In After June 14th: The Long Way Home, Manuel Hinds describes how mass protests on June 14th marked a decisive turning point against The Prince’s bid for tyranny, revealing his overestimated power and beginning a shift in political momentum. However, Hinds warns that the struggle is far from over; The Prince remains dangerous, driven by malignant narcissism that may lead to increasingly erratic and destructive behavior. Beyond the immediate political crisis, Hinds argues that liberal democracy must be reinvented to address deep structural challenges: weakened social cohesion, outdated national institutions, and the unstoppable force of globalization. Global elites, both legal and illegal, are accumulating unprecedented power, making traditional national governance increasingly inadequate. The naive hope for a stable multipolar world is an illusion, as major powers continue to seek dominance in an interconnected world prone to global conflicts. To avoid future tyrannies and preserve freedom, Hinds calls for bold institutional redesign on a global scale, recognizing that liberal democracy must evolve to survive in the rapidly changing geopolitical and technological landscape.
A WATERSHED
Hey Jack! Last week marked a pivotal moment in the global power struggle. The myth that The Prince’s pursuit of tyrannical power is unstoppable was dispelled.
Jack answered with the same enthusiasm.
“Yes! June 14th marked the high-water point of The Prince’s power. What happened was fantastic! It was an authentic watershed. June 14th revealed that The Prince’s political strength had been grossly overestimated, and this has very important political consequences. It's not just that we can be more optimistic because we discovered reality is better than we thought. Discovering the overestimation changes the political reality.
“Why?” asked Laurie.
“All the planets align for leaders whom people believe have power and thus own the future. Politicians tie their fortunes to the success of those leaders. As you've witnessed in the past few months, this has become evident since the November 2024 elections. Most politicians, particularly Republicans, pledged loyalty to The Prince personally—not to his ideas, which he changes every minute, but to him as an individual. The impact has gone beyond the supporters; their opposition has grown silent. With a few exceptions, the private sector has begun adopting a submissive attitude toward The Prince. They all recognize that opposing him could provoke his wrath, potentially leading to their political downfall. Journalists, lawyers, and other professionals also react in similar ways.
This effect reached incredible extremes. For example, The Prince threatened famous law firms with demands, accusing them of daring to oppose him in legal disputes when he was not president, and the law firms negotiated instead of defying him in cases they would have easily won.
“This, however, changed on June 14. The Prince’s parade saw low attendance, while the protests drew large crowds. The Army marched with little enthusiasm. Those who were compelled to attend appeared bored. The mood at the protests was joyful.
“According to 50501, the organizers of the protests, 13.5 million people demonstrated! This was a decisive moment. Erica Chenoweth, a well-known expert in the field, analyzed over 300 major resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006. She found that none of the movements in her dataset that peacefully mobilized at least 3.5% of the population failed. Fifteen and a half million is approximately 4.5% of the United States' population. Two facts lend more weight to these figures: it was the first series of demonstrations, and it occurred during a time when The Princes’s popularity (and that of the Congresspersons who support him) is rapidly declining and is likely to keep on falling.
“This was enough to change perceptions and will likely shift the balance of power.
“Now everything is going downhill for him. Our novel can have a natural happy ending. Many believe that separating him from power requires a complex process, such as impeachment or proving he is deranged. In reality, we only need to reverse the slim majority he currently holds in Congress. If things continue as they are today, this is practically assured. He has made enemies everywhere with his economic measures—by cutting legitimate social expenditures, closing useful government services, and displaying an Olympian disdain for the American people. He will also lose many of his allies, those who will be looking for another leader, a more secure one. We can be sure he will lose the 2026 elections. We just need to take the wind out of his sails. We are on our way home.
Nicco intervened.
“I don’t want to throw cold water on your enthusiasm. As Churchill said after the British Army won their first victory over the Germans in World War II:
“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
“We may be on our way home,” continued Nicco, “But it is a long way, and we even have to define where home is. We must do this in a world that is entirely different from the one we know.
