Anglospherics

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.