Democracy is Fucking Awesome. 

1989: When Democracy Felt Inevitable 

I was eleven years old when demonstrators occupied Tiananmen Square. 

That week, my parents made an exception to the no-TV-during-dinner rule to watch the news. And we huddled around the little screen without even clearing the dishes. 

More than thirty years later, I vividly remember the image of a man, standing alone, in the middle of a broad avenue. The street was empty. Or it seemed that way until the camera panned out to show a column of tanks, rumbling down the asphalt … right toward him. The man was turned away from the camera, arms by his sides, with some kind of bag or satchel in his hand. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled as he repositioned himself right under the cannon of the lead tank … and that tank ground to a stop. 

Having grown up in United States, freedom had always been something that had happened in the past, when men in powdered wigs and tri-corner hats had played “Yankee Doodle” and flouted the red coats. But that evening, the fight for liberty didn’t look like an oil painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. It looked grainy and urgent. What if that was my country? What if that was me? Would I have the courage to stand in front of the tank?

That moment … watching one man stand in defiance against the enormous machine of the state … is the first time I ever thought about standing up for liberty in the present tense.

That was June of 1989. It was an historic year. Even as a kid, I could feel it. The same week that the Tank Man made the world stand still, Communism collapsed in Poland. Then, the Iron Curtain came down in Hungary. And by November, only five months later, the jubilant people of East Germany took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall and danced and wept with their reunited families on the rubble. I knew nothing about Communist dictators or the East German surveillance state, but I didn’t need to to understand the joy on those peoples’ faces. 

Even as an eleven-year-old growing up in a tidy Connecticut suburb, I could feel their hope. That year, democracy felt like an unstoppable rising tide. Strongmen and their cronies might keep people down for a while, but it couldn’t last. Eventually, people would rise up. Eventually, justice would win. It had to. Democracy was inevitable. 

Then I grew up. 

Autocracy: Democracy is a Failed Experiment 

It turned out that democracy was anything but inevitable. It was hard to secure and easy to lose. 

This became especially clear in the spring of 2010 when another wave of history-making uprisings spread across the Arab world. I was an overworked and underslept new teacher with little bandwidth for world events. I got most of my news on my harried commutes to school. On the radio, protesters told reporters how they wanted to go to school and speak their minds, who wanted to no longer be afraid of the police. Even without images, I could still feel the same thrill of hope that I felt in 1989. Could you imagine what a world it would be if democracies bloomed across the deserts from Gibraltar to Damascus! Could you imagine? 

But imagination was all it was. As spring turned to summer, hope dried up. The dreams of one country after another were smothered in the crib. Religious extremists grabbed power in Egypt. Bashar al-Assad gassed and starved his people. Libyan warlords trampled innocent bystanders as they squabbled over the scraps of the Qadafi regime. 

On the radio, voices of hope became voices of despair. People plead with the world for help … to give their country a chance to get on its feet before another dictator took the place of the last one. Pundits would come on to explain how it had all gone so terribly wrong, and I would shout into my empty car that, “Somebody’s got to do something!” 

Whatever help came was too little, too late. Of the 17 countries that rose up, only Tunisia escaped from sinking back into dictatorship or civil war. 

In my adult life, anti-democratic regimes have spread like a weed: Putin in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, Orban in Hungary, Lukashenko in Belarus, Maduro in Venezuela, Kagame in Rwanda. The Chinese Communist party has tightened its stranglehold on dissent with Orwellian surveillance. Iran’s so-called “Islamic Republic” tortures and disappears women who dare to uncover their heads. Vladimir Putin’s misinformation minions scatter the seeds of mistrust throughout the world. 

In the words of Anne Applebaum, a journalist who has extensively covered the rise of these regimes, they have little in common except, “a determination to undermine both the language and the reality of liberal democracy.” 

Wait! “Undermine the language of liberal democracy?” Were the autocrats actually trying to make an argument against democracy? I mean, I always knew that authoritarians existed. They opposed democracy because it stood in their way. But were they really trying to make a reasoned case against it? Did they really think that they could convince people that freedom and justice were bad ideas? 

But they were! “Forget your democracies,” they said, “Look at them. They are weak. They are unstable. They are inefficient. They’re sliding down slippery slopes of moral decline. 

“Look at your partisan gridlock. Look at your bickering politicians. Instead of greatness, you get watered-down compromise, if you get anything at all. If you want someone to get things done, you can’t do it by committee. You need someone strong, someone who can take control.”  

Cynical and manipulative as it might be, they were actually trying to get the world to believe that democracy is corrupt, that it was a failed experiment. And to my utter bafflement, I have watched people actually buy it, even here in America. It leaves me speechless. Incredulous. 

Democracy is Fucking Awesome

But democracy is NOT a failed experiment. Democracy is fucking awesome. Putin and Xi Xingping are wrong. Exchanging liberty and justice for security or purity or to “save your country” is a fool’s bargain. 

How is it that this case even needs to be made. Freedom is like sunsets and a loving family and indoor plumbing … something that never got old … something that everyone could agree is wonderful and sacred. I thought we held these truths to be self-evident. 

But maybe that is actually the problem. 

For me, growing up in a democracy was like living with a mouthful of non-toothaches. You know a non-toothache? When your mouth is so free of pain that you don’t notice your teeth? The freedoms I had were that way, I didn’t ever really know they existed because I’d never felt the pain of not having them. 

But as I learned about the world, I began to understand just how full it was of people who didn’t get democracy for free: fifteen-year-old girls shot in the face for claiming their right to go to school, political prisoners beaten to death only to have their official cause of death listed as “fell in the shower,” journalists murdered and dismembered in their own embassy because they told stories that a ruler found embarrassing, innocent men murdered for the color of their skin by mobs who then posed next to his hanging corpse for a picture postcard.   

