In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. The Cold War had ended, and it looked like liberal democracy had triumphed.
That same year, Francis Fukuyama published his famous essay, “The End of History,” which posited the idea that with the fall of communism, an international consensus had been reached that liberal democracy was “the final form of government.” No more communism, or fascism; no more theocracy, or monarchies. No more totalitarianism. Democracy had won.
The phrase, “the end of history,” comes from Hegel, who prophesized that “history” would end when there was no longer ideological competition in world affairs. This was not the end of “events” happening—front pages would still be filled with news—but the end of history as a struggle for the best way for human beings to govern themselves.
Hegel even worried that the world would reach a state of global boredom.
In the years after the fall of the wall, dozens of nations in eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia embraced constitutional democracy. There was, in Bernard Bailyn’s wonderful phrase, a contagion of liberty. The gap between rich and poor narrowed.
But something started to change around 2005. According to the Freedom House survey, 2005 was the last year when global movement toward democracy outnumbered declines. Every year since then, the number of countries moving away from democracy has outnumbered those becoming more democratic.
This is what political scientist Larry Diamond calls the “democratic recession.” We are still in the middle of it.
The signs: The weakening of the rule of law. The undermining of an independent judiciary. The diminishment of free speech. Corrupt elections, or no elections at all. And political parties that do not accept election results
The causes: The steep rise in global immigration in part due to the Syrian Civil War and wars in Sudan and Congo. Climate change making life more difficult for hundreds of millions of people. Increasing economic inequality. The grievances of older white populations in the West who felt they had been shunted aside. The extraordinary economic growth of China and their influence on nations around the world.
Democracies do not die from the outside, but from within. They do not die at the end of a gun, but at the ballot box. They elect leaders who then dismantle democracy. It’s often unwitting. They elect leaders who seem strong, or who don’t like immigrants, or who stoke their grievances, who say, It’s not your fault.
If you vote for a candidate who does not promise to uphold the Constitution, you will get a leader who unravels the Constitution.
My old boss, Barack Obama, loved to quote the Martin Luther King line that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. It’s a beautiful sentence. The idea also arises from the notion that history is linear, directional, even providential. And, of course, you have to bend it yourself.
Autocrats do not think that history bends toward justice. I’m not sure Xi and Putin even think there is a moral universe. They believe, like the ancient Greeks, that history is cyclical, and that humankind is not advancing. That life, like Hobbes said, is nasty, brutish, and short.
What we’re seeing now is a rise in soft fascism—a combination of ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, and toxic nostalgia. The reason is clear: the immigration of brown people from the global south to the global north. The universal slogan of “Make country X great again,” is very often, “Make country X white again.”
Instead of moving forward, the wheel of history has turned back to the 19th century world of strongmen and power politics, spheres of interest and economic nationalism. Spheres of interest is the idea that great powers can dominate and control other nations in their spheres of interest.
Strongmen love spheres of interest. Putin justified invading Ukraine because it is in Russia’s sphere of interest. Xi says Taiwan is part of China because it is in their sphere of interest. And an American president called Canada the 51st state because it is in our sphere of interest.
And it doesn’t just operate on land, it operates in the realm of information. The trend for the last twenty years is for a Balkanized internet—not the idealistic worldwide web, but local internet without much access to the outside. Countries, beginning with Russia, have passed data localization laws.
It is happening, too, in the AI race, with competition between China and the US. There will be a Western AI, and there will be a Chinese or authoritarian AI. That idealized 1990s world of “information wants to be free” is long gone.
Conservatives celebrate the past and believe the benefits of immigration ended after World War I and the advantages of free trade ended after World War II. They have a 19-century mercantilist view of trade that American must have surpluses with its trading partners and high walls to secure American sovereignty.
Gone are the days when American presidents and Secretaries of State talked to foreign authoritarian leaders about human rights, transparency, and democracy.
I had the privilege of seeing them do it.I sat in a room and witnessed Barack Obama and John Kerry talk to Xi Jinping and other world leaders about human rights and transparency.
That is what we used to do, and you can debate whether or not it was effective. But it was who we were. The world has changed.
I remember meeting with an African foreign minister. At the end of the meeting he said to me, “You come and talk to me about transparency and human rights, and the Chinese build me a super highway. Who do you think I’m going to listen to?”
China’s argument is that you can create prosperity without free speech or elections, without democracy. Other countries are listening.
Twenty years ago, I was the head of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. One of the things I did was recruit Justice Sandra Day O’Connor for the board, the first female Supreme Court Justice. Take it from me, she was a force. (She is a member of the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame. You can look it up.)
One day she said to me, “Mr. Stengel, we’re going to pay a terrible price for having stopped teaching civics in this country.”
We have.
In one of the exhibition halls at the Constitution Center, carved into the marble wall were some lines from one of the most beautiful speeches ever given about democracy: “The Spirit of Liberty,” given by Judge Learned Hand in Central Park in 1944, as WWII was raging.
“I often wonder,” he said, “whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can do much to help.”
Finally, he says something very poignant, “The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure it is right.”
Authoritarians don’t wonder whether they are right.
So, what to do? We don’t have time to start teaching civics again. But one thing that civics teaches is that elections and voting is the democratic superpower.
This is why the enemies of democracy spend a lot of time and money on making it harder to vote. Voting should be as easy and ubiquitous as online banking. A country that succeeds in making it harder and harder to vote ends up not being a democracy anymore.
The other democratic superpower is protest. In the 1960s, dissent was patriotic. Now the silent majority seems to be those of us who are pro-democracy.
Let’s get out there. Let’s continue to enlarge the circle of liberty. We actually haven’t been at it for that long. Yes, we’re 250 years old, but it was only the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that really made voting possible for all Americans. That made us a democracy. I do think the only way to combat anti-democracy is with a more inclusive and efficient democracy. As the old saying goes, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Let’s give it a try.
This essay was adapted from the Christ Church, Oxford 500th anniversary lecture.
The post The Arc of History is Bending Backward appeared first on TIME.
