Policymakers throughout the Unites States must rally to reverse a slide away from responsible freedom that for 15 years has plagued this nation and most of the world.
In its annual “Freedom of the World” report, the respected nonprofit group Freedom House this week said that 2020 continued a worldwide and U.S. trend whereby levels of liberty have declined each year during that time. Abuses by China particularly harmed global freedom, which also was harmed by the retrenchment of populous India from “free” to “partly free” status. And the U.S., ominously, dropped from an overall score of 86 (out of 100) to 83. In 2010, the U.S. score was 94.
Let’s start at home. The continued U.S. decline was driven, among other factors, by worsening levels of governmental transparency, by former President Donald Trump’s “abrupt dismissal” of numerous inspectors general who were documenting malfeasance, and by a “dramatic increase in arrests of and physical assaults on journalists across the country.” Oddly, Freedom House did not reduce the sub-scores for the U.S. on either religious liberty or academic freedom, despite reporting numerous warning signs involving politicization and a “hostile environment” against some viewpoints and speakers. In contrast, the organization described no trends in the other direction, toward greater liberty.
Without the U.S. leading in the right direction, the rest of the world continues to deteriorate.
“In 2020, democracy’s defenders sustained heavy new losses in their struggle against authoritarian foes, shifting the international balance in favor of tyranny,” says the report. “The countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began in 2006. The long democratic recession is deepening.”
And: “Nearly 75 percent of the world’s population lived in a country that faced deterioration last year.” And: “The proportion of Not Free countries is now the highest it has been in the past 15 years.”
Meanwhile, as Republican U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska and others have been warning, the largest threat to world freedom is probably Communist China.
“The malign influence of the regime in China, the world’s most populous dictatorship, was especially profound in 2020,” reported Freedom House. “Beijing ramped up its global disinformation and censorship campaign to counter the fallout from its cover-up of the initial coronavirus outbreak, which severely hampered a rapid global response in the pandemic’s early days. Its efforts also featured increased meddling in the domestic political discourse of foreign democracies, transnational extensions of rights abuses common in mainland China, and the demolition of Hong Kong’s liberties and legal autonomy.”
My colleague Tom Rogan has repeatedly and rightly specified ways the U.S. and free-world allies can rein in Chinese abuses. Yet as China, along with Russia and other authoritarian regimes, continue to make the world less safe and free, we should remember the lessons taught by former President Ronald Reagan, that successful diplomacy entails both power and persuasion. Firm, realistic insistence on the importance of freedom and human rights serves interests not just propagandistic and aspirational but eminently practical.
It’s harder to persuade when one’s own failures muddle the message.
U.S. leadership is needed both domestically, in improving transparency and governmental integrity while better protecting free expression, and internationally. As worldwide freedom contracts, U.S. interests, and the safety of travel and commerce for U.S. citizens, suffer as well.
“The United States will need to work vigorously to strengthen its institutional safeguards,” wrote Freedom House, “restore its civic norms, and uphold the promise of its core principles for all segments of society if it is to protect its venerable democracy and regain global credibility.”
