Katrina Gulliver

When voters lose faith

Timothy Snyder and David Runciman join a score of recent authors tackling the theme of democracy in crisis

issue 23 June 2018

If social media manipulation has influenced elections, and dark money has influenced our elected representatives, then we are already on the road to unfreedom, as Timothy Snyder, the well-known historian of Russia, argues in his new book. He sees threats to democracy in Europe and America as following the Russian model of oligarchic takeover: ‘The stabilisation of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity.

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