Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Here's a thread of a recent post of mine that got a fair amount of attention.

It's about growing illiberalism around the world.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-darkness

2/We see a lot of scary stories in the news lately. Here's just a small sample.

3/But headlines are just headlines, right? Surely there are always bad things happening around the world.

Unfortunately, our best data confirms that human rights and political freedoms are in retreat around the world.

freedomhouse.org/report/freedom…

4/Freedom House finds that declines in freedom have outpaced gains since 2006.

5/The Economist's Democracy Index held up a bit better, but shows a marked decline in the past few years.

6/And the Swedish institute V-Dem finds that the number of people who live in "autocratizing" countries now vastly outnumbers the amount of people who live in "democratizing" countries.

7/China is the most oppressive and the most aggressive of the Great Powers.

8/But America's decline should worry us even more. Without America, there will be no one to stand up as a powerful bastion of liberal democracy.

And America's level of freedom is in steep decline.

9/The biggest threat is the Republican Party's seeming rejection of electoral politics, in favor of election denial and political violence.

Many Republicans aren't happy with this trend, but they're not in control now.

https://twitter.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1390985282661621760

10/And besides America, who is there?

Europe and Japan have weakened and aged, and India is also backsliding on liberal democracy.

11/We could thus be looking at the darkest period since the 1930s.

12/How did we get here? Why is illiberalism and oppression on the march around the world?

Well, the trend looks like it began in the mid-2000s. And what can we think of that happened in the mid-2000s?

13/The Iraq War crushed the U.S.' moral standing around the globe.

It only partially recovered after Obama was elected, then took another nosedive after Trump came to power.

14/But even as America flushed its moral leadership down the toilet, its economic leadership was in decline. China's rapid rise, combined with the Great Recession, mean that America no longer dominates the global economy.

15/America's absolute moral decline and its relative economic decline created a power vacuum on planet Earth.

And into that vacuum flowed...fear.

16/When FDR said "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself", he was talking about a banking crisis, but really he was talking about the rise of autocracy.

And as Gramsci said:
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

17/So the darkness creeps over our world.

What do we do to stop it? How do we fight back?

In 2019-2020, protesters around the world fought back. But though they scored a few victories, overall they could not turn back the tide.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-great-pr…

18/We need powerful states on our side if we're going to fight back effectively against the Darkness.

First of all, we need to shore up America's economic vitality as best we can, and create economic networks not centered on China.

19/But even more importantly, America must restore our commitment to human rights and democracy, so that we can once again be a bastion of those things.

20/We need to renew our commitment to Democracy -- not just elections, but a society focused on participation, inclusion, equality, dignity, and respect. Democracy with a capital "D".

21/Democracy, I think, is the only ideology that can drive back the Darkness.

22/The point here is that we've done this before.

Our ancestors faced the Darkness last century and threw it back. And we ended that century with a far freer, better world than we began it with.

We can do this again.

(end)

noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-darkness

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noahpinion.substack.com