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Democracy is in trouble, and the Russian/Ukrainian conflict highlights how imperiled it is becoming in the 21st century. The real issue in eastern Ukraine isn’t just land, any more than the real issue in the US last week was the filibuster: that’s all the noise on the surface.

What’s grinding away below the surface, however, is the erosion or outright destruction of democracy itself, whether by invasion from without or corruption from within.

Ukraine and Taiwan represent possible tipping points for democracy internationally, while Republicans passing laws that allow politicians to ignore the results of elections — while the US Senate refuses to stand up for democracy — could be a tipping point here.

Around the world, and in America today, there are nations and politicians who do believe that democracy — governance via the will of the majority, carried out by elected representatives — is the best form of government for a republic.

At the same time, however, there are many who give lip service to democracy to accomplish their political ends but, in reality, believe that authoritarianism and oligarchy are better ways to rule a nation and keep peace around the world.

And that movement toward authoritarianism and away from democracy is growing.

Freedom House reported last year that:

“[T]he share of countries designated Not Free has reached its highest level since the deterioration of democracy began in 2006, and countries with declines in political rights and civil liberties outnumbered those with gains by the largest margin recorded during the 15-year period. The report downgraded the freedom scores of 73 countries, representing 75 percent of the global population.”

One of those countries they identified as a place where democracy itself is under assault is the USA, where virtually the entire Republican Party has rejected supporting democracy at home and supporting democratic governments abroad. Case in point — yesterday Congressman Tom Malinowski tweeted:

Tom Malinowski @Malinowski

My office is now getting calls from folks who say they watch Tucker Carlson and are upset that we're not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine, and who want me to support Russia's "reasonable" positions.

6:36 PM ∙ Jan 24, 2022

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11,576Likes3,637Retweets

While this may seem like it’s just a conflict between Russia and the US/Europe, what’s really at stake here is a much, much larger issue. 

The real question at the core of the Ukraine conflict, as well as the geopolitical and domestic political positions taken by Fox and many in the GOP, is simple and straightforward:

“What’s the best way for humans to govern themselves?”

As we watch the crisis play out on the border between Ukraine and Russia, there are all sorts of theories about what’s “at stake” or “at the core” of the conflict: 

• Is President Putin doing this to salvage his popularity in the wake of Covid and the politically disastrous Navalny poisoning and imprisonment? 

• Is it a legitimate effort to right an improper separation, generations ago, of Ukraine from the greater Rus, what the ancient Russian empire was called when it was founded and run by Vikings twelve centuries ago?  

• Is it because the US and NATO ignored and then violated a commitment George HW Bush made to Gorbachev that if he let the USSR fall apart, NATO wouldn’t expand further toward the new Russian borders?

All are reasonable topics of debate and appear at the front of most discussions of the Ukraine crisis. 

But what’s really at stake here isn’t any of the above. 

The real issue in the Russia-Ukraine and the China-Taiwan (among others) conflicts is that core question of what form of government is best.  

Both Ukraine and Taiwan are asserting that democracy is the best way for humans to govern themselves; Russia and China (and about half the other countries of the world) believe they know better — and that history is on their side.

Who’s right?

Is democracy viable and natural, the “best” form of human governance, or is it a weak attempt to accomplish do-gooder goals that simply aren’t realistic or, even worse, are violations of natural law and/or human nature? 

Strongman authoritarian regimes, theocracies, and dynastic empires run by ruling families or landowning cliques have been the “norm” for most of the last 5000 years of “modern” human history.

Is that proof, as many on the hard right argue, that the “experiment” of democracy is unnatural and therefore doomed to failure?  Should we have let Trump overthrow democracy and establish authoritarian rule here in the US? Has the “American experiment” run its course?

This is not a new debate. 

Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 book Leviathan, often seen as the seminal origin document for the Enlightenment, argued that people should ultimately be able to govern themselves (thus establishing what Americans today call the “liberal” school of political science).

Leviathan also, however, articulated the foundation of the modern-day “conservative” worldview when Hobbes wrote that, lacking the iron fist of church and state, human societies and nations would invariably revert to their “natural” state:

“In such condition, … the life of man [is], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

One-hundred-three years after Hobbes published those words, Jean Jacques Rosseau rebutted him and established the intellectual basis used by the Founders of our American republic, arguing that the “natural state” of humankind is not violent and hierarchical but, rather, compassionate, egalitarian, and democratic. 

