A More Perfect Union

A small Balkan nation is in an existential crisis, but it looks pretty good to me.

Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić during the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, on Sept. 24, 2025.

BELGRADE, Serbia – As is often the case, I offer this dispatch from a strange and distant land where in recent years I’ve been spending a whole lot of time. Here presides a corrupt leadership, with a Tammany Hall style of patronage government, facing its third year of sometimes paralyzing protests from a loud, feckless opposition fronted by college students with no vision of a future except the immediate resignation of the Aleksandar Vučić government.

No policy initiatives, no economic plan, no coherent message of any sort — not even in support of democracy. This opposition’s notion of representative government seems to be to decide every matter, from foreign policy to infrastructure to education to social welfare, by plenum. All of this is quite vague, but that apparently means convening assemblies of public-spirited citizens to make every decision, from war to bus fares, by the will of the assemblage.

Once again, the mechanics of governance are unclear, but seems to be missing a few key elements, such as a bureaucracy, technocracy, expertise, experience or even any delegation of governmental duties beyond the plenums themselves. This is something like the Iowa caucuses, something like mob rule and something very much resembling Bolshevism. Recall that Serbia’s 40-year dalliance with Communism ended with collapse, followed by genocidal civil war.

The status quo puts the Republic of Serbia’s future in the hands of self-dealing demagogues who crudely control the mainstream media and who trade in (mostly) hallucinatory Western conspiracies to emasculate a proud nation. But these racketeers also know where the greatest corruption lies: with the voters, who remain bought and paid for via the vestiges of the socialist “miracle” of ex-Yugoslavia. Feather-bedding employment, free education, free healthcare, low taxes, 5-week vacations, ever-growing pensions and new highways and hospitals galore. Unlike the Yugo glory days under Marshal Josip Tito, such goodies are not paid for with vast loans and grants from Western powers grateful for Tito’s split with Stalin and eventual semi-market economy. No, to fund the largesse in the post-Communist era, a series of governments have sold large chunks of every sovereign asset that isn’t nailed down, from telecom to banks to mineral interests to broadcast channels to banks to the Belgrade airport and the national airline.

Plus modest funding from the European Union for the supposed upgrade of economic and democratic institutions in harmony with EU values. Plus an unscalable mountain of debt. So as the opposition (literally) sets dumpster fires and blocks traffic, refusing any negotiation with the government, it’s reasonable to ask whether the country is better served by them or the devil they know. Alas, the answer is: no. Neither offers anything remotely like a sustainable future.

The point is, this place where I have taken refuge for months at a time each year is a truly fucked-up country. But not nearly as fucked up as the United States. No mass arrests. No mass deportations. No campaign of extortion against private companies and universities. No wholesale abandonment of the constitution or rule of law. No threats against foreign nations or nationals. No military occupation of its own cities. No cold-blooded murder of Venezuelan drug traffickers (or mere unarmed teenage boaters). No daily vilification of domestic adversaries. No insults of foreign governments. No catastrophic dismantling of national institutions or sabotaging of international ones. No construction of a gulag archipelago, such as Alligator Alcatraz and Alcatraz itself. No abrogation of 75 years of civil rights and human rights law, not to mention treaties. No daily diet of outrageous and utterly preposterous lies, whether about climate change, vaccines, slavery or the president’s golf scores.

Yes, Serbia is a mess. It’s also, relatively speaking, Camelot.

Twenty-five years ago, through an accident of matrimony, I began visiting here now and then for a few days at a time. It was in equal parts exotic, welcoming and scarred by its traumatic history, which included 500 years of Ottoman occupation and countless wars. In that time, I have become ever more attached to the Serbian people and the paradox of their way of life: countless joys and countless grudges, which, as my novelist friend Vladimir Pištalo wrote,“swirled around me like leaves in a whirlwind.” Never did I imagine its manifest flaws and ongoing traumas be dwarfed by the USA’s. I misunderstood not the cynicism of politics but the mentality of my own people. Much as Serbian corruption is greatest in the populace, so American fascism has its roots in the American soul — which does not make us exceptional. The rest of the world is regressing in rough parallel.

What it makes us, notwithstanding the lie we told ourselves for generations, is unexceptional. So for the moment, or longer, I’m digging in here. The future is indeed uncertain, but the grilled meat and slivovitz are phenomenal.