TODAY’S READING

These are the books I downloaded In the last couple of days – with some explanatory notes - 

Educating the Germans – people and policy in the british zone of Germany 1945-49 

David Phillips (2018). I have a certain fixation about Germany. This is a book about
 the difficulty of making sense of the immediate post-war years in the country
Personal Impressions Isaiah Berlin (2014) Berlin was one of England’s most prolific writers 

and this is a great analysis of some of the key intellectuals of the 20th Century
Our Age – English intellectuals between the Wars – a group portrait Noel Annan (1990) 

Annan was an academic who knew everybody worth knowing 
History in our Time David Cannadine (1991) essays from an English historian
Dashing for the Post – the letters of Leigh-Fermor ed Adam Sisman (2016). Leigh-Fermor 

was you might call an “intrepid traveller” famous for walking through Germany, Austria, 

Romania and Bulgaria in the the 1930s  
Patrick Leigh-Fermor – Encounters between Budapest and Transylvania Michael O’Sullivan 

(2019). New insights on his his classic trilogy 
Joan - the remarkable Life of Joan Leigh-Fermor Simon Fenwick (2025) A debutante 

hardly worth bothering about 

5 Feb

The Death of  Men Allan Massie (1981) Massie (who died this week) was one of my favourite writers
Political English – language and the decay of politics Thomas Docherty (2019) An interesting take
tCulture, Community and Development ed Phillips et al (2020)
The Good Society Alan Draper (2013)
Get Carter a film with Michael Caine which is a classic gangster film
Capitalism – the future of an illusion Fred Block (2018) One of the best
The Progress Illusion – reclaiming our future from the fairlytale of economics 

Jon Erickson (2022) I’m always a sucker for critiques of economics
The Racial basis of Trump Support – important article
Identity Crisis – the 2016 presidential campaign and the battle for the meaning of 

America Michael Tesler (2018) 

The election was also symptomatic of a broader American identity crisis. Issues like immigration, racial discrimination, and the integration of Muslims boil down to competing visions of American identity and inclusiveness. To have politics oriented around this debate—as opposed to more prosaic issues like, say, entitlement reform—makes politics “feel” angrier, precisely because debates about ethnic, racial, and national identities engender strong emotions. It is possible to have a technocratic discussion about how to calculate cost-of-living increases in Social Security payments. It is harder to have such a discussion about whether undocumented immigrants deserve a chance for permanent residency or even citizenship. It is even harder when group loyalties and attitudes are aligned with partisanship, and harder still when presidential candidates are stoking the divisions. Elections will then polarize people not only in terms of party—which is virtually inevitable—but also in terms of other group identities. The upshot is a more divisive and explosive politics.

Authoritarian Nightmare – Trump and his followers J Dean and R Altemeyer (2020) Perhaps the definitive explanation

If you Google “books about Trump,” the answer seems obvious: “You’ve got to be kidding!” But while there are many books about the man and his presidency, favorable and not so favorable, we could find no book that explains why he acts the way he does. Nor are there any books that explain his base, the source of his power. In fact, many observers have thrown up their hands in despair at Trump’s very steadfast supporters. They seem beyond the pale, beyond understanding. Well, give us a chance, for we believe we have solid science-based answers.First things first. Many people have opined there is something seriously wrong, psychologically, with Donald Trump. If you proudly wear a Make America Great Again hat, you may be offended by the suggestion. For you, as for him, Trump should be immortalized on his own Mount Rushmore, maybe renamed Mount Trump, as America’s greatest president. But if you have passed on a twenty-five-dollar official MAGA hat while observing Donald Trump for any time at all, you may believe the man is deeply troubled mentally. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists have been riveted by his behavior from the outset of his presidential bid. They wondered during the campaign, “Is this an act just to get elected?” But by the time he moved into the White House, many concluded Trump was not “crazy like a fox” but “crazy like a crazy.” This point was made by one of the mental health professionals who wrote the bestselling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”, edited by Dr. Bandy Lee of the Yale School of Medicine.

The conclusions of these analysts and therapists varied quite a bit, understandably, since clinical diagnosis remains something of an art. But more than anything, these psychiatrists and psychologists believed that Trump displayed extreme narcissism with more than a touch of psychopathy. He is, as one therapist put it, in a phrase reflecting years of professional training, “a dog with both ticks and fleas.” These professionals have company. Many sophisticated Washington pundits and presidential observers have deep concerns about Trump.

