According to “Freedom in the World,” an annual report released by Freedom House, a respected American think tank, seventy-three nations had a lower “freedom score” in 2020 than the year before.1 Only twenty-eight nations saw their scores rise. Ominously, the report noted that 75 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that experienced a diminution of voters’ rights. “For the first time in this century,” as the British historian Timothy Garton Ash has observed, “among countries with more than one million people, there are now fewer democracies than there are non-democratic regimes.”2
The threat to global democracy could not be more real. The assaults on freedom are global, sustained, and formidable.
Governments of all ideological stripes, including many that style themselves as paragons of democracy, have seized opportunities to weaken the checks and balances that constrain their power. As we have discussed in these pages, in some countries these attacks are blunt and visible; in others they are subtle and stealthy.
Democrats must prevail in the existential contest against enemies who prefer a world in which power is concentrated and unchecked. Yet how best can we fight a war that rages on multiple fronts, against 3P adversaries adept at exploiting democracy’s weaknesses and tapping into popular frustrations and discontents that democracies have failed repeatedly to address? In this latter-day incarnation of President John F. Kennedy’s “long twilight struggle,” democracy’s defenders must choose their battles wisely to prevail.3
Of the many that lie ahead, I believe that these five stand out as the most important:
In what follows, I sketch what we must do to win in each of these five battlefields. I offer no magic bullets but concentrate instead on identifying the key objectives to be met and the most promising avenues for meeting them.
Any strategy to defend democracies and ensure that the political system works for the good of society hinges on restoring the ability of citizens to differentiate truth from lies. As Timothy Snyder, one of the most astute chroniclers of contemporary tyrannies, has warned, “Post-truth is pre-fascism … to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”4
Yet around the world, political leaders increasingly see the appeal of lying in pursuit of power. And by lying I mean not fibbing or spinning, as politicians have always done but telling the kind of lies that poison democratic coexistence and undermine the very possibility of democracy. Count on Donald Trump to show the way: in May 2021, more than five months after blaming his reelection loss on mythical claims of fraudulent voting, he brazenly declared that “the Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 … will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!”5
Big Political Lies belong in a completely different category from political fibbing. The Kremlin’s framing of Chechen separatists for the gruesome 1999 bombings of four apartment blocks in Moscow and other Russian cities is a terrifying illustration of how the Big Lie was used to consolidate power, in this case by Vladimir Putin after an ailing Boris Yeltsin designated him as prime minister. Whether it’s Putin blaming Chechens, Turkey’s Erdoğan alleging a shadowy conspiracy of Gulenist wreckers, or Donald Trump claiming a nefarious “deep state” was arrayed against his administration, the Big Lie enables 3P politicians to justify their power grabs. Every populist pitch has a Big Lie at its core, casting the aspiring autocrat as the only hope of the noble, downtrodden, and betrayed people against a shadowy elite that hates them.
Until recently, the reputational damage of being caught telling a Big Lie served to check the most egregious behavior by aspirants for high office in established democracies. But the rise to power of Trump, Erdoğan, Modi, Duterte, Orbán, and Bolsonaro, among others, suggests a dangerous shift in the cost-benefit balance of telling a Big Lie. No democracy can survive if the propagation of Big Lies is consistently rewarded with power. Draining Big Lies of their power will require a huge amount of political will, legal creativity, and technological and journalistic innovation. But if we lose this particular battle, success in the others will be moot.
Much attention has focused on the role of the internet as a force multiplier for Big Lies. There’s some exaggeration involved in this. After all, three centuries before the internet was invented, Jonathan Swift was already quipping that “falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.”6 But the internet has tilted the playing field so heavily in favor of the liars that people no longer trust the institutions that exist to sort truth from lies. The strong propensity of online algorithms to favor the flashy but false over the humdrum but true has left truth-telling in a kind of crisis, an epistemic muddle that threatens the entire democratic project.
As Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev have argued, this trend can be reversed. “The internet,” as they put it, “doesn’t have to be awful.”7 Creative approaches to improving the quality of online civic engagement have been tried with some success in places from Taiwan and Brazil to Seattle and Vermont. Some innovations have tried to strip away the anonymity that stokes toxic online speech; others have sought to create platforms that encourage and reward consensus-building and depolarize the online public square.
The lessons from these initiatives need to be adopted by the online behemoths that now form oligopolies of online search and advertising—through their own choice if possible and by regulation if necessary. The financial, legal, and reputational incentives of the tech giants need to be aligned with society’s broader interests.
