After a decade of democracies kowtowing to authoritarians, 2022 finally saw some setbacks for strongmen. The world’s worst tyrants — Xi Jinping, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Vladimir Putin — witnessed some push back to their totalitarianism.
Russia’s disastrous war in Ukraine, China’s ineffective war against COVID-19, and Iran’s detestable war on Iranian women are testaments to the evil of systems where leaders are never held accountable.
Useful idiots may encourage autocracy, but their failures should sometimes elicit contrition from disingenuous voices who spent the past few years denouncing liberal democracy.
Still, neither Putin, Xi nor Khamenei seem fully chastened. Their Maoism, Islamism and irredentism will probably continue, so there’s always work to do. It’s a long struggle, when you also consider Recep Erdoğan, Nicolás Maduro, the Taliban, and a communist named Cruz still rule Turkey, Venezuela, Afghanistan and Cuba.
Meanwhile, in parts of the West, despite what some media hope you’ll believe, the rise of populism has been slowed.
This is evident by Boris Johnson’s resignation in Britain, the defeat of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the re-election of Emmanuel Macron in France.
In the United States, Donald Trump’s disastrous year diminished his 2024 campaign launch, while his hopes of securing the Republican presidential nomination a third consecutive time seem to be fading.
The revolution against the “establishment” — an ambiguous term lacking meaning — is seemingly failing, perhaps because it's mainly fueled by conspiracies and bromides.
But ruling class elites also had a bad year. Their haughty assumption that the masses will eventually come to their senses is belied by history showing that self-aggrandizing snobbishness rarely ends well.
Despite aforementioned setbacks, the populist cause advanced in Hungary, Italy, Sweden and arguably with the latest iteration of Benjamin Netanyahu's government in Israel.
One could argue it also did in the U.S., with re-elections of strong-willed governors of both parties from California, Florida and Georgia to Illinois, Michigan and Texas.
A lesson is that voters have not fully embraced the technocrats and governing classes. As a friend emailed last week, “they simply rejected the buffoonery and narcissism of recent champions, like the ex-president, who marked the year ending by hawking digital cards of himself posing as an astronaut.”
On the foreign stage, the isolationist wing — which has never learned from military history — continues to lose, even as its adherents double down.
In Ukraine, the deranged idea that Europeans hold about a borderless utopia, singing John Lennon songs, is over.
President John Adams once mused that he “must study war that my sons have liberty to study philosophy.” Americans who don’t follow Tucker Carlson or Bernie Sanders know this, but too many Europeans declined to study history and now they must again study war.
On a fortuitous note, Putin’s illegal violence brought to an end the risible and unaffordable left-wing "green" energy future.
Following decades where foolhardy world leaders championed quixotic energy transformation goals based on fanatical propaganda, the year thankfully ends with Germany planning to reconvene its nuclear program, Britain burning coal, and Joe Biden begging fossil-fuel-rich nations to ramp up production.
The administration also recently let it slip that Barack Obama's execrable Iran Nuclear Deal is finally dead.
Lastly, 2022 has seen some progress in restoring reality to our inane culture wars.
The U.S. Supreme Court overtly re-established a measure of constitutional symmetry this summer and seems ready to continue in 2023.
Elon Musk is imperfect, but by reclaiming Twitter from the grip of insular Stalinists, who unfortunately dominate our culture, he made a significant contribution to freedom and public discourse.
As some mused this week, it's hard to tell if the populist movement is gone or if it still exists in some form; but as I mused two years ago this month, populism is often dangerous and destabilizing, which is what tyrants prefer.
Let’s make a New Year's resolution not to give Putin, Xi and the Ayatollah what they seek.
A.J. Kaufman is a correspondent for several U.S. newspapers, websites and magazines — from Minnesota and Ohio to Tennessee and Virginia. He taught school and served as a military historian before beginning his journalism career. The author of three books, he is also a guest on various radio programs and contributes to Israel National News and The Lid.