Republican leaders and other influential conservatives who hoped he would grow into the job have often been disappointed. Trump’s interactions with his cabinet and senior advisors led some of them to expose the man, warts, more warts, and even more warts, to journalists such as Bob Woodward, who compiled them in his bestseller, “Fear: Trump in the White House”. One senior official, “Anonymous,” reported strikingly similar information in an op-ed in the New York Times on September 5, 2018, and later, a book, revealing that a group of alarmed officials had quietly banded together to keep some of Trump’s decisions from being enacted. Other aides, competing with one another for the president’s favor, leaked damaging information about their opponents in Trump’s inner circle, which implicitly diss Trump for hiring their opponents. The Trump White House “leaks” more than Nixon’s did when he formed the infamous “Plumbers” unit to shut off the flow. It appears everybody is trying to get even. John Bolton’s book “The Room Where It Happened” revealed just how dysfunctional the White House had become by 2018 and what a terrible manager and decision maker Trump was. During the first five months of the 2016 GOP primaries, the New York Times was so struck by Trump’s demagogic rhetoric they gathered and analyzed “every public utterance” by him, some 95,000 words. They retained historians, psychologists, and political scientists to review the material, and the experts concluded it echoed “some of the [worst] demagogues of the past century.” Trump was campaigning in the traditions of segregationist George Wallace and anticommunist red-baiter Joseph McCarthy, “vilifying groups” and “stoking insecurities of his audiences,” except the Times noted, by contrast, Trump was a more “energetic and charismatic speaker who can be entertaining and ingratiating,” thus more engaging than his predecessors, which the Times found made his demagoguery “more palatable when it is leavened with a smile and joke.” Nonetheless, in words and action, Trump was and is a demagogue, pure and simple, albeit ranked stylistically slightly better by one leading American news organization than his predecessors, like Joe McCarthy and George Wallace (p27). In 1950, they published “The Authoritarian Personality”, nearly one thousand pages filled with psychoanalytic theory and preliminary explorations in the fields of personality and social psychology. A fourth  contributor, Theodor Adorno, was added to the project by its sponsor after the work was nearly finished. Other American researchers at the time believed that what happened in Germany in the 1930s “could happen here” as well. The experience of McCarthyism soon after The Authoritarian Personality was published convinced many social scientists that a large segment of the American public could be stampeded into surrendering the democratic rights the country had just fought to preserve in the war against fascism (p28). Authoritarianism is studied by psychologists, political scientists, and sociologists, with each discipline developing its own focus and definitions while using its preferred methods. We have focused on the psychological research in this field. No one in the media apparently knows about this body of evidence but we do not think it is a secret. Our narrative is largely based on the findings of one academic investigator, who happens to be the person Dean asked to cowrite this book. If that was a mistake, blame him. He, however, believes he has chosen wisely because the data, set forth in the pages that follow, speaks for itself and should not be ignored as America faces the crisis we believe lies immediately ahead.

• “There really is no such thing as ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ It all boils down to what you can get away with.”

• “One of the most useful skills a person should develop is how to look someone straight in the eye and lie convincingly.”

• “The best skill you can have is knowing the ‘right move at the right time’: when to ‘soft-sell’ someone, when to be tough, when to flatter, when to threaten, when to bribe, etc.”

• “There’s a sucker born every minute, and smart people learn how to take advantage of them.”

• “It is more important to create a good image of yourself in the minds of others than to actually be the person others think you are.”

• “One of the best ways to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear.”

4 February

Music and Painting for a Rainy Day

It’s just midday here in Bucharest so I have only a few posts to recommend – the first being one of my favourite singers, Alan Price (whom I’m glad say is still alive, being a few months older than me) who supplied the theme songs for the famous  Lindsay Anderson film “O Lucky Man”. The other posts are -

The Carney Doctrine Luke Savage
 
Does the US need a Deeper State?. It was a couple of years ago I last posted about the 
deep state 
 
World War III my Sri Lankan blogger 

Roger Fry exhibition 

Systems Thinking for Civil Servants Martin Stanley. I've never really got my head around this notion

Timothy Snyder on his Bill of Wrongs. Superb satire from the author of "On Tyranny"

