The Dead and the Dying

Let's help global autocracy die.

Illustration by Riley Levine

They always think they’ve cracked the code.

From the gilded, Saddam’s Brothel stylings of today’s White House to the sterile, long-tabled madness of the Kremlin, to 50,000 sq ft baronial lodges in the forests outside Budapest, the would-be strongmen of the world share a singular, delusional fantasy: that they have finally figured out how to kill history.

They believe that with enough surveillance tech by their little friends in Silicon Valley, enough flood-the-zone propaganda, enough offshore bank accounts, and enough willingness to use violence against their own people, they can build a perpetual motion machine of human misery.

They think they’ve moved past the messy, “obsolete” era of consent and into a permanent state of command.

I am not, as you are all quite aware by now, a ray of sunshine, but I take this morning’s essay to remind you that three of the world’s worst, most abusive, most poisonously anti-democratic leaders are dead or dying, both physically and politically.

Look closely at the screen this morning, folks. The Strongman era isn’t ascending; it’s entering the hospice phase, that end-stage smell of decline and decay, putting one of the key test cases of the techno-authoritarian dream on life support.

Elon Musk, Alex Karp, and Peter Thiel may want a sleek Blade Runner dystopia where they control the masses through surveillance and brutality, but it’s still a future we can kill before it’s too late. In the political global alt-right, the wheels are coming off for three of today’s worst: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Viktor Orban. Instead of a flying car, these mooks are behind the wheel of a Soviet-era Lada screaming at the dashboard as if that will make the engine start again

.For years, the Bannonite “national-conservative” set looked at Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as the North Star. It was their laboratory for illiberal democracy, a place where you could maintain the aesthetic of a republic while gutting its soul. They flocked to Budapest to sip Tokaji and marvel at how easy it was to capture a state by simply rewriting the rules of the game until only one player could ever win.

America’s techno-authoritarians, political authoritarians, and white nationalist authoritarians (yes, the Venn diagram overlaps meaningfully) loved Orban with the heat usually reserved for melting Grindr servers at CPAC.

Well, the laboratory is exploding.

As we sit here in 2026, Orban is staring down the barrel of an imminent, humiliating political defeat by a (and do pay attention, Democrats) by a young, center-right coalition who broke with the ruling party and became their most dangerous nightmare; a man who knows their tricks.

The myth of Orban’s invincibility has been shattered. The Orban Model was supposed to be the blueprint for the global MAGA future; a soft autocracy leading to a harder one where the media is neutered, the courts are packed with political loyalists, and the cronies are fed like a foie gras goose.

Instead, it’s a cautionary tale: you can’t feed a nation on a diet of pure grievance and absolutely lurid George Soros conspiracy fantasies forever. Eventually, the people realize they can’t eat “sovereignty,” and the Dear Leader becomes older, fatter, and more obviously greedy, just another corrupt bureaucrat in a good suit.

The Bannonite dream is hitting a wall of Hungarian reality, and the crash is going to be spectacular, but don’t underestimate how many lessons MAGA’s elite leadership class took from Orban.

Orban did one enormous favor for the pro-democracy side; he stopped pretending he was taking control of the economy for his friends, the government for his own protection, the schools and media for indoctrination, and the mantle of power for as long as he lived. (Once again…sound familiar?)

Then there’s the reigning autocrat himself, Vladimir Putin. As his special military operation continues to bleed Russia white, both in literal blood and in the flight of its brightest minds, its economy, and its demographic future, the paranoia has reached a fever pitch.

He’s shuffling his cabinet like a deck of greasy cards, looking for anyone who hasn’t realized yet that the emperor has no clothes (and no tanks, air defense systems, no Black Sea fleet, and after China, just one meaningful international ally left in the form of Donald Trump). He’s surrounding himself with yes-men who are too terrified to tell him that the map doesn’t match the ground.

The Kremlin is now trying to pull the plug on the Russian internet, a desperate, late-stage attempt to turn the Runet into a digital North Korea. They want to entirely ban Telegram, which is a deeply-wired part of Russian online life, throttle the broadband, and force 140 million people into a state-sanctioned coma. It’s the ultimate admission of failure. If your regime is so brittle that a few memes and some honest reporting from the front lines can topple it, you aren’t a strongman.

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The brilliance of the Ukrainian campaign to cripple Russia’s entire oil-production and sales infrastructure is making life increasingly dangerous for Putin, who lived the techno-authoritarian dream without even bothering with most of the messy signifiers of democracy in the two decades. His claque of oligarchs and supporters is being bled white, and his campaign to win a war to stay in power has doomed Russia. (I know…that sounds familiar, right?)

