Dimensions: 9.18'' x 6.27'' 250 pages AEI Press  (Washington) Publication Date: October 1996 Hardcover ISBN: 0844739928 Price: $ 24.95 Add to Cart   Examination Copies

This book is an interpretive essay and a call to action, trying simultaneously to put the democratic revolution of the past two decades in its proper context and to urge America to embrace that revolution and make it the centerpiece of our international strategy. The author is a resident scholar at AEI. A summary of the book follows

For the past two decades, we have been living through a global democratic revolution of such magnitude as to warrant calling this period the Age of the Second Democratic Revolution. Inspired by the values of the American Revolution, supported and advanced by American military power and a remarkable generation of democratic leaders, the revolution has swept the world. Antidemocratic regimes have fallen in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Even the American Congress has been radically transformed. The cult of the state--belief that government is better suited than individuals or spontaneous, temporary organizations to solve mankind's basic problems--under assault, and in a surprising number of countries the powers of once-oppressive central governments are being reduced. Tyranny has been routed on every continent, and hopeful democrats, many of them survivors of frightful repression, torture, and mass murder, have proclaimed the people's right to choose their own government and live under a system of law rather than arbitrarydiktat. When the Soviet Empire collapsed at the beginning of this decade, it seemed that we might soon see democracy everywhere triumphant and that our children could live in a would governed by our highest ideals.

Yet just at the moment our values had swept the world, our leaders--George Bush, then Bill Clinton--the Democratic Revolution, abandoned our historic mission, and stood by as the forces of tyranny reestablished much of their evil sway. The enemies of democracy--overthrown just a few years ago--becoming stronger in much of the former Soviet Empire, and in some cases the very same men and women who inflicted the Communist terror are now returning to power, wrapped in a newfound mantle of democratic respectability. Having won the cold war, we are in danger of seeing our historic victory overwhelmed by a new generation of tyrants.

This is not new for the United States: twice before in this century we led a successful campaign against the enemies of democracy but tragically bungled the peace. We have only an occasional international vocation, and our history attests to our reluctance to play the Great Game. German U-boats torpedoed us into the First World War; Japanese zeroes bombed us into the Second; and Stalin's voracious appetite roused us from our postwar slumbers in the late 1940s. Left to our own devices, we would have waited longer, possibly beyond the moment of survival. An American sage once remarked that "God protects the blind, the drunk, and the United States of America," but one is entitled to suspect that divine benevolence may have its limits. Unfortunately, we have failed to accept the fact that we are condemned to lead the forces of democracy, and, believing that peace is the normal condition of mankind despite millenia of evidence to the contrary, we disarm after each victory. In a typically American triumph of hope over experience, we convince ourselves that this time the others will leave us alone.

Our First Father told us to avoid foreign entanglements, and we cherish his words. Woe to those who tear us from our domestic pursuits and drag us into the gutter of filth and corruption outside our gates! We do not wish to be a part of that world. We do not know its geography, we do not speak its languages, and we do not study its history or its cultures. We remember that our fathers ran from it, and deep in our viscera the antibodies still multiply to protect us against its poisons. We often forget that we have survived this righteous antipathy because of the blessings of global geography and regional history.

Other peoples might well wish to share our disdain for the "others," but they cannot, for danger lies just across their borders. They have Libyans or Syrians, Hutus or Zulus, Serbs or Mongols; we have Mexicans and Canadians, not threatening presences. Others' dreams are drenched with fears of rape, massacre, torture, and death; we worry that our neighbors' labor costs are too low or that their smokestacks lack proper filters.

Yet, in our schizophrenic way, even as we separate ourselves from the others, we preach to them our own revolutionary values. This, too, is part of our genetic makeup, for even if our leaders remain silent, the radical facts of our existence shake the foundations of the undemocratic and the repressive. That we were frequently unworthy to stand on the pedestal to which we were elevated is beside the point. We drive the revolution because of what we represent: the most successful experiment in human freedom. The boiling blood of Paine and Jefferson is as much a part of our national body and soul as the isolationist injunctions of Washington. We do no wish to be part of the outside world, but we do wish to change it, to democratize it, to make it more like us. We are an ideological nation, and our most successful leaders are ideologues. They are seized by what George Bush called the "vision thing," intuitively understanding the wisdom of Proverbs, "Where there is no vision, the people perish."

The Second Democratic Revolution is much more than the defeat of communism: it is a worldwide mass movement against all forms of tyranny. The end of communism was just one moment--the most important--a global revolution inspired by our values and led by a generation of remarkable leaders from the king of Spain to the British prime minister, the Catholic pope, the leader of a Polish trade union, and the president of the United States. This worldwide revolution began in Spain and Portugal in the mid-1970s, swept Latin America during the Reagan years, and then surged into Eastern and Central Europe, and finally to the Soviet Empire. Today it has come full circle, back to America, as demonstrated by the elections of 1994.

Marx said that the point was not to understand the world but to change it; yet his own misunderstandings led to catastrophic change. Similar--in some cases the very same--now threaten our ability to fulfill the promise of this revolutionary moment. Those who opposed the fight against the Soviet Empire are trying to rewrite the history of the struggle between freedom and tyranny, downplaying, and in some cases even denying, the all-important role of the United States. The fall of the Soviet Empire is attributed primarily, if not solely, to the failures and errors of the leaders of the Soviet Union, to the vision and actions of Mikhail Gorbachev, and to the leaders of the local democratic movements like Lech Walesa, Andrei Sakharov, and Vaclav Havel. In some cases, it is even argued that the Soviet Empire would have fallen earlier, if only Western leaders--Ronald Reagan--not been so aggressive and combative.

