The GOP Turns Its Back on Global Democracy

As autocracy makes gains worldwide, the party of Reagan (mostly) shrugs.

(Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images).

This article is brought to you by American Purpose, the magazine and community founded by Francis Fukuyama in 2020, which is now proudly part of the Persuasion family.

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During the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee the media made a point of interviewing delegates who supported American military assistance to Ukraine. Clearly, journalists were hopeful that someone from the GOP’s anti-Putin faction might have a dissenting phrase about the absence of so much as a kind word for Ukraine in the party platform or the speeches of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, or other MAGA luminaries.

In fact, the remnants of the GOP’s pro-democracy forces scrupulously declined to inject a critical word into the discussion of the party’s increasingly isolationist foreign policy, a position sanctified in Milwaukee. Instead, they asserted, with a straight face, that the party had become a big tent formation where those with opposing perspectives could express opinions and hash out differences without polemics or rancor. They noted that the Ukraine aid package that was passed earlier this year did so with bipartisan support, including many Republicans from both houses of Congress.

All true. And yet the greater truth is that the Milwaukee Republicans is a very different party in its international outlook from the party of McCain, Bush, or Reagan. And while the pro-Ukraine forces remain numerically important in the House and Senate, they were practically nonexistent among those whose speeches set the tone for the upcoming presidential contest. While the GOP’s pro-Kyiv contingent worked diligently to win passage of the assistance package, there was an absence of urgency, not to mention indignation, in their remarks to journalists about the consequences of a Russia victory. While a number of Republican legislators distinguished themselves earlier this year in the debates over Ukraine aid, in Milwaukee the party’s public attitude was summed up by J. D. Vance’s off-hand remark that he didn’t “really care what happened to Ukraine one way or the other” and Trump’s repeated observation that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are “at the top of their game.”

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The decline of the GOP’s internationalist wing is especially ill-timed given the recent gains for global autocracy, the most significant since the years of Soviet expansionism that followed World War Two.

Fifteen years ago or so, democracy scholars were reporting that the wave of democracy gains that had taken place around the time of the Soviet collapse had ground to a halt. The march of democracy had been replaced by a stunning increase in strongman rule that began in Russia and Venezuela and subsequently spread widely across the globe. 

At the same time, the world’s autocrats were beginning to develop the series of networks, de facto alliances, and partnerships that are the grim subject of Anne Applebaum’s important book, Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Rule the World. The seriousness of the new league of dictators has been made unsettlingly clear by Putin and Xi’s invocation of a “no limits” friendship just as Russia invaded Ukraine and Putin’s subsequent arrangements with Iran, Belarus, and North Korea to strengthen and replenish the Kremlin’s battlefield capabilities.

While global autocracy has been adept at exploiting American polarization and European instability, another key to its success can be found in the sophistication and thoroughness of the system of domestic repression that has been embraced, in one country after the next, during this century. Putin, Xi Jinping, Nicolas Maduro, the Iranian leadership—all are driven by a determination to avoid the mistakes of the old-school strongmen and military dictators who surrendered power to their democratic adversaries in the latter part of the 20th century, and particularly to avoid the liberalizing reforms that, in their view, led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism as an alternative political system. They have, instead, built autocratic systems that have proved remarkably resilient and widely applicable to societies with different religions, cultures, and economies.

Data from Freedom House’s annual report on the state of global democracy reveal a world where liberal institutions are under pressure everywhere, but where many of the most serious declines are found among countries that were already noteworthy for the absence of personal freedom. In other words, in a world where the worst are getting even worse, the unfree are steadily losing what minimal liberties remain.

Between 2010 and 2023, the countries whose Freedom House scores were already near the bottom of the heap continued their downward spiral. Whether they were the most powerful autocracies, like Russia, China, and Iran, or smaller and unable to project regional or global power, like Belarus, all embraced more subtle or, if called for, forceful methods of fixing elections, enabling kleptocracy, controlling the legal system, suppressing independent-minded religious denominations, and, most importantly, gaining mastery over political messaging, whether from traditional media or social media.

The Freedom House methodology is based on a series of indicators that measure political rights and civil liberties, with scores ranging from the best, at 100, to the worst, at 0. In 2010, China registered at 17, a poor score but one which reflected some measure of liberalization that had accompanied its economic and cultural opening. In 2023, China’s score stood at a dismal 9. During the same period, Russia’s score declined from 27 to 13, a decrease that reflected Putin’s decision for a political and cultural break with the liberal West. In 2010, Venezuela had a score of 42, among the worst scores in Latin America. By 2023, Venezuela had plummeted to 15, among the worst in the world.

