DL Open Thread: Tuesday, March 17, 2026

‘America Is No Longer A Democracy.’  Just thought you’d like to know:

The US is no longer a democracy. One of the most credible global sources on the health of democratic nations now says this outright. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University reaches the alarming conclusion in its annual report, that the US is hurtling towards autocracy at a faster rate than Hungary and Turkey.

“Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country,” says Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute.

Since 2012, Lindberg has led his small group of researchers in Sweden to become the world’s leading source for analysis of the health of global democracy. In their latest report, published on Tuesday, they conclude that the US, for the first time in more than half a century, has lost its long-term status as a liberal democracy. The country is now going through a rapid process of what the report’s authors call “autocratisation”.

“For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year,” Lindberg says.

Israel Sends Ground Troops Into Lebanon.  Nobody could have foreseen this, except everybody but Trump:

Israel’s rapidly expanding invasion of Lebanon will destabilise a country that is already on the brink of collapse.

“This war can really be the tipping point,” said Sami Nader, director of the Institute of Political Science at Beirut’s Saint Joseph University.

“That’s something that is threatening the very existence of this country.”

One possible outcome of the invasion is the kind of power vacuum that led to the nation’s 15-year civil war in the 1970s and 1980s.

Almost one million people have been displaced as Israel bombs southern Beirut and pushes troops into southern Lebanon, in its campaign against the Iran-backed militia, Hezbollah.

JD Vance Surreptitiously Proclaims Himself A ‘War Skeptic’.  You know, to better position himself for 2028:

One person, however, is conspicuously absent from this cheerleading squad: Vice President JD Vance. But he hasn’t been silent, exactly. Instead, as the war has dragged on, he has carefully seeded a message to the press that has steadily grown more aggressive: He’s not a fan of Trump’s war.

Publicly, of course, Vance is doing his best to tow the line. He has attempted to square his long-standing opposition to prolonged conflict in the Middle East by insisting this war is different from the ones waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight—there is no chance that will happen,” Vance told The Washington Post two days before an Israeli airstrike killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the intervening days, he has repeated that claim, made a few tepid statements in support of the war, and attended the dignified transfer of the remains of a U.S. service member who died as a result of it.

The real story, however, is what’s playing out behind the scenes. A March 3 New York Times piece about the lead-up to the war captured the vice president trying to have it both ways. Vance, the Timesreported, “appeared to personally lean against military attacks” but also “argued that a limited strike was a mistake. If the United States was going to hit Iran, he told the group, it should ‘go big and go fast.’”

It’s not a particularly coherent position—Vance appears to have simultaneously opposed the war and advocated on behalf of waging it aggressively—but it is a revealing one. There is a palpable sense that he wanted to come out against the war but couldn’t because doing so would risk his standing with the president and his base. Instead, Vance staked out a position that he wouldn’t have to shed if he were to come out more strongly against the war later: that it should be big and fast, which is a clever way of saying the U.S. should end it quickly by winning.

Anyone who has suffered through Hillbilly Elegy and was subsequently astounded at Vance’s apparent change of heart knows that Vance stands for nothing save his own political advancement.  My prediction?:  Not long before he gets ‘Penced’.  In fact, it’s already started as Trump talks up Marco Rubio while not speaking Vance’s name in public:

Vance has built a political profile around his opposition to foreign intervention, which he traces to his own disillusionment while serving as a Marine in Iraq. That meshed well with Trump’s first-term image (if not his reality), but it clashes with the imperial ambitions of his second. Vance was conspicuously missing when Trump launched the January raid to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. He’s also been scarce since the start of the Iran war, which threatens to turn into a quagmire with record speed.

Vance has begun making public statements in support of the war, but they appear to emerge from clenched teeth. Bolstering this impression was what sure looks like an intentional leak toPoliticoon Friday that Vance “was skeptical of the U.S. striking Iran in the leadup to President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the war.” This report was greeted dismissively in some quarters as a frantic attempt by Vance to distance himself from a doomed war, or, as The New Republic’s Alex Shephard put it, “a Machiavellian and astonishingly self-serving maneuver.” One can never rule this out with Vance, but I think it’s just as possible that the story is less a strategic ploy than Vance reacting in frustration to being so ignored by the president.

Insofar as Vance has any sincere beliefs in anything other than himself, his opposition to military intervention seems to be one. Though he has changed many of his positions in the past decade, he has remained consistent on this, and he seems to say the same things in private that he does in public.

What Vance is learning now is that serving Trump doesn’t mean just compromising on some ancillary issues that you care less about, or keeping a straight face during his nonsensical digressions. Instead, Trump will humiliate you even—or especially—on your most deeply held views. Just as Pence found himself obliged to defend Trump’s least socially conservative tendencies, Vance is now defending his war in Iran. Vance may have thought he was getting a cheap ticket to the pinnacle of power. The price, it turns out, is much higher than he realized.

What do you want to talk about?