; others have emphasized the economic and political concerns of merchants, artisans and farmers in a prosperous outpost of the British Empire.
Those specific contexts and hidden meanings are important. But if the declaration remains relevant and vital for ordinary readers after 250 years, it may be for the opposite reason: Its writers said so much more than they meant. The genius of the document lies not in the original, local intentions that might be excavated from it, but in the meanings that later generations have projected onto it.
Unlike its younger sibling, the U.S. Constitution, the declaration isn’t an instruction manual. Interpreting it isn’t the job of tenured specialists. It belongs to the secular realms of politics and literature, which means that it lives to be adapted, quoted (and misquoted), wrenched out of its original bearings and repurposed.
The contradictions and limitations of the historical text are self-evident. The founders proclaimed liberty in a slave-owning society. They could hardly have anticipated the raucous, pluralistic, self-polarizing democracy the United States would become. (For what it’s worth they didn’t, in 1776, imagine what we know as the United States at all, but rather 13 autonomous, loosely affiliated political entities.) They wrote, as everyone does, in the heat of a chaotic present and in the face of an unknowable future.
That future, a succession of chaotic presents, including the one we now occupy, has looked back at those men gathered in Philadelphia as signers of an as yet uncashed check.
Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg cited the words of the declaration as a promise to be, however belatedly, fulfilled.
And nearly 100 years later, at the March on Washington, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. warned that the check had bounced.
For Lincoln and King, the declaration functions as both a sacred text and an unfulfilled promise. The conditions that it holds to be self-evident in that second sentence did not, at the time it was written, exist in any known reality. Whether they subsequently did or ever could is the subject of debates that have more or less defined our politics ever since, but the ringing confidence of the statement has not diminished.
The source of that confidence, the conviction that gives the prose its bracing clarity, lies in the founders’ understanding of what they were against. Liberty and equality were ideals yet to be realized, but tyranny was a fact. The main body of the declaration is devoted to describing its manifestations in exacting detail — taxing the colonists without their consent, suspending their legislatures, keeping standing armies among them — in order to justify the radical and unprecedented disruption of the status quo put forth at the beginning.
The invocation of self-evident truths and inherent rights is a warrant for the destruction of existing order, a rhetorical erasure not only of the divine right of kings but also, more generally, of the prerogatives of power.
This is a revolutionary document. Many years after it was written, when the world, emerging from the Napoleonic Wars, seemed to be entering an era of reaction and retrenchment, Jefferson wrote to Adams that “the flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776 have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism. On the contrary they will consume those engines, and all who work them.”
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