A Protester is seen holding up a US Flag in Hong Kong on September 8, 2019, Protester march from Charter Garden to the US Consulate in Hong Kong calling for support. (Photo by Vernon Yuen via Getty Images)
Americans are beginning to feel some relief from the worst of the political pressures of the past twelve months. Nevertheless, a global pandemic, nationwide protests over social justice, a bitterly contested election, the incumbent’s refusal to accept his loss, and the storming of the U.S. Capitol by his angry mob—all exacerbated by the wretched excesses of social media and traditional media’s substitution of self-serving speculation for skeptical, factual reportage—have all taken a sharp toll on our individual and collective psyches. It doesn’t help that the backdrop is growing Chinese power and Russia’s ongoing efforts to create exploitable chaos.
Even the good news adds to the confusion: the stock market is seemingly in a rush to price in strong future economic growth and America’s undeniable comparative advantage in tech innovation. And, really, how many trillion dollars in federal stimulus spending is too many?
In times like these, when everything seems new and invites getting caught up in the passions of the moment, it might not be a bad idea to step out of the maelstrom and review what we think is really important.
Such, I think, was the purpose of Freedom House, the venerable monitor of the tides of freedom and democracy around the world, in convening, together with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the McCain Institute, a nonpartisan task force that I joined on democracy and its authoritarian challengers.
Our final report, Reversing the Tide: Towards a New U.S. Strategy to Support Democracy and Counter Authoritarianism, came out today. The first thing to say about the report is that it is full of detailed recommendations that will be useful to the Biden Administration, future administrations, and Congress in their efforts to think about promoting democracy abroad and shoring it up at home.
Many of these recommendations have the potential to drive significant change in policymaking. The report calls on President Biden to issue a Presidential Decision Directive identifying “support for democracy at home and abroad as a core value and core national interest.” It calls for democracy to become the “fourth D” of our national security strategy, joining defense, diplomacy, and development. The report calls for the publication of a National Democracy Strategy alongside the traditional National Security Strategy and for establishing an interagency National Democracy Council to oversee its implementation.
The government’s interagency processes may not be the sexiest subject in town, but if Biden follows these recommendations, he will motivate serious activity within the government. He will also find many individuals who care deeply about these issues and about the people around the world, from Hong Kong to Belarus, who are fighting for their freedom.
In a broader sense, however, the significance of this report comes not primarily from its specific recommendations but from the general claim it stakes: Democracy really matters to the United States and to Americans. We are now going through a rough patch from which we have yet to fully emerge, and one reason for the roughness is our rediscovery of the profound ways in which our practice of democracy fails to live up to the ideals that animate it. But the problems lie in the practice, not the ideals themselves. Regardless of our structural problems, there aren’t many Americans who urge the replacement of practices like popular elections with governing structures modeled on those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They want a better American democracy, not Xi Jinping. The task force report unequivocally affirms this fact.
This normative conclusion about how a free people should govern its affairs has application abroad, as well. Democratization by force of arms is not part of the program, but standing with those who seek freedom and democracy for themselves definitely is. So is assisting these seekers of democracy in ways they see fit.
The top-down and externally driven approaches of the past must give way to assistance and support designed in close consultation with the people who actually have to live with the results. This is a worthy project not just for American democracy but for democracy more generally. The democracy summit that President Biden has proposed is an opportunity for like-minded countries to explore what can be done collectively along these lines. Like Americans, the people of, say, Japan, South Korea, and Australia have shown no appetite for chucking their democracies in favor of one-party rule, let alone dominance from abroad by the CCP.
As the Cold War ended and especially in the decade that followed it, democracy seemed to be traveling globally with the wind at its back. That is no longer the case. But this fact does not warrant the conclusion that we should give up on the role of democratic aspirations—including the hopes for human, civil, and political rights—in the conduct of our foreign policy.
In the largest sense, in fact, the Freedom House report arrives as a rebuke to those who conclude from democracy’s current challenges either that we should put all such considerations aside, instead approaching the world solely from the perspective of national interests narrowly construed, or stay home with our heads hung in shame at our own deficiencies.
We should do neither. It would be wrong in principle, bad for our country and our friends, and a comfort to our enemies; it’s not who we are as a people.
This article was originally published on April 14th, 2021 in American Purpose
Since the 1789 adoption in Philadelphia of the Constitution that established the form of government of the United States of America, this country has been committed to democratic, rights-regarding self-governance. “What do we have,” a lady asked Benjamin Franklin afterwards, “a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied with a quip for the ages: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
That American habit of conditionality has persisted. “O say,” Francis Scott Key asked in 1814 after watching the British shell Fort McHenry in Baltimore, “does that star-spangled banner yet wave?” And there was Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863, explaining that the Civil War should be seen as a question of whether America, built on principles of liberty and equality, could “long endure.”