Twitter’s decision to ban Donald Trump following his four-year tsunami of daily lies from the Oval Office will be remembered as the first, if partial and problematic, step in this fight. But the ensuing debate over the effectiveness and justice of deplatforming Trump from Twitter and Facebook (the latter used an independent board to review such decisions, evoking as much scorn as praise) is a reminder of how much more needs to be done. The broad protection from liability granted to the big tech companies in the United States will rightly continue to be a target for legislative attention. Profit-motivated firms with business models built on maximizing user engagement, which falsehood drives in ways that truth cannot, can’t be relied on to detoxify their platforms of their own volition.
Traditional media, too, faces a reckoning. In 2020, for the first time, fewer than half of all Americans said they trust traditional media, according to data from Edelman’s annual trust barometer. Fifty-six percent of Americans agree that “journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.” Fifty-eight percent think that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.” When Edelman polled Americans after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the figures had deteriorated even further, with 57 percent of Democrats trusting the media and only 18 percent of Republicans.8 Journalism used to act as a bulwark against the Big Lie—but it can’t play that role if the stories that journalists report are not believed.
Overcoming this crisis will mean revising, and in some cases renouncing, old journalistic impulses. The entrenched habit of “bothsidesism”—the tendency to try to find moral equivalence where there is none—must be rejected if one of those sides is attacking the democratic system.9
As Lionel Barber, the former editor of the Financial Times, has argued, this does not mean journalism must be openly partisan. So long as arguments are made in good faith and on the basis of evidence, both sides do need to be heard. However, when good faith is not on offer or when evidence is maliciously manipulated or ignored, a respectful hearing is not only unwise but potentially destructive.10 Journalists and commentators cannot be allowed to establish their bona fides as impartial observers by remaining equidistant between the people peddling Big Lies and those resisting them. Aspiring autocrats have long exploited such corrosive moral relativism as part of their 3P strategy.
The principle that a Big Lie disqualifies those who tell it from high office must be reasserted. Leaders who set out to nullify democratic decisions—such as the Republican members of Congress who endorsed Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 U.S. election—must have no future in politics if democracy is to survive. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1787: “The hope of impunity is a strong incitement to sedition; the dread of punishment, a proportionally strong discouragement to it.”11 Yet instead of embracing this principle, after the election the Republicans in thrall to Trump purged those in their party who endorsed it.
A hardening of sanctions against malicious lying would not be as unprecedented as it is often made out to be, nor as unusual. All Western nations have safeguards, for example, to prevent advertisers from making unfounded medical claims. The recognition that false or exaggerated claims on behalf of medicines marketed to sick people can harm them is not controversial, nor should it be. Regulators scrutinize such communications, looking for the claims that cannot be made on behalf of a drug and the warnings and disclaimers that must be included, as anyone who has turned on a television set in the United States knows. To treat this as a violation of speech rights would be outlandish. The falsehoods that national politicians have delivered to their constituents regarding the 2020 election and the pandemic (not to mention climate change) have brought a sharp reminder that political lies can be just as deadly as medical lies.
The instinct that balks at regulating political speech has deep and honorable roots. Legally mandating that such speech be truthful would put us on a slippery slope. After all, if we accept the principle that some political speech is allowed and some is not, what happens when those called on to make the distinction are our adversaries? Such arguments will rightly command scrutiny from judges called on to adjudicate challenges of any new legal framework to protect against Big Lies. But in a world where the viability of democracy as a system is in doubt, such arguments can no longer be admitted as the final word on the matter. Prudence requires that we do better.
Citizens should also be better armed with a robust understanding of the mechanics of democratic governance. Civic education was once a mainstay of secondary education around the world. In too many cases, such lessons have simply been canceled, giving way in the curriculum to flavor-of-the-month approaches that don’t give students the historical context and knowledge to assess the debates immanent in democracy. Indeed, a 2018 survey found that only one in three Americans could pass a multiple-choice test drawing on items from the U.S. citizenship examination.12 The consequences of this ignorance are plain for all to see.
Getting “back to basics” and teaching teenagers how a bill becomes a law is not enough. Today’s technological environment places unprecedented demands on information consumers to make choices about what to trust. A generation ago, decisions about which ideas would gain wide currency were relegated to a small cadre of elite editors in a handful of cultural capitals. No longer. Today, every news consumer is his or her own editor. In unschooled hands, this is a recipe for rampant disinformation.
