Liberal democracies are not being destroyed by tanks or military coups. This is said, more or less, by Anne Applebaum, historian and award-winning journalist, who told us tem consistently warned of the erosion of liberal democracies. Very recently he did so in interviews with Portuguese media outlets such as “Público” and “Express”and in his most recent book “Autocracy, Inc..”. His analyzes of authoritarian acceleration, the destructive role of digital platforms and the existential risks for Europe provide an essential interpretative framework for understanding the historical moment we are going through. The reflection that follows is part of these conversations and the urgencycia they convey: Western democracies face an unprecedented threat, and the window for effective resistance is quickly closing. This is not alarmism, but a rigorous diagnosis of why democratic institutions are failing to contain autocratic forces that operate with unprecedented speed and coordination.
They are crumbling from within, corroded by forces that exploit their structural vulnerabilities with surgical precision. What we are witnessing – from the United States to Europe – is not a frontal attack on democratic institutions, but their capture and gradual emptying. A process that maintains formal appearances while destroying substance. The speed of this transformation reveals something disturbing: the defense mechanisms that democracies have built over decades reveal themselves to be tragic and surprising.grossly inadequate.
The central question is no longer whether democracies can resist autocratic advances, but why they are failing so spectacularly. The answer lies in a profound structural misalignment: democratic institutions were built for a world that no longer exists.
For generations, we have operated under a comforting premise: institutions would act as automatic barriers against the authoritarian concentration of power. Independent courts, free press, separation of powers – these structures would be enough. This institutional trust has become our main vulnerability.
We are facing a collapse of the institutional architecture of liberal democracies. Democratic institutions were designed for an analog world where information flowed slowly through controlled channels, where economic power was relatively dispersed, where the nation-state was the primary political unit. None of these premises holds. Information flows instantaneously through algorithmically mediated global networks. Economic power was concentrated in technological corporations that operate above any national jurisdiction. Financial flows cross borders in milliseconds, making national regulation obsolete.
More fundamentally, democratic institutions presuppose good faith on the part of political actors. The separation of powers works if all powers accept mutual limitations. Parliamentary scrutiny works if the executive recognizes parliament’s authority. Judicial independence works if judicial decisions are respected. When a political actor decides to deliberately operate outside this framework, systematically exploiting loopholes and gray areas, institutions reveal themselves to be surprisingly fragile.
The American Congress has immense constitutional power over the President. But all this power depends on the will to exercise it. When the parliamentary majority decides not to confront the executive, for fear of retaliation, for pressure on social media, for short-term political calculation, constitutional power becomes irrelevant. Institutions do not defend themselves; they depend on people willing to make choices that involve losses or sacrifices to preserve them.
The fragmentation of reality constitutes the deepest blow to democratic foundations, that is, we are facing the destruction of shared reality. Democracies have always coexisted with intense ideological divergences, but they shared common factual ground. That base has disappeared. We are not faced with citizens with different opinions; We are faced with populations that inhabit incompatible factual realities.
This fragmentation is not accidental, it is the business model of digital platforms. Algorithms were deliberately designed to favor content that provokes intense emotional reactions, because these reactions translate into metrics that support advertising models. Western democracies have allowed this architecture of manipulation to be built without meaningful regulation. More serious: they allowed American and Chinese companies to become the main mediators of the political debate. Viewed retrospectively, this abdication seems incomprehensible.
Since the 1990s, Western democracies have facilitated the departure of looted money from autocratic countries, allowing it to be hidden in tax havens. This money didn’t disappear into safes offshorewas invested in real estate in New York, London, Miami, Lisbon. The effects were multiple and devastating. This money has corrupted the democratic financial system, creating entire industries that profit from autocratic money laundering.
Democracies have become dependent on illicit financial flows that undermine their own legitimacy. When these flows began to finance political campaigns, capture of the system became inevitable. The oligarchs didn’t need to invade Western democracies – they bought stakes in them.
Contemporary autocracies are articulated through three vectors: shared financial interests, coordinated narrative manipulation and military cooperation. This is a network pragmatics of autocratic interests that operate through the same financial structures that democracies have built.
What Putin took two decades to consolidate is being attempted in months in the United States. This acceleration exploits a specific vulnerability of democracies: the slowness of the institutional response. Democratic institutions operate through deliberative processes that, due to the way they are structured, are slow. When faced with an actor making multiple disruptive decisions simultaneously, slowness turns into paralysis.
While the courts analyze the legality of one action, three others have already been implemented. This cognitive overload is precisely the goal: doing so many things simultaneously that resistance fragments. The current militarization of cities creates images of conflict, accustoms the population to military presence, tests response capabilities, and provokes reactions that justify even more extreme measures. Each action prepares the next step in a calculated climb.
The disintegration of American leadership paradoxically creates an opportunity for Europe. But harnessing it would require coordination that he rarely demonstrated. European institutions depend on unanimity that turns decisions into paralysis. When a single country can block coordinated responses, the capacity for collective action evaporates. It will not be necessary to give examples, look at the summits and meetings of European leaders, on Ukraine, on Gaza or on the taxes that Trump imposes.
Europe has allowed external platforms to become primary mediators of European political debate. When algorithms amplify messages that undermine European cohesion, democratic sovereignty is materially compromised. Technological regulation becomes a matter of democratic survival, not industrial policy.
The “rescue” will not come from institutions that magically begin to function, but from citizens who understand that they defend not a party, but the conditions for the possibility of democracy. It requires abandoning illusions: that existing institutions are sufficient, that normal processes will produce normal results, that the liberal order can be preserved without struggle.
The historical moment does not offer easy choices. But the fundamental choice remains binary: actively resist autocratic erosion or gradually accommodate. Historical experience offers no comfort to the second option. Never has an institutional capture reversed itself without organized resistance.
We have not yet reached the point of no return. But we can see it on the horizon, approaching at the speed that only democratic inertia allows. The answer will be written in the coming months by concrete choices. Each decision to resist or accommodate writes another line in that response. And once the text is complete, it will no longer be possible to rewrite it. The story offers no drafts.
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