Nearly half of the world’s population is experiencing an election this year, which in some respects makes 2024 the most important year yet for global democracy. Since President Biden believes the world has “emerged anew in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy,” 2024 should be a banner year for the American left. Instead, from its perspective, the record has been decidedly mixed: The Hindu right retained its majority in India and the Euroskeptics did well in the European Union elections. Americans should also be concerned about the populist left’s victory in Mexico and the ascent of anti-American anti-Semites in France.
Over the past decade, the West has shifted from promoting democratic expansion to fretting about democratic backsliding to now fearing the consequences of what Freedom House calls a “democratic recession.” Although they are losing ground, the democracy-promoting NGO complex and its supporters in the Democratic Party have failed to respond adequately. Even worse, they have added on new pet causes that make democracy less popular in the developing world. There has to be a better way.
Although there are many kinds of democracy promoters who pursue a variety of strategies, most of them focus on training and supporting activists in other countries. This has yielded some major victories: Communism collapsed in Europe largely because of the Polish labor movement, Solidarity, and nonviolent movements toppled several Asian dictatorships around the same time.
Ironically, these groups defeated communism by borrowing some of Vladimir Lenin’s tactics. Karl Marx had predicted that the proletariat in industrialized countries like Great Britain and Germany would stage violent revolutions, but by the beginning of the 20th century, this had not happened. In response, Lenin called for a “vanguard of the proletariat” that would be “capable of assuming power and leading the whole people to socialism … of being the teacher, the guide, the leader of all the working and exploited people.” […]
— Read More: freebeacon.com