A LONG WAY HOME
Completing What Began on June 14th
“Before we can walk back home, Americans need to finish what they started on June 14th. The Prince remains powerful and possesses many tricks up his sleeve. One of those tricks is intimidating opposition politicians and citizens. Over the last two months, ICE and the Secret Service have mistreated and arrested Democratic elected officials, including the mayor of Newark, U.S. Congress members, and a U.S. Senator, as well as a county judge from Wisconsin. He has been ambiguous about the use of ICE and the federalized National Guard to capture U.S. citizens and put them beyond the reach of habeas corpus by sending them to prisons outside the country’s territory. Furthermore, he can exploit situations that benefit him, such as the brewing war in the Middle East. He appeared absurd during his parade, receiving the salutes of despondent soldiers, but he could be viewed as a great general if the American Army defeats Iran alongside the Israeli Army. Destiny could provide him with many opportunities to play Napoleon in our turbulent times.
“Thus, taking the wind from his sails may prove to be more difficult than we anticipate today.”
Dealing with a Declining Narcissist
“The Prince is not a typical president. As we have discussed on at least four occasions[1], he shares many traits with seriously narcissistic individuals, making him, along with Putin, one of the most perfect examples of a narcissistic head of state in our times. One of the most prominent features of narcissism, particularly malignant narcissism, is that the behavioral cycle characterizing them becomes more pronounced with age and frustrations, leading to an increasing degree of destructiveness. The Prince is subject to these two problems. Age is advancing fast, and frustrations have increased drastically with his defeats in international policy, economic warfare, social reforms, and his birthday parade, combined with the demonstrations against him.
“Narcissists cycle through this behavior multiple times a day to compel people to validate an inflated view of themselves. To achieve this, they need to establish control over their enablers, which they do through heavy manipulation that becomes abusive. They feel this need due to their zero or negative self-esteem, resulting in a complete lack of a stable identity. They construct this identity using the imaginary virtues and accomplishments they create and force others to shower upon them. These validations become like drugs that they have to consume continuously.
“Of course, as proof of the falsity of the identity they have created accumulates, the need for validation increases exponentially, leading them to do bizarre things to demonstrate their superiority, like trying to humiliate Xi or Putin. For instance, he claimed that the former was begging him for a deal, or, on a rare occasion (he is always servile to Putin), that he the latter was waiting for him and kept him waiting for an hour while he spoke with some youngsters. Then there was the big military parade he thought would resemble the one he saw in France, which, as we all know, was a disappointment.
“Heather Cox Richardson, in her Letters from An American, recently provided an example of the weird way The Prince responds to the stress of seeing the falsity of his fantasies.
“Yesterday at the meeting of the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7), a forum of democracies with advanced economies, President Donald Trump told reporters: “The UK is very well protected. You know why? Because I like them, that's why. That's the ultimate protection.”
Commenters often note that Trump talks like a mob boss, but rarely has his organized-crime style of governance been clearer than in yesterday’s statement.[2]
“The magnitude of the void he has inside him is illustrated by what he needs to cover it—the self-validation of thinking he is either a global Godfather or Superman.
“It is in these circumstances that he could become more dangerous—when he, who has the button to unleash a nuclear war, separates himself from reality to feel how powerful he is.
“In his first term as president, The Prince was surrounded by serious adults. Now, he has appointed only yes-men, many of whom are likely capable of betraying him from behind, but unable to stop him if he decides to do something crazy.
“Dealing with this problem will not be easy. Impeaching or legally declaring him deranged is not an attractive possibility because that would mean replacing an incompetent tyrant with an undoubtedly competent one. Thus, the best solution appears to be converting him into a lame duck in November 2026 by withdrawing congressional support. He, of course, knows this, and for this reason, the period between today and the congressional elections is the most dangerous in the country’s history.