Denying charlatans a receptive audience will require a new focus on digital hygiene. Democracies must develop and support a curriculum for their students that imparts the mental skills to filter the torrents of disinformation that digital life puts before internet users. Technology needs to be enlisted as an ally in this larger effort. AI-enabled tools can measure the credibility of participants in online debates and their adherence to usual standards of verification and truth-telling. Today’s online giants already have the technology needed to rank their users according to their vulnerability to disinformation and could put in place mechanisms to protect the vulnerable from the most misleading and corrosive material.
Informed and responsive citizens are the first line of defense against the Big Lie. Where citizens lack the tools to perform their citizenship duties, today’s 3P autocrats are more likely to entrench themselves. The costs of inaction on this front are just too high to countenance.
It is imperative that we accelerate the development and adoption of new laws, institutions, technologies, and incentives that give citizens a fighting chance to repeal the barrage of lies deployed against them by existing or aspiring autocrats. This is an eminently achievable goal.
The second battle we must win is against criminalized governments. Don’t misunderstand this as another call to fight corruption. Criminalized government is to corruption as the Big Political Lie is to traditional political fibbing. Democracies can coexist with a certain amount of corruption—indeed, they always have. But democracy cannot survive where officials at the highest levels of governments are also the top leaders of sprawling criminal organizations that control critical public institutions (police, the military, intelligence agencies, the diplomatic service, the tax authority, customs, regulatory agencies, etc.) and lucrative private ones (protected state-owned enterprises, industries that exploit natural resources, private monopolies, etc.). These criminal organizations enrich their leaders and their cronies and enable them to attack and repress adversaries at home and abroad. Democracy cannot work in mafia states that rely on organized crime’s strategies, tactics, and methods and have the backing of a sovereign state.
From Russia, Syria, and Kosovo to Venezuela, North Korea, and Honduras, mafia states radiate lawlessness, exporting gangland tactics even as they offer safe harbor for the world’s criminals. Their financial institutions shield ill-gotten gains from around the world, their diplomacy undermines the democratic aspirations of people everywhere, and their security services terrorize dissidents. A mafia state anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
In today’s international system, Vladimir Putin’s Russia plays an outsized role in sustaining this loose global confederation of mafia states. Russian diplomats, spies, hackers, and trolls poison the waters for democrats everywhere. Russia’s size and geostrategic weight create space for the criminalization of other states. Which is why, in the near term, the battle against criminalized statecraft must take the form of a tough line against the projection of Russian power and an insistence on preventing the Russian criminal elite from enjoying its loot. Beyond Russia, countries that put gangland techniques at the center of their statecraft must be met with determined resistance. In the era of 3P autocracy, the threat to democracy is a challenge not to liberal ideology but to the principle of governance based on law and truth. The routine uses of murder, intimidation, racketeering, and disinformation by a state must never go unchallenged.
The campaign to bring today’s mafia states to heel will be a war of attrition. Although spectacular wins may be elusive, it can gradually reduce the threat that mafia states pose.
The first step is simple: follow the money. Ramp up the discovery and sanction of places where mafia state leaders stash away their assets, and you’ve greatly undermined their model’s attractiveness. Yet despite a huge upsurge in enforcement activity in recent decades against illicit financial transactions, leaks, hacks, and investigations continue.13 It is no secret that leaders and cronies from mafia states are still using some of the world’s biggest banks to move and hide vast sums of money in offshore havens.
In that effort, each mafia state is supported by an unseen web of highly paid professionals toiling to make crime pay. Lawyers, accountants, wealth managers, private bankers, public relations and communications experts, corrupt law enforcement, and those serving as fronts must coordinate carefully to disguise and protect mechanisms for laundering ill-gotten loot. Without them, the leader of a mafia state is confined to his own country, a fate few of them are willing to accept. Democracies need to boost the resources they allocate to targeting this ecosystem: the 2020 budget for the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, for instance, was only $120 million, a puny sum set against several trillion dollars in illicit flows.14 Democracies must make it harder to create anonymous shell companies by creating more beneficial ownership registries and making the data public. They must curb the dubious practice of selling citizenship, which has given mafia state members hideaways and footholds not only in Caribbean tax havens but also, via Malta and Cyprus, in the European Union.
