Long War

WHEN YOU CAN’T EVEN FAKE OUT THE RUBES ANYMORE

Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua plans to scrap elections – what that says about today’s autocrats (Felix Wiebrecht, July 27, 2026, The Conversation)

Nicaragua’s elections have long been rigged and repressive. But this marks a new scale of authoritarian rule. The elimination of elections is a rare and extreme case, even in today’s landscape of authoritarian regimes. So this reflects a worrying trend of brazenness on the part of Nicaragua’s president.

Most modern autocrats are what researchers call “spin dictators”. They invest in a democratic disguise and the careful curation of a public image fostered by propaganda and misinformation. Elections play a central role in this playbook.

Hence, most authoritarian regimes nowadays hold somewhat competitive multiparty elections – and only a handful of regimes have resisted the turn towards elections that took off in the 1990s and 2000s. Among those are primarily hereditary monarchies such as Saudi Arabia and Brunei and the one-party state of Eritrea ruled by the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ).

While there are differences in how non-democracies design their elections, they all share a playing field that is inherently tilted towards the incumbents. Widely used methods include restricting ballot access for genuine opposition candidates, manipulating electoral commissions and courts to favour the incumbent and controlling media coverage. Incumbents also have the power to deploy state resources for campaigning while harassing or co-opting opposition figures.

FAILURE TO DENAZIFY WAS TRAGIC:

Reagan was right about Daniel Ortega all along (Jon Miltimore, July 25, 2026, Restoring America)

Ortega, the son of a shoemaker, first came to power in 1979 after dropping out of law school to join the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a socialist revolutionary movement. He became an unapologetic disciple not just of Karl Marx but also of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik revolutionary who brought terror as well as revolution to Russia.

“I admire Marx, I respect Marx, as I also admire and respect Lenin,” Ortega told the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s.

Like the Bolsheviks, Ortega had little hesitation about expropriating private property, helping himself to the luxurious mansion of a wealthy banker. Throughout the 1980s, Ortega implemented a familiar socialist playbook: nationalizing industries, redistributing wealth, and radically reallocating land, all while enjoying the spoils of what capitalists had built.

President Ronald Reagan famously dismissed Ortega as a “dictator in designer glasses.” Yet many argued Ortega was a reformer disinterested in personal power.

The desire to accommodate remnants of prior regimes–particularly the army and judges–is admirable, but disastrous.

THE ENDARKENMENT:

The Illusion of Madame Récamier (Adam Sandonato, July 21st, 2026, Imaginative Conservative)

In other words, during the course of the Enlightenment, man truly became the measure of all things. By being reduced to his mere physicality, he became both an object of social control through seemingly innocuous behavioral standards—such as we find in Chesterfield—and an object open to radical distortion and experimentation—such as we find in Sade and Shelley. In the quest to rationalize the body, and therefore separate it from its metaphysical dimension, eighteenth-century society did not eliminate the darker impulses, the passions, and the brokenness inherent in man’s fallen state. Instead, it pushed them to the fringes, consigned to the sick imaginings of Sade’s Juliette and of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.

Here we arrive at the chief issue with the Enlightenment: the idea that the persistent application of reason can cure all of the ills of mankind. In Földényi’s words,

The belief in the omnipotence of reason that illuminates all phenomena—similar to the sun—is the great inheritance of the Enlightenment. Thinking, of course, ever since humans have existed, has always tried to disperse the darkness. Earlier individuals did not cherish the illusion that here on earth they would be able to liquidate every shadow and every darkness. During the Enlightenment, however, the conviction that only time and intellectual preparation were required in order to eventually cast light upon all things—with no dark corners remaining anywhere unilluminated by the light of reason—became resolute.[11]

As a critic and philosopher of art, Földényi is preoccupied with the “duality” between light and darkness, much like a composer is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between tension and release. What Földényi sees in the Enlightenment is man’s attempt to assert his autonomy over light and darkness, with the express purpose of eliminating the latter through the use of rational control.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Why Fascists Admired Keynes’s Economics: Keynes saw centralized economic direction as an improvement on market coordination. This provided cover to later corporatist authoritarians who wanted to control every aspect of life. (John Phelan, July 23, 2026, Daily Economy)

Keynes believed, according to his biographer, the economist Roy Harrod, that “the government of Britain was and would continue to be in the hands of an intellectual aristocracy,” of which he was part. He supported economic central planning, via corporatism, because he assumed that enlightened experts like himself, a leading member of the Bloomsbury group, not a goon like Mussolini, would be doing the planning. He underestimated the political dangers of replacing decentralized decision-making with central planning, assuming that economic freedom could be curtailed without curtailing other freedoms.

