Thread by @jwdwerner

The liberal international order, functioning as designed on the single most consequential question it faces right now. I guess India and South Africa are sinister revisionist powers. 1/
law360.com/lifesciences/a…

If we want to understand what’s going on in the world, the dominant US foreign policy framing dividing the world between democracies and autocracies is not very useful. As this episode illustrates, it’s the rich vs poor divide that is more often the salient distinction. 2/

The dominant ideology is so powerful and blinding that when someone in the US says “the democracies”, it’s almost always coterminous with the rich, former colonial countries. It’s frequently used in situations that obviously do not include most of the world’s democracies. 3/

Take this story, which is not about “democratic nations”—countries like India, Indonesia, Nigeria, México were not part of the survey. It’s about rich countries. 4/
nytimes.com/2020/10/06/wor…

Or consider this report on “China’s challenge to the free world”. China’s activities that supposedly challenge democracy are largely things that “the democracies”, i.e. the rich countries, themselves do regularly. 5/
atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-resea…

The major exception is the developmental economic policies that pose no threat to most democratic countries—the vast majority of democracies, which are poor, would love to emulate them. These practices do, however, threaten the economic dominance of the rich countries. 6/

The erosion of political liberalism over the last decade *is* real and extremely dangerous. But it has affected most countries regardless of whether they qualify as formal democracies, and it’s deeply connected to the inequality and exclusion produced by economic liberalism. 7/

If we care about democracy—or even just human life—then we need to reject the political establishment’s use of “democracy” to distract from inequality. We need to start attacking the rich–poor divide both within and between countries. /8