Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Within weeks of their publication in July 1776, those words spread around the world. In August, a London newspaper reprinted the Declaration of Independence in full. Edinburgh followed. Soon after that, it appeared in Madrid, Leiden, Vienna, and Copenhagen.
Before long, others drew on the text in more substantial ways. Thomas Jefferson himself helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, issued by French revolutionaries in 1789. The Haitian Declaration of Independence, of 1804, drew on both the American and French precedents, calling for the construction of an “empire of liberty in the country which has given us birth.” In subsequent decades, declarations of independence were issued by Greece, Liberia (the author had been born in Virginia), and a host of new Latin American nations. In 1918, Thomáš Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, signed a Declaration of Common Aims of the Independent Mid-European Nations at Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, using the Founders’ inkwell.
On that occasion, a replica of the Liberty Bell was rung, not because any American president or official had asked for it to ring but because Masaryk had been inspired by the story of the American founding. He evoked the Declaration not because of any pressure applied by U.S. foreign policy, but because of Jefferson’s words and what they signify. Since 1776, Americans have promoted democracy just by existing. Human rights and the rule of law are in our founding documents. The dream of separation from a colonial empire is built into them too. Our aspirations have always inspired others, even when we did not live up to them ourselves.
In the 20th century, we moved from simply modeling democratic ideals to spreading or promoting them as a matter of policy. We did so in part because the language of democracy is in our DNA, and when we are confronted by autocrats and despots, we use it. Woodrow Wilson, when arguing for entry into the First World War, said America should advocate the “principles of peace and justice” in opposition to “selfish and autocratic power.” In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to America as an “arsenal of democracy” determined to aid British allies against the Nazis: “No dictator, no combination of dictators, will weaken that determination.”
During the Cold War, we connected words such as freedom and rights not just to our military strategy but to our national identity, to our culture. We were advocates of free markets, a free press, abstract expressionism, and jazz, and we exported those things too. Plenty of people wanted them. Willis Conover, the host of Voice of America’s nightly jazz broadcast in the 1960s and ’70s, had an audience of 30 million people, mostly in Russia and Eastern Europe. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950, pulled together anti-Communist intellectuals from all over Europe into a single movement.
Many people found our language hypocritical, and they were right: Americans were perfectly capable of backing dictatorships while talking about democracy. The contradiction between the ideals we said we fought for abroad and their failure at home bothered foreigners as well as Americans. In 1954, the Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that argued in favor of desegregation because, among other reasons, racist laws prompted “doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.”
Democratic faith. Because it was at the center of our foreign policy, we aspired to it, even if we didn’t live up to it. Others did too. Over time, the number of these democratic aspirants increased. After the Second World War, the dream of American freedom and prosperity strengthened what were initially shaky democracies in Western Europe and Asia, including recently defeated West Germany and Japan. Their political and economic success drew others into the fold. Greece and Spain joined the club of democracies in the ’70s; South Korea and Taiwan in the ’80s; Central Europe in the ’90s. Asked in 1989, the year they voted out Communism, what kind of country they wanted to be, most Poles would have said, “We want to be normal.” And by “normal,” they meant a European democracy, a capitalist state with a welfare system, a close ally of the United States.
We Americans were inspired by our own language too. We always think about America’s postwar role in Europe as an act of great generosity, the defense of allies from Soviet aggression. But by putting democracy at the center of our international and national identity, we also helped strengthen our own political system. If nothing else, all Americans, even those on different sides of our deepest cultural divides, had a common cause: Right-wing or left-wing, Christian or atheist, we could all be in favor of freedom.
Considering how deeply we were divided about so many other things, it’s extraordinary how bipartisan our foreign policy was for so long, and how many energetically bipartisan institutions we built to promote it. Radio Free Europe and Voice of America—and later Radio Free Asia and a clutch of other foreign-language broadcasters—always enjoyed support from Democrats and Republicans, as well as every president from Harry Truman onward. From the time of its founding in 1983, so did the National Endowment for Democracy, which was inspired by Ronald Reagan’s call for new institutions to “foster the infrastructure of democracy—the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities—which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.” The National Endowment, run by a bipartisan board, makes small grants to groups that monitor elections, promotes free speech, and fights kleptocracy and authoritarian propaganda.
