Too Bad Biden Isn’t Selling Freedom Instead of Democracy

It’s easy to criticize President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy, a virtual event meant to demonstrate the power of democracy as a uniting principle for the 112 participating countries, as a hypocritical and harmful U.S. attempt to give an ideological grounding to its geopolitical interests, primarily in competition with China. Branco Milanovic, the inequality scholar, does just that, arguing that while geopolitical conflicts can be resolved on a realpolitik basis, playing up ideological divisions can only exacerbate them. But then again, it’s normal for politicians to seek a moral foundation for their positions and actions. It’s just that 2021 may be a particularly bad time to do it.

Any discussion of democracy is, of necessity, an argument about definitions. The U.S. founding fathers saw it as a system in which the majority could wield too much power over minorities and thus attempted to circumscribe that power. “If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy,” Alexander Hamilton warned in 1787 — and his fear was realized, in a way, 130 years later when aspiring dictator Vladimir Lenin espoused the “democratic centralism” of abolishing private property in “State and the Revolution.”