Every night, Ukraine’s drones rule the skies over Putin’s Russia, hitting strategic, energy, and military targets without meaningful air defenses. Russians are locked in an inflation trap, soaring energy prices, a ruined economy, and there’s no convenient scapegoat. Even the most jaded Russians (and Russians, in my experience, can be pretty damn jaded) know Putin started this war and knows Putin wrecked their nation, and knows the only way he’s leaving is either out a third-story window, accidentally drinking a radioactive isotope, or the old-fashioned Tokarev-to-the-back-of-the-head method.

Putin’s days are numbered.

And that brings us to the home game.

This past weekend, millions of Americans took to the streets for yet another round of No Kings protests. From the Twin Cities to the reddest places in the reddest states (shoutout to the Village in Central Florida this weekend), the message was sent with a loud, clear, collective middle finger:

We don’t do royalty here.

The nascent Trump dictatorship, built on the fever dreams of tech-bro AI takeovers, Project 2025, retaliatory DOJ investigations, monstrous corruption, and a blatant disregard for the checks and balances that have held this experiment together for 250 years, has hit a wall of American resolve.

Trump’s attempt to wear the crown is failing not because he’s a genius, but because he’s a chaotic, cognitively declining narcissist.

Let’s be honest: Trump’s mental and physical health are doing the heavy lifting right now. The slurred speech, the confusion of names, the visible glitching on stage, his necromancer’s claw of a hand, are all increasingly obvious.

Biology is a cruel mistress to a man who wants to live forever as a deity. But we can’t just sit back and wait for the Last Hamberder to do its work.

We need a democratic wave this fall that doesn’t just win, but cleanses. We need to sweep the Vichy Republicans and the MAGA cultists out of power at every level, from the school board to the Senate. We need to remind the party of America’s would-be dictator that in this country, we don’t serve men; we serve the Constitution, the law, and America’s deep values.

As the brilliant Anne Applebaum has meticulously documented, these guys aren’t just lone wolves. They are part of a global club, which she called “Autocracy, Inc.” They don’t share an ideology; they share a business plan. They use the global economic system to wash their money and, increasingly, the digital world to control the populace.

“The members of Autocracy, Inc. aren’t linked by a unifying ideology... but by a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity.”

When they offer “concessions,” they are lying. When they hold “elections,” it’s just a feel-good DLC in a terrifying alternate reality game where they always hold the controller. They want you to think the game is rigged, so you stop playing. They want you to believe that everyone is corrupt, so you stop caring when they are corrupt.

The Soviet Union fell because it was a hollow shell of lies. China’s current trajectory toward hyper-surveillance, ahead of its massive demographic collapse in the mid-2030s, is a sign of fear, not strength. These regimes fall, but they never learn the lessons of their fall.

They always blame “foreign agents,” “deep state” saboteurs, or “traitors” rather than their own inherent rot. They can’t admit that freedom is a more powerful operating system than fear…if we do the work.

Some dictators end violently; it’s the occupational hazard of the job, the Ceaușescu exit. To be honest, I’m a big fan of it pour encourager les autres.

But for the sake of the American republic, we need to end this one politically. We need to defeat the apparatus of Trump, Trumpism, and their financial sponsors so soundly at the ballot box that the ideology itself becomes toxic.

Not just for the man at the top, but for the allies, the family members, the useful idiots, and the corrupt associates who enabled the evil. We need to treat them like the racketeers they are. Punish the corruption, seize the ill-gotten gains, claw back their profits and their payoffs, and make it clear that trying to overthrow the American experiment carries a price that no bank account can cover.

This is why I’m terrified the Democrats will win, but miss the reason they did. Yes, reversing the economic harms of Trump is important, but unless Democrats understand that the millions of people in the streets and the millions more who will race to the ballot box to destroy Trump and MAGA this fall are giving them power to end this regime from top to bottom.

The economy and accountability are the only real issues, and if Democrats screw this up because they think America wants to, there’s no second chance.

The worst dictators and strongmen in the world are dying, politically and physically.

But the men behind Trump, Orban, and Putin aren’t going away. The systems that they built to win and hold power aren’t going away. The greed, mania, and will to control aren’t going away.

Unless people are willing to truly fight for freedom and democracy to utterly and finally break the systems and the men who put them there, more will arise, powered by money and tech that makes today’s systems look primitive.