JUST A TYPICAL DAY

I wanted to share the reading I do each day – before 3.30pm. So let me tell you 

that this Sunday these are the (various blogposter links eg this here) – a strange 

mix of right-wing tracts and left-wing writing

Taboo – how making race a sacred cow produced a cultural revolution Eric Kaufmann 
(2024)
Bad Education – why our universities are broken and how we can fix them Matt Goodwin 
(2025) reviewed here
World History – a new perspective Clive Ponting (2000)
Thirteen Days – the countdown to the Great War Clive Ponting (2003)
1940 – myth and reality Clive Ponting (1990)
From What Is to What If Rob Hopkins (2019)
Society Against the State - essays in political anthropology Pierre Clastres (1989)
Waiting for Yesterday – pages from a street kid’s life Michael Parenti (2013)
Attenuated Democracy – a critical intro to US government and politics  David Hubert 
(2020)
History as Mystery Michael Parenti (1999)
Power and the Powerless Michael Parenti (1989)
Hemingway documentary 
Underground Empire – how America weaponised the world economy 
Henry Farrell and Abe Newman (2023)

Mark Carney wows Davos

Mark Carney may have been a hit at Davos but history may judge his speech differently. This is a brilliant contextualisation of Carney’s address this year to the Davos audience of company chief executives and government leaders

Mark Carney’s surprise manifesto at Davos got a lot of attention for presenting a big 

vision for the world but also, can I just say: Thucydides and Vaclav Havel in the same 

speech? The guy sure knows how to tug at my heartstrings. Is this what it feels like being 

pandered to? Let me just bask in it for a moment.Usually it’s dangerous to have an intellectual in office, but Carney comes from the 

world of finance and therefore has the requisite amount of cynicism. 

So it’s only right he opened his speech by quoting Thucydides: 

“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” This aphorism, he added, 

“is presented as inevitable, the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.” 

As the rest of his speech suggests, there’s nothing natural about it. People who consider 

themselves tough-minded pragmatists love to pluck this line from the Melian Dialogue. 

They invoke it as timeless wisdom about power politics and a corrective to liberal 

delusions. 

“We live in a world, in the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed 

by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller said in a recent CNN interview.

“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

This is the governing philosophy of Trump’s second term, and it’s also exactly what 

brings down hegemons. The year after Athens delivers that famous ultimatum and 

brutalizes Melos, it launches the Sicilian Expedition. This act of imperial overreach 

destroys a massive portion of its fleet and army. Its alliance begins to fracture as the 

subject states, tired of Athenian arrogance (like the kind echoed by Miller), sense 

weakness and revolt. Within a decade, Athens has lost the war. Its walls are torn 

down and its empire is dissolved.
The Melian Dialogue is not endorsing a timeless law of global politics. It’s showing 

us Athens at the precise peak of its imperial hubris: the moment when a great 

power becomes so convinced of its own invincibility that it can no longer perceive its 

limits. Does that sound like anyone else right now? But their fall only proves the point, 

someone inevitably responds. They became weak and suffered what they must, right? 

No. The Sicilian disaster was not just some unrelated streak of bad luck. 

The same hubris that led Athens to dismiss diplomacy as irrelevant to the strong is 

what led them to believe they could conquer Sicily.
The failure of self-knowledge, and the inability to see your own limits — or worse, 

seeing yourself as exempt from these limits — is what destroys great powers. 

If there’s one timeless lesson of history we can extract from the Peloponnesian War, 

that would be it. But it’s not the lesson Trump or Miller have internalized. 

Despite what self-proclaimed realists like Miller believe, rejecting imperial hubris does 

not require the embrace of mushy liberal beliefs about morality or global justice. 

It’s not about the weak eventually prevailing over the strong, or some other feel-good 

nonsense. For all their faults, actual realists (the ones who write books but don’t make 

policy) recognize the quote for what it is: pragmatic caution about strategic over-reach.

The Greengrocer’s Revenge
Carney then pivots to something clever: Václav Havel’s greengrocer. Every morning, 

the greengrocer places a sign in his window: Workers of the world, unite! He doesn’t 

believe it; no one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal 

compliance, to get along, etc. And because every shopkeeper on the street does the 

same, the system trudges on. 

“Not through violence alone,” Carney says, “but through the participation of ordinary people 

in rituals they privately know to be false.”

Carney’s argument is that for decades, middle powers like Canada have played the 

greengrocer. They placed the “rules-based international order” sign in the window. 

They knew the story was partially false, that in many places the liberal order was not 

liberal or even orderly. That “the strongest exempted themselves when convenient, 

that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, that international law applied with 

varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused.”
But it was a useful fiction so long as American hegemony provided public goods: 

open sea lanes, stable finance, global trade, collective security, frameworks for 

resolving disputes. It provided a sense of stability or at least acquiescence to weaker 

states. Not every time, but enough that they would keep the sign in the window.