A new trend worth noting was an across-the-board decline in academic freedom, a phenomenon driven by the rewriting of history texts and the purge of universities, schools, and museums. Today’s autocrats are determined to control both the everyday political news as well as the interpretations of past history, conflicts, and leaders. In Russia, this has meant the glorification of Stalin (and Putin), disparagement of reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev, vilification of independent Ukraine, and the justification of the Soviet Union’s subjugation of Eastern Europe after World War Two. In China, it has meant skipping over the crimes of Mao’s policies, including the Cultural Revolution and the Great Famine of the early Mao period, which combined claimed 50 million victims or more. In both countries, it has meant that the institutions and principles that are embedded in the fundamentals of constitutional government—rule of law, freedom of speech, universal values—are rejected as instruments of imperialism meant to weaken rising powers like China and Russia. 

Autocracy’s surge has led to the return of the kind of human cruelty that was in blessed eclipse since the Cold War’s end. A prime example is political prisoners. The recent multi-country hostage-exchange reminds us that there are several thousand prisoners of conscience in Putin’s gulag. Many have been sentenced to terms that are far lengthier than was the case of the dissidents locked up during the Soviet Union’s Brezhnev era. And the extreme conditions endured by Alexei Navalny and other Russian dissidents sound distressingly similar to conditions described by Varlam Shalamov in his stories about life in Siberian camps under Stalin. Chinese authorities go abroad to kidnap people who criticize the state on social media. And Chinese courts are known to give independent-minded scholars life sentences for challenging the state’s monopoly on power or its suppression of minority cultures.

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The failure of the United States to develop an effective response to the global democracy crisis is not due solely to conservatism’s new isolationist identity, nor to its embrace of autocrats like Putin and Viktor Orbán. After all, global autocracy took some of its most critically important steps during the Obama administration. This period includes Putin’s brazen takeover of Crimea and his launch of a frozen conflict in the Donbas, outrageous violations of sovereignty that were met with a shrug by the American authorities. During the same period in China, Xi Jinping was anointed as Communist Party leader, after which he rejected closer relations with the West, continued to tolerate intellectual property theft, and introduced domestic policies meant to further muzzle critical voices at home and strip minority groups of cultural and religious freedoms. Nor did the administration push back when Orbán announced that he would no longer align his country with the world’s liberal democracies, and in words dripping with contempt for American democratic values declared that henceforth Hungary would chart its own, illiberal path along the lines of non-democratic states like Russia, China, and Turkey.

When I worked for Freedom House around the turn of the century, we would accompany the release of the yearly Freedom in the World report with briefings for lawmakers and their staff. Even then, there were early signs of pushback against democratic government in countries like Russia and Venezuela. Our findings drew interest from both right and left, but it was Republicans who then made up the majority of briefing participants and showed the greatest concern at evidence of backsliding among the new democracies. 

For some Republicans, a part of their political identity was forged in the tide of democracy that defined the end of the last century. The democracy wave reached its pinnacle during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Reagan is best remembered for his anti-communism, encapsulated in his challenge to Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” and make Europe a zone of liberty. But Reagan had also signaled his support for the promotion of democracy as an American priority when in 1983 he launched the National Endowment for Democracy, an organization that has played a crucial role in freedom struggles throughout the world. 

Some Republicans recognized that conservative principles were ingrained in the democratic idea: principles like economic freedom, property rights, the rule of law, equality of opportunity. Conservatives insisted that there is an unbreakable link between human rights and military spending, and that the ability to steal a person’s home, his farm, or his business is fundamental to the autocrat’s playbook. And conservatives understood that the most ambitious autocracies regarded American values and American power as the major impediment to their ascendancy. 

Republicans once invoked the fundamental principles of conservatism to identify the enemies of freedom, explain why they posed so monumental a threat to American security and ideals, and to insist that America take the appropriate measures to prevail in the struggle. The absence today of conservative insight and energy is a major setback at a time when freedom is confronted by political and intellectual crises, here and around the world.

Arch Puddington has worked as an assistant to civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Freedom House. At Freedom House, he authored Breaking Down Democracy: The Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians.

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