Trump is speeding the global erosion of democracy, watchdog says
By Ishaan Tharoor January 18
On the same day President Trump was supposed to unveil “awards” for the “fake news” media, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) briefly held the nation's attention with a speech from the Senate floor. Flake, an outspoken critic of Trump on the right, lambasted the president's routine attacks on the media, lamented his propagation of falsehoods and stressed the importance of the relationship between “truth” and democracy.
"2017 was a year which saw the truth — objective, empirical, evidence-based truth — more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government,” said Flake, who decided not to run for reelection in November. “It was a year which saw the White House enshrine 'alternative facts' into the American lexicon, as justification for what used to be known simply as good old-fashioned falsehoods.”
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That was also the conclusion reached this week by Freedom House, a Washington-based nonpartisan watchdog, in its annual report on the state of global democracy. The organization uses its own metrics to measure the health of a nation's democracy, ranking countries around the world as “free,” “partly free” and “not free.” In 2017, according to the executive summary written by Michael Abramowitz, Freedom House's president, “political rights and civil liberties around the world deteriorated to their lowest point in more than a decade.”
The organization points to 12 consecutive years of democratic decline, sped by nations that once seemed “promising success stories” — such as Turkey and Hungary — "sliding into authoritarian rule." But this year, the report noted, the global plight of democracy has been made all the more dire by the Trump administration's rhetoric and posturing. “Democracy is under assault and in retreat around the globe, a crisis that has intensified as America's democratic standards erode at an accelerating pace,” a summary of the report stated. Freedom House bemoaned Trump's “retreat” from America's supposed traditional role as a champion of democratic principles around the world. As we've noted in this space before, Trump has largely replaced talk of universal values and rights with appeals to a narrower cultural or civilizational identity, exposing divisive fault lines within Western societies. All the while, as Abramowitz wrote, “the American leader expressed feelings of admiration and even personal friendship for some of the world’s most loathsome strongmen and dictators.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/18/trump-is-speeding-the-global-erosion-of-democracy-watchdog-says/?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.b36d8b61448a
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