Do you know how the Arab Spring started? Do you remember? 

Mohamed Bouazizi grew worked most his young life on his uncle’s farm, a farm that was repossessed by the bank when it became insolvent. With no other livelihood, Mohamed moved to the city where, in an attempt to support his family, he would buy food on credit to resell on the street. Such a life would be hard enough. But Mohamed didn’t just have to contend with creditors. He had to contend with the police. 

These police regularly shook vendors down for bribes, demanding to see vending licenses that no law required them to have. If you didn’t pay up, they took your wares. This is what happened to Mohamed. After borrowing about $200 to buy produce to sell at the market, the police came by to demand their cut. When he refused, they toppled his cart, took his scales, and beat him. 

Then they left him there. What was Mohamed to do? He had nothing left. Nothing! But $200 of debt and a hungry family. He complained to the local officials, but they blew him off. Can you imagine the desperation he must have felt, then, to walk out into traffic in front of the governor’s office, douse himself in gasoline, and set himself ablaze with a match. 

That is what happens when police have power over people who do not, in turn, have power over the police. 

Right now, there are people all over the world who live in fear of their governments. People who have to watch what they say, who they say it to, and where they say it. That could have been me. It could have been you. In the cosmic lottery of human souls, what were my chances of being born in Venezuela, in Afghanistan, in North Korea. But I wasn’t. 

I walked out of my house today without being spied on. No militia checked my papers or evaluated whether my head was appropriately covered. I went to work at a job that I could quit whenever I wanted, but that I won’t because it enables me to do work that I love. I went to a library where I could read any book I wanted. I listened to a news program that I trust, not censored by the government but still held to high principles of journalism by its fact-checking competitors. Right now, on this podcast, I can tell a story that is critical of very powerful people. And you can listen to it without it being intercepted by some government censor. And today, at least, I do so without fear that I will be imprisoned, assassinated, or tortured. 

The only reason that I feel secure in these rights is that my ancestors, brave men and women of all colors and faiths, risked demanding them, risked wresting them from the hands of power … over and over again.   

That is not a failed experiment. That is a smashing success. The autocrats may be right about how democracies are inefficient and prone to gridlock. They are, by definition, full of debate. But that’s not a weakness. That is democracy’s greatest wonder. We argue instead of going to arms. We debate instead of bombing each other’s children. 

Freedom may be the greatest blessing of democracy. But it is not the only one. In democracies, famine is virtually unknown. It is in autocracies where people starve. In the mid-twentieth century, Communist dictators decided, under the influence of the ideologue, Trofim Lysenko, that genetics and evolution smacked too much of bourgeois competition and therefore were anti-communists. Scientists who wouldn’t back Lysenko’s supposed Marxist science of “vernalization” (and there were thousands of them) were fired, outcast, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. And when this bogus theory was enforced on the collective farms of the Soviets, and later in Mao’s Great Leap Forward, tens of millions of people died. Tens of millions more were stunted and scarred by starvation. More death and misery than all the nuclear and chemical weapons ever unleashed on the world.

Shit like that doesn’t last in democracy. We throw those bastards out. People who live in democracies are less likely to starve and more likely to know peace and stability. They have more education, more opportunities to find fulfilling work, more innovation. And, in study after study after study, they are happier. 

Conclusion 

Right now, if you are living in the United States, you might be thinking, “Jesus, Ben! Appreciation isn’t what we need right now. The goddamned house is on fire. This is an emergency. We’ve got to DO something.” And you are right. In the next few episodes, I will talk about hope and about help. I know this is an emergency. 

It’s okay to feel afraid and angry. Anger helps us face those who hurt us. Fear helps keep us safe. But anger and fear are not enough. There is a difference between protecting something because you are afraid to lose it and protecting something because you love it. Giving thanks for democracy is not a substitute for action; it is a practical and strategic action. 

It is strategic because fear is paralyzing and anger burns itself out. Anger and fear weren’t enough to win women the right to vote or reintegrate schools or bring down the Berlin Wall. Those required love. Love of freedom and justice sustains action long after fear and anger have been reduced to despair. Think about it. What parent wouldn’t go to the ends of the earth to free their children. And that is exactly who we are fighting for. 

Remembering the sweetness of our freedoms enlists and inspires us. Instead of making enemies, love builds coalitions. Loving our freedoms will give us wisdom and courage. And not just us. When other people hear us proclaim our love, it will give them strength and hope and the courage to take action. It will remind them that they are not alone. 

So what are we waiting for. Let’s get out there. Let’s point out every non-toothache we can to everyone who will listen. Let’s let every attack on our neighbors and on the balance of power remind us of how good those neighbors are and how wise those checks and balances. Let’s feed each other’s conviction … and our courage … with gratitude. Because there are millions of us. 

Now is the time to notice! Our democracies are one of the greatest things that humans have ever made. They are worth believing in. If you are lucky enough to live in one, look around. Rejoice in your libraries and schools and the juries of your peers. Rejoice in the diversity of faiths and colors and traditions.

Anyone can help with this. It’s not hard. Here’s what you do: Think about the freedoms and institutions that make you proud and happy. Then tell someone how wonderful they are. Tell a friend. Write a letter to the editor. Post it on your socials. Write a song. Let’s start a chorus of gratitude for freedom a million voices strong. And let’s keep singing as we get down to business. 

I don’t know, if the moment ever comes, whether I will have the courage to stand down the tanks, but if I do, it will because I love my kids and I love my country. I just hope that if I ever get there, I won’t have to do it alone. 

Please, sing with me.