“This bargain no longer works,” Carney said. “We are in the midst of a rupture, 

not a transition.”

What Havel knew, and what American MAGA triumphalists have forgotten, is that power 

built on performed compliance is fragile in a very specific way. It depends on the continued 

willingness of the powerless to keep performing. The moment the greengrocer removes 

his sign, the illusion begins to crack, because his refusal reveals that the whole edifice 

rests on a mutual agreement. For countries like Canada, their part of the agreement was 

to ignore the liberal order’s partial hypocrisy in order to reap the benefits of cooperative 

coexistence. But that lasts only as long as the hegemon makes cooperative coexistence 

possible.
The self-proclaimed pragmatists who quote “the strong do what they can” imagine this 

as a stable equilibrium, a description of how power works forever. But the Athenians 

who deliver that ultimatum to Melos are not wise statesmen seeing clearly. 

They’re men drunk on their own power, ready to sail into catastrophe.
Carney seems to be betting, I think correctly, that America under Trump has reached its 

Melian moment: maximum confidence, minimum self-knowledge. 

Trump’s tariffs-as-leverage obsession assumes permanent asymmetry, that the United 

States can weaponize economic integration indefinitely while its targets have no choice 

but to comply.
But the greengrocer can remove his sign. Supply chains can diversify. Alliances can 

hedge, as they have already. Each act of coercion accelerates the erosion of the compliance 

that made America’s global order effective to both its originator and its subjects. 

What does it mean for middle powers to take down the sign? 

Carney lays out a proto-doctrine for middle powers. To begin with, refuse to live in the lie. 

Stop invoking the rules-based order as though it still functions. Call the emerging system 

what it is: a world where the most powerful increasingly pursue their interests using 

force and economic statecraft as weapons of coercion. But most importantly, 

reduce the hegemonic leverage enabling this coercion. Countries earn the right to principled 

stands, he said, by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation. 

Rather than waiting for the hegemon to restore an order it’s busy dismantling, 

create your own institutions and agreements that function as intended.

“Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships,” Carney continued. 

“Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. Buy insurance. Increase options.” 

He got a standing ovation at the end of his speech, which I’m told is an unusual 

reaction at Davos. I think it resonated not just because he’s offering a bigger vision, 

but because it names what everyone in the room already knows but still hesitates to 

say out loud: the old bargain is dead and the grocer’s sign must be taken down. 

This is the insight that Melian Dialogue quote-mongers typically miss. 

Power that rests on the performed compliance of others is more fragile than it looks. 

The strong do what they can, until the moment they discover that “what they can” 

was always bounded by what others were willing to tolerate. Athens found out in Sicily; 

the question is where America finds out.

But my favourite blogger (a Canadian citizen from from Sri Lanka) sounds a 

different and overdue note 

People like Canada's Mark Carney are crying foul about the demise of the ‘rules-based 

order’ now, over fucking Greenland, and not over the whole Palestinian genocide he 

just merrily supplied and supported, or any number of atrocities Canada has been 

involved in, including Canada. White people really want to do crime and high-fives 

for confessing. I hope America does take Canada, to cure them of their delusion of 

being the ‘good guys’ of colonialism. I say this as a passport-carrying Canadian.
Carney's ‘speech of the century’ isn't worth the dust on a Palestinian fighter's 

sandals. His resistance isn't worth a drop of sweat from the actual resistance, 

which Canada still condemns as terrorists. Canada is still on America's side in 

every imperial war, they're not on our side at all. Remember that Canada is a 

card-carrying member of the White Empire and is only complaining now that its 

white privileges are being threatened. Remember that Carney was Central Banker 

for the UK also, he's a ripe example of how Canada is not a real country and how 

the White Empire is one.
What he's complaining about here is not a loss of human rights but white privilege. The privilege to invade other people but to keep your own stolen home. Even within the speech, Carney is proudly talking about funding the corrupt Ukrainian dictatorship, all to further American interests. He's only complaining now that America is interested in his territory, he has no actual principles. Carney is still part of the imperial tail proudly wagging even as the big dog shits on them. Carney just another historical vandal trying to white himself out of history as White Empire becomes a scandal to white people. As Aimé Césaire said, 

What he cannot forgive [Trump] for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is 

not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation 

of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which 

until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, 

and the “niggers” of Africa... And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism.