The leaders of criminalized states are obsessed with reputation laundering, giving “generously” to charities and nonprofits that exist largely for this purpose. Find those fake charities, name them, and shame them. Criminal state hierarchs enjoy the perks of foreign travel and foreign property ownership; withdraw it from them. Take care to raise, one by one, the costs and risks associated with their line of business. When the opportunity arises, jail them. Criminal activity calls for law enforcement responses, whether the perpetrator is a mob boss or a cabinet minister.
As any student of history knows, states have meddled in one another’s affairs for as long as they have existed. Back in the fifth century BCE, Thucydides, a general and one of the first historians, had already identified how Greek city-states used propaganda, rumors, and misinformation to undermine their rivals’ morale, foster divisions among their elites, and install allies to lead the enemy’s troops and, at times, even its government.15
Modern times have been no different, whether what’s at issue are the machinations behind revolutions and wars on the European continent or the bluster, subterfuge, and manipulations of the global Cold War. The political scientist Dov H. Levin has found, for instance, that on a worldwide level, the United States and the USSR/Russia “intervened in one of every nine competitive national level executive elections between 1946 and 2000.”16 In the twentieth century’s contest between autocracies and democracies, the latter gained ground after the fall of the Soviet Union. By 2007, most of the seventy-five countries rated as autocracies in 1987 by the Center for Systemic Peace’s Polity IV dataset had become democracies or had mixed systems.17
As we have seen, the momentum in that struggle is shifting. The swelling power and sway of an authoritarian China have upended expectations of democracy’s inexorable triumph. So has a revanchist Russia. Together, they have extended their shared interest in overturning the existing international order through new groups, initiatives, and institutions, whether BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Indeed, globalization and interdependence have superheated the competition between democracies and autocracies in once obscure multilateral bodies like the World Health Organization (WHO), the Universal Postal Union, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and the International Civil Aviation Organization.
Yet for all these changes, perhaps the most unprecedented and insidious disruption we have recently witnessed has been the malicious use of state power to undermine the political legitimacy of democratic rivals abroad through new online communications technologies. Meddling in other countries’ politics has become far easier and cheaper in the twenty-first century, so much so that this tool is no longer available only to superpowers. North Korea, Turkey, Brazil, and Iran are just some examples of midsized, poor countries from which cyberattacks have been launched against politicians, governments, and private companies in larger, wealthier countries like the United States, France, or Spain.
We have come to grips with the scale of this problem only gradually. To Britons, the realization came as evidence emerged that Russia interfered in their 2016 Brexit referendum. For Americans, it came when evidence began to pile up of Moscow’s meddling in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020. Spaniards learned the same lesson ahead of Catalonia’s wildcat independence referendum in October 2017. And many Chileans came to suspect the same after a subway fare hike triggered widespread protests in October 2019. Time and again, foreign disinformation campaigns emanating from autocracies destabilized what had been seen as a consolidated democracy. Influence operations like these are deeply asymmetrical: they’re heavily stacked in favor of the instigator. With costs so low and potential rewards so high, such attacks are certain to proliferate.
Take the case of the foreign disinformation onslaught in the last two U.S. elections. As I have written before, this cyberconfrontation was asymmetrical not because America was at a technological disadvantage (the United States is a global leader in the technologies needed to wage cyberwars), but because Russia, China, and other autocracies were able to exploit the vulnerabilities of a democracy. What made America susceptible to the attack from an authoritarian Russia encapsulates the weaknesses that make all democracies susceptible to foreign political cyberattacks. For one thing, Russia targeted the democratic process. In the words of the intelligence community’s January 2017 report, the hacks and leaks worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process.”18
They aimed to take advantage of the free flow of information in a democratic society, the effect of that information on public opinion, and the electoral mechanisms through which public opinion determines a country’s leadership. Moreover, not only are democratic politicians more vulnerable to leaks, but democracies are also more likely to produce leakers to begin with. The legal protections afforded to individuals in democratic states make it hard to deter this type of behavior.