So, again, who is right?

In The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, I laid out scientific reports on how animals, from ants and gnats, to birds and fish, to dogs and humans, are all wired for fairness and majority-rule group-decision-making, something we generally call democracy.

Sometimes it even appears seamless, and only in the past few decades have we learned of the existence of this phenomenon in the animal kingdom. Prior to these recent discoveries, generations of scientists had asserted that pretty much every animal species worked the way medieval European kingdoms did, with the equivalent of a dictatorial alpha dog dominating a submissive pack.

Now we know that this sort of authoritarian rule is quite rare in nature: it may even be the exception that proves the more egalitarian rule.

When birds migrate or fish swim in schools, each wingbeat and tail twitch is, essentially, a vote, and the votes of all the members within sight are continuously and instantly tabulated moment-to-moment by every member. Thus, when more than half the birds or fish “vote” to move 20 degrees to the right, for example, suddenly the entire flock or school moves, seemingly as if choreographed by telepathy.

On the other hand, there are some animal societies that are rigidly hierarchical, particularly among primates, which raises the question: What is the best way for humans?

Human history only brings more confusion to this debate. 

For example, Anthropologist Peter Farb, in his brilliant 1968 book Man’s Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State, lays out the structure of several dozen Native American tribes at the time of first contact with Europeans.  Some were highly to totally egalitarian and democratic; others had kings, Sun Gods, practiced human sacrifice and, here in the Pacific Northwest, even held slaves.

While the democratic tribes far outnumber those run by strongman or dynastic types of governments, Farb and generations of subsequent anthropologists never answered the question of what is “best” or “natural” for human societies. 

Russia’s president Putin clearly is more in Hobbes’ camp: government needs an iron fist to retain law and order.  As are China’s President Xi, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad Bin Salman, the ruling mullahs of Iran, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, among others.

The United States, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Ukraine and most of the rest of Europe (excepting Hungary) are more with Rosseau and America’s Founders.

But even here in the United States, there are powerful voices asserting that Hobbes’ authoritarianism, not Rosseau’s democracy, should be our role model. 

Donald Trump openly admired strongman autocrats the world over while denigrating and ridiculing the leaders of democratic nations; men aligned with his administration like Michael Flynn, John Eastman and Gym Jordan clearly believe, like Trump does, that “democracy is for suckers.”

The same is apparently true of authoritarian-loving Fox “News” hosts, a perspective that appears to come down on high from the authority to whom they answer: Rupert Murdoch himself. 

Australia’s former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd documented Murdoch’s profitable career undermining democracy first in Australia, then the UK, and now here in the US after the Reagan administration granted him citizenship so he could set up his television empire.  

Prime Minister Rudd characterized Murdoch’s empire in an op-ed for The Sydney Morning Herald as the “Cancer eating the heart of Australian democracy.”

Virtually the entire Republican Party is now committed to authoritarianism instead of democracy.  Not even one single Republican senator was willing to vote to guarantee free and fair elections, and the party is using Trump’s “stolen election” lie to undermine and ultimately end democracy at the state level.

The few Republican holdouts, like Kinzinger and Cheney, are the exceptions that prove this rule: the GOP is no longer a political party that holds what most of the world has always thought to be “American values.”  

They’ve joined the side of Russia and China in this debate, openly asserting that political power should flow from the top down; in our country’s case, they’ve embraced a ruling class of morbidly rich oligarchs.

A “hot” war may be on the way in Ukraine, perhaps followed by China seizing Taiwan once the precedent of “reclaiming former territories” has been set.  

This debate about how humans should govern themselves is the real battle of our time, both metaphorically and literally, both internationally and right here at home. 

It’s being fought across social media, battled in the billions spent on elections, and even in state and local governments across the US as authoritarian politicians work to keep minorities, young people, women, and LGBTQ+ people “in their place.”

No matter how the crisis in Ukraine works out, the underlying dispute will remain: should humans govern themselves democratically from the ground up, or oligarchically from the top down? 

The future of democracy is hanging in the balance, not just in Ukraine and Taiwan but here in the US, as well.

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