It's honestly funny watching these colonizers scurry for cover as they discover that 

they're Euro-peons and the 51st State to Americans. ‘The Coalition of The Willing’ 

is baffled that the country that invaded so many countries with might turn around 

and invade them. Remember that colonizers always lie and hide in abstractions, 

there's no general principle at work here, it's just the usual racism.
Hence Carney proposes a whites-only non-aligned movement like he just came 

up with the idea of ‘middle powers,’ when he could just join colored people. 

But he won't. Canada still supports America's war against Russia, 

still exploits Africa via mining, and still backs the death cult 'Israel'. 

Canada has no problem with white supremacism as long as it benefits them. 

That's the only principle at play here, they only speak out when it threatens 

their capital. As Césaire said, continuing,

And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has 

diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been

—and still is—narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, 

sordidly racist.

Mark Carney is just another hand-wringing White guy, his hands 

dripping with blood and his mouth redolent with bullshit. 

As Césaire said (honestly, just read Discourse On Colonialism), 

“Before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before 

it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, 

until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.”

Even worse is the Kingdom of Denmark, which is further up shit creek and furiously 

peddling bullshit. Their Ambassador to the US, Jesper Moller Sorensen, piously 

and pathetically said, 

“The Kingdom of Denmark has always stood shoulder-to-shoulder w[ith the USA] After 9/11,

 Denmark answered the US' call. We lost more soldiers in Afghanistan per capita than 

any other NATO ally.” 

He's seriously saying we helped you occupy non-Europeans, why would you do it to us? 

Their Ambassador is fondly remembering the murder tour they took of Afghanistan 

together, and wondering where the bromance has gone. 

These people are not mourning the loss of the ‘rules-based order’ here, 

they're bemoaning the fact that the actual rules might apply to them. 

That they might be invaded because they're weak, despite their White skin. 

Europeans are discovering they're the rump end of White Empire, as they get 

slapped 

 Peter Oborne has also been on Carney's track https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/carney-wants-new-world-order-only-west

Apologies

 My deep apologies for the textual overlapping which has become such an annoying feature of these posts. I simply don't know how to deal with this problem - which reflects so badly on blogger.com!

Democratic Backsliding

Designing Resistance -  democratic institutions and the threat of backsliding (IDEA 2023) 
The following (non-exhaustive) list outlines 12 of the most frequently
seen trends in backsliding: 
1. Draining, packing and instrumentalizing the judiciary.
This process begins by diluting the power of the judiciary—for
example, by restricting its jurisdiction or lowering judicial
retirement ages to purge sitting judges from the bench. The court
is then packed, either by filling newly vacant seats or by adding
or expanding tribunals in order to allow the current majority to
confirm several judges at once. Once reconstituted, power is
reinfused into the judiciary, who can act to enable and legitimize
the backsliding regime’s policies as well as to attack the
opposition. See: Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Hungary, Israel,
Nicaragua, Maldives, Poland, Türkiye, United States of America,
Venezuela. 
2. Tilting the electoral playing field. This involves making changes to the electoral system to heavily favour
the incumbent. This can include changing electoral districts and
apportionment (gerrymandering), curating the electorate through
selective enfranchisement/disenfranchisement and changing the way
that surplus votes and seats are distributed between winners and
losers. It might also include finding ways to disqualify opposition
members from standing for election or reducing transparency or
independence in election management and oversight. See: Albania,
Benin, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Georgia, Hungary,
India, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Poland, Serbia, Türkiye, Ukraine, USA,
Venezuela, Zambia. 
3. Weakening the power of the existing opposition. Limiting the
ability of the existing opposition to check the government
complements the tactic of working to keep the opposition from
gaining power. It has been achieved by using disciplinary sanctions
against opposition members to remove them from parliament and
amending parliamentary procedures to reduce the floor time or
bargaining power of the minority. See: Ecuador, Hungary, India,
Türkiye, Ukraine, USA (Tennessee), Venezuela, Zambia. 		

4.Creating
		a democratic shell.
		This tactic involves incorporating measures into the constitution
		or legal system which are ostensibly democratizing or liberalizing
		but do not necessarily have that effect in practice. This might
		occur when design choices are imported from other democratic
		systems but are divorced from other elements central to their
		functioning or lack the enforcement mechanisms that give them
		teeth. This strategy allows the backslider to point to design
		elements borrowed from strong democratic countries and insist that
		criticism is unfounded or even hypocritical. See: Hungary, North
		Macedonia, Türkiye. 
		

