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In his 2005 inaugural address, then-President George W. Bush unveiled a new policy, which came to be called the Freedom Agenda, that placed the promotion of democracy abroad at the center of U.S. foreign policy. Bush asserted the 9/11 terrorists rage had been forged in the tyranny of the Arab world; only the force of human freedom could dampen those fires and thus ensure the survival of liberty in our land.

Bushs theory turned out to be wrong on all counts. The Arab states that were the object of the Freedom Agenda proved to be hopelessly intractable to U.S. influence; nevertheless, the United States has succeeded in reducing terrorism to a manageable threat through the classic instruments of domestic security, armed force abroad, and diplomacy. Whats more, the Bush administrations willingness to cast aside those sacred precepts of liberty in the name of the war on terror turned the very language of democracy promotion into gross hypocrisy.

In his 2005 inaugural address, then-President George W. Bush unveiled a new policy, which came to be called the Freedom Agenda, that placed the promotion of democracy abroad at the center of U.S. foreign policy. Bush asserted the 9/11 terrorists rage had been forged in the tyranny of the Arab world; only the force of human freedom could dampen those fires and thus ensure the survival of liberty in our land.

Bushs theory turned out to be wrong on all counts. The Arab states that were the object of the Freedom Agenda proved to be hopelessly intractable to U.S. influence; nevertheless, the United States has succeeded in reducing terrorism to a manageable threat through the classic instruments of domestic security, armed force abroad, and diplomacy. Whats more, the Bush administrations willingness to cast aside those sacred precepts of liberty in the name of the war on terror turned the very language of democracy promotion into gross hypocrisy.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama avoided what he considered the grandiloquent language and arrogant demands of the Freedom Agenda. And former U.S. President Donald Trump, of course, preferred autocrats; he solved the problem of hypocrisy by dispensing with democracy policy altogether.

Now U.S. President Joe Biden has restored democracy to the heart of U.S. foreign policy. Biden has spoken often of the summit of democracy he plans to convene in his first year in office. In mid-July, his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, sent a cable to all U.S. diplomats, instructing them to speak out on issues of human rights and democracy and to meet with local activists. Standing up for democracy and human rights everywhere is not in tension with Americas national interests nor with our national security, Blinken wrote.

What happened? Biden has never believed the United States can do much about the insides of other countries. He hadnt taken the Freedom Agenda seriously, did not believe Americans could turn Afghanistan into a democracy, and remained skeptical when the Arab Spring briefly seemed to portend a revolution in the Middle East. Biden counted himself among the seasoned pragmatists in the upper reaches of the Obama administration who needed to remind the idealistic youngsters the world was a messy place. Why, then, has he now become a prophet of democracy as passionate as Bush?

The answer is Biden has a very different theory from Bush. The democratic deficit that preoccupies the president and his team is not the one out there but the one in here. The heroic language of democracy promotion presupposed a world where democracy was expandingas it was when Bush gave his inaugural address. Since then, it has been contracting. The United States is only one of the democracies once confidently regarded as consolidated to have elected a populist bent on enhancing his power by dismantling democratic safeguards. So, too, have Brazil, India, Poland, Hungary and others. Democracies, as then-presidential candidate Biden wrote, are paralyzed by hyperpartisanship, hobbled by corruption, weighed down by extreme inequality.

Hard-headed realists dismiss all of these theories of the democratic case as distractions from, or flimsy decorations on, the United States pursuit of its geopolitical interests. Theres a long-standing tendency in U.S. foreign policy to cloak the pursuit of American interests in the garment of democratic ideals, Aaron David Miller, a U.S. Middle East policy expert, recently wrote. But although promoting reform among Arab autocrats may have been an idle or even cynical pursuit, one can hardly deny that defending democracy from authoritarian tendencies at home and from authoritarian states abroad is a matter of the highest national interest. The only questions are how and whether it can be done.

Defending or protecting is a very different enterprise from promoting. Bushs rhetoric assumed democracy was something the United States had in more or less infinite supply, and thus, it was well positioned to infuse some of it into shakier states. The last few years have cruelly exposed the vanity of that posture; the United States now needs the medicine it once supplied. In his cable, Blinken instructed diplomats to make clear that we ask no more of other countries than we ask of ourselves.