WHERE IS HOME? THE NEW WORLD ORDER
“While all this is happening, you must understand that there is no home to which to return. Of course, you want to revisit the values and principles that have sustained liberal democracies for two hundred and fifty years. Yet, while these values and principles exist, the manner in which they need to be integrated into an institutional structure suitable for our times is unclear, and those values and principles have weakened significantly in the last few decades. Moreover, social cohesion has also weakened due to a surge in excessive individualism, often referred to as the ”I” society, as well as a reversal in the process of absorption that traditionally took place in the United States. Rather than becoming uniformly American in values, people coming from different parts of the world are retaining their original national identities, and individuals whose ancestors were fully American now identify themselves with their race and the original land of emigration of their ancestors.
“A society with outdated institutions, weakened communal values, and diminished social cohesion has no reason to exist. With its social cohesion significantly weakened, the United States will struggle to maintain its freedom. If these problems remain unresolved, The Prince will depart, and another will rise, as societies will continue to seek tyrants. Without them, society would struggle to function, as everyone would seek only their own benefit.
“Thus, we will have to rebuild liberal democracy to address the changes that are creating a new kind of society in our times. Just as in the eighteenth century, when nations were being formed to adjust their feudal organizations to a global economy that had internationalized, we now need to adapt our institutions to larger units to fit a globalized world.
The Elephant in the Room: We Are Globalized
Globalization is the force that has dismantled the institutional framework that supported liberal democratic nations. It is also the same force that resulted in the creation of the institutions now facing collapse. As the British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote:
“Industrialization, like Democracy, is intrinsically cosmopolitan in its operation...Finding the World divided into small economic units, industrialization set to work, a hundred and fifty years ago, to re-shape the economic structure of the World in two ways, both leading in the direction of world unity. It sought to make the economic units fewer and bigger, and also to lower the barriers between them.”[3]
“A society whose institutions have become obsolete must be reorganized, much like the Founding Fathers reorganized the thirteen colonies to form a modern, federal country. Each state had its own institutional setting modelled after the English democratic traditions. Yet, they didn’t have the essential institutions to become a single country while respecting the local democratic institutions. Two geniuses, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, provided the conceptual scheme of these new institutions. Doing so followed the same direction that had created the first modern nations in Europe—Spain, France, and the UK, which were formed through the unification of old feuds into single nations. Unlike these European states, the United States unified itself under a democratic and republican form of government.
“Now the world has moved toward globalization as a result of the Connectivity Revolution, a technological transformation that has nearly eliminated the barriers between nations. The fading of borders and frontiers has sparked strong resistance to change, leading to attempts to reverse the global society that has emerged over the last three or four decades. The trade wars and rivalries between China and the United States have produced the most deceptive of all fake news: that globalization is over. Everyone, including academics, accepts this misleading narrative and spends time discussing how a non-globalized world order would function. Meanwhile, global corporations are expanding at an unprecedented rate, making it increasingly difficult to find non-globalized firms among the large and rapidly growing enterprises. While we dine and claim that globalization belongs to the past, we wrestle with thoughts of the impacts of wars in Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Gaza, and Iran, the No King demonstrations in the United States, elections in Germany, discussions about NATO, and the boats crossing the English Channel, as we witness financial trends spreading across the globe in an instant. Political movements and trends propagate worldwide. What occurs in one country inspires collective actions around the globe.
“We worry about all these global events, not out of curiosity but because we understand that whatever happens in any part of the world will significantly affect our way of life. Moreover, the only countries attempting to cut international supply lines are the United States and those reacting to American policies, and this is solely concerning the United States. Economic globalization remains robust elsewhere. Foreign investment in the United States is declining, and the international use of the dollar is waning, not due to a decrease in international transactions but because the use of other currencies is rising.
“Nobody can deny that we are interconnected across the globe, and nothing suggests that this trend will diminish.
“We worry about things happening far away because we are globalized, and the future points toward even more globalization, not because someone has decided it should be, but because the logic of social, political, and economic progress will naturally lead to it.
