US democracy still in peril, when we need to show it can deliver, former NSC official
Fiona Hill is trying to think about how to save American democracy, when our politics seem at their most grinding, polarized and broken.
In a departure from what I usually report on here, I wrote today to highly recommend the new book by former National Security Council Russia advisor Fiona Hill, “There is nothing for you here: Finding opportunity in the 21st century” to anyone concerned about the fate of democracy in the United States and beyond. And it turns out, that should be all of us.
If one thought, as I did, that Nothing was going to be a book delving more deeply into what Hill observed working in the Donald Trump White House that led to her role as a witness in Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2019, it quickly becomes apparent that she is writing about something more startling, and important. American democracy is still fragile and under ongoing threat, Hill argues, and, as improbable as it may initially seem, it has more commonalities with, and could face a fate similar to Russia’s.
“Russia’s fate over a twenty-year period shows how a country’s political path can turn away from democracy towards autocracy,” Hill writes. “No state, no matter how advanced, is immune from flawed leadership, the erosion of political checks and balances, and the degradation of its institutions. Democracy is not self-repairing. It requires constant attention and renewal, especially during periods of rapid technological and social change and economic uncertainty.”
Hill’s life story gives her a unique vantage point to see commonalities that were not obvious, at the time, for reasons she explains. The working class daughter of an unemployed coal miner turned hospital porter (after the mines closed) in the northeast of England, who went on (against considerable odds) to study Russia as the Soviet Union collapsed, and subsequently, to earn a PhD at Harvard and become a White House Russia expert, Hill lived firsthand, witnessed and studied post-industrial economic transformations in England, Russia and America that have left behind populations of disenfranchised, demoralized, stuck people; conditions that have proved fertile ground for the political rise of Vladimir Putin in Russia and Donald Trump in the United States, and in which democracy has come under threat, and, in Russia’s case, been eclipsed by autocracy altogether.
“I have seen firsthand just how vulnerable America is to the political afflictions that have befallen Russia,” Hill writes. “I share…my observations of how Donald Trump began to follow ‘the authoritarian playbook’ scripted by Vladimir Putin and other ‘strongmen’ leaders. By November 2019, when I was subpoenaed as a fact witness in the first impeachment trial of President Trump and found myself in the international spotlight, I knew that America had embarked on an authoritarian swing of its own. When the global coronavirus pandemic hit, the U.S. teetered on the verge of a system failure. We needed to address our opportunity crisis and pull ourselves back from the brink.”
As the Financial Times’ Ed Luce put it, on a panel he moderated with Hill at the Brookings Institution last week (Oct. 25): “The really heart-stopping implication of your book, Fiona, the real relevance of Russia is not its alleged interference in our elections, but that Russia’s present could be our future if we don’t address some of these problems.”
Problems that our alarmingly broken politics are struggling to address, and so far, coming up short. Frustration grows, as the country watches the protracted Congressional negotiations on Biden’s social and infrastructure initiatives drag on and on, without the prospect of a single Republican vote. Drag on and on, as Biden flew off to the G-20 and the COP climate change summit in Glasgow last week, and returned this week, with still no vote. Drag on and on, as Republicans won the governorship and two other state-wide races in Virginia Tuesday night (Nov. 2), for the first time in over a decade, among other Republican gains in races around the nation.
The question is, can not just Biden, but the small-d democrats, show that democracy can deliver? So far, Congress has given us more the spectacle of grinding stalemate, growing frustration and polarization.
Hill acknowledged last week she was even more pessimistic now than when she served in the Trump administration.
“I do think there's a sense that we know we have to fix this, [and] you see in Congress right now the grappling with…all of the…legislative efforts to try to tackle many of these problems,” she told the Brookings panel. “But I'm not so sure that there's sufficient political will behind this to really move forward.”
“And I'm extremely pessimistic because of.. what happened on January 6th,… with the insurrection, the attempt to storm the Capitol,” she continued. “Because... we're now in a state where people are fighting over that event. There's no longer any kind of sense of shared mission and shared purpose. And the polarization has become even more acute…
“And in an acute atmosphere of polarization,” Hill warned, “we're more likely to see outbreaks of violence again in the future.”
Even as our national politics seem broken, Hill suggests local efforts, mentorship and other such grassroots initiatives can make a meaningful difference in helping bolster an “infrastructure of opportunity” that can help individual people find opportunities for advancement that they otherwise might not be able to find or access.
“If there is one message that I hope to convey more forcefully than any other, it is that opportunity does not materialize from thin air and no one does anything alone,” Hill writes. “Delivering greater opportunity for America in the future will be the product of hard work on multiple levels. …When opportunity vanishes, it is because this infrastructure has eroded or even failed.”
“We need sort of a mobilization from somewhere below the political edifice right now to get people to…be working together to show that we can overcome this, even if it might be on the local and community level,” Hill said last week. “We have to kind of basically show that we can actually get things done. Because at the top, the frustration is building up with the state of affairs in Congress.”
I recommend the book, not because Hill has all the answers, but because she is a serious analyst, and her assessment about the continuing vulnerability of the United States to political unrest and autocratic trends is alarming and persuasive, because she is trying to think about solutions, and we need all hands on deck thinking about how to show democracy can deliver, and save it, and the US, from further Jan. 6-type unrest, or worse.
She summarized some of the book’s key ideas in this Foreign Affairs article.
You can see a video of her Brookings panel here.
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An ‘epidemic’ of coups: It is of course not just American democracy that is feeling stressed. This eye-opening Wall Street Journal article today about the Oct. 25 military coup in Sudan shows an alarming rise in the number of coups just in the past year.
Sudan’s military coup is the fourth in Africa this year, the Journal reports:
Military strongmen in Guinea, Chad and Mali have in recent months taken power from weakened governments that were vulnerable to foreign interference and plagued by poor governance, stuttering economies and insecurity. Attempts at military coups have been foiled this year in Madagascar, Central African Republic and Niger.
The result is what United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called “an epidemic of coup d’états” in a speech following the Sudanese putsch….
In Africa, this year has seen a quadrupling of coups after just one putsch in 2020—again in Mali—and an average of just two a year over the past decade. The number is the highest since 1980….says Jonathan Powell, an associate professor at the University of Central Florida and an expert on coups….
Diplomats and analysts say that a key reason for the surge in coups is that the willingness of a number of international powers to deal with authoritarian regimes has lowered the potential cost of a regime change. ..
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Iran talks Nov. 29: Last but not least, we finally have a date for Iran nuclear talks to resume in Vienna, after being on hiatus since June.
International talks on trying to restore US and Iranian full implementation with the Iran nuclear deal are set to resume in Vienna on November 29, the European Union coordinator Enrique Mora and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri announced today.
That is the day after the next International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors meeting, Iranian journalist Sara Massoumi noted.
The timing suggests Iran’s new administration picked the date to try to dissuade any board members from censuring Iran at the November BoG meeting, for fear Iran might then cancel the Nov. 29 talks, which it has taken five months to get them to come. Rather predictable. It’s going to be a slog.
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