The crisis Biden is addressing is thus preeminently a domestic one: A democracy that sailed through depression and war now finds itself suffering a mass crisis of faith. Biden hopes to address the crisis through a massive effort to restore prosperity to a fearful middle class, through the insistent use of bipartisanship and collective purpose rhetoric, and through the passage of critical legislation on democracy-specific issues like voting rights. Its too early to say whether the specific measures will succeed and whether they will break the fever that now grips the country.

But Biden also believesas U.S. presidents since Woodrow Wilson havethat a liberal, democratic United States cannot thrive in a world that is neither liberal nor democratic, even as works with autocratic states on global problems. The United States is hardly alone in its woes: Frances right-wing populist politician, Marine Le Pen, now has about an even chance of defeating French President Emmanuel Macron in elections next April. Whats more, the worlds chief autocratic powers, chiefly Russia but also China, are now working actively to weaken the liberal order and individual liberal states. The protection of democracy has thus become a transnational issue like climate change or public health.

There is thus no contradiction between Blinkens look to yourself and the foreign-policy dimension of democracy support. In my conversations with administration officials involved with democracy issues, I hear this note of mutuality struck again and again. Those involved with planning the democracy summit say all invited countries, including the United States and other mature democracies as well as nascent ones, must bring solid commitments to address democratic backsliding at home. They are now working both on the guest list and on what my family called mitbringssuggested party gifts.

Mutuality is a very good thing, suggesting as it does a most un-American humility and willingness to learn from others. But this admirable new ethos offers no useful guidance in the face of crises like the one just precipitated by Tunisian President Kais Saied, who dismissed his government and assumed emergency powers on July 25,a Blinken admonished the Tunisian leader to work with all political actors and the Tunisian people and promised help with the countrys economic and public health crisis; but Washington and its alliesabove all, Francemay have to either promise or threaten much more to keep the only democracy in the Arab world from toppling into dictatorship. We will see in the coming days and weeks just how committed Biden is to this endeavor.

The vow of mutuality also confronts us with our own limitations. The most important gift the United States could bring to its own party is legislation preventing voter suppression and post-electoral manipulation. (See my recent column on the United States negative exceptionalism on this score.) But Republicans are likely to block any meaningful bill on the subject. One administration official suggested the congressional investigation of the Jan. 6 riot now underway will demonstrate the United States commitment to examine its own failures; but that, too, will be repudiated by half the country.

Democracies depend, of course, on law and legal institutions, but they finally rest on citizens beliefs in those institutions and willingness to abide by their strictures. People in highly polarized societies will not trust any outcome that disadvantages themselves; and what is imposed by law can be undone by new law. We dont really know how to reverse radical polarization. And, of course, populist leaders do whatever they can to amplify mistrust. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may lose an election someday, but they may have rendered their country democratically ungovernable by the time they go.

Opportunistic autocrats like Russian President Vladimir Putin add fuel to the flames whenever they canbut they need flames in the first place. In a recent article, Frances Z. Brown and Thomas Carothers, leading scholars of democracy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, observed that framing a democracy strategy around the goal of countering China and Russia, as the Biden administration has often done, ignores the main drivers of democratic decline, which are internal. Yet one of the temptations of doing so is its easier to forge political consensus around legislation to counter foreign hacking or surveillance as well as influence campaigns than it is to confront the deep-seated divisions inside societies.

Countries can, in fact, bring all sorts of useful gifts to the party. Laws compelling foreign investors to disclose their identities, regulatory schemes to govern artificial intelligence or surveillance technology, rules to restrict black money in politicsall of them will advance the cause of democracyhowever, incrementally. Perhaps countries will even compete to bring something especially good. But lets remember how frustrating it has been for even a very determined U.S. president to undo the damage wrought by Trump and a generation of polarizing Republicans. Hard as it is for afflicted countries to rebuild the spirit of democracy at a time when industrial middle classes have been hollowed out and secure cultural identities have been unmoored, its so much harder to make things better in someone elses country.

