President Biden gathered, virtually, representatives of more than 100 countries for what was billed as a “Summit for Democracy” on Thursday and Friday. The goal was to rally nations in the face of rising authoritarianism around the world. “Democracy needs champions,” the president said.
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The administration, seeking to show global leadership, released a list of initiatives designed to strengthen and encourage democracies abroad — efforts to strengthen a free press, to fight corruption, to support democratic reformers, and to defend free and fair elections.
The summit drew some criticism, in part for who was invited and who was not. But the most persistent questions focused on whether the United States, at a time when democracy is threatened at home, could stand as a beacon for the rest of the world in this most important undertaking.
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“One of the ironies here is it’s never been more important that the United States lead the world in promoting democracy,” said Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford University Law School. “But it’s also the case that the United States is more hobbled in its capacity to do so. It’s difficult to say, ‘Be more like us’ in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection.”
Freedom House does annual surveys of nations around the world, measuring the health of democracy country by country. Over the past decade, the United States’ score, on a scale of 0 to 100 has gone from 94 to 83, and the United States now ranks 53rd globally in the state of its democracy.
“Compared to many other countries, we’re doing pretty well still,” said Michael J. Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House. He cited a robust U.S. media and strong protections for the media, along with a strong rule of law and an independent judiciary. “But we have been declining,” he said.
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The nation is deeply divided, and those divisions have affected the state of democratic institutions. In an era of polarized voting and the drop in ticket-splitting, Republicans enjoy structural advantages in the Senate and the electoral college. Increasingly, the majority of the population can be ruled by a minority of the population.
The number of competitive House districts shrinks with every decennial redistricting, thanks to gerrymandering and the geographic sorting of the population, often leaving it to the political wings of the two parties to pick their House members and to set the tone and agendas.
The executive branch is ill-prepared for many crises, anticipated or not, as the coronavirus pandemic has shown. It is further constrained by a personnel process, in conjunction with the Senate’s role confirmation responsibilities, that has left this and other administrations with gaping holes in departments and agencies far into a president’s term.
The Supreme Court is in danger of being seen as reflective of the country’s political divisions rather than independent of them, to the point that there is more talk than ever on the left about whether changes should be made to its structure.
Biden was able to offer the democracy summit little in the way of concrete reassurances for repairing America’s democratic institutions. With Republicans implacably opposed, Biden’s support for a Democratic-sponsored national voting rights bill is stuck in the Senate, unable to move forward unless there is a change in the filibuster rules, which isn’t likely anytime soon. In the states, Republican-controlled legislatures have enacted restrictions on voting laws.
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“It’s true that the administration can’t deliver on its own the things that need to be done to fix U.S. democracy,” Abramowitz said. “So the inability to agree across the political aisles makes it hard for Biden to propose new things the U.S. can do. He is handicapped by the inherent gridlock and polarization in our country, and he’s been unable to break that.”
Does that negate the value of a democracy summit? No, said Timothy Snyder, a Yale University historian. “I personally think there’s tremendous value in it,” he said. “It’s important to name democracy as an aspiration. We’ve spent too long imagining that democracy is the normal state of affairs, that democracy is something everybody wants.”
The Russians, he said, present democracy as a joke. The Chinese present it as a mess. Both U.S. adversaries are effective in undermining a system of government that too often is taken for granted. “My basic background point is that democracy is always a struggle,” Snyder added. “It’s never the status quo. The idea that the people should rule is always a radical idea and one you have to make sacrifices for or it will erode.”
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In Snyder’s view, the United States should not shrink from acknowledging that its democracy is imperfect, or that it can learn from others. “The approach should not be democracy promotion, but the approach should be every teacher is a student,” he said. “.？.？. The people who are against democracy have been cooperating quite well, learning from one another. But the people who are for democracy are behind on this.”
Here in the United States, threats to the integrity of the electoral process are growing, as a recent article in the Atlantic highlighted. Former president Donald Trump continues to falsely claim the 2020 election was rigged and stolen. He badgers Republicans to do something, and Republican legislators in some key states have responded by seeking to make it easier, if there is a repeat of the 2020 results, to turn the administration of elections over to partisan politicians and to make it possible to challenge the certification of results and potentially overturn the next election.
To Snyder and others, the clear and present danger is the prospect that Trump could lose the popular vote in 2024 by an even bigger margin than in 2020, lose in the electoral college and yet still be installed as president. “If we just kind of let this keep rolling downhill and following gravity, the most likely thing is the guy who loses will be installed,” he said. “If we don’t name the risk, we’re going to make [that outcome] much more likely.”
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Persily noted that roughly a third of the population believes that the last election was marred by fraud and that Biden is therefore an illegitimate president. But he speculated that it is possible that in a year, if Democrats lose the House, the Senate or both, many of their voters will see voter suppression as the principal reason.
“It is extremely difficult to build trust in political institutions,” Persily said. “Once you lose it, there are very few examples of building it back. We are at a critical period right now where the population is losing confidence in the basic fairness of the election infrastructure. Unless leaders stop sending signals that the process is rigged, we’re going to be in this situation for a long time.”
Many Americans spend little time thinking or worrying about issues of democracy. Some see these kinds of warnings as alarmist or question the credibility of those who sound them. After all, Trump tried to overturn the election and failed, though not before an attack on the Capitol by a Trump-inspired mob.
Given the former president’s relentless campaign of untruths and his seeming desire to run in 2024, there’s no guarantee that the system will hold the next time around. As Biden put it when opening the democracy summit, “Here in the United States, we know as well as anyone that renewing our democracy and strengthening our democratic institutions requires constant effort.”