Can Democracy Survive in '25?

When extremists use democratic means toward advancing their illiberal ends, democracy is at a severe disadvantage, making us all less safe and less free. How can we save democracy?

V-Dem (2024) – processed by Our World in Data

As we prepare for the somber anniversary of January 6, 2021 on Monday, it is clear that 2025 is going to be a pivotal year for democracy, especially given that, on Jan. 6 of this year, Congress will officially certify the election of the man who has vowed to “shake some of democracy’s pillars.”

On the one hand, this January 6, when compared to the one four years ago, will restore a sense of normalcy to the no-longer-so routine transition of power; but on the other, we’ll be transitioning to a leader who routinely shuns democratic norms. Monday will be living proof that when extremists use democratic means toward advancing illiberal ends, democracy is at a severe disadvantage. In providing the roadmap to this transition, has democracy become a willing accomplice to its own demise?

• See: Meet the New Autocrats Who Dismantle Democracies from Within (Scientific American)

• See also: Autocrats’ Favorite Word? Democracy (Freedom House). Authoritarian leaders are using the language of democracy in an attempt to conceal the abusive systems through which they cling to power.

As we ponder that question, wondering, worrying and preparing to fight like hell (metaphorically) for the future of our country, it behooves is to spend some time exploring the state of democracy around the world. We’ll take a look here and abroad, noting that as one wannabe dictator is coming to power in the US next week, a 63-year father-son dictatorship of unparalleled brutality summarily ended in Syria last month. And in Germany, the Nazis are rising again.

As we look ahead to navigating uncharted waters, success or failure depends on the responses to these questions:

• Can democracy continue to keep us safe?

• Can it keep us free?

• Can it keep itself viable?

• What lessons can we learn from recent history?

• What can we do to sustain this priceless resource?

• And what support can religion give to this effort?

As we see from this front page of Friday’s Toronto Sun, incidents such as this past week’s terror attack in New Orleans have roots in the extremist views of groups that are becoming more and more mainstream in countries that espouse democratic ideals and free elections. And because of that Achilles’ heel, we are less safe and less free.

I’ve spent the past several weeks asking the question that has confounded half the country: How could 49.9 percent of American voters so casually, so indifferently, risk grave damage to our system of government, when Donald Trump and his allies were making their authoritarian intentions quite clear?

I’ve now concluded that this is the wrong question. It’s not about the choices made by voters here so much as what is happening to democracy all over the world. As we begin 2025, freedom is on shaky ground everywhere, too big to fail but too impaired to sustain us without lots of help. Free elections are so fragile now - not just here, but everywhere - that when things happen to work out to stem the tide of illiberalism, with a truly free voting process and pro-democracy result, it almost seems like a fortunate accident.

The Varieties in Democracy Project (V-Dem) has been publishing a “Democracy Index” every year since 2006, rating from 0-10 the extent to which citizens can choose their political leaders in free and fair elections, enjoy civil liberties, prefer democracy over other political systems, can and do participate in politics, and have a functioning government that acts on their behalf.

From 2006-2023, the U.S. has dropped from 8.2 to 7.8 in the overall score.

It’s not just here. As Dahlia Scheindlin¹ writes in Friday’s Ha’aretz, the annual index published by Freedom House, one of the gold standards for measuring democracy trends, found a global decline beginning in 2005. In 2023, democracy was deteriorating in 52 countries in the world, while only 21 showed improvements (the remaining countries in the study showed no change). In 2005, four times more countries appeared in the improving camp.

Joan Hoey, Editor the Democracy Index report, explains that the 2023 results “point to a continuing democratic malaise and lack of forward momentum,” resulting from wars, Covid and economic pressures.

Freedom House assesses that Israel (minus Palestinians under occupation) lost three points on its overall score in 2023, compared to 2022. And V-Dem found in early 2024 that Israel had fallen out of the "liberal democracy" category for the first time in over 50 years. As Scheindlin puts it, “What's…worrying is that Israel appears to be rushing ahead of the pack – backwards.”

And if you think things are sliding now, coming attractions around the world are not promising for democracy. The newsletter The Conversation directs our attention to five key elections to watch this year: Canada, Germany, Chile, Belarus and the Philippines. Many of the same themes that we saw in 2024 will persist, including the impact of inflation, the rise of the populist right and the fallout of war in Europe and the Middle East. Those trends resulted in stiff headwinds for incumbents in 2024. No reason to believe that won’t continue, unless the incumbent happens to be a dictator.

Are Germans about to vote Nazis back into power?

Germany is headed to snap parliamentary elections in February, and in his New Year’s address, German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz blasted none other than Elon Musk for trying to influence the outcome in favor of the far-right, Nazi-adjacent, pro-Putin AfD party. “You, the citizens, decide what happens in Germany,” Scholz said, as reported by Politico. “It’s not up to the owners of social media.”

