Front Burner - Hope for democracy in 2022

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

Just over a month into 2022, Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation” in Ukraine, and set the tone for what looked like an ominous year for global democracy. High-stakes elections in Hungary, Brazil, the U.S., Israel, and the Philippines put core issues of democracy on the ballot, and it was anyone’s guess how things would turn out. In some cases, authoritarianism made gains. But some regimes best positioned to challenge democracy for its global influence also saw policy failures, and signs of public resistance. Today, Vox senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp on why 2022 was a surprisingly good year for democracy, and how it exposed the fundamental weaknesses of authoritarian political models.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. 2022 has been a year of major political shifts around the world. The war in Ukraine, explosive protest movements in Iran and China, and critical elections in Brazil and the United States. And according to my guest today, all of those stories point to 2022 actually being a surprisingly good year for democracy.

One that revealed some ways in which democratic systems have strength over autocratic ones. And that despite very real threats against it, people around the world decided democracy is still something worth fighting for. To talk about all of this, I'm once again joined by Vox senior correspondent, Zach Beecham. Hi, Zach. Thanks so much for coming back on FrontBurner so soon. It's great to have you. Oh, yeah. Hey, look, I'm always happy to be back. And it's always fun to tape in Canada, where I am right now visiting relatives. Yes, it is very good to have you and your family here in this country. So thank you. Thank you.

So take me back to the early months of 2022 and how you were feeling about where democracy seemed to be heading globally at that time. So it was an ominous looking year early on, right? So there were a lot of things, some of which were anticipated, like elections scheduled in the United States, in Brazil, in Israel, in the Philippines, and in Hungary, where to varying degrees, there were core issues of democracy on the ballot. And no one was quite sure where they were going to go. But there were some signs in some of these cases that things were looking pretty bad.

And then in February, we got what looked to be pretty much the worst news for global democracy in quite some time, which was the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And the reason that we thought that was sort of twofold, right? First, the invasion challenged one of the most fundamental norms of what people like to call the liberal international order, the basic arrangement and setup of the world, roughly since World War II. And the most fundamental norm of that was you can't conquer other countries and steal their territory. It's understood to be a general rule of international relations that even the most autocratic countries felt the need to abide by most of the time. If they didn't, they would

face significant consequences. That's been an important part of creating a global environment in which democratic countries can feel safe and can survive and prosper and democracy in general can take root in the world. And the second reason is that it threatened peace and stability on the European continent itself. So it is an operation to protect people, says Vladimir Putin, as he says that NATO expansion and its use of Ukraine's territory has become unacceptable to Russia. He admits clashes between Russian and Ukrainian forces are inevitable, to Russia. He admits clashes between Russian and Ukrainian forces are inevitable, as he tells Russian people in a surprise address that he has authorized a special military operation in the

east of Ukraine. Now, that came off. This is Russia going into another country, trying to annex all this territory. And it was very clear from the beginning that this is a war of regime change and conquest, basically putting itself on NATO's doorstep, right, given where just geographically where Ukraine is, and, you know, potentially creating the conditions for a very, very, very serious flashpoint between, you know, Cold War style, basically, between the West and the former Soviet Union. Whoever would try to stop us and create further threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia's response will be immediate and lead you to such consequences that you have never faced in your history. We are ready for any outcome. And so it seemed like we were entering and moving into a

world that was just much more dangerous and more threatening to that democracy, even in its, maybe its historic heartland, arguably, you know, the European continent. This is probably the most dangerous moment in what is the biggest security crisis that Europe has faced for decades. This really gloomy sense that we were entering into a disastrous year for the state of democracy, particularly in Europe, centered on the notion that Russia would be able to conquer Ukraine without too much difficulty. Russian troop numbers have continued

to rise. For some time, it was estimated there were about 100,000 troops around Ukraine's borders. That estimate has risen to 130,000. Russia has also been moving thousands of troops into Belarus here to the north for what it says are military exercises. Exercises taking place just a few hundred miles from the capital city of Ukraine, Kiev. Right, that they would, you know, maybe it would take a few months or so on. But, you know, some projections that it would take just as little as three days. Yeah, and that's certainly what Russia seemed to believe when they went in. I remember when this special military operation started, there was a sense that Kiev could fall within days. That's right.