The Dark Networks
“One sign of increasing globalization is the growing economic and political power of both legal and illegal global organizations, including mafias, human and drug traffickers, and weapons dealers, as well as connectivity companies. Similar to what occurred during the Industrial Revolution, when a new economic elite emerged to manage industrial and financial national companies (as opposed to local enterprises) to produce industrial goods for the entire world, today we observe the rise of global firms operating worldwide to produce, sell, and source inputs from all corners of the globe. The Prince is a local entrepreneur, but Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and many other members of this new elite are not. They belong to the new global elite, which is significant not only locally in every country but also for the connections between those countries.
“These new elites are so significant that they are amassing greater economic and political power than many countries. These legal and illegal entrepreneurs may pose a credible threat of becoming the rulers of the world. We will not face this challenge when trying to recover liberal democracy if we are still pretending that the world is not globalized, that the crypto currencies are growing so big because dark networks are using them to globalize their system of payments, that in the long term the likes of Elon Musk and his peers have more individual power than The Prince and other national leaders.
“This is why we have to redesign the institutions that sustain the values of liberal democracy.
A Multipolar World?
“Along with the idea that globalization is dead, we naively believe that in the new world order, no country will be hegemonic; that Russia, China, the United States, and maybe Iran will split the world among themselves and peacefully establish a new way to impose discipline on the rest of the world. But we also observe that superpowers are extending their control over distant regions to increase their territories and establish positions on a chessboard that covers not just a region, not just a bloc, not just half the world, but the entire planet.
“Yet, we naively think that the world is moving toward a “multipolar global order” in which three or four power blocs acknowledge each other as sovereigns in one part of the world and establish rules to maintain stability, both territorially and politically, within each bloc and between them. The Israel-United States conflict with Iran highlights the naivety of the notion that major blocs will agree to share global power, especially in a modern world where everything is interconnected. Whatever the outcome of this war, it will not lead to a peaceful resolution and handshakes but rather to a confrontation without a clear end in sight.
“In the 1930s, what was coming was not a reorganization of the world into three peaceful blocs—the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union—but a war for world domination. The same is happening today. Confrontations in this new world are to the death.
“I haven’t mentioned the threats that the rise of AI will pose to the new world and the possibilities it will create to extend the possibilities of asymmetrical wars, which allow relatively small countries like Ukraine to defend themselves with great effect against giant countries like Russia. Smaller, non-national organizations can use these same technologies. We are living in a James Bond world in which companies can make wars against countries.”
IN SUMMARY
“So, these are some of the problems that the United States and the West must face to return to a liberal democratic environment. In the process, we have to reinforce the strength of liberal democratic values and principles to avoid falling into the trap of global tyranny."
“I apologize if I disturbed your breakfast. Ignoring these threats would be more costly than it was to ignore, a decade ago, the dangers that The Prince was carrying with him”.
…..
Manuel Hinds is a Fellow at The Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University. He shared the Manhattan Institute's 2010 Hayek Prize. He has worked in 35 countries as a division chief and then as a consultant to the World Bank. He was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. His website is manuelhinds.com
[1] Manuel Hinds, Tyrannical Personalities: Hubris and Nemesis in Current Despots, Substack, April 01, 2025, https://manuelhinds.substack.com/p/tyrannical-personalities ; Manuel Hinds, The Narcissistic Wound…and existential envy, Substack, April 07, 2025, https://manuelhinds.substack.com/p/the-narcissistic-wound ; Manuel Hinds, Is Trump the Shadow of the United States? The Lord of the Flies, Substack, March 01, 2025, https://manuelhinds.substack.com/p/is-trump-the-shadow-of-the-united ;Manuel Hinds, Trump’s Worsening Narcissism: The Road to Economic and Political Chaos, Substack, June 06, 2025, https://manuelhinds.substack.com/p/trumps-worsening-narcissism .
[2] Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from An American, Substack, June 18, 2025
[3] Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridged Edition by D.C. Somervell, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1946, Volume I, pp. 287-288.