The dramatic shift we have undergone in just a few months—away from a foreign policy based on democratic faith and toward the promotion of a more cynical, more authoritarian, view of the world—has hit these institutions very hard. The fact that the Trump administration has tried to shut down all of America’s foreign broadcasters is telling. The president appointed Kari Lake, who lost races for both the U.S. Senate and Arizona governor, to eviscerate Voice of America, and she did so with enthusiasm, even ostentatiously revoking the visas of VOA employees, reporters, and translators, in some cases giving them 30 days to leave the country after many years of work on behalf of Americans. Though the National Endowment for Democracy has rallied its many supporters in Congress, on both sides of the aisle, it remains the target of a small group of conspiracy theorists who have influence in this administration because they have large followings on X or have appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast. It’s strange to think of Reagan as a naive idealist, but that’s what he looks like now, for having founded an institution that promotes fair elections and the rule of law.
[Anne Applebaum: America surrenders in the global information wars]
The shift against these historically bipartisan institutions, against the belief that Americans should defend and promote democracy around the world, and against the democratic faith itself is part of something broader. We have a president who regularly attacks judges and journalists, who bullies CEOs into handing over stock in their companies and university presidents into paying meritless fines, who sends military forces into American cities, who is building a new form of interior police, and who raucously encourages the deepening divide between red and blue America. Abroad, Donald Trump appears much happier with dictators than with democratic allies. His random, punitive tariffs sent Lesotho, a small African country, into economic decline. His demands to occupy Greenland created a political crisis in Denmark, a longtime U.S. ally.
His vice president’s single notable speech since taking office, made in a room full of people expecting a serious discussion of security, berated Europeans with a list of dishonest or exaggerated attacks on them for alleged assaults on free speech. Trump’s own attacks on “radical-left judges” and “fake-news media” now travel around the world much faster than “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” did. Vladimir Putin has banned media that spread “fake news”—that is, accurate information—about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The autocratic ex-president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, called Rappler, a famous investigative-reporting site, a “fake-news outlet” to discredit its work. In places as varied as Egypt and Myanmar, the fake charge of “fake news” has been used to destroy legitimate journalists.
All of these changes are part of a larger shift, a revolutionary transformation in the way Americans present themselves to the world, and the way they are therefore perceived by others. The most ubiquitous form of American culture nowadays is not jazz programming going out on shortwave radio across Eurasia, but the social-media platforms that pump conspiracy theories, extremism, advertising, pornography, and spam into every corner of the globe. After Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union for political dissent, the U.S. government facilitated his arrival in America. Now we have different heroes: The Trump administration went out of its way to rescue and welcome the Tate brothers, who had been arrested and briefly held in Romania, charged with rape in Great Britain. (The Tates deny the charges.) Instead of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, we now have the Conservative Political Action Conference, a kind of movable rent-a-troll event. Identikit nationalists anywhere—Hungary, Poland, Britain, Mexico, Brazil—can pay the CPAC team to come to their country and produce a MAGA show. Steve Bannon or Kristi Noem will show up, deliver a rowdy speech alongside the local talent, and help them make headlines. A CPAC conference held near Rzeszów a few days before the second round of the Polish presidential election featured Noem and was sponsored by a Polish cryptocurrency company that wants a U.S. license.
American culture is no longer synonymous with the aspiration to freedom, but with transactionalism and secrecy: the algorithms that mysteriously determine what you see, the money collected by anonymous billionaires, the deals that the American president is making with world leaders that benefit himself and maybe others whose names we don’t know. America was always associated with capitalism, business, and markets, but nowadays there’s no pretense that anyone else will be invited to share the wealth. USAID is gone; American humanitarian aid is depleted; America’s international medical infrastructure was dismantled so quickly that people died in the process. The image of the ugly American always competed with the image of the generous American. Now that the latter has disappeared, the only Americans anyone can see are the ones trying to rip you off.
The impact of this change around the world will be profound, far-reaching, and long-lasting. The very existence of American democracy inspired people in every corner of the planet, and the decline of American democracy will have the same effect. Perhaps the mere existence of Trump’s America will boost new autocratic parties that will carry out assaults on their own democratic political systems, as Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters have already done in Brazil. Perhaps the Chinese and Russian propagandists who replace Voice of America and Radio Free Europe will simply win global ideological arguments and undermine American economic influence and trade.
More unpredictable is the impact of the change on Americans. If we are no longer a country that aims to make the world better, but rather a country whose foreign policy is designed to build the wealth of the president or promote the ruling party’s foreign friends, then we have fewer reasons to work together at home. If we promote cynicism abroad, we will become more cynical at home. Perhaps expecting Americans to live up to the extraordinary ideals that they proclaimed in the 18th century was always unreasonable, but that language nevertheless shaped the way we thought about ourselves. Now we live in a world where America is led by people who have abandoned those ideals altogether. That will change all of us, in ways we might not yet be able to see.
This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark.”