There's one report that that was actually the U.S. intelligence estimate, though I haven't seen that report corroborated other than one Fox News article. And it just didn't turn out that way, right, for a variety of reasons. But what this meant in the macro picture is all of a sudden, instead of this being a demonstration that authoritarianism is on the march, that there's a future of instability and threat towards NATO alliance countries, which could potentially trigger a third world war. Russia has had to rely on a lot of external support and is still underperforming militarily, and in fact, has been losing ground for the past several months since a Ukrainian offensive in the fall has really pushed Russia back, even in the amount of territory it has managed to take. So in doing so, it has proved that, you know, sort of this particular country,

which seemed like it might be able to pose a significant threat to democracy in the European continent, is struggling and in fact is proving that it's not very capable at the thing it was supposed to be good at. That's the other thing, right? Like Russia does not have a government that other countries admire. It doesn't have an especially dynamic economy. It doesn't have an ideological system that attracted significant interest from political factions around the world. Its thing, Russia's great source of strength, aside from oil, was its military. That was supposed to be and had been for the past years, primarily how Russia had exercised power abroad. All of a sudden,

the Russian military is looking not just weak, but extraordinarily weak. President Vladimir Putin and his army are being humiliated in Ukraine. Russia has announced its imminent withdrawal from the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, the only regional capital it has captured since February's full-scale invasion. In a rare admission of a setback, Russia's saying it's not fleeing, it's regrouping. U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley saying well over 100,000 Russian soldiers have either been killed or wounded in the nine-month war so far. Some Russian soldiers, plagued with poor morale, lack of fuel and food, have, quote, surrendered en masse or sabotaged their own vehicles to avoid fighting. The Ukrainians in their counteroffensive have managed to gain more territory,

some 9,000 square kilometers. That's more territory than what Russia has been able to gain in five months. The probability of Russia achieving its strategic objectives of conquering Ukraine, of overrunning Ukraine, is close to zero. So a number of analysts have argued that Russia hasn't succeeded in this war in the way that they were expected to because of a kind

of structural issue in terms of how Vladimir Putin has been running his government. And tell me more about that. That's right. It's helpful to understand how politics works in authoritarian countries. There's a lot of internal jockeying and complex different kinds of political engagement in an authoritarian state. And even if we're just talking about the elites, not sort of ordinary people in that country, a lot of the political concerns orient around power struggles, like sort of different palace dynamics, you know, like roughly speaking, but not quite like Game of Thrones. You've got people competing over who

gets to be in the big chair, who's in positions to influence the person in the big chair. And so authoritarian leaders have a tendency to structure their governments around ensuring that there isn't a kind of Game of Thrones dynamic where people are working to topple them from the inside to prevent primarily against military coups and any kind of internal political threat. So what this means in part, the technical term for this in the literature, the academic literature is coup-proofing, right? They create a system where the primary imperative is not the government works well, but that government is subject to their whims. And now that's typically used to discuss why militaries of authoritarian countries

are weaker than they should be, right? The context of coup proofing. You basically promote not good generals, but generals who you can count on. That's what's happened in Russia. It's not exactly coup proofing because Putin was never at serious risk, but he has structured a lot of his regime,

including the military, including the internal security services, around ensuring that his loyalists are in positions of influence and power, right? And that everyone is afraid of him and that information, accurate information, doesn't necessarily filter up to the top because you don't want to tell Putin something he doesn't want to hear because his power is so unchecked that that's how you lose your job, right? This is a characteristic problem of authoritarian regimes just baked into the nature of what it is, the incentive structure that leaders face there.

Right. You don't necessarily have people around you who are going to say like, I don't know if this is a good plan to take over Ukraine or I'm not sure if our troops are up to the task here, that kind of stuff. Yeah, they don't. And also that structure can replicate on down the line, right? Like you can debate how linked corruption in the military is to Putin's top level structuring of the regime. You can debate the extent to which people, certain generals in Russia are competent.

But what you can't debate based on the evidence that we have right now, is that Russia invaded Ukraine on the basis of a plan that almost nobody knew in advance, even inside the Russian military and government. It was dreamed up based on Putin's own personal ideas. He wrote this very lengthy essay about how Ukraine was part of Russia, and it was an artificial construct to separate those two things. And as a result of Bolshevik's policy, the Soviet Ukraine was created. And we have every reason to say now that it's Ukraine created by Vladimir Lenin. He is its creator and architect. And this led him to believe, a belief that was reinforced by his own intelligence services,

that Ukraine would just fold if Russia moved in and they could just move very quickly right into Kiev, the capital. And we know the assumptions that the plan was shaped on and we know that it was the product of essentially Putin having a bunch of yes men around him who are unwilling to tell him or maybe didn't even know themselves.