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What Biden Really Thinks About Democracy Promotion - Foreign Policy

Is the UKs democracy for sale, asked the Financial Times. Reporters from this newspaper have revealed the existence of a select coterie of financiers and grandees who belong to an invitation-only club known as the Advisory Board and who enjoy frequent, direct access to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

The price of membership? Big donations to the Conservative Party, some as high as 250,000. What they discuss with ministers is not minuted. The very existence of the board is not documented. It exists in a shadowy world of privileged access.

Orchestrating it all is the Tory party co-chairman Ben Elliot, the founder of Quintessentially, a concierge service that caters to the super-rich: it secures restaurant reservations and society invitations; it advises on the best schools; it has even sourced albino peacocks for a Jennifer Lopez party.

Thats fine in business; but allowing wealth to facilitate access should not happen in government. Property developers, for instance, have paid 18m into Tory coffers since 2019. With major planning reforms in the works, thats a clear conflict of interest.

Elliot is certainly well connected, said Robert Mendick in The Daily Telegraph: colleagues call him Mr Access All Areas. Hes the nephew of the Duchess of Cornwall and, by marriage, the Prince of Wales. It recently emerged that he arranged for a telecoms multimillionaire and philanthropist called Mohamed Amersi a Quintessentially client to have dinner with Prince Charles at Dumfries House in Scotland in 2013. Amersi later donated 1.2m to Prince Charless charities, and has given 750,000 to the Tory party.

Amersis meeting with Charles has caused a minorfurore, said Sean OGrady in The Independent. But should we really care if social-climbing plutocrats meet the heir to the throne? Yes, they might try to arrange favours in return for donating to the Princes charities. But theyd be disappointed: Prince Charles has no real power and very little influence.

Come to that, theres nothing wrong with donating to a political party, said Daniel Hannan on Conservative Home or with being a property developer. We know about these donations because they were duly registered with the Electoral Commission. Theres nothing furtive or sinister about them.

I disagree, said Sean ONeill in The Times. Amersi used the euphemism access capitalism to describe how his wealth opened doors, allowing him to wine and dine with the Prime Minister. This case came soon after a report describing how the disgraced financier Lex Greensill had enjoyed extraordinarily privileged access to David Camerons government. And we have heard how friends and associates of MPs were able to wangle lucrative PPE contracts.

If this was happening in Iraq, Zimbabwe or Venezuela, wed call it what it is: corruption. The easy access to power granted to those with the fattest wallets is having a corrosive effect on trust in government and public life.

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Cronyism and the Conservatives: is the UKs democracy for sale? - The Week UK

Israeli company NSO Group's spyware was used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political dissidents in several countries. A former U.N. adviser says this type of spyware is a threat to democracy. Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Israeli company NSO Group's spyware was used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political dissidents in several countries. A former U.N. adviser says this type of spyware is a threat to democracy.

Spyware made by the Israeli company NSO Group was used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political dissidents in several countries, according to The Washington Post and other media organizations.

NSO Group says it sells its spyware to governments to track terrorists and criminals. But the Post found the Pegasus spyware was used in "attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and the two women closest to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi."

David Kaye, a former United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of expression, calls the private spyware industry a threat to democracy. Spyware often can collect pretty much anything on a target's phone without them even knowing: emails, call logs, text messages, passwords, usernames, documents and more.

"We are on the precipice of a global surveillance tech catastrophe, an avalanche of tools shared across borders with governments failing to constrain their export or use," he writes with Marietje Schaake in the Post.

Kaye has been speaking about the dangers of spyware abuse for years. He's now a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. He talked with NPR's Morning Edition.

On governments conducting surveillance on people in other countries

This gets at the fundamental problem. There is no international law that governs the use of this technology across borders. There have been cases where foreign governments have conducted spying of people in the United States. So, for example, the Ethiopian government several years ago conducted a spying operation against an Ethiopian American in Maryland. And yet this individual had no tools to fight back. And that's the kind of problem that we're seeing here right now: essentially transnational repression, but we lack the tools to fight it.

On dangers to people beyond those directly targeted

If you think about the kind of surveillance that we're talking about, foreign governments having access to individual journalists or activists or others, that in itself is a kind of direct threat to individuals. But it goes even beyond that. I mean, there are many, many cases that show that this kind of surveillance technology has been used against individuals or the circle of individuals who then face some serious consequence, some of whom have been arrested even to suffer the worst consequence, such as murder, as there's actually indication that people around the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi were surveilled both before and after his disappearance and murder by the Saudi government a few years back.

