We Need to Talk About the Global Crisis of Democracy

By a Twitter-famous social scientist.

Woah. I just ran the numbers, and it’s terrifying. You may not understand this if you aren’t a political scientist or you didn’t listen to Yascha Mounk’s latest podcast, but the global crisis of democracy is real (and I mean it this time). It’s really real, because it’s not just happening to the “brown” countries anymore. After Tuesday’s election, my research team at the Boston University Liberalism, Law, and Social Happiness Indicator Trend (B.U.L.L.S.H.I.T.) was forced to drop the United States from “partly free” to “partly unfree” on the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Global Freedom Index. That’s only a single rank above Iran, North Korea, and every country in Latin America with a leftist president.

If you weren’t concerned before, that should terrify you. I’m a liberal social scientist from an elite university who accumulated a large online following by quote-tweeting Donald Trump, and I’ve never seen anything like this. The United States hasn’t had a democracy score this low since before it declared independence in 1776. Everything in the history of our republic — the Revolutionary War, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the War of 1812, slavery, the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Jim Crow, 9/11, and the last season of Game of Thrones — pales in comparison to the challenges we face today. In fact, according to our B.U.L.L.S.H.I.T. model, the challenges to democracy today are at least a million times as serious as all of our past challenges put together. Between Russia’s sinister influence over U.S. media heavyweights like Benny Johnson and Lauren Southern, and the Washington Post’s failure to tell me who to vote for, the fate of American democracy may be in more trouble today than anything has ever been in the history of the entire universe.

You might not think that’s a big deal, but it’s huge. With so many open fronts in the struggle for freedom around the world, from Ukraine’s war against reality to Israel’s war against Palestinian children, the forces of democracy need a strong and engaged United States to back them up if freedom is going to have a fighting chance. President Biden understands this, and so do responsible Republicans who champion the liberal international order and its institutions, like Dick and Liz Cheney and former national security advisor John Bolton.

But a majority of Americans — as well as the incoming Donald Trump administration — don’t seem to realize how important it is for the United States to champion liberal values like dealing cluster bombs and ignoring the International Criminal Court. In a recent poll, my colleagues and I asked 1,000 registered voters if they think Biden should give Ukraine control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal and attack Russia immediately, or if they think we should give them 24 hours to surrender beforehand. A shocking 79% of respondents said they hate democracy.

Stark findings like this make it all too clear why, on Tuesday, a majority of Americans voted for a candidate who once vaguely considered maybe possibly negotiating a deal with the single most dangerous and powerful man who has ever lived, Kim Jong Un — which would have forever tarnished our great country’s otherwise blemish-free record of never ever treating dictators like rational actors — instead of doing the right thing and following through on his promise to exterminate every last man, woman, and child on the Korean Peninsula.

Trump’s return to the White House ought to be a wake-up call to people like me — Twitter-famous social scientists and historians — that we need to start speaking earnestly with the American people about the unprecedented threats posed to democracy in the United States and around the world. For too long, we’ve been politely biting our tongues about the danger of the Trump phenomenon, and the consequences of our inaction are now clear. I’ll never stop wondering if it was my failure to talk about democratic backsliding on NPR for a 163rd time that allowed Trump to clinch a second term.

It’s time that we finally cut to the chase, shot straight, laid it all on the line, cleared the air, put our cards on the table, bit the bullet, got it off our chests, set the record straight, and had an open and frank discussion with the American people about the global assault on freedom and why it matters. That means speaking some inconvenient truths — like “January 6th was bad” and “tenured faculty are the backbone of our democracy and deserve more money” — but it has to be done if we’re going to stop the free world’s inexorable descent into fascism.

As you can see below, the stakes really couldn’t be higher. We hear it every year, but the 2024 election actually was the most important of our lifetime. Trump’s platform this year includes some unprecedented plans to dismantle the liberal international order, like prosecuting journalists who aren’t named “Julian Assange” and deploying only 90,000 troops to Europe rather than 100,000 — and then deploying 100,000 anyway because that’s what his advisors want and he got distracted by something else. Without steadfast resistance, Trump’s second term is bound to be a giveaway to the global forces of bad and evil and even just things that are generally annoying and unpleasant, for that matter.

It’s critical that the most important people in the world — liberal academics — start speaking the truth about Trump’s threat to democracy. And that means raising two uncomfortable issues that some elites and politicos would rather ignore.

First, with so much at stake, Democrats need to start asking what they can do to make victory a slam dunk in the next election. If that means using dirty tricks to keep fascist collaborators like Jill Stein off the ballot, or shutting up terrorist-sympathizing college students who think ideological purity tests like “not committing war crimes” matter more than getting Democrats elected, then that’s what it’s going to take. The same goes for all those antisemitic Arabs (read: A-Rabs) who didn’t vote for Harris this year because she helped kill their cousins in Palestine. Laying down the law against these hooligans may be just what it takes to salvage our precious remaining democratic principles, like open elections, free speech, and ethnoreligious tolerance.

Second, we need to be clear and unapologetic in calling out the actors who pose an existential threat to the survival of the free world. We face a working coalition of autocrats and nefarious non-state actors who are bound together by nothing more than their hatred of everything that’s good and free about the United States, from Russia and China to Iran, North Korea, and Bolivia, to Fox News, Wikileaks, and the Supreme Court, to Tucker Carlson’s basement and Elon Musk’s X servers. Obviously, the only solution is to talk constantly about how we want to fragment the world order along political lines, while forcing these actors to rely on each other for their security and economic survival by threatening regime change and cutting them off from doing business with any country aligned with the United States. As my friend and mentor Samuel Huntington used to say, there’s nothing wrong with international order that a few well-placed sanctions aren’t going to fix.

At the same time, we need to exercise moral clarity by supporting the few bastions of freedom that are bravely holding out against the New Axis:

As ringleader of the free world, it’s up to the United States to help these countries out, even if it takes a few trillion dollars and our solemn commitment that we’d fight a nuclear war on their behalf. As President Biden declared not long ago, states like Ukraine and Israel are brothers in arms in the fight against imperialism — or was it racism or something? — and we’ll have their back forever and ever, no matter how many people have to die along the way.

If nothing else, the Biden administration deserves credit for understanding that democracy’s survival sometimes means bending the rules a little. If we’re serious about upholding the liberal international order, then why on Earth would we have to be — well — liberal, international, and orderly while we’re at it? Some inane regulations, like the prohibition on cluster bombs and intentionally targeting civilians, were meant to be broken anyway. What did a brave freedom lover once say? I forget.

Oh, yeah: If you want to save democracy, first you have to destroy it.

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