Right. Because they were not very competent. Let's keep pulling on this thread and talk about some more examples about the way that authoritarian regimes are structured and how that's led to massive challenges for them this year. And there have been a few authoritarian regimes that have seen huge protest movements this year. The first is Iran, right? The protests there started in September after a 22-year-old, Masa Amini, died in police custody. 22-year-old Masa Amini died in police custody. And they're still going on more than 90 days later, even in the face of this ruthless government crackdown, which has included public hangings of protesters. And you've written in this piece about how the strength of these protests demonstrate another element of what we're talking about, this authoritarian information problem.

And flesh that out for me. So if the issue in Russia was like starting a new policy that was a bad idea and making a massive mistake, right, in invading Ukraine, one that has backfired spectacularly and fundamentally weakened Russia's position, the mistake in Iran is being unable to understand or grasp the depths of public oppositions to longstanding policy. Women in Iran set their headscarves on fire in fury. They are tired of the morality police beating them up and the Islamic Republic leaders who police their every move. So in this case, as you referenced, it's the policy of mandatory veiling in public that has been the centerpiece of the opposition, right, and the source of the protest movement. But the Iranian government had ways of channeling public dissent with its policy, or it was supposed to, in theory.

In Iran, Ali Khamenei, who is the supreme leader, has ultimate authority, but there also are lots of different structures, institutions like the Guardian Council, the presidency, that exercise different roles in the Iranian system. And the presidency in particular is an important one because it was seen as a kind of release valve for public anger from the more moderate and liberal segments of the Iranian population. You can elect a more moderate president if you want, and that will have some influence on the regime, even if the fundamental structure doesn't change. The morality police is still there, right? And so you had this in the election of Mohamed Khatami, when in 2009, it appears the government rigged the election. According to the government, hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cruised to a landslide

victory. However, that's not sitting well with supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi. His backers are alleging fraud and point out that the country's text messaging system has been down since the voting began, and several of his websites were blocked or difficult to reach. There were massive street protests. You may remember the Green Movement, as it was called, that had millions of Iranians on the street. the green movement, as it was called, had millions of Iranians on the street. Then in 2013, a reformist candidate was allowed to win again. And it seems like people were, there might be some improvements. The nuclear deal opened Iran up to the world. It was very popular among moderate and liberal segments of the Iranian population. So you have these different ways, right, of the regime, if not like making people happy, at least making them feel more like the government wasn't just being forced on them.

Yeah, that there was some kind of representation. Right. So things changed in 2021, in this election, when the regime's favorite candidate for the president, an ultra hardliner called Ibrahim Raisi, basically was handed the election, by which I mean the government disqualified, before any votes were cast, all of the viable opposition candidates. In a surprising and controversial move, Ali Larijani, the three-term former Speaker of Parliament and advisor to the Supreme Leader, has not qualified. Neither has the current vice president, Ishaq Jahangiri. Former two-term president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was also stopped from participating. It means the moderate and reformist blocs in Iran don't have prominent candidates to take part in the election. What this meant is that people who had some faith in the system, or at least were willing to try to reform it from the inside, lost it pretty much entirely in that election.

Turnout hit a record low in Iranian elections. The Iranian government wasn't capable of registering how upset people were about the direction, the way that things were going, about elevating an ultra hardliner, about its failure to get back into the nuclear deal, which is still under negotiations. It created a situation where without the kind of circumscribed democracy that they had, they didn't have as good tools for gauging the nature of public opinion. So when Raisi comes into office, one thing that he does is escalate enforcement

of quote-unquote public decency rules, rules like the veiling requirements. And he seemed not to have anticipated how unpopular this would be and how frustrated people were with the government and how angry they were and how willing to take to the streets. And that's what happened, right? Now you have just a really like

a regime threatening kind of protest, right? I'm not saying the Iranian government is going to fall. I'm saying it is a possibility. And not just the women that have been fighting this for decades, but they were joined by such a huge cross-section of people. That's right. They're pan-Iranian protests. I don't know when our protests will come to an end, but today Iranian society is more awakened than ever and we are ready for big changes. Isn't this clear from the very beautiful slogan of this revolution? Women, life, freedom. Everyone who has some grievance with the Islamic Republic government has been activated. And again,

all of this goes back to the government's inability not only to understand the depths of public opposition to their policies, but to do anything that could ameliorate it. It's an example both of the information problem that we've been talking about, but also about a kind of rigidity created by the ideology that has to prop up certain kinds of authoritarian states, in this case, a theocratic ideology, but one that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for the government to abandon ship on a policy that threatens half of the population existentially. So now to China, do you think similar things were going on there? A combination of information plus rigidity.

