Jan 18, 2018 3 min read

Winston Churchill may have once quipped that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter,” but you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better system of government.

While far from perfect and in constant need of fine-tuning, democracies offer the best avenues for citizen participation and fairness, and they give people an opportunity to air their grievances. In this country, all citizens over age 18 also have a right to vote, even though all too many do not exercise that privilege. Moreover, many states have actively tried in recent years to make it harder for less well-off citizens to cast ballots thanks to voter ID laws. Our democracy also failed to live up to its ideals in the Jim Crow South, until the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s offered overdue relief to African-Americans.

Still, democracies work, despite the fact they move in fits and starts and are filled with disputation.

That’s why a report released this week by Freedom House, a U.S.-based organization that advocates for political freedom and human rights, is so unsettling. It found democracy is in retreat around the world, and it’s happening in countries that have been considered democratic bulwarks.

The report found “democracy faced its most serious crisis in decades” in 2017, and “guarantees of free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press, and the rule of law came under attack around the world.”

Freedom House looks at such countries as Turkey and Hungary, which were once thought to be democratic success stories, but are backsliding into authoritarianism, and Myanmar, the majority-Buddhist nation which launched a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against its Muslim Rohingya minority.

But the United States does not get off the hook. Freedom House cities “an accelerating decline in American political rights and civil liberties,” a decreasing commitment to promoting democracy around the world, and President Trump’s attacks on the press and the judiciary.

The report also finds the ebbing of democracy around the world has coincided with Russia and China having increased influence on how smaller, less powerful countries conduct themselves. It states, “A confident Xi Jinping recently proclaimed that China is ‘blazing a new trail’ for developing countries to follow. It is a path that includes politicized courts, intolerance for dissent, and predetermined elections.”

The success of democracy both here and elsewhere is of more than passing interest to us, since a free press is a central tenet of democracy. The media landscape in countries that have taken up the authoritarian mantle are “dominated by propaganda mouthpieces that marginalize the opposition while presenting the leader as omniscient, strong, and devoted to national aggrandizement.”

Why should it matter if we remain democratic, however tenuously, and large portions of the rest of the world tumble into autocracy? Democracies are generally stable, wealthy, protect individual liberties and tend to be more peaceful. On the other hand, autocracies tend to succumb to instability, radicalization and violence. For example, look no further than Iraq or Afghanistan, places we have sent troops to in recent years.

Because we have had a relatively stable democracy for more than 200 years, we have taken it for granted. Freedom House’s report shows in clear terms why we should not.