It was not a great day for the image of American democracy. Leaders from New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern to India’s Narendra Modi issued statements decrying the storming of the Capitol as an attack on democracy itself. French President Emmanuel Macron gave an impassioned speech noting how France and the United States have historically come to each other’s aid to fight threats to democracy. Not surprisingly, governments that are usually on the receiving end of human rights criticism from the U.S., such as Turkey and Russia, took the opportunity for some trolling.
Despite the invasion, Congress did finish certifying the Electoral College count, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are expected to be sworn in later this month. But the events of this week underscore the difficulties facing the incoming Biden administration, which has vowed to make support for global democracy a centerpiece of its foreign policy. Even before this week’s quasi-coup attempt, global observers were generally in agreement that, at the very least, U.S. democratic institutions have eroded in recentyears, particularly when it comes to voting rights, mass incarceration, the treatment of immigrants, and economic inequality. It was recently announced that the United States had fallen below the “democracy threshold” on the Polity index, a measure of a country’s level of democracy that’s widely cited by political scientists, and is now considered an “anocracy,” a country with both democratic and autocratic features.
Will any country still take the U.S. seriously when it talks about democracy and the rule of law? Continue reading.