We keep asking. And so we should, not least to remind ourselves that democratic self-governance is neither automatic nor easy. But some 230 years after Franklin’s impish reply, this much we seem entitled to say about our Republic: We have kept it.
The arduous road
The keeping of the American Republic hasn’t been an easy or gentle task. It entailed our willful accommodation of the odious institution of slavery for more than seventy-five years after the ratification of the Constitution, then a Civil War in which more than 2 percent of the country’s population died, then more than a hundred years and counting of regional segregation and nationwide discrimination. Keeping the Republic also entailed our encroachment on what we called a frontier, displacing and decimating the Native American population.
It entailed the struggle to recognize that “all men are created equal” applies to all human beings. It entailed navigating the disruptions of the industrial age and now the digital age, two world wars, assorted lesser wars, and a Cold War against a nuclear-armed superpower convinced of its inevitable worldwide dominion—not to mention a Great Depression, a Great Recession, the disruptions globalization has wrought, and numerous lesser economic travails. It entailed the creation and, then, the difficulties of managing a vast administrative state meant to reduce the risks attendant on a modern economy far removed from its largely agrarian origins.
Keeping the Republic has entailed coping with not just the advantages but the problems of being first a rising power, then a great power, then a superpower, then a hegemonic power, and now a power facing other rising powers. Moreover, the path hasn’t just been long; it has also been marked by often overheated political moments in which great numbers of Americans viewed their political opponents as morally illegitimate or even worse. In such moments, preservation has entailed the need to cope with the human ambition to have its way whatever the cost.
Through it all, we’ve kept our Republic—our democracy, as we call it today, the ability of free people to govern themselves. The commitment hasn’t wavered for nearly 250 years, through wave after wave of crisis and response. It stands as the longest-lasting such commitment in the world, and there is reason to believe that it will persist.
American exceptionalism
An intermittent elite disdain for the idea of American exceptionalism has always been part of the mix of American opinion. One need not embrace doctrinal exceptionalism, though, to recognize that the United States is indeed exceptional.
How exceptional? With the ravages of a pandemic, the polarizing figure of President Trump, the digitally promoted tribalism, the coarseness of expression, and the increasing insistence that you’re entitled to a little violence if your side is losing despite its righteousness, 2020 will definitely rank among America’s toughest peacetime years.
But does even this year show that Americans are willing to abandon our constitutional arrangements? In favor of what, exactly? Membership in some upper Midwestern militia? Swearing allegiance to a woke clerisy dedicated to shutting down dissent? A divorce, velvet or otherwise, between red states and blue states?
Even this year, the democratically and legally constituted authorities, with all their equivocations, have not really shown themselves prepared to let hotheads prevail over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. To put it another way, if “buy low” is generally good advice, 2020 would be an excellent time to invest in American democracy.
Warts and all
The failure of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, and of Orwell’s chilling vision in 1984 of permanent one-party rule to come to pass, reflects the reality that mutually respected freedoms are more in accord with human desire than is total control by one human being or one advantaged group. The conceit of totalitarianism is that with enough force, one can eliminate the possibility of disagreement once and for all. But in fact one cannot do so, even if the force is thoroughgoing and brutal. That is because disagreement over at least some things is inevitable whenever two or more people gather. Even relatively successful exercises in totalitarian control can suppress only the expression of disagreement, not the disagreement itself.
The question of politics, writ large, is how to resolve disagreements. The totalitarian answer is to resolve them by force from the top down—inevitably to the primary advantage of those closer to the top. But the dissatisfaction generated by such an arrangement can never be eradicated, nor can the desire for better arrangements.
Peaceable, rights-regarding, democratic self-governance is simply better than any other form of government at filtering and satisfying people’s competing desires and disagreements. The United States literally pioneered this form of government; it is the founding member of a club now populated on every continent by democratic states peaceably inclined toward one another.
The condition of the American Republic has never conformed to an ideal type, nor will it. It arose under a particular set of circumstances and has evolved within constitutional limits as circumstances have changed. The result is often unattractive. For an example, take security: The United States had the geographic advantage of maturing politically between two oceans. But beginning in the late 19th century, American security has focused on the development of formidable military capabilities. In fact, these capabilities radiate outward through alliance relationships and less formal understandings to provide security for many other countries, democratic countries most prominent among them. To varying degrees, this security umbrella relieves other countries of much of the burden of providing for their security themselves.
The American ability to take care not only of its own security but also that of others warrants commendation. Unfortunately, it also creates certain democratic debilities that many other democratic countries don’t encounter precisely because of their lesser security responsibilities: the excesses of the surveillance state, for example, and criminal misbehavior in wartime. Some deficiencies of American democracy, in other words, have structural origins.
