I’ve been enjoying Ken Burn’s new documentary on the American Revolution. In the act of declaring independence, militarily resisting British rule, and establishing a new country with a democratic government, the Americans were creating a democratic revolution that changed the world forever. Learning more about those events from 250 years ago helps to put some things in perspective.
There are interesting similarities with present day events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for instance. It’s not much of a stretch to think that, from the point of view of Putin and probably most Russians, Ukraine is a rebellious colony, and its leaders are illegitimate, in the same way that King George III saw the American revolutionaries. In 1776, the British, with the biggest navy in the world, appeared to have overwhelming force on their side; yet they were not able to defeat the American rebels. Just three years ago, in February 2022, almost everyone but Zelensky and the Ukrainian military believed that Russia, with its massive superiority in men and firepower, would take Kiev in three days. But today in late 2025, it’s becoming more and more obvious that Russia, like Great Britain before it, will never defeat its former colony.
Modern Russia under Putin represents the opposite of everything that America once stood for: it is not a representative democracy with a free press, it is a criminal oligarchic state run by a ruthless leader. And today the current U.S. president wants to run America in the same criminal manner as Putin runs Russia, so he is bent on destroying the free press and democracy. To add to this, the extreme right is emboldened everywhere both by Russian propaganda and by this president’s attempts to destroy the international rule-based order.
Democracy, that great experiment in modern government, is under fire from the richest and most powerful men in history, and up until very recently they appeared to be winning. But are they?
Democracy has gone through a lot of big tests lately: the U.S. financial meltdown in 2008, where banking elites ate the economy and the common people had to pay the tab; the Covid 19 global pandemic of 2020, when public health became too much of a perceived burden, and opposition to vaccines, the very thing that prevented a worse disaster, was used to leverage authoritarianism; the Insurrection of January sixth 2021, when a sitting President tried to reverse an election defeat by spreading lies and inciting a mob to attack the U.S. capital in an attempt to unseat his successor; and that same person’s stunning re-election in November 2024, which supercharged his ability to sow political and economic chaos throughout the world.
It is poetic justice that Donald Trump’s ties to the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein have brought America back from the brink. For Trump’s followers who, up till now, had no problem with giving him free reign to trample on democracy, the one thing they won’t countenance was his refusal to release the Epstein files. Thank God for that one red line!