Why haven’t Western democracies made the necessary reforms to adapt to the threat? Why have they let countries like Russia get the upper hand, not in capabilities but in practice? One reason is surely the checks and balances that limit the concentration of power and slow down governmental decision-making. While all bureaucracies, including those of authoritarian regimes, move slowly, Putin and Xi are far less encumbered by laws and institutional constraints than their democratic counterparts.19
These genetic democratic weaknesses can also hamper the ability of democracies to forge a united multilateral front against 3P autocrats. Look, for instance, at how voting structures in the European Union have prevented it from holding Viktor Orbán to account or from stopping Hungary from blocking criticism of China and Russia. The Trump administration’s frustrations with the challenges and democratic niceties of multilateral diplomacy caused it to withdraw from bodies such as the UN Human Rights Council, citing the membership of malefactors such as China, Venezuela, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet as former congressional representative Eliot Engel noted, that withdrawal just allowed “the council’s bad actors to follow their worst impulses unchecked.”20 The way to strengthen democracy is not to withdraw from universalist bodies, which are the battleground for influence, but to build up alliances and complementary groups and use them more effectively. For instance, democracies account for 80 percent of funding for the WHO: properly concentrated, such power could have blunted the effort of China, which contributes only 2 percent, to distort the organization’s initial investigations into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.21 Yet the effort to build better coalitions cannot come at the expense of principles: democracies lose more than they gain when they uncritically welcome, for strategic reasons, 3P leaders such as Modi, Erdoğan, Orbán, and Duterte to their ranks.
Thomas Carothers has called for democracies to “make collective, mutually supportive commitments to improve their own democracies and to stand up for democracy whenever it is threatened in other countries.”22 Such a commitment should be at the center of an agenda for democratic renewal focused tightly “on three priorities: fighting corruption, defending against authoritarianism, and advancing human rights.”23 Solidifying the commitment of a small group of core established democracies to support one another vigorously along these three axes would be a major achievement in guarding against foreign subversion.
That commitment needs to be public, solemn, and backed by specific action, because like a cancer, autocracy metastasizes. Left unchecked, it seeks out new organs to infect, both across and within borders. Democracy protection, then, is no mere matter of liberal do-goodism: it is a vital national security priority.
Democracy is a way of organizing political competition. In a democracy, those unhappy with the current state of affairs can change things, but only if they can persuade enough fellow citizens to vote for them. Ensuring fair and lawful political competition is the central purpose of democratic checks and balances. Impartial courts, term limits, and checks on executive power in general exist to bar those who hold office from subverting the system to remain in power indefinitely.
Nearly every negative trend in today’s democracies stems from the rise of anti-competitive pressures in the political system. In all the different ways we have seen in this book, 3P autocrats enlist the power of the state—its judges, cops, soldiers, media, civil servants, and regulators—in the service not of the nation but of their side. Their goal is to rig the game, plain and simple, and to consolidate their power.
In the business world, anti-competitive practices have been closely regulated for well over a century. Laws protect consumers from competition-stifling practices such as price-fixing, cartels, and predatory pricing. We must now extend this same reasoning to the political realm. 3P autocrats are all in when it comes to anti-competitive politics. They corner the market on political donations, erecting huge financial barriers to entry for competitors. They gerrymander safe districts for themselves. They drive their opponents off the airwaves, stack the courts with judges who will rule against those who threaten their power, and create artificial barriers to voting in order to disadvantage their opponents. In short, 3P autocrats act as consummate political monopolists.
To defeat them, we need a kind of political anti-trust doctrine, one designed to protect the competitive dynamic at the heart of democracy. Whether dealing with campaign finance, redistricting, voter registration, or media regulation, policymakers must squarely confront one question: Do the current rules foster fair and constructive competition? Where the answer is no, a strong prima facie case exists for intervention and reform.
The United States deserves special mention in this context. To reestablish its role as a stabilizing force in the international system, the United States needs to reimagine its central political institutions, beginning with the presidency, to curb the threat of autocratic backsliding. It needs to reform how Congress is elected and how it operates to allow it to make timely and difficult decisions. It needs to revolutionize an election system that produces intractable partisan gridlock and rancor by default. Most urgently, America needs to rethink the role of money in politics to curb the plutocratic takeover of its most important institutions.
From Bolivia to India, from Italy to the Philippines, many other countries will need reforms on a similar level of ambition and scope to tackle the threats democracy now faces. The obstacles to such a program are well-known. Entrenched interests too often mean that deep reforms are politically inviable, while those that are viable are often too shallow.
This reality, however, is no grounds for despair. The outer limits of what is viable can alter rapidly in a crisis, and 3P autocrats are pinwheels of crises. Nothing exercises the political imagination like the sudden realization of peril, and amid the onslaught of 3P autocracy, those who still believe in the relevance of democracy are motivated as seldom before.