Others are constitutional. The United States went first in crafting a republican constitution—and today bears the scars of the struggle to bring thirteen states together in one nation. No country setting out on a democratic path today would create a mechanism such as the electoral college. But we have it, and we are stuck with it until such time as there is sufficient support to amend the Constitution (or for some extra-constitutional workaround).
Other democratic deficiencies are entirely of our own making. In the post-Cold War period of American “hyperpower” (hyperpuissance, a coinage of then-French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine in 1999), some U.S. politicians and policymakers became wildly overconfident about their ability to hasten the adoption of democratic, rights-regarding self-governance around the world. American exceptionalism was transformed into a universal principle and mission. That was a mistake: Self-governance advances only against resistance, and it remains a difficult enterprise even when broadly supported. (In fact, American exceptionalism might better be viewed as an alternative to the expectation of universal application of this form of governance.)
Notwithstanding overreach and resistance, however, the example of the United States still stands—and that of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and many more. The hills are now alive with shining cities, though their brightness varies from time to time. Democracies should work singly and together to bolster the case for democratic, rights-regarding self-governance. A little competition among them for bragging rights on aspects of democratic practice is hardly a bad thing. In fact, it’s excellent.
The Authoritarian Challenge
Meanwhile, authoritarians of all kinds, especially those with sufficient resources to support clandestine active measures abroad in addition to the secret police that keep them in power at home, don’t like the power of democratic example. They like even less advocacy on behalf of the superiority of democracy. Worse still are efforts by the United States and others to promote democracy and provide support for democratic forces abroad. So authoritarians use whatever capacity they can muster to undermine the legitimacy of democracy itself.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) today, Putin’s Russia (like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union before it), and the mullah-ruled theocracy in Iran are quick to point to the faults of the United States as the leading democratic power and our supposed failure to live up to our democratic ideals. The purpose is twofold: secondarily, to persuade others that the American example is not worth following; primarily, to persuade Americans that the American example is fundamentally flawed and not worth advocating for.
How do we respond to this challenge? First, we should note that the CCP, Putin, and the mullahs do not share our republican ideals. Their criticism is insincere. They loathe and fear the United States for its ideals as the most powerful democracy and will do so still more intensely the more fully we live up to them. Russia and Iran, for example, persecute individuals who are not heterosexual. They would prefer a United States with anti-sodomy laws still on the books as justification for their own persecution to a United States that implicitly rebukes this persecution abroad through constitutional protection for same-sex marriage. Similarly, Chinese government media outlets enjoy calling out the United States for racism, while the CCP perpetrates genocide against the Uighurs in Xinjiang.
Such persecution is indeed perfectly consistent with these regimes’ authoritarian sensibilities: no hypocrisy there. It’s just that their authoritarian sensibilities are disgusting. The United States can and should accept criticism over its practices from those who share our self-governing ideals. In fact, Americans themselves provide abundant such criticism. The United Kingdom, France, and others among the democratically like-minded have standing to offer criticism. We should take criticism from the likes of China, Russia, and Iran as an invitation to explain the superiority of our political arrangements.
The second response to the challenge from these non-democracies is something of a corollary. We should not confuse two different questions: how the world should be and how it measures up to those ideals. Deficiency on the latter does not refute the normative prescriptions of the former.
If our ideals were truly impossible to achieve, the perpetual failure to measure up or even make progress toward them would be grounds for rethinking their validity. In fact, however, the United States and many other countries have substantially achieved progress toward democratic rights, from self-governance on the political side to individual sufficiency in the face of inevitable scarcity on the economic side. China, Russia, Iran and many others have not. There is no doubt that the United States and others could improve on their performance. Indeed, our normative principles—our ideals about how the world should be—themselves provide the guideposts for improving our practice. For many other countries, their interest in pursuing these ideals consists only in pretending to support them.
There is a third response to these regimes: to push back, with moral clarity as well as humility. It may be true that China would collapse into anarchy without a strong one-party state. If so, that’s sad for the Chinese people (though good for members of the Chinese Communist Party). But our people and the people of other countries practicing democratic, rights-regarding self-governance do not require one-party rule to avoid such a collapse, and that is simply a better position for a government or a society to be in. We should say that when we can, and certainly in response to charges of hypocrisy from autocrats and would-be totalitarians. If they act to undermine systems of self-governance by taking advantage of the freedom of our societies, we should find creative ways to return the favor. We are not without capabilities, and our adversaries have weaknesses—most of them involving their fears for their long-term success and their personal physical security.
We shouldn’t expect the rest of the world to conform anytime soon to principles of democratic, rights-regarding self-governance. But we can affirm that such a system is the best answer human beings have devised to the problem of politics. Or to tone that claim down a bit, we can put it in Churchillian terms: our system is the worst—except for all the others.
Either way, we’re keeping it; and, where we can, we should help others who aspire to pursue something similar.
This article was originally published on November 23rd in American Purpose
Tod Lindberg 