Of course, of course, China saw incredible protests this year over COVID-19 policies. It's years of pent up anger. This is three years of draconian lockdowns that have cost people's lives, their livelihoods. But the trigger for this wave of protests was a deadly fire in Xinjiang that killed at least 10 people. Videos of the scene indicated that COVID restrictions prevented victims from getting help. But these protesters, not just angry about COVID lockdowns, they're also targeting their anger towards the Supreme Leader himself. You know, they certainly, I think it's fair to say, weren't as large as Iran's protests, but the largest that we've seen in China since Tiananmen Square.

Yes, that's right. In recent years, Xi Jinping has moved China in a more authoritarian direction. And I mean that in two senses, right? The first one is that he has increased restrictions on personal freedom, right, over what was already a pretty restrictive regime to begin with prior to his seizing of power. And the second is that he's consolidated power in his own hands. Under Xi Jinping, the elite has become subordinate to him and you have a system that looks more and more like Russia's where all the power is in the hands of one guy.

So it's not a partyocracy anymore. It's pretty much what political scientists would call a personalist autocracy. And personalist autocracies suffer from this information problem particularly badly. It's one guy who's in charge, not a bunch of different people getting information from different sources, but one person who consolidates power around himself and elevates people primarily for personal loyalty, not loyalty to a structure or to a government. So it's tempting to say that China's zero COVID failure this year is just sort of an outgrowth of its move to personalism under Xi Jinping. I don't think that's the whole story, but it's definitely part of it, right? So, I mean, what happened in China is that Xi decided not only were we going to adopt a zero COVID policy, but we were going to make it the calling card of Chinese power and success relative to what was happening in the West. We have protected the people's health and safety to the greatest extent possible and make tremendous encouraging achievements in both epidemic response and economic and social

development. The government had started crowing about a zero COVID policy as being a success because they haven't had subsequent major outbreaks in the way that we've had. And that looked like a sort of tenable position for them to take right up until the Omicron wave hit. Omicron spread. It was so infectious, the strictest lockdowns that one of the world's most capable authoritarian governments tried to put in place couldn't contain its spread. Part of the problem with Xi Jinping turning COVID and COVID response into like a sort of ideological proof for the Chinese system of government is that when it failed, he couldn't abandon it quickly without admitting that

those arguments were flawed and that maybe his government wasn't so much better than Western governments. So he didn't. He refused to and refused to learn from the experiences other countries have. They were so confident in their own model that they sleepwalked into disaster and now are facing a nightmare, right? Because they didn't understand their own population's resistance to the heavy lockdowns because there's no democratic source for input. They were forced by the public basically to back down because they were afraid of this protest movement growing.

COVID restrictions are being eased little by little across China. On Wednesday, another small but significant step. Outside care homes, hospitals, schools and other special places, proof of negative tests and QR codes will no longer be required. There will also be no more checks on people who move across regions. People will also no longer be required to carry out a check when they arrive in another city. Now we've got the conditions for a just gigantic, gigantic outbreak in China, because there isn't any natural immunity and there's not nearly enough vaccine-induced immunity. So over the winter, when COVID is most likely to spread, my guess is that

we are about to see suffering on a scale that may be hard for us to understand given the size of the Chinese population. Yeah. And I think we're already starting to see some preliminary reports that it's kind of heading, heading potentially in that direction. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Look, we've talked about authoritarian regimes that have seen real challenges this year.

But there were places where authoritarianism won, right? Like this is an all good news story as much as I would love to deliver that before Christmas. So tell me about that. democratic governments is not coming from places like Russia, China, and Iran. It's coming from inside their own countries, coming from their own electorates, empowering leaders with authoritarian inclinations. And then once in power, these people change the rules to ensure that they can't lose or allow them to engage in behavior that makes it very, very, very difficult for the opposition to win. Oftentimes, there's no functional difference between those two things. And when you look at that particular variant of authoritarianism, the rise of what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, or sometimes electoral authoritarianism, where you keep elections, but just make sure that the outcome is basically predetermined, what you find is a bit of a mixed bag.

