The violent Jan. 6 insurrection. White-male bluster about civil war. The efforts in Republican-controlled legislatures to render elections a sham. The fog of lies in which perhaps a third of Americans wrap themselves. The fringe-right defense of Vladimir Putin and his Ukraine invasion, and the fringe left’s parroting of Kremlin talking points to insist blame for his murdering civilians rests with the U.S., NATO, and the E.U.
A January poll found that 64% of Americans believe the U.S. is a democracy “in crisis and at risk of failing.” In another from December, 51% agreed with the statement that “U.S. democracy is at risk of extinction.” A year after Donald Trump’s failed coup attempt, Congress has failed to shore up the Voting Rights Act and failed to turn back efforts in the states to institute minority rule clothed as democracy. “Is this what it looks like when a democracy dies and nobody cares?” asked Zack Beauchamp at Vox months before the Ukraine invasion. Democracy needs defending and ours was missing in action last year.
All presage the slow death in plain sight of American democracy.* Democratic governance is at risk here and abroad from the rise of authoritarian movements. A report last year by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) found “the number of democracies backsliding into authoritarianism has doubled in the past decade, including EU states Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. People in those three countries are among the two-thirds of the world’s citizens living in backsliding democracies or under autocratic regimes.” Ours is among the backsliders.
And then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky and his Ukrainian army and irregulars stand now as democracy’s standard bearers while established democracies flail. Theirs is not a defense of democracy scripted in Hollywood, composed in Nashville, or splayed across self-described patriots’ tee shirts. It is not an abstract, intellectual defense. It is real. It is bloody. Three million people and counting have fled Ukraine.
A democracy booster shot
Anne Applebaum makes the case in The Atlantic that Ukraine’s defense of democracy is our own:
The Ukrainians, and especially their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, have made their cause a global one by arguing that they fight for a set of universal ideas—for democracy, yes, but also for a form of civic nationalism, based on patriotism and a respect for the rule of law; for a peaceful Europe, where disputes are resolved by institutions and not warfare; for resistance to dictatorship. Zelensky has urged Americans to remember Pearl Harbor. He appealed to the German Parliament with the phrase “Never again”—a mantra used to mean that no Hitler would be allowed to arise again—and told members that, in light of the brutal war in his country, those words are now “worthless.” He called on the European Parliament to “prove that you indeed are Europeans” and admit Ukraine to the European Union.
This language is effective because it evokes the principles that bind together the majority of Europeans, Americans, and many other people around the world, reminding them of how much worse the world was in the bloodier past, and how much worse it could be in the future if those principles no longer matter. The words Zelensky uses also reverberate because they are true. A victory for Ukraine really will be a victory for all who believe in democracy and the rule of law. Citizens of existing democracies and members of the democratic opposition in Russia, Cuba, Belarus, and Hong Kong will all be emboldened. “Their struggle is ours,” a Venezuelan acquaintance told me last week. The institutions protecting the states that embody those ideas, most notably the European Union and NATO, will be strengthened too.
At a moment when democracy needs defending in many countries, Ukrainians have no choice but to defend it where they live.
The democratic resurgence, if it comes, will be sparked not by a new infectious agent but a familiar one. Putin’s Russia could trigger a democratic immune response. If we refuse the booster, Russia means to reorder the global body politic. Russia’s foreign minister assures us the war in Ukraine is “a battle over what the world order will look like.” Applebaum offers a foretaste.
Already, the Russian occupation of some eastern-Ukrainian towns resembles the Soviet occupation of Central Europe at the end of World War II. Public officials and civic leaders—mayors and police but also members of Parliament, journalists, museum curators—have been arrested and not seen since. Civilians have been terrorized at random. In Mariupol, authorities report that citizens are being forcibly deported to Russia, just as Soviet secret police deported Balts, Poles, and others to Russia after the invasions of 1939 and 1945. In the case of a Russian victory, these tactics would be applied all over Ukraine, creating mass terror, mass violence, and instability for years to come. And, yes, if we accept that outcome, autocrats from Minsk to Caracas to Beijing will take note: Genocide is now allowed.