On spyware's threat to democracy

Spyware is aimed in many of these situations at the very pillars of democratic life. It's aimed at the journalists and the opposition figures, those in dissent that we've been talking about. And yet there's this very significant problem that it's lawless. I mean, it's taking place in a context without governance by the rule of law.

And that's essentially what we're calling for. We're calling for this kind of industry to finally be placed under export control standards, under other kinds of standards so that its tools not only are more difficult to transfer, but are also used in a way that is consistent with fundamental rule of law standards.

Chad Campbell and Jan Johnson produced and edited the audio interview. James Doubek produced for the web.

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Former U.N. Adviser Says Global Spyware Is A Threat To Democracy - NPR

Few in the audience applauding Joe Biden could have questioned the sincerity of his warning about a momentous threat to American democracy.

But they may have walked away with lingering doubts about his ability to meet the moment or answer fears that even the office of the presidency will be found politically impotent in the face of the challenge.

Were facing the most significant test of our democracy since the civil war, Biden said in a speech on Tuesday in Philadelphia, recalling the mid-19th-century conflict that left more than 600,000 people dead. The Confederates back then never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on January the 6th.

The president added pointedly: Im not saying this to alarm you; Im saying this because you should be alarmed.

Yet while Biden was praised by voting rights activists for correctly diagnosing the sickness, albeit somewhat belatedly, he was criticised for failing to offer a cure. He concluded his 24-minute speech with the exhortation Weve got to act! but did not provide a battle plan.

At stake are the basic principles of democracy: who gets to vote, how they exercise that right and who gets to decide what vote counts. Since Bidens victory over Donald Trump last November a result that Trump and many Republicans refuse to accept, citing bogus claims of fraud that right has been under a coordinated, relentless assault as never before in modern times.

This year 17 states have enacted 28 new laws to make it harder for people to vote. There have been nearly 400 voter suppression bills introduced in 48 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Some measures aim to reverse the vote-by-mail expansion that was put in place in the 2020 election due to the coronavirus pandemic. Others try to strengthen voter identification requirements, curtail hours and locations for early voting and ballot drop-offs or increase the risk that voters could be intimidated by poll watchers.

Campaigners say that people of color, young people and poor people would be the biggest losers. These groups are generally more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. Civil rights leaders met Biden at the White House earlier this month and appear to have convinced him that the 21st-century Jim Crow assault is real, as he put it on Tuesday.

The speech in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy, was a good first step, according to Chris Scott, chief political officer of the group Democracy for America. I think thats what a lot of us, especially in the progressive movement, have been calling for, he said.

The part that really stuck with me was invoking Congressman John Lewis in saying, Freedom is not a state; it is an act. And so thats why I say the speech is the first part but we are asking him to take action on this.

Never once in his remarks did Biden mention Washington DCs version of the F-word: filibuster. This arcane procedural rule in the Senate enables the minority to block debate on legislation. Last month Republicans used the filibuster to stall the For the People Act, which would create national standards for voting that could prevent some of the restrictions imposed by red states.

Former president Barack Obama has called the filibuster a Jim Crow relic, a reference to its long history of thwarting civil rights legislation. Biden, who served in the Senate for 36 years, could push for its abolition or reform from his bully pulpit and by privately making the case to sceptical Democratic senators such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

Scott continued: We cannot get any meaningful reforms passed as long as we still have this filibuster in place and so one of the greater problems is seeing him be able to have the ability of some of his predecessors. I think of Lyndon B Johnson and how he was able to leverage his experience in the United States Senate to get his own party members to fall in line.

When we have members like Joe Manchin, like Kyrsten Sinema, we have to have them actually fall in line because what were seeing is Mitch McConnell do what he does best. Whether or not hes majority leader or minority leader, he always finds a way to handcuff whatever progress we actually want to get done.

Fears were expressed during the Democratic primary campaign that Biden is a boxer, not a fighter, whose faith in an age of political chivalry and bipartisanship is ill-suited to the bloodsport of the Trump era. On Tuesday he urged the passage of both the For the People Act a national imperative and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act but both appear doomed under current Senate rules.

