Larry Diamond Wants a Global Crusade Aganist Autocrasy
The Hoover Institution’s Larry Diamond begins his new essay in Foreign Affairs by highlighting the supposed importance to the United States of the fall of a dictatorial regime in Bangladesh, where Sheikh Hasina’s autocratic misrule led to a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience followed by increased repression that caused the military to withdraw support for her government. But then he bemoans developments in El Salvador, Hungary, Nicaragua, Serbia, Tunisia, Turkey, Venezuela, Georgia, Honduras, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Botswana, Mauritius, Mongolia, Mexico, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Pakistan, Thailand, and South Africa, where “democracy” is losing out to “competitive authoritarian regimes.” “The global outlook for democracy,” he writes, “is clouded, if not downright disheartening” because “political extremism, polarization, and distrust have been on the rise even in long-established liberal democracies.” Then Diamond makes his obligatory (for most Foreign Affairs contributors) negative reference to Donald Trump, when he writes that there is “doubt about the democratic commitment of one of the two major-party candidates . . . in the presidential race this year.”
Diamond’s essay is about the supposed global struggle between “democracy” and “autocracy,” and the role that the United States should play on the side of democracy. According to Diamond, the United States is once again in a bipolar global ideological struggle, but this time it is with autocratic governments everywhere. He calls upon the United States and other liberal democracies to support “domestic opposition fronts” in countries where “authoritarian populism” governs “fake democrac[ies].” He describes his essay as a “playbook for democratic change” in all these populist autocracies.
Diamond’s essay includes a chart tracking the global rise in autocracy and the corresponding fall of “democratizing countries” since the year 2000. Several factors are to blame for this, he says, including the lack of an “economic base and rule of law institutions,” the 2003 American invasion of Iraq that “tarnished the idea of promoting democracy,” China, Russia, and Hungary promoting authoritarian governance around the world, the use of digital surveillance and artificial intelligence by autocratic regimes, a shift in global power to Asia, the lifting of restraints on human behavior, and the misuse of elections by authoritarian populists to create and maintain autocratic rule.
Diamond’s essay is in reality an attack on populism, even if that populism is the will of the majority that is sustained by elections. Populism, he writes, “is personalistic and hegemonic,” and its leaders seek “extraordinary, unfettered power.” When populists run for office in democracies and win, “[e]lections are no longer instruments of political accountability and constraint but rather plebiscites to revalidate leaders and their political monopolies.”
Diamond’s solution to this problem, unsurprisingly, is the deep state, “elements of civil society,” and an independent news media–by coincidence, the very institutions that have opposed Donald Trump and his supporters since 2015 and continue to do so today. It is no coincidence that Foreign Affairs is publishing this piece less than 10 days before the 2024 election. Diamond says that the best way to oppose populist autocrats is at the ballot box, but he also has kind words for “color revolutions,” which are designed to unseat populist autocrats who win at the ballot box. The deep state tried that after Trump won the 2016 election by using the Russia hoax and were fully supported in that effort by our so-called “independent” news media. It almost worked.
Diamond surely also knows that Trump would stand in the way of his proposal for a global crusade against autocracy. Trump’s “America First” approach to foreign policy includes an aspect of realism that rejects the idea that the United States should attempt to transform other countries into democracies. We’ve been there, done that, and, for the most part, failed miserably at great cost in lives and money. Diamond, however, wants America “back in the game” of democracy promotion. He writes: “The possibility of a democratic transition cannot be written off in any country.” This is Wilsonianism on steroids. Diamond wants the United States to interfere in foreign elections when populist autocrats are running for office. And if that doesn’t defeat the populists, we can “bring withering pressure down on the regime.” This is a recipe for global chaos and possibly more endless wars.
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Francis P. Sempa writes on foreign policy and geopolitics. His Best Defense columns appear at the beginning of each month.