Consider This from NPR - Threats To Democracy Are Growing Around the World — And The U.S. May Be One Of Them

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

All over the world, democratic institutions are under threat. The United States isn't just part of that trend — it may also be one of the causes. Former Obama administration foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes examines why in a new book called After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From Asia to Europe to the Americas, strongmen are growing stronger and democracy is struggling. In Hong Kong, more than a million people filled the streets two years ago in protests against China's moves to crack down on free expression. Then, a new national security law targeted protesters with harsh penalties, including life in prison. And now 10 prominent democracy activists, including a media mogul and billionaire named Jimmy Lai, have been sentenced to prison time for participating in those protests. Prominent pro-democracy campaign is guilty of unauthorized assembly. It's the latest blow to the city's democracy movement. Heading west to Russia, President Vladimir Putin plans to tighten state control over the internet.

His government labeled one of Russia's media organizations a foreign agent, fined it millions of dollars, and froze its bank accounts. This pressure campaign against independent media that we've seen in recent months is more extreme in many ways than the final years of the Soviet Union. Jamie Fly is the president of the Soviet Union. Jamie Fly is the president of the organization Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, which is funded by the U.S. Authorities also closed its Moscow bureau.

We are not going to back down in the face of this pressure. And in Brazil? People were already concerned about President Jair Bolsonaro committing to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses next year's election. And that was before he said recently that the military would follow his orders if he sent them into the streets. Bolsonaro reiterated that freedom in Brazil is in the hands of the military. So is democracy in these places fundamentally broken? I would reframe the question and suggest that we think of democracy not as a solid state, but as a vector. Masha Gessen is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of

Surviving Autocracy, about the corrosion of American democracy. They argue that any country in the world is becoming more or less democratic at any given time. So Gessen argues we should be asking, which way are things headed? We're enfranchising more people, making our government more a government of the governed, or we're going in the opposite direction. And I think if you think of it that way, the answer becomes suddenly very painfully clear. We're going in the opposite direction. Consider this. All over the world, democratic institutions are under threat. The United States is a part of that trend and may also be one of its causes.

From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Friday, May 28th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. An officer pins a 16-year-old to the ground and punches out his teeth. But are there any consequences for the cop? For the first time, we take you inside the secret investigations that show how police

protections in California shield officers from accountability. Listen to On Our Watch, a podcast from NPR and KQED. It's Consider This from NPR. Every year for almost half a century, a nonpartisan democracy advocacy organization called Freedom House has published a report on the state of freedom in the world. This year, they titled the report Democracy Under Siege. The group found that nearly 75% of people in the world live in countries that became less democratic in the past year. And they say the U.S. is one of those places. They point to partisan fighting over the electoral process, bias and dysfunction in the criminal justice system, and growing inequality. By the way, they finished that analysis before January 6th. Since then, Republicans in many states have Trump does not steal! Trump does not steal! Trump does not steal! Trump does not steal! Since then, Republicans in many states have passed laws to make voting rules more restrictive.

Donald Trump keeps trying to undermine the legitimacy of the election he lost. And on Friday, Senate Republicans blocked the formation of a bipartisan 9-11-style commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection. I think at the heart of this recommendation by the Democrats is that they would like to continue to debate things that occurred in the past. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued that such a commission can't reveal anything new. So I think this is a purely political exercise that adds nothing to the sum total of information. But there potentially is new information that a commission with subpoena power could have uncovered. A long list of people have never shared their version

of what happened on January 6th, including Trump and his top advisors, like former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. In contrast, both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney testified to the 9-11 Commission while they were still in office. The rest of the world pays attention to what's happening in the U.S. This year, in an annual survey called the Democracy Perception Index, people around the world were asked about threats to democracy, and many of them identified predictable ones,

like economic inequality, limits on free speech, unfair elections, and social media. But 44% of the people surveyed said another threat to democracy worldwide is the influence of the United States. That ranked higher than the influence of China or Russia. In the last couple of years, Ben Rhodes has also been taking a survey of sorts on how the world views American democracy. Rhodes worked on foreign policy in the Obama administration, and after eight years of that, he wanted to get away. And as I traveled and I talked to Hong Kong protesters, I talked to Alexei Navalny in Russia,

I talked to these young democratic advocates in Hungary, which has become more and more of a dictatorship, they saw both Americas. Rhodes found that all of those people viewed America as a symbol of equality and the pursuit of democratic rights. But at the same time, they saw this country struggling to keep its own democratic institutions healthy. They still really cared what happened here.

Because precisely because we're made up of people from everywhere, if we can figure this out, if we can weather the storms that are threatening our democracy, what they believe is, then maybe they can too. So will that happen? And what will the world look like if democracy doesn't weather these storms? Those are the questions at the heart of Ben Rhodes' new book. It's called After the Fall, Being American in the World We've Made. Over the period of time that you worked on this book, the trend lines moved in a scary direction.

I mean, Alexei Navalny, who is a major figure in the book, was arrested in Russia. Hong Kong, which occupies a major part of the book, is now governed by a national security law that basically allows China to lock up dissenters. What does that tell you? It tells me that we have a lot of work to do in this country and around the world, that the election of Joe Biden didn't arrest these trends that have been eroding democracy here and around the world. The Hong Kong young people that I was speaking to who were so inspiring, I met with them at kind of a high watermark for their protest. Some of those same people have had to leave the country because they don't see a future for themselves where they can be free in their own city. I think we Americans have to realize, therefore, how precious our democracy is. And it was very strange for me, Ari, because I finished this book right around January 6th.