So starting with the bad news, as you mentioned, in Hungary, the government of Viktor Orban, who's maybe the most savvy and impressive competitive authoritarian entrepreneur in the world. And this year was a good test of his hold on power. So he faced a major election in which the opposition parties all ran on a shared ticket with one goal, take out Orban, and they lost by a pretty resounding margin. Orban maintained a two-thirds majority in parliament. Nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban has won a large majority in Sunday's parliamentary election. That means he will serve a fourth consecutive term in office, his fifth overall. That is not a reflection of authentic Hungarian public opinion, though Orban does have truly hardcore committed supporters. It's a testament to how effectively

he has set up the system such that it's very, very difficult when using everything from gerrymandering to state control in the media to ensure that it will be nearly impossible, probably impossible, to topple him at the ballot box. So that was one piece of real bad news, the resiliency of the Hungarian system. In the Philippines, you saw an election that was a kind of coronation of a new generation of leaders who have no respect for liberal democratic norms. You move from Rodrigo Duterte to the new leader, Bongbong Marcos, who is the son of the former dictator. Once a disgraced family ousted from the presidential palace in 1986

amidst charges of corruption and brutality, the Marcos family looks set to return with the people's backing. The Marcoses now promise a return to a golden age of economic prosperity. But critics say they've used social media to whitewash the sins of their past. And his vice president is Sarah Duterte, the daughter of the outgoing president, indicating that power in the Philippines is not transferring in the way that it might in a country where democracy was stronger between different factions. But there's an elite, a familial elite, that is consolidating its own control.

So that's a worrying shift there. Also bad news. Yes, also bad. And probably worth mentioning Israel here, I think. That's right. Yes. So Israel had an election. They've had a lot of elections recently.

And it was because of a sort of difficult, polarized situation where you had a set of far-right political parties consolidating around the former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is currently on trial for corruption charges, including, and this is very important, attempting to rig media coverage in his favor. Now, he's prime minister again. And because he won the November election, he and his factions, finally a decisive victory for one of the two sides, right? Because the other side, like in Hungary, was a whole slate of ideologically distinct parties, again, ranging from the far right to the left, consolidating on an anti-Netanyahu platform, and like, let's defend israeli democracy

for him now he's coming into power with parties that are i think some of them are ultra-orthodox religious parties um there's an anti-lgbt party in there there's and then there's the the most worrying party which is there's no other way to say this but it's a neo-fascist party, right, called Jewish Power. And they have shot up in popularity. The leader, Itamar Ben-Gavir, has become a sort of cult icon among a certain segment of the Israeli electorate. And Ben-Gavir and another far-right party, Religious Zionism, led by Bezalel Smotrich, now have pretty significant power over Israeli internal security and over the administration of the occupation of the West Bank. One of their main priorities

is to pass a law that allows the Knesset, which is their parliament, to override Supreme Court rulings. The Supreme Court is like one of the last institutions in Israel that is really working to preserve the rights of minority groups and left-wing dissidents against a state that has become increasingly willing to marginalize them and even limit their freedom of expression. So the situation in Israel is grim. It's not clear how much of the sort of authoritarian agenda this coalition will be able to accomplish during its time in power.

But laws like the Supreme Court override law. There's another law that might immunize Netanyahu from prosecution, enabling him to return to his old trying-to-seize-control-of-the-media Orban-style politics. It could get quite bad in the next few years. So, like, we spent so much time today talking about authoritarian governments and governments kind of really doing the authoritarian thing. But Zach, do we have a sense of how democracy is doing globally this year? I do get this is a pretty big question, and we could probably talk about it all day, but it would have been on the other side of the ledger.

Yeah, look, I mean, I just cited a few examples of countries where democracy had taken some hits, democratic countries, or at least previously democratic countries that have started going down an authoritarian pathway. That kind of thing has become more common. But but in two really, really important democracies, you had some good news this year. And I think that's led me to an overall optimistic picture. And I'll say why. But first, I want to detail what happened in those two countries. The United States, as I'm sure your listeners know, had midterm elections. And in the midterm elections, there were a lot of people who

denied the outcome of the 2020 election on the ballot. Yeah. And they got wiped. Yes. They won in some elections, right? In congressional elections, some statewide offices. But in the key swing states, there were two positions that would have given them the ability to actually influence electoral outcomes, being the governor of a state and being the state secretary of state, which is like the highest position administering, among other things, the state's electoral system. And in the six most important swing states, you don't have an election denier in any of those positions. And it's not that they didn't run for them. It's that they were defeated in most cases in general

