O "farol da democracia" se extinguiu
Anne ApplebaumThe Beacon of Democracy?
What happens when democracy is no longer part of America's identity
ANNE APPLEBAUM
JUL 5, 2026
To mark the 250th Fourth of July, I am reposting an article that appeared at the end of last year. It was part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” The Atlantic’s special 250th commemorative issue. That issue is available on the website, along with more than a dozen other articles, some on American history, some on the present. You can find them all here, with a table of contents to help you sort through them: The Unfinished Revolution. I especially loved the article on Ben Franklin and his son, William, who fought for the British. It’s a useful reminder that history, with all of its warts and nuances, is never quite the same thing as the mythology.
My own article was prompted by the reporting I have done over the past year and a half on the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the institutions that America has long used to promote democracy: foreign broadcasting, support for election monitors, investments in civic education. These were not tools used to overthrow governments, and they had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq. They were used, rather, to explain to the world the basic values that underly the American experiment: liberty, equality, the rule of law.
Some of these insititutions survive, limping along. I wrote earlier this year about Kari Lake’s assault on Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and other broadcasters, which has done a lot of damage but so far failed to kill them all off. Others, such as the Global Engagement Center, have been destroyed completely, leaving us without any ability to monitor foreign propaganda, whether from Russia or from terrorist groups. But in this anniversary essay, I ask a different question: if “democracy” is no longer at the center of our national identity, what does that mean for Americans? Who are we now?
Here is the first part of the article. Read the whole thing on the Atlantic website, through this gift link:
The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Within weeks of their publication in July 1776, those words spread around the world. In August, a London newspaper reprinted the Declaration of Independence in full. Edinburgh followed. Soon after that, it appeared in Madrid, Leiden, Vienna, and Copenhagen.
Before long, others drew on the text in more substantial ways. Thomas Jefferson himself helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, issued by French revolutionaries in 1789. The Haitian Declaration of Independence, of 1804, drew on both the American and French precedents, calling for the construction of an “empire of liberty in the country which has given us birth.” In subsequent decades, declarations of independence were issued by Greece, Liberia (the author had been born in Virginia), and a host of new Latin American nations. In 1918, Thomáš Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, signed a Declaration of Common Aims of the Independent Mid-European Nations at Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, using the Founders’ inkwell.
On that occasion, a replica of the Liberty Bell was rung, not because any American president or official had asked for it to ring but because Masaryk had been inspired by the story of the American founding. He evoked the Declaration not because of any pressure applied by U.S. foreign policy, but because of Jefferson’s words and what they signify. Since 1776, Americans have promoted democracy just by existing. Human rights and the rule of law are in our founding documents. The dream of separation from a colonial empire is built into them too. Our aspirations have always inspired others, even when we did not live up to them ourselves.
In the 20th century, we moved from simply modeling democratic ideals to spreading or promoting them as a matter of policy. We did so in part because the language of democracy is in our DNA, and when we are confronted by autocrats and despots, we use it. Woodrow Wilson, when arguing for entry into the First World War, said America should advocate the “principles of peace and justice” in opposition to “selfish and autocratic power.” In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to America as an “arsenal of democracy” determined to aid British allies against the Nazis: “No dictator, no combination of dictators, will weaken that determination.”
During the Cold War, we connected words such as freedom and rights not just to our military strategy but to our national identity, to our culture. We were advocates of free markets, a free press, abstract expressionism, and jazz, and we exported those things too. Plenty of people wanted them. Willis Conover, the host of Voice of America’s nightly jazz broadcast in the 1960s and ’70s, had an audience of 30 million people, mostly in Russia and Eastern Europe. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950, pulled together anti-Communist intellectuals from all over Europe into a single movement.
Many people found our language hypocritical, and they were right: Americans were perfectly capable of backing dictatorships while talking about democracy. The contradiction between the ideals we said we fought for abroad and their failure at home bothered foreigners as well as Americans. In 1954, the Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that argued in favor of desegregation because, among other reasons, racist laws prompted “doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.”
Democratic faith. Because it was at the center of our foreign policy, we aspired to it, even if we didn’t live up to it. Others did too. Over time, the number of these democratic aspirants increased. After the Second World War, the dream of American freedom and prosperity strengthened what were initially shaky democracies in Western Europe and Asia, including recently defeated West Germany and Japan. Their political and economic success drew others into the fold. Greece and Spain joined the club of democracies in the ’70s; South Korea and Taiwan in the ’80s; Central Europe in the ’90s. Asked in 1989, the year they voted out Communism, what kind of country they wanted to be, most Poles would have said, “We want to be normal.” And by “normal,” they meant a European democracy, a capitalist state with a welfare system, a close ally of the United States.
We Americans were inspired by our own language too. We always think about America’s postwar role in Europe as an act of great generosity, the defense of allies from Soviet aggression. But by putting democracy at the center of our international and national identity, we also helped strengthen our own political system. If nothing else, all Americans, even those on different sides of our deepest cultural divides, had a common cause: Right-wing or left-wing, Christian or atheist, we could all be in favor of freedom.
Read the rest here:
Beacon of Democracy:
https://substack.com/redirect/5758e6c0-2ed7-4001-81fa-e9cd582810f0?j=eyJ1IjoiOG1hOTIifQ.cIj3zdxxgLAE0Kc2Pv6DJk4AEqMTg7YdnfnuGKbdL0Y
The Unfinished Revolution:
https://www.theatlantic.com/category/unfinished-revolution/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
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