Attachment #28: The Need to Re-examine Democracy
There is a need to re-examine democracy, particularly as it is being practiced in the US, with Russia’s attack on Ukraine as a magnifying glass. While Putin’s war on Ukraine has clarified the contest between democracy and authoritarianism, there is a great irony playing itself out between what Ukraine is struggling to achieve since 1991 and what’s going on in the US. For sure, even before the Feb 24th Ukraine ranked low on Transparency International’s 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index (122 in the world, slightly better than Russia, which comes in at 136.) But that doesn’t mean the people don’t want democracy, and they have finally elected a man who has democracy in his veins.
But flip across the Atlantic. The Freedom House 2022 report on the dire threat to global freedom, released last month, noted that “democracies are being harmed from within by illiberal forces, including unscrupulous politicians willing to corrupt and shatter the very institutions that brought them to power.” Their primary example was that of the US, which “has fallen below its traditional peers on key democratic indicators, including (presidential) elections, freedom from improper political influence, and equal treatment of minority groups.”
Fox News personality Tucker Carlson’s monologues are so supportive of Putin they are being replayed on Russian state television. Representative Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has called Zelenskyy a thug and says democratic Ukraine is “incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies,” and Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) were part of a conference in which white nationalists cheered on Putin’s attack on Ukraine and chanted his name. The findings of the January 6 committee reveal that the pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party appears to have been willing to overturn the US liberal democracy so long as it could get what it wanted. Trump shifted US foreign policy away from its traditional democratic allies and toward Russia.
The US will have to wake up to the reality that the only way human rights can be helped or made secure is through the existence of the state, of public order, and of the rule of law – a rather strange and troubling thing to be saying to this supposed cradle of democracy.
Attachment #29: Bibliography
- Blake, Heidi – From Russia with Blood
- Browder, Bill – Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice
- Judt, Tony – Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
- Macintyre, Ben – Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy
- Macintyre, Ben – The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
- MacMllan, Margaret – War: How Conflict Shaped Us
- Myers, Stephen Lee – The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin
- Plokhy, Serhil – Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation
- Sarotte, Mary – Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate
- Service, Robert – Kremlin Winter: Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin
- Weisberg, Joe – Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy For the Second Cold War
- Werth, Alexander – Russia At War