In an interview with the Reuters news agency following the speech, the civil rights leader Al Sharpton pointed out that Biden did not mention the filibuster, adding that he had just spoken to the president. And he said to me just now, Al, were still working through where we are going to be on that. Hes not committed yet.

Bidens passivity on the issue was thrown into sharp relief by more than 50 Democratic legislators who abruptly flew out of Texas in an attempt to derail Republican efforts to pass voting restrictions in the state. The group came to Washington, gave impassioned speeches outside the US Capitol and met Kamala Harris, the vice-president who is leading White House efforts on voting rights.

Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of the progressive grassroots movement Indivisible, said: Its inspiring, its exactly what should be happening. Everybody in the country should be looking at what they are doing and asking themselves, how do I fight just as hard for the right to vote as these Texas Democrats are doing?

One, theyre holding up the legislative process, but two theyre making a stand and actually bringing that fight to Washington and seeking help from the federal government and now its on all of us to rally to that cry.

Greenberg also urged Democrats to be similarly aggressive regarding the filibuster. Both Manchin and Sinema, while theyre clear that they will not abolish the filibuster, have in the past both entertained discussions around reforming it to try to return it to its real purpose, from the talking filibuster to things like having quorum limits go down over time.

These are the kinds of things that the Democratic caucus should be talking about, because the idea that we are going to fundamentally leave our democracy unprotected because of this legislative loophole from the late 1700s is just absurd.

She added: Fundamentally, President Biden could say that out loud. He hasnt yet even called for reform so for him to say, Im doing everything I can when he literally hasnt even made the call for legislative reform that would be necessary to pass the For the People Act just doesnt pass the smell test.

Some Democrats are seeking creative ways to break the stalemate. James Clyburn, the House majority whip, has suggested creating a carve-out to the filibuster for legislation applicable to election law or other constitutional changes, which would give Democrats a way to pass their voting rights bills with a simple majority, rather than 60 votes.

Clyburn, who arguably did more than anyone to secure Bidens victory in the Democratic primary, told reporters on Wednesday: I think President Biden should weigh in. All I want him to do is express support for it.

Biden has also argued that legislation is not the only tool, noting that the justice department will challenge the onslaught of voting rights restrictions and focus on dismantling racially discriminatory laws. One such intervention is already under way in Georgia.

But the issue continues to threaten Democratic unity and shine a light on the limits of the presidency or the man who currently holds that office. Adam Jentleson, executive director of the pressure group Battle Born Collective, said in a statement: On voting rights, President Joe Biden is failing to meet the moment.

There is a wide gap between his rhetoric and his leadership. In his speech, he described the conservative assault on our democracy as an existential threat, yet he refused to endorse the obvious solution, which is to pass voting rights legislation and reform the filibuster to do so, if necessary.

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US democracy faces a momentous threat, says Joe Biden but is he up for the fight? - The Guardian

Democrats need to start showing up in Scott County. As of this writing, there is no Democratic county chair. They need to start listening to people and admitting that our standard 10-point plans too often leave out how to create meaningful change for these places and many who live there. This Other America is key to a Democratic future. Any candidate who doesnt devote time and energy to these places is making a strategic blunder.

A tailored, place-based economic message is crucial. While pro-democracy Republicans may create the opportunity, Democrats will need to drive a message that focuses on the economic recovery and the benefits of the Rescue Plan, the Jobs Plan, and the Families Plan. In different districts, different elements of the recovery will resonate. They key is identifying how the recovery is benefiting real people.

Finally, in every district, the 2022 election needs to start today. In too many red districts, there is an issue and media echo chamber. The only voices on national policy are locally elected Republicans. For voters who rely on local news, it is a one-sided conversation.

It does not cost a lot of time or effort to change that conversation. As important as our issue forums were as an organizing tool, they were even more important as a means of taking the debate to the Republicans representing East Tennessee. The issue forums generated a front-page story, a lead business story, and an editorial in the largest local newspaper in the district, as well as a top story on local news one night. The issue forums forced Fleischmann into responding that he was vehemently opposed to the American Jobs Plan, only to go on Fox News a few weeks later suggesting a bipartisan alternativewhich he then voted against.

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Democrats Can Win House in 2022 by Courting Pro-Democracy Republicans - The New Republic