Those who argue this way usually offer a narrow, economic explanation for the fall of the Soviet Empire and the end of communism: the economic system failed, and the empire collapsed accordingly. Yet this is not an explanation at all, for the Soviet system was a failure from the beginning. It did not suddenly come to grief in the 1980s; it was a failure always. Russia was the world's greatest grain exporter at the beginning of the twentieth century; it was the world's greatest grain importer by century's end. This decline was not accomplished overnight in the 1980s; the misery of the Russian people was theleitmotif of the Communist era. If economic conditions caused the fall of the Soviet Empire, it should have fallen much earlier.

In fact, the fallen tyrannies during the Democratic Revolution do not seem to have been the victims of economic crisis: Pinochet was voted out of office in Chile during an economic boom; the Spanish transition to democracy was achieved during a relatively tranquil economic phase; Corazon Aquino's battle cry was directed against corruption in Manila, not misery; and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia was not kicked off by bread riots. The failed uprising against Chinese communism was a protest against political oppression, not economic misery. On the other side of the coin, the much-vaunted correlation between wealth and democracy is considerably overstated. Throughout the Middle East, the richest oil-producing countries are tyrannical, despite the growth of a substantial and quite wealthy middle class, while Israel, one of the poorest, is an effervescent democracy. The U.S. Democratic Party was decimated in the 1994 elections, even though the economy was very strong, contrary to the conventional wisdom that "Americans vote their pocketbooks." The Democratic Revolution, like most others, was the result of political failure at the top and of superior democratic leadership from below.

But of all the myths that cloud our understanding, and therefore paralyze our will and action, the most pernicious is that only the Left has a legitimate claim to the "revolutionary" tradition. According to this bit of propaganda, anything on the Right is counterrevolutionary (and therefore bad, because contrary to the direction of history). This myth has a distinguished ancestry, dating from the French Revolution, and in our times assiduously promulgated by the Soviets and their friends in the Western intelligentsia. It retains astonishing strength even today. The popularity of that myth makes it impossible to understand the revolution of our time, for we have seen Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and a handful of others lead a worldwide revolution directed in large part against the Communist Left.

Even Reagan's appointed heirs eagerly denied that his policies were important or should be continued. Bush and James Baker seem not to have understood that the Soviet Empire fell because its failures were decisively exploited by the West (led by the United States), because its values and efforts to expand were challenged--militarily, and economically--because the Soviet leaders, for the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution, lsot confidence in themselves and in the destiny of communism. The empire fell when Gorbachev and his colleagues had a failure of nerve, while Reagan, Thatcher, John Paul II, and other Western leaders reinvigorated the resolve of the West.

That first Bush and then Clinton conditioned so much of their foreign policy on simply helping the man in the Kremlin (whether Gorbachev or Yeltsin) shows an unfortunate confusion about the actual state of world affairs, a confusion that inevitably produced an incoherent (and, in the case of Clinton, a counterrevolutionary) policy.

Our obligations did not end when the Soviets were beaten; we were obliged to help the newly freed nations face the basic questions: how to build democracy? How to build a free market economy? These are enormously difficult tasks, not least because the damage done by communism was much more profound than had been generally understood. It is not merely the oppression and the day-to-day misery but the violent separation of those peoples from the knowledge, the culture, and the skills of the civilized world, in addition to the violence done to the human spirit by decades of institutionalized terror, that will constitute the ongoing legacy of the Bolshevik tyranny. The citizens of the old empire must learn the rules of a free society and the habits of mind of free peoples. The problem is so grave that although most of the world recognizes that democratic capitalism is the best available system, many societies are overwhelmed by the task, thereby opening the door for a reentry of the old tyrants.

We Americans have an enormous stake in seeing that the new democracies succeed. If they fail, the blow to the future of democracy— therefore to our long-term national security--will be monumental. Years hence, we will see a generation of embittered democrats come to power, convinced that the United States is not only an unreliable ally but a hypocrite as well. They will accuse us of having used Afghanis and Angolans, Kurds and Shiites, Grenadians and Nicaraguans, Poles, Czechs, and others as foot soldiers and cannon fodder in the war against tyranny, only to turn our backs on them once our immediate objectives were achieved. If they succeed with our help, future generations will envy us and sing our praises.

We must pledge to the peoples of the world, friend and foe alike, that we will do our best to complete the global Democratic Revolution that began more than twenty years ago with the fall of the Latin European dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, continued with the dramatic transformation of Latin America, destroyed the Soviet Empire, gave hope to the peoples of Africa, inspired the creation of new democracies in Asia, and unleashed the creative rage of the American electorate in 1994.

Few have seen the intimate connection between a successful American foreign policy and the battle for individual freedom within the United States, but the one cannot be achieved without the other. Other countries can deal separately with foreign and domestic policies, but for us there can be no dividing line, because we stand for an idea: the sovereignty of a free people defined by a commitment to the rights and obligations embodied in the written law, rather than by a shared ancestry. We need greater freedom so that the creative energies of the American people can continue to stimulate and enrich mankind and continue the assault against the enemies of democracy, at home and abroad.

We would do well to recall Thomas Paine's words at the time of the First Democratic Revolution: "Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious issue; by cowardice and submission, the sad choice of a variety of evils."