Precisely because the stakes are so high, the next few weeks will be extremely dangerous. Putin will do what he can to create fear. The extraordinary speech he made last week, describing Russian critics of the war as “scum,” “traitors,” and “gnats,” had exactly that purpose. He spoke of Russia’s need for “self-purification” using a word with the same root as purge, the term that Stalin used when ordering the liquidation of his enemies. Putin is deliberately evoking the worst and bloodiest era of Soviet history to avoid even a hint of domestic opposition. He has just thrown away 30 years of economic gains, 30 years of Russian integration with the outside world, 30 years of investment in order to turn the clock back to the era of his youth—an era that the majority of Russians no longer remember and few wish to see restored. He seems to believe that only elevated levels of fear will prevent them from protesting, once they understand what has happened to their country. He may be right.
The stakes are higher than just Ukraine at a time a significant faction of Americans have rejected democracy for flirtations with strong men.
Those of us who remember the Gulf of Tonkin hoax, the domino theory, and the Vietnam War grew up seeing the U.S. either as misguided, a militaristic aggressor, or worse. We watched George W. Bush invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 because he could. We let our leaders walk free after committing torture. We took actions that destabilized the Middle East, cost hundreds of thousands of civilians their lives, and made refugees of perhaps 4 million, internally and externally. Our hands are not clean. We may never repent, but have we learned?
Putin has not and will not. With our recent history, the U.S. is not exactly the defender of democracy we like to imagine. Right now, that’s Ukraine. If we expect democracy to endure, U.S. military supply is essential. Pray it won’t require more of us. France once aided our revolution. It is our turn to support Ukraine’s democracy if we expect to re-enliven our own.
Under the circumstances, and given Russian crimes listed above, that will require violence. It is not inappropriate to find that abhorrent. I do. But here we are. Weeks ago, Ukrainians who had never fired a weapon were living lives as ordinary as ours. IT workers. Students. Academics. Now they carry Kalashnikov rifles.
I keep returning to a passage from “Perelandra,” the second book in the space trilogy British writer and lay theologian C.S. Lewis wrote during World War II. Protagonist Elwin Ransom is transported to Venus to find it an unpopulated second Eden. But not a biblical copy. The “King” is elsewhere. But Ransom finds a demonic Tempter, the Un-man, and the Lady, an innocent with one thing forbidden to her. Ransom is there to stop a second “fall.” But after days of debating (he is an academic), the Lady has resisted, Ransom is talked dry, and the Un-man, an unsleeping “managed corpse,” has not relented.
“This can’t go on,” Ransom tells himself. The Un-man will wear her down; it is a matter of time. But he has done all he can, Ransom, alone in the dark, says to the Silence:
Hullo! What was this? … His thoughts had stumbled on an idea from which they started back as a man starts back when he has touched a hot poker. But this time the idea was really too childish to entertain. This time it must be a deception, risen from his own mind. It stood to reason that a struggle with the Devil meant a spiritual struggle . . . the notion of a physical combat was only fit for a savage. If only it were as simple as that . . .
If the Lady were to be kept in obedience only by the forcible removal of the Tempter, what was the use of that? What would it prove?
Exhausted at last, Ransom asks, “Lord, why me?” But there was no answer. His presence on the planet was the miracle he was asking for.
“People remember when you get really basic life-and-death morality wrong, and will never trust you again,” Hullabaloo alum David Atkins warned last week. Until Jan. 6, we’d grown comfortable here seeing freedom and democracy as irreversible birthrights purchased by others, their defense an intellectual or political exercise. Many on the left have grown up seeing the U.S. only as a force for imperialism, and violence, in the words of Isaac Asimov’s protagonist, “the last refuge of the incompetent.” But it is the only refuge Ukrainians have left.
* The word itself appears nowhere in the text of the Constitution. In its many references to elections and voting, governance via democracy is implied. Republican senators interrogating Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would conclude from that absence that democracy is not constitutional.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.