And I just wanted to grab my reader and shake them and say, look, it can happen here. Look at what these people are going through in these other places. We cannot take this for granted here in the United States. In the section where you talk to freedom fighters in Hungary and look at Viktor Orban's rule there, you write something that is disturbing. You say that Orban represents the historical norm, that he's not an aberration, that pluralism, democracy, and freedom are the exception. Can you tell us more about what you mean by that? Well, you know, it's interesting. The starting point for this book is I talked to

one of these Hungarian oppositionists and anti-corruption activists, and I said, how did your country become, you know, a dictatorship in basically a decade after being a democracy? And he said, well, it's simple. Viktor Orban got elected on right-wing populism as a backlash to the financial crisis. He packed the courts with right-wing judges. He changed the voting, financed Orban's politics, and created kind of a right-wing propaganda machine. And he wrapped it up in a nationalist message, a blood and soil nationalist message. We are the true Hungarians. It's us versus them. The them can be immigrants. They can be Muslims. They're George Soros.

He's talking, and I'm thinking, well, he could be describing my lived experience of American politics and the Republican Party over the last decade. And the more I explored this and pulled the thread of what happened in Hungary, I came to that realization, Ari, that most of human history is a story of nationalism and nationalism that leads to conflict. It's really only the recent decades, the post-World War II era, where people started to take for granted that somehow we'd put that behind us. So you say the U.S. has a lot of work to do. And clearly, looking at the capital insurrection on January 6th and other events, there is work to do domestically. When you look globally at the impact the U.S. had on the Middle East in the Iraq war, at the impact the U.S. had on the Middle East and the Iraq war, at the impact the U.S. had

on the global economy and the 2008 financial collapse, do you think that mission of, we have a lot of work to do to get the world on the right track, is a mission that is possibly going to do more harm than good? Well, I think we have to learn the lessons of our own excesses. You know, I think America achieves such a position of power in the world that, you know, power, I think we have to learn the lessons of our own excesses. I think America achieves such a position of power in the world that power, I think, corrupts. Something like the Iraq War is only possible when you're a complete dominant superpower and you can do something that in retrospect was so unfathomably wrong to invade and occupy a country on a false pretense. And we lost a lot of credibility over the last couple of decades because of those excesses. I think there's opportunity in that though, Ari, right? In some ways, the rest of the world now looks at us and thinks, well, they're just like us. They could elect the corrupt

autocrat with the son-in-law in the office down the hall. But the opportunity in that is if we can work it out, if we can figure it out, then we can be a recognizable example for them. How do we make capitalism about something that is bigger than just wealth? How do we make national security about something that is other than just subjugation? How do we make these amazing technological tools that we create in the United States about the enlightenment of human beings and not disinformation and division machines as they've become. This is the work that we have to do. And I think if we do it, it's going to ripple out around the world, as well as obviously improve our own society. So let me ask why your team, your boss, who had the levers of

power for eight years, were not able to do more to shape this. I mean, you write about structural issues that you say the Obama White House could not address during your eight years in power, from the inequality of the US economy, to the way the war on terror dominated American foreign policy, to the way social media distorted the information landscape. Why couldn't those problems be fixed during the two terms that Barack Obama was president? Yeah, you know, I described this metaphor that Obama used to tell me, which is that running the American government is like directing an ocean liner. And I do think that over the course of those eight years,

we did a lot to point the ocean liner in a different direction. But at the same time, we didn't deal with the wiring of the ocean liner itself. The structure of American capitalism and the inequality it produces, the post 9-11 national security state, which I think helped breed the kind of politics of us versus them. And I just wanted to take readers into kind of a very honest reckoning that I had with that. But I think it's also a lesson that presidents alone can't fix this. This is about kind of who we decide to be as Americans, Ari. What is our national identity? Can I just end by asking you personally, I mean, this book is also to some extent a memoir that describes your coming of age in an era of American power and going to

work for the government at the highest levels with a belief that the U.S. is a force for good in the world. How did reporting this book shape or change the way you see yourself, the arc of your life and the country that you've represented? Well, you know, it made me think, Ari, I mean, you and I met probably around the time of that 2008 campaign. We were much younger then. I was a White House correspondent. You were working for Obama, yeah. We were kids, right? And now it appears so. I say that from my middle-aged perch.

But what I realized in writing this book is that as someone who, of our generation, who came of age, kind of in that post-Cold War moment of the 90s, I really just fundamentally believed that history was kind of inevitably moving in a positive direction, that things were going to get better in the United States and around the world. And the shock that the 2016 election gave to me, on top of, you know, a lot of difficult things that happened around the world during the Obama administration is, wait a second, this is not inevitable. There's nothing inevitable about it. You know, history is a cycle of the same conflicts playing out again and again. Donald Trump and Barack Obama represent diametrically opposed stories of America that have always been there from the beginning of this country's history,

from the time that the Declaration of Independence declared all men were created equal, and that declaration was written by a guy who owned slaves. We're living the latest iteration of this conflict. But the journey I go on and I try to take people through in this book is essentially letting go of that belief of the inevitability that things are going to get better. But I find a lot of hope at the end because even if I had to look much more squarely at America's flaws, it made me realize how much more important it is to care about and to love what America is supposed to be.

Ben Rhodes, his new book is After the Fall, Being American in the World We've Made. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.