But if we can excuse such a belief held in 1926 as naivety, how can we excuse it still held ten years later when fascism’s true nature was becoming apparent? In September 1936, Keynes wrote in the preface to the German edition of his masterpiece, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, that “the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of the production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.”

If a totalitarian state is the price we must pay for the Keynesian “theory of output” to be put into practice, it is not a price worth paying. Likewise, if laissez-faire was the economic manifestation of political liberalism, then its death was to be mourned, not celebrated. If economic freedom is surrendered, other freedoms follow. “The economy” is just people acting, and one can only control “the economy” by controlling people.

CHANGE THE REGIME:

A Family’s Daring Escape From North Korea ‘to Live and Stand Tall’ (Choe Sang-Hun, July 21, 2026, NY Times)

Rain lashed a flimsy wooden boat as it tossed through a churning sea, its engine straining against the swell. Under the cover of a stormy night three years ago, the vessel was fleeing North Korea.

On board were nine people, including two small children and a woman who was six months pregnant. Only a couple of the passengers had seafaring experience. They eluded a patrol ship, speeding across the world’s most heavily guarded maritime border.

Soon after their boat lurched into South Korean waters, a high-speed warship of the South’s navy bore down on it, tearing the water in aggressive circles. Snipers on the vessel trained their laser sights on the chests of the three adult men on the wooden boat.

Through a loudspeaker, a voice boomed: “Are you lost? Engine trouble?”

The North Koreans shouted: “Please help. We are defecting.”

The red dots remained stubbornly fixed on their chests. The South Koreans were taking no chances: The three men were clad in North Korean military uniforms, camouflage for a high-stakes escape. Desperate, the men shouted into the boat’s cramped hold for the other passengers to emerge in order to prove that they were civilians. From below, the two children, a 5-year-old girl and 3-year-old boy, were hauled up first, both pale and wasted from seasickness. Only then did the red dots drop off.

The North Koreans, led by Kim Il-hyeok and his younger brother, Yi-hyeok, were bound together by blood and marriage. The brothers, both in their 30s at the time, were accompanied by their mother and their families: Il-hyeok’s partner, who was pregnant, and Yi-hyeok’s wife, their two children, his mother-in-law and brother-in-law.

The family, who defected in 2023, were among the few who managed to escape North Korea after its leader, Kim Jong-un, imposed a crushing lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic. They arrived in their adopted country with rare insights into a nation that had been choked off from the outside world. Some details of their escape have not been previously reported.

“That night,” said Yi-hyeok’s wife, Yu-mi, “we crossed from a sea of darkness to a sea of freedom.”

As Reagan said at Bitburg:

Twenty-two years ago President John F. Kennedy went to the Berlin Wall and proclaimed that he, too, was a Berliner. Well, today freedom-loving people around the world must say: I am a Berliner. I am a Jew in a world still threatened by anti-Semitism. I am an Afghan, and I am a prisoner of the Gulag. I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am a Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.

The one lesson of World War II, the one lesson of nazism, is that freedom must always be stronger than totalitarianism and that good must always be stronger than evil. The moral measure of our two nations will be found in the resolve we show to preserve liberty, to protect life, and to honor and cherish all God’s children.

LITERALLY ADAPTATION:

Europe May Never Be Cool, but It Can Be Air Conditioned: The continent’s political class needs to get over its aversion to life-saving technology. (J.D. Tuccille, 7.6.2026, reason)

“I’m horrified by the people who tell me you can put air conditioning everywhere. You think it will avoid forest fires?” France’s Minister of Ecological Transition Monique Barbut huffed in June, even as temperatures soared and the World Health Organization (WHO) reported more than 1,300 deaths in Europe just since June 21 because of high temperatures. After conceding the need for emergency leniency to permit the use of cooling technology, she complained, “It is not adaptation to climate change.”