With poll results beginning to roll in and states changing from the dull background of gray to red or blue on election maps, it is impossible to not feel the potent excitement of election night.
As Americans exercise their rights and vote and media gleefully await the news as information trickles out from around the country, it is not just U.S. citizens watching the spectacle, but the world.
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That is partly for the darker reasons of our time: the partisanship and violence that has marred the run-up to Tuesday’s election. But it is also because of the lure of the promise of democracy at its most fundamental: people freely choosing their own leaders.
A few decades ago, America was the single dominant world power in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2018, the world is very different, with rising threats from Russia and China offering an alternative to liberalism, free trade, and democracy.
In Europe, leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban look to the authoritarian model offered by Russian President Vladimir Putin. In Asia, the lure of the ill-defined “China Model” of state control and state-led development is increasingly attractive as Beijing’s cash purchases political influence.
The threat posed by Russia and China to the U.S. is not just the physical threat of Russian interference in elections and armed rebels in Ukraine or Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative that is quietly taking over key infrastructure and winning power through debt, but also the competition of an alternative to free society — an alternative that is all the more attractive if democracy, especially America’s brand of stars and stripes, is viewed as increasingly problematic and fragile.
On the world stage, that is truly what is at stake in the U.S. elections: proving that viability of a vibrant, contested multicultural democracy as an alternative to the one-party rule increasingly pitched as an attractive alternative by Beijing and Moscow.
So far, despite contentious campaigns and the less than graceful conduct of some candidates, the American election is again a success. That itself, regardless of who wins, is a reason to celebrate democracy.
