Leaders of democracies increasingly echo Putin in authoritarian tilt

Though hardly a champion of democracy, Russian President Vladimir Putin late last month delivered an address that would sound familiar — and, to many people, attractive — in democracies from the United States to much of Europe. Putin railed against expansive definitions of gender, calling the idea a “perversion,” part of a “complete denial of man [and an] overthrow of faith and traditional values” by “Western elites.”

“The world has entered a period of revolutionary transformations,” which Russia aims to resist, Putin said in a speech that echoed the rhetoric of Russia-friendly right-wing politicians in many democracies.

In the United States, former president Donald Trump has presumptively rejected future election results, and a majority of Republican candidates on the ballot this fall for major state and federal elective offices have joined him in repudiating the outcome of the 2020 presidential election — an epidemic of election denialism in the United States that historians and political scientists define as a core element in any country’s drift toward authoritarian rule.

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism heralded a new era of democratic governance and a huge expansion of global trade, that democratic wave has been replaced in many countries by a tide of authoritarianism.

The street demonstrations and passion for the freedom to travel, trade and speak out that brought down the Soviet empire seemed to promise a vast expansion of people power — and for a time, democracy broke out in most of the former satellite nations of the Eastern Bloc. Similarly, the Arab Spring revolutions that began in 2010 raised the promise — but no enduring reality — of democratization across the Middle East.

Recent years have brought a sharp reaction in many parts of the world, as globalization, political polarization, the rise of social media and a collapse of trust in major institutions have left many people feeling betrayed by their governments, torn apart from their careers and alone in their communities, according to historians, political scientists and sociologists who have studied these shifts in the world’s economies and governments.

The result has been a similar quest for nationalist solutions in country after country, and a growing bond among the far-right autocrats in those places. For example, Hungary’s prime minister, Victor Orban, and Italy’s likely…