My Take | The sick man of democracy hosts a democracy summit
- The Washington summit next week is the very symptom of what is so terribly wrong with American democracy, rather than what is wrong with democracy generally around the world that needs a course correction by American politicians
The best democracy is not necessarily the most powerful. The most powerful democracy is not necessarily the most representative or functional, though by sheer dominance, it may well claim to be so.
The practice of democracy starts at home. Though if that is failing, politicians may invoke an external enemy or enemies to distract the public.
It’s true that there is a democratic deficit, if by that, there are fewer “democracies” today than 10 or 20 years ago. But still, the Washington summit has invited more than 140 countries; that’s almost three quarters of the total number of nations. Not all democracies are the same. Some are better or more functional than others; some are in name only but it’s still useful to count them up. As Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.”
There are two unspoken assumptions behind the Washington summit that deserve to be challenged because they are, as far as I can see, unsound and untrue. Being a long-time Kantian-Hegelian student, let me write them as two theses and then I will present my own antitheses.
Thesis 1: The global advance of democracy since the end of the Cold War is backsliding and it needs the United States to reverse it.