Tim Steller's column: From Ukraine to Arizona, democracy faces threats

In Ukraine, they’re carrying out the ideological battle with missiles and armed drones.

Here in Tucson and across Arizona, we’re using ballots, thank goodness.

As things have played out, though, the deep divide in both places is along related lines: Anti-democratic rule on one side, democratic rule on the other.

The trick is, authoritarians can be elected and use their positions to cement their power. It’s happened many places before. Might happen here.

You probably are familiar by now with the right-wing authoritarian international movement — they tend to call themselves nationalists or populists.

Vladimir Putin, a genocidal fascist, is arguably the figurehead, but other members of the circle include legitimately elected ones — Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Recip Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and Narendra Modi in India, among others.

In the United States, the leader is, of course, Donald Trump. And in Arizona’s primary election, Republican voters chose Trump-supported candidates over less radical ones.

Some of the common themes in the authoritarians' approach to government include:

- Upholding the ideal of a strong man — a powerful, impatient leader who gets things done.

- Proclaiming the country’s core citizenry — so-called “real Americans” here in the United States — to be under attack.

- Decrying their country’s enemies as a shadowy “globalist elite,” often led by George Soros.

Putin has perhaps nowhere expressed his worldview as clearly as when he told The Financial Times in 2019: “The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”

Of course, sometimes the voting majority rejects these strongmen, but when they do, people like Trump say the system itself is fraudulent. Bolsonaro tried to play that card, too, when he lost the presidential election in Brazil Sunday, but his allies abandoned him and supported the system, leaving him without the Trump option.

We haven’t had such luck.

Taking power from the people

In Arizona, we’ve wasted the last two years entertaining the never-ending “questions” about the 2020 election raised by people like Rep. Mark Finchem of Oro Valley, the Republican candidate for secretary of state.

The Kalamazoo Cowboy, as he’s known due to his origins and choice of dress, seems convinced that the Arizona he wants to exist — the one he saw in Old West movies growing up in Michigan — is the real one. It isn’t.

Arizona population is, of course, largely metropolitan. More than three-fourths of the residents live in Maricopa and Pima counties.

And in those counties, the key votes that decided the 2020 election in Arizona were by people who voted mostly for Republicans but chose not to vote for Trump for president. A trio of election researchers, including Tucson Republican Benny White, found that by analyzing Maricopa County’s cast vote record, which comprises all 2.1 million ballots cast there.

But people like Finchem have pointed to Trump’s enthusiastic support — the car caravans and such — as evidence that couldn’t really have happened. “Isn’t it interesting that I can’t find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden?” Finchem told Time Magazine.

None of this would matter so much, or steer Arizona toward a less representative system, if it didn’t also bring about anti-democratic policies.

Finchem spent much of late 2020 arguing that the Legislature should convene in special session and use dubious constitutional powers to decertify the presidential election in Arizona. They would then have chosen their own presidential electors — Republicans, instead of the Democrats Arizona voters chose.

He spent time Jan. 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, where Oath Keepers, a group Finchem used to belong to, tried to overturn the election results by violence. The leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, days later, regretted not bringing rifles and hanging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from a lamp post. He is on trial for sedition.

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And in subsequent legislative sessions, Finchem has supported bills that would allow the Legislature to overturn certified election results, among many other election changes. That would functionally take away citizens’ right to elect their own government and hand it to a power structure that could perpetuate itself.

This election season, he’s still suing to require hand-counts of ballots, and supported armed intimidation at ballot drop boxes.

‘A war against democracy’

In September, the State Department released an assessment that Russia has spent more than $300 million since 2014 trying to influence politicians and elections in foreign countries. The United States, of course, has been one of them. We know some of the players who have been indicted or sanctioned for their roles, but we may never know the full scale or impact.

Russia’s efforts here didn’t start or end with supporting Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. More than anything they have worked to exploit our political divisions and make them worse.

You can’t look at the unhinged rhetoric of a candidate like Finchem — calling his opponent a Marxist, socialist, radical, criminal and Soros agent — without seeing the success of those who seek to divide us.

Putin, bogged down by his imperial war in Ukraine, must take some solace seeing such demonization in our democracy.

He “has made it clear that he sees this war as a war against democracy, that democracy is a threat to his particular kind of autocratic, kleptocratic regime,” said Anne Applebaum, a historian of Russia and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gulag: A History, in a recent interview.

To their credit, most Republicans have joined Democrats in recognizing who is right and wrong in Ukraine, with only a relative few openly siding with Putin. That’s allowed us to provide vital aid that has helped Ukrainian soldiers liberate some of their terrorized countrymen, pushing Russia’s army back.

Putin’s terrible misjudgment in invading Ukraine has also exposed a key weakness of authoritarian rule: The freedom of the strongman leader to make bad decisions unchallenged.

Francis Fukuyama, the intellectual who proclaimed “The End of History” and the victory of liberalism when the Soviet Union fell, sees Ukraine as key to showing the weakness of strongmen.

“I do think that if Ukraine is able to defeat Russia, the demonstration effect is going to be really tremendous,” he told the Washington Post. “It’s going to have domestic political consequences inside every democracy that’s threatened by one of these populist parties.”

Authoritarian international movement

To nurture sympathies with conservatives in the United States and elsewhere, Putin has been transparently hitting cultural issues that move the right wing.

In a late-October speech, for example, he decried Western “cancel culture” — ironic for a man who literally has dissidents killed. He also said the idea of transgender children verges on a “crime against humanity.” And in September, while announcing the annexation of Ukrainian, he said the West represents “outright Satanism.”

It’s questionable whether that tactic will lead Republicans to take Putin’s side in Ukraine, though. The memory of the Soviet Union lingers and the moral abomination of the Ukraine invasion is too clear.

But Republicans have for months been signaling they want to question, reduce, or eliminate aid to Ukraine. It’s the safe position staked out early on in the war by former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who, rather than support Putin, has said we shouldn’t be involved.

“Putin ain’t woke — he’s anti-woke,” Bannon said Feb. 23, the day before the invasion began.

Bannon, it turns out, serves as a sort of connective tissue between the authoritarian international movement and Arizona.

Bannon has hobnobbed with leaders from Hungary to India. He also regularly hosts Finchem on his online show, called War Room. He showed up in Chandler for a Republican rally Tuesday.

Bannon even owns a home in Oro Valley, where Finchem lives, and plans to broadcast his show from there. Bannon, as he has often made clear, wants to tear down existing American institutions in favor of an amorphous but glorious authoritarian future.

The vision should sound familiar to anyone who has followed Putin.