elections. A Republican lost, a Democrat won. But in Georgia, you had two Republicans who had pretty vocally and publicly resisted Trump's efforts to get them to change the election results in 2020, right, they both won, which is kind of stunning to me. I really didn't expect that going in. And so that was a real sign of democratic resilience in the United States, which had been had taken so many democratic body blows recently, that it was very encouraging to see that to see that there was a certain level of commitment from the voters there to continuing and perpetuating a democratic system, or at the very least to rejecting people who told outlandish lies. Just to push back on this a little bit, I get that this is a good news example when

we're talking about democracy in the US. But this is a country where, for example, the Supreme Court is currently weighing a case that could majorly impact voting rights by freeing the states to make their own rules about gerrymandering and voting rules. So is it fair to say that none of what we're talking about here is to suggest that all is well with the state of American democracy, right? Yeah, or global democracy, right? It's like this is a complex story with a lot of different moving parts. We've got a few pieces of good news that speak to some of the fundamental weaknesses of authoritarian political models and some of the sources of the strength and resilience of democratic ones. Like in the US, yeah, you had a critical mass of voters coming out to reject functionally speaking authoritarian candidates. And that's good, but doesn't mean we're out of the woods. of the woods. On the democracy beat, when things have been so bad for so many years, right, there's one report this year that said the level of global democracy was the lowest it's been since 1989,

which was when the Berlin Wall fell, right, putting us right back to the Cold War. Like, that's really scary. And so to take good news when you get it in really big and influential countries like the United States or Brazil, which had a presidential election this year, right, and the candidate, the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, lost. And he was making a lot of noise about not accepting the results. And he still hasn't said he lost, but he hasn't done what he threatened to do in the past and call in the military, right? Brazil had a military coup not that long ago in the 60s, right? It was under military rule for about 20 years. And yet, the Brazilian elite seemed to say, you're not going to do this to Bolsonaro. You had some of his allies coming out and saying the results were legitimate right after the

election. He filed a lawsuit. It got smacked down. Some of his supporters tried to riot and attack a police station in Brasilia. The riot accomplished basically nothing. Brazil is, you know, by some standards, a very young democracy, post-military coup, right, emerging really in the 80s. And yet, it showed an impressive amount of resilience in the face of somebody who seemed to really want to go back. I don't know, right? Like, that to me is a suggestion that something is going well in certain important places and that other ones that might be positioned to challenge democracy for its global influence, most notably Russia and China, but also to a lesser degree Iran,

those regimes have experienced major, not only like policy failures, but also signs of public resistance of people not wanting the governments to continue in the nature that they currently do. You had protesters in China calling for elections, right? There are protests in China on a semi-regular basis, but people calling for elections because it's so dangerous, yeah, you almost never hear it. It's tentatively promising. Is the arc of history bending towards justice? Not necessarily. Do we have good signs? Do we have things that should encourage people who want to work on behalf of global democracy to fight for it, to donate to activist organizations, to participate in activism themselves? Should those people be emboldened, the people who are

on the front lines? Yeah, they should be heartened by what happened this year. It was on balance good, even if there were still dark spots and even if the fight to protect democracy from the new kinds of authoritarianism propping up around the world isn't over. Zach, you know, this is our last episode of the year that we're doing with you. Oh, really? And I'm heartened that we're going to go into the new year with the overarching message that things are tentatively optimistic, which I'll take. So thank you. Wow. I look, I very rarely get to say, hey, look at the good news. And so it's really nice for someone who writes about the depressing stuff in the world to be able to like end the year on a semi-optimistic note, even if it's not, you know, fully everything's great.

Well, a very happy holidays for you. Thank you so much for coming by. Thank you. All right. So as I just mentioned, this is our last timely episode of the year, but please don't take us off your rotation. We've got some great episodes running next week from some of our colleagues at CBC Podcasts, and we're re-airing some of our favorite episodes of the year. Thank you to you all so much for listening this year. You have been wonderful, and wishing you all and all of your friends and all of your families such a wonderful and happy holidays, And we will see you in the new year.

Frontburner was produced this week by Shannon Higgins, Imogen Burchard, Lauren Donnelly, Sam Connor, Derek Vanderwyk, and Allie Janes. Our sound design was by Sam McNulty. Our music is by Joseph Chabison. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos. And I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.