Kruse Reviews: Saving our democracy

— Book review by Jens Kruse —

Larry Diamond opens his book Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition and American Complacency (New York: Penguin Press, 2019) with the scene when, two days before the November 2016 election, he and 20 of his students attend a theatrical adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. He watches the rise of Lewis’ populist demagogue Buzz Windrip to the presidency and then to dictatorship with anxiety, but assures himself that “it can’t happen here.”

But then Donald Trump is elected and of that moment Diamond writes: “It was not simply the shock of Donald Trump’s election that moved me to write this book. It was the anguished knowledge of what his presidency would mean for democracy around the world” (3).

Diamond, a senior scholar at the Hoover Institution and Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, is a student of the rise and fall of democracy around the world.

After his “Introduction” (“The Crisis”) and before his “Conclusion” (“A New Birth of Freedom”), the arc of his book stretches from “Why Democracies Succeed and Fail” to “Reviving American Democracy.” In between, Diamond devotes the first half of the body of his book to the threats and challenges, both internal and external, to democracies around the world and to our democracy right here. In the second half he develops the ways in which democracies, including our own, can and must fight back against those threats and challenges.

His account is grounded in not only decades of study, but also personal experience and first-hand observation in countries around the globe. It is well written, and if you follow his narrative you will learn a lot about what makes democracies strong, what makes them weak, how they can be hollowed out, and what needs to be done to resist their transformation into
autocracies and dictatorships.

This review cannot be a substitute to the urgent task of reading this timely and important book, but I will give you a series of quotes that hopefully will provide a flavor of the importance of Diamond’s book:

• “When a democracy dies, it is rarely a case of suicide; such deaths often carry a strong whiff of homicide, in which those who want to kill democracy from the inside are aided and abetted by foes on the outside.” (17)
• “So all these norms are crucial to democracy: legitimacy, tolerance, and trust; moderation, flexibility, and compromise; civility, mutual respect, and restraint.” (28)
• “The ultimate defense of liberal democracy lies not in the constitution but in the culture — in free, informed, and principled citizens who will not tolerate the abuse of their democracy or their rights.” (39)
• “To make American democracy great again, we must forthrightly confront – across party and ideological lines – the assaults on truth, science, the news media, the judicial system, immigrants, minorities, the civil service, and our democratic allies that President Donald Trump has deliberately unleashed. Containing his illiberal actions and authoritarian inclinations is now the paramount challenge for our democratic system.” (253)
• “… the greatest blight on American democracy is our profound complacency.” (303)
• “But it is up to us. This is an existential moment for American democracy. We could rescue it from the howling gales of bigotry, fear, nativism, prejudice and misinformation. But we could also lose it. That is the central warning of this book: we could lose our democracy – or see it so degraded by abuse of power, deliberate divisiveness, and the steady erosion of our civil liberties that it fails to protect and inspire, at home and abroad. We would like to think that American democracy is immortal and impervious. We would like to think that it can’t happen here. But it can.” (305)

Diamond closes his book with these sentences: “This is the duty of democratic citizenship: to fight for the values of our republic as if our own freedom is at stake. It is.” (307).