Continuing on with my post-Soviet Russia reading, Krastev’s ‘The Light That Failed’ is one of the most insightful books I’ve read yet. When the USSR failed and broke apart, numerous western observers predicted “the end of history,” in which liberal democracy unequivocally took over as the best model of governance. Krastev examines Eastern European countries’ disillusionment with imitating western democracies, with the emphasis on imitation and the many reasons that pretending to adopt Western values was unsuccessful. This book explores demographic change and its connections to the rise of racism and xenophobia, populism and authoritarianism, in short the general parlous state of the world. His chapter on Donald Trump’s presidency is possibly the best analysis I’ve ever read on that clusterfuck, and still somehow he manages to end on a positive note. Writing about what he calls “the end of the Age of Imitation,” he believes “what it signifies, rather, is the return not to a global confrontation between two missionary nations, one liberal and the other communist, but to a pluralistic and competitive world, where no centers of military and economic power will strive to spread their own system of values across the globe” (204-205). This might be the best we can hope for.