The Real Threat to Western Liberal Democracy

[Martin Eden]

Pretty good Commentary in today's Chicago Tribune.

Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former US ambassador to NATO wrote The real threat to liberalism is the U.S.’ unwillingness to defend it.

“The liberal idea has become obsolete,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told the Financial Times in an eye-opening interview last week. It would be easy to dismiss this declaration of liberalism’s demise, considering the messenger.

That would be a mistake. Putin has spent the better part of two decades centralizing his own power at home while actively undermining liberal institutions abroad. But it is the failure of the United States and its allies to adequately defend liberalism that is the real threat.

First, though, it’s important to understand that the liberalism under threat does not refer to American liberals — meaning the left, as opposed to the conservative right — as President Donald Trump seemed to think. When asked what he thought about Putin’s attack on “Western-style liberalism,” Trump responded by agreeing that conditions in Western U.S. cities “run by an extraordinary group of liberal people” were deeply problematic.

Putin wasn’t talking about Los Angeles or San Francisco, however. He was calling into question the very liberalism at the core of the American republic itself — the essential notion of ensuring the rights of the individual above all else. Or, as the Declaration of Independence, put it: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” And that the role of government is above all to secure those unalienable rights.

(more at the link above)

Authoritarian nationalism is on the rise, with "populist" politicians exploiting anti-immigrant fear and other resentments to divide the public while assaulting the free press and other institutions critical to the preservation of the world order which has sustained Western rights and democratic freedoms from the defeat of fascism in WWII through the collapse of the Soviet communist empire.

Now the American president calls the free press "the enemy of the people" and demonstrates a total disregard for Constitutional checks & balances while placing himself above the law and taking the word of an ex-KGB agent over our own intelligence agencies regarding the Russian intervention to install Trump as president in the 2016 election.

We are in a global struggle to protect the rights and freedoms our nation's founders fought and died for, which we celebrate every July 4. Donald Trump is on the wrong side of this struggle, which is a reason transcending partisan politics to condemn his use of our military as self serving political props in our national July 4 celebration.

[Blue_true]

1. What we are too compassionate to point out.

Trump put down big cities, but the big problem in big cities is that they have been so successful that things like residential rents and housing prices are high, as is commercial rents. People choose to move to those places for opportunity. By comparison, the rural towns and cities that Trump calls so great are stuck in a time warp of low pay, no growth and drug addiction, we don't harp on that because we would try to fix the problems in those places, not take political advantage of them.

History has shown over and over that totalitarians like Putin fail, they may loom large for a while, but they fail and the affairs of the world move forward. Trump is the most dishonest and corrupt President in our history by a good margin, but we have had corrupt Presidents before and the nation moved on forward. We don't and never have had a perfect country, but the liberal mindset admits that and then work to fix problems, and it has been that feature that has made to country improve with time, abeit with setbacks. I am convinced that 50 years from now, Trump will have taken his earned place as the worst, most corrupt president in our country's history, and all politicians will be falling over themselves to disavow that they are anything like him. Putin in time will be seen as the dark, malevolent figure that he is and everyone will avoid association with him as people do with Stalin.

[pangaia]

3. "50 years from now..."

But, what about now?

Next year. the next decade...??

If this isn;t stopped now,there will BE no Boston, NY, Miami. SF, DC.... among other bad stuff...

[Blue_true]

10. I don't have your pessimism about the ecology.

Likely because I am an engineer and we are arrogant enough that we believe that we can find a reasonable fix for everything. I believe that we will soon (within a decade) have a holy grail clean energy source and after that, craft that can be sent into the atmosphere to harvest problematic gases, release them into outer space to be swept away by solar wind, and restore those gas levels in the composite atmosphere to desired levels. We need a certain amount of greenhouse gases in the composite atmosphere to survive, just not nearly as much as we have put there.

[Martin Eden]

4. Trump's supporters have been conned

The evangelicals are getting what they want in suppressing the right of women to control their own bodies, but in the long run that is far from the only rights that will be lost if the authoritarian nationalists triumph over the liberal world order. Christian "conservatives" ostensibly cherish the freedoms we celebrate on July 4, but they have made a deal with devils who will destroy what our Founders bequeathed to us.

[sharedvalues]

6. Yes. And American oligarchs are complicit

The Koches and the Waltons and the Mercers and Phil Anschutz and Sheldon Adelson have more in common with Putin and Russian oligarchs than they do with average Americans.

[pangaia]

2. And 99% of Americans have NO fucking idea what is going on..

And I dare say probably many here as well...

[Martin Eden]

5. Though the effort to educate may be futile,

that's why I thought it was important to start this thread.

[warmfeet]

7. Putin is scum,

as is our own "dear leader."

I will fight them every day I live.

[Blue_true]

11. Putin is a boil on the ass of humanity. They come up, hurt, but they eventually go away.

So will Putin, to be remembered in history little better than Stalin and Hitler.

[zaj]

8. Can we drop the term "liberal" in these discussions and just call it...

" western democracy"?

I understand that liberal is part of the textbook terminology, but we are living in a world where powerful people on the right are trying to bring an end to democracy entirely.

We aren't helping our case to win the battle with radical right leadership by labeling democracy with the left when we need all Americans to take ownership of democracy.

We will lose the fight if half the country stops believing in democracy because it got labeled as a tool of the liberal left.

[Martin Eden]

9. If we can't use accurate terminology here at DU, the struggle is already lost.

When our candidates communicate with an ignorant audience, "Western Democracy" will suffice.

[Caliman73]

12. liberalism is not the same as "Liberal"

Liberal is the term that has been coined to either define or disparage people in America who typically support the Democratic Party, its opposite being Conservative.

liberalism as a concept is much more broad and includes conservatives, liberals, progressives, and some libertarians as adherents. It is the basis of what was called "Enlightenment thinking" which was about reason, science, individual rights, freedom of speech and thought, and choice, and other concepts. It resulted as a backlash against Monarchism and Theocratic institutions like the Catholic and Protestant churches which held most of the influence on people's lives until that time.

What we need to do instead is attack Putin's stupid statement as his desire to institute an order based on White nationalism and fascism which is a direct opponent to liberalism. The criticism from the other side (the left) of liberalism comes from socialists who point out that it is precisely this yielding of ground to the right wing that is liberalism's greatest weakness. liberalism is beset by its reliance on "being fair" and having open and honest debate, while right wingers care NOTHING about doing that, only exploiting that trait of liberalism to get themselves a platform. If we continue to yield the language for fear of being seen as "the left" then we will continue to let them chip away at the institutions the liberals tend to think are rock solid.

[Martin Eden]

14. +1

We need to stand for Liberalism in the broader sense (which includes American conservatism) and the liberalism of our Democratic Party.

[scarytomcat]

13. So true

We need to speak up for democracy and label the right fascists that they are every time we talk.