Donald Trump decried “the swamp” and promised to drain it. Hugo Chávez called his opposers “the squalids” and threatened them with jail or worse. Spain’s Pablo Iglesias and Italy’s Beppe Grillo slam “the caste”: their country’s monied political and economic elites. In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson derided “Brussels” as the home of unelected bureaucrats who used the European Union to impose silly rules and abusive regulations on Britain. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán attacked “the globalists” who wanted to fill the country—and Europe—with illegal immigrants, while Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is obsessed with “Gulenists,” whom he describes as members of a cult-like terrorist organization led by dissident cleric Fethullah Gulen. “Cabal” trips off the tongues of all 3P autocrats, who use it as a cudgel to attack their rivals. Their named enemies may be as diverse as their societies, political backgrounds, and ideologies. Yet the stories that 3P autocrats tell their followers follow a familiar pattern. Mutatis mutandis, they are the same narrative. All 3P leaders define themselves in opposition to an enemy beholden to nefarious interests at home and abroad. In this narrative, the traitor to the nation, and especially to the working class and the poor, is a cancer that needs excision. Sometimes the enemy is a rival political leader, in other cases an institution, and often another country or social, racial, or ethnic group.
Like all good narratives, this one has clear villains and heroes as well as artfully crafted combinations of facts and fictions. As Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist who focuses on extremism and populism in Europe and the United States, has shown, the damsel in distress in this fairy tale is always the same, the “noble people” abused by predator elites. The savior hero is also always the same: the necessary autocrat called on by destiny to protect the poor and defeat the elite.24
Conspiracy theories abound in the narratives that populist leaders use to radicalize their followers. And the early twenty-first century has provided plenty of raw material to work with. Poverty, immiserating economic crashes, inequality, pandemics, armed conflicts, ruinous climate change, job-destroying technologies, and a long list of grievances and dashed expectations are realities that autocratic leaders did not create. What they did create are narratives that mobilize fear and anger and propose fanciful solutions designed to energize their followers. They offer a promised land where predatory elites are tamed and problems go away—provided, of course, that the 3P leader is given unlimited power.
It is hard for democrats to compete against this 3P narrative. As the political scientist David Runciman has lamented about Donald Trump, “His tweets, his this, his that, it’s like a knife through the butter of information space. I thought people would have worked out barriers, and they haven’t. Trump’s way of doing politics just continues to cut through.”25
Post-truth populists don’t need to stick with hard facts. They’re free to promise painless, instantaneous solutions that rekindle hope, boost expectations, and promise revenge. At the moment, this toxic tale feels good to their followers. And therein lies its power.
What do democrats offer in reply? Abstract ideas and process. The rule of law. Checks and balances. Freedom. The power of the market and the possibilities opened by economic opportunity. All attractive ideas for those who don’t have to worry about basic needs. To a chronically unemployed father who needs to provide for his hungry children, these ideas are remote, irrelevant, and surely not a solution to his family’s problems. Liberals offer a complicated explanation for why conducting politics in a certain way will lead to the best results for all. Not only is this counternarrative full of abstract ideas, but it often lacks an identifiable hero and villain. Our “good guys” are just those willing to commit to a set of abstract ideals and procedural rules, and our “bad guys” are those who refuse to do so. The entire package can feel lifeless, bloodless, hatched in a lab. I passionately believe it is correct … but I also have to accept that it doesn’t get people’s adrenaline pumping the way a 3P narrative does.
This imbalance is baked in to the terms of the debate. It’s an unfair disadvantage that those of us who stand up for democracy will always have to face—notwithstanding the exceptional rhetorical gifts of inspiring democratic leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, B. R. Ambedkar, and Vaclav Havel. But while we can never entirely overcome it, we can blunt the impact of the 3P autocrats’ advantage by stressing that freedom and democracy lead to human flourishing in a way autocracy never can. We can give people something substantive to be for, not just against. We can make an argument for a good life with deep roots in the traditions of the West that may not be intoxicating but remains honest.
The populist frame is too powerful to be defeated permanently. Like a virus, it reappears in outbreaks again and again throughout history. But the rhetoric is hollow. And pointing out that hollowness gives us an opening we must exploit to sell people once more on the promise of democratic life.
Sobriety is in order. The fact that democracy has survived over the last three centuries in no way guarantees that it will prevail against its enemies once more. But if we can defeat the Big Lies, sideline criminalized governments, parry the attempts at foreign subversion directed at democratic elements, face down the political cartels that stifle competition, and beat back the illiberal narratives that sustain autocratic onslaughts, we’ll have won the war to preserve democracy.