		5.
Shifting
		competencies/parallel institutions.
		This strategy entails shifting powers from a non-captured
		institution to a captured one. This can be useful when the existing
		institution has effective safeguards for independence. For example,
		a backslider could set up a new elections oversight committee,
		which is then given some powers previously held by an independent
		election management board. While this may, at first glance, appear
		simply to give greater attention to an important issue, it ensures
		that this attention is exercised by those chosen by the
		administration. See: Hungary, Israel, Poland, Venezuela. 
5. 5. 		
6. Political capture: realigning chains of command and accountability. This involves
		changing appointment procedures or bringing an office under the
		command of a different (political) office, thus infusing civil
		service offices with a political pressure that is difficult to
		detect from the outside. For example, independent prosecutors may
		be brought under the command of the Minister of Justice, having
		originally been accountable to an independent judicial oversight
board chosen by judges and lawyers. See: Hungary, Israel, Poland. 
		
7. Selective prosecution and enforcement. Selectivity is one 
of the most common and liberally used of the backsliding methods. On the 
prosecution side, it may include prosecuting political opponents for low-level 
non-political crimes—such as building code violations or tax infractions—which
are not generally strictly enforced. On the rights side, it might include having 
laws on the books that ostensibly protect minorities but failing to enforce them 
when certain unfavoured minorities are affected. See: India, Türkiye, Ukraine, 
USA, Zambia.  

8. Evasion of term limits. Eliminating term limits is usually justified by one 
of two arguments. One is that they obstruct the ability of the people to choose their own leader. The other is that they impede the ability of 
the backslider—portrayed as the only true representative and defender of the 
interests of ‘the people’—to vindicate those interests. Term limits may be 
evaded in a number of ways beyond mere elimination. The toolkit includes 
examples such as enacting term limits that do not apply retroactively 
(El Salvador); rotating out of office and then back in (Russia); and delaying 
elections on purportedly emergency grounds (Ethiopia). See: Armenia, Bolivia,
Burkina Faso, Burundi, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Nicaragua,
		Sri Lanka, Venezuela. 		9. 

Expanding executive power. Most tools in the toolkit involve eroding the 
checks on the exercise of executive power. The converse of these strategies 
is the direct expansion of that power. Expanding executive power is, in some 
sense, the most direct form of backsliding because backsliding largely serves 
the main end goal of aggrandizing power personally to the backslider. 
While more efficient and effective, directly expanding power is more transparent 
and thus politically costly than the subtler art of shaving down checks. 
Executive powers that have been expanded include control over appointments 
(Ukraine), control over finances (Hungary) or even the power to decree laws on 
certain topics, like banking or use of national resources (Venezuela). 
See: Armenia, Hungary, Türkiye, Ukraine, USA, Venezuela. 
10. Temporal entrenchment (‘harpooning’). This refers to a strategy 
whereby backsliders make major changes while they enjoy a 
supermajority and then move to make it as difficult as possible 
for 	those changes to be undone. This involves (a) requiring a 
future supermajority to undo the changes and (b) relying on other 
measures, such as tilting the electoral playing field, to make it 
difficult for the opposition to acquire such a supermajority. 
We refer to this strategy as ‘harpooning’ because the backslider 
penetrates the halls of power, makes changes and then makes these 
difficult to undo—much in the way that a harpoon opens and cannot 
be pulled back out. See: Hungary. 
	11. Shrinking the civic space. This tactic includes attacks on the media, 
civil society organizations and the civil liberties of the electorate. These should 
normally act as checks on government by demanding government transparency 
and promoting government accountability, facilitating the organization of opposition 
and protest, and, of course, by exercising the franchise. However, the backslider 
can significantly impair the ability of these non-government ‘institutions’ to act as a 
check by buying up, shutting down or regulating the media; placing onerous 
requirements on unfriendly civil society organizations; and using libel laws or states 
of emergency to restrict freedoms of expression and association among the electorate. 
See: Hungary, Poland, Türkiye, Zambia. 
12. Non-institutional strategies. While this Report canvasses 
institutional tactics by which backsliding is achieved, it is still imperative for the 
constitution-builder to consider non-institutional strategies, such as using populist 
rhetoric or supporting discriminatory policies. Account should be given to how 
institutional design choices can help (a) to address a backslider’s ability to use such
non-institutional tactics to their advantage and (b) to prevent the conditions that 
give rise to backsliding in the first place. Regulation of political parties, for example, 
may help prevent backsliding candidates from entering office at all.