America no longer has a lesson in democracy to teach the rest of the world

Through our cinema and our literature, we promote democracy. In our conferences and our speeches, we talk about democracy. In our national anthems, we sing about democracy.

We have government agencies that do only one thing: think about ways to help other countries become, or stay democratic. We even fund organizations that work in this direction.

The end of exemplarity

But by far the most decisive weapon that the United States of America has ever had to defend democracy, to defend political freedoms, to defend universal rights, to defend the rule of law, is the strength of exemplarity.

Basically, it was not our words, our hymns, our diplomacy, not even our money or our military strength that made the difference. What mattered was what we had achieved: two and a half centuries of peaceful transitions, the slow but enormous advance in the franchise, and civilized debates that were thought to be firmly rooted in our traditions.

In 1945, the countries of Europe that had been occupied by the Nazis chose to become democracies, not least because they aspired to be like their liberators. In 1989, the countries of Eastern Europe long under the communist yoke chose in turn to become democracies, in particular because they too wanted to join the great democratic alliance enamored of freedom, behind America. .

In recent decades, countless countries, from Asia to Latin America to Africa, have also chosen democracy, at least in part because they wanted to be like us, because they saw in imitation of our example a path to peaceful conflict resolution, a

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Anne Applebaum