The year we’re leaving behind was a bad one for democracy — a reminder that progress is fragile and not inevitable, and that history doesn’t always take a linear path.
Democracy’s decline isn’t new. According to Freedom House, a nonprofit that researches trends in democracy, as of 2020, global freedom had been declining for fifteen consecutive years, and the pace is accelerating. Democracy isn’t just elections, after all. It’s also the independent institutions — political parties, free press, the judiciary — that check power and hold it to account.
One of the biggest stories is happening here at home. The year began with the Jan. 6 insurrection, a clear attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. Efforts to undermine trust in that election and to rig the next have continued. Nineteen states have passed laws to make it harder for Americans to vote, and some have eased the path for partisan interference in results.
European democracies have been hit hard too. Poland took advantage of the pandemic to double down on its authoritarian turn, but its slide began in 2015, when the Law and Justice party won the presidency and parliament and began pushing Poland toward radical nationalism. The ruling party flouted constitutional law to undermine judicial independence and has been openly hostile to LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and media freedom since.
Poland isn’t the only European country to do so, but its decline has been a particular surprise to me because I served there as a U.S. diplomat less than a decade ago, when Poland was a major EU success. As the human rights officer, I drafted our annual human rights report, which we conduct in every country every year. Poland’s liberal democratic standards seemed so strong then that I felt embarrassed asking questions about women’s rights, law enforcement, or the prison system — areas where Poland had a better record than our own. In only a few short years, that Poland is at risk of disappearing.
Hong Kong’s struggle to retain a semblance of democracy took a potentially fatal blow in 2021 as well. After a strong showing of pro-democracy politicians during local council elections in 2019, Beijing cracked down hard with arrests and harassment of officials and independent media. This led most pro-democracy council members to quit this year. In late December, the University of Hong Kong removed a monument commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, out of concern that it might be found to violate national security law. Authoritarianism requires total control, after all, and that includes the historical narrative.
The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban was another gut punch for the democracy movement. The trappings of democracy that the United States and its allies had propped up there for two decades, at a cost of $2 trillion, disappeared almost overnight. Was this a collapse or simply proof that democracy never took hold in Afghanistan to begin with? Either way, the culprit was largely corruption, and the country’s fall proof that the U.S. cannot spend or kill a new democracy into being.
This was also a record year for coups. The military in Myanmar seized power in February, just ahead of the new parliament’s opening. Mali experienced a coup in May 2021, its second in less than a year. Guinea’s president was ousted by force in September. In October, the Sudanese military dashed hopes of the fledgling democratic transition that began with months of public protests in 2018-2019. While those protests succeeded in ousting Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled the country brutally for 30 years, they have failed so far to lead to durable civilian rule.
As this year comes to an end, 100,000 Russian troops sit on the border with Ukraine, a physical symbol of the global standoff between autocracy and democracy that President Biden has warned of throughout the year.
But just as the continued march toward greater democracy isn’t a given, neither is democracy’s decline. Brave people put their daily lives on hold in countries around the world to fight for the freedoms that democracy provides. Protests in Poland continue to hinder the march toward authoritarianism. Crackdowns in Hong Kong demonstrate how much authoritarians fear the will of the people. Sudan’s protests achieved what no one thought possible in 2019, and the citizens remain undeterred today, protesting the latest coup even in the face of violence and death.
These people risk it all to have what we still have here in America because it’s something worth fighting for — and they have been fighting for years.
It’s easy to get disenchanted with our democracy, frustrated by the rancor in Washington and the inevitable clumsiness of a government by the people in a country as large and diverse as ours. But look around the world at how precious democracy is to those who don’t have it.
Democracy is not a spectator sport. If you’re into New Year’s resolutions, consider committing to do your part in the year ahead to help preserve ours by being an engaged and informed citizen. If we don’t, we may lose it.
Elizabeth Shackelford is a senior fellow on U.S. foreign policy with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. She was previously a U.S. diplomat and is author of “The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.”
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