Is it possible that in Germany, of all places, this neo-Nazi party could garner 20 percent of the vote, as recent polls suggest, doubling their current representation? It could happen. After Trump’s reelection, and given the technological boost Musk is determined to provide once again, all bets are off. Musk and Putin seem to be coordinating their efforts on both sides of the Atlantic.

Am I allowed to say that?

Keep in mind that Hitler climbed into the chancellery with just 34 percent in 1933.

Democracy is in danger in Germany.

(See the current polling trend below. Graphics from Politico - AfD in blue).

Can Syria possibly become at least quasi democratic?

In Syria, suddenly the Arab Spring of 2011 has returned with a shocking reprise. A huge question for 2025 is whether Syria can transform itself into a functioning representative government, given that its 21 million people speak 17 languages, and the population includes such diverse groups as Sunni, Christians, Alawites, Druze, Isma'ilis, Mhallami, Yezidi and Shiite, smaller tribal groups, plus military factions, such as Kurds, Turks, Russians, Americans and Iranians and Lebanese, all on Syrian soil. Oh yes, and the Israelis too, who have taken the heights of Mt Hermon and have their own Druze supporters near and on the Golan.

With little time to spare before things implode again, either internally or triggered by Iran, perhaps the fate of the entire Middle East depends on the answer to this question: Can something resembling representative government come from the mess that is now Syria?

Syria could be democracy’s last stand - or the dawn of its salvation.

Can this country that has known only repressive rule since - I don’t know - King Cyrus the Great, suddenly pivot to a more representative, pluralistic arrangement? Could there possibly be more ballots than bullets in Syria’s future?

And if positive change comes to Syria, her neighbors - the people in the street - in Iran and Lebanon might be emboldened to follow suit. The time is ripe for them…but we’ve been here before.

As we recall, the first Arab Spring did not end well in most of the affected countries, especially Egypt, where the push to democracy yielded a short-lived rule by the Muslim Brotherhood, who, like so many autocracies before and since, pretended to espouse democracy just to gain power, but in this case they were quickly - and fortunately - overthrown before they could do too much damage. Status quo ante was restored, putting back in place the devil we know.

Freedom House says that there could be elections in Syria within about four years, if the transition is handled correctly.

But do we even want elections?

I wouldn’t rush into things.

The lessons of 2006

The 2006 elections in the West Bank and Gaza were free and fair, witnessed and supervised by Jimmy Carter, propelled by the vision of George W. Bush, and inspired by the great freedom hero who helped bring down the Soviets, Natan Sharansky, who wrote the playbook: The Case For Democracy: The Power Of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny And Terror. Sharansky’s book became the talk of Washington. When he went on Meet the Press, he told Tim Russert, “I am willing, I wish, I want, I insist to give the Palestinians all the rights in the world except the right to destroy me. And the only way to do it is to encourage democratic reforms and the emerging of a democratic Palestinian state.”

Bush was given the book by his friend Tom Bernstein, a New York developer and founder of The International Freedom Center, a museum focusing on human rights. Bush told an interviewer, "I think it's an important book and I think people ought to read it."

He read it, and then everything went wrong.

To be fair to Sharansky, a warning in his book went unheeded by the impatient Bush:

Elections are not a true test of a democracy. They are never the beginning of the democratic process. Only when the basic institutions that protect a free society are firmly in place—such as a free press, the rule of law, independent courts, political parties—can free elections be held.” Until then, “elections are just as likely to weaken efforts to build democracy as they are to strengthen them.”

That in fact is what happened in 2006, when the Palestinian territories held what turned out to be their last parliamentary elections. Hamas won a bare plurality of votes (44 percent to the more moderate Fatah party’s 41 percent) but, given the electoral system, a strong majority of seats (74 to 45). Neither party was keen on sharing power. Fighting broke out between the two. When a unity government was finally formed in June 2007, Hamas broke the deal, started murdering Fatah members, and, in the end, took total control of the Gaza Strip. Those who weren’t killed fled to the West Bank, and the territories have remained split ever since.

In other words, Hamas’ absolute rule of Gaza is not what the Palestinians voted for back in 2006. They used free elections as a springboard to one of the most brutal dictatorships the world has seen.

Here’s what Carter wrote after returning to the U.S. following the elections that January.

On election day, Rosalynn and I visited 25 polling sites, in East Jerusalem and its outskirts, Hebron, Ramallah, and Jericho. It seemed obvious to us and other observers that the election was orderly and peaceful and that there was a clear preference for Hamas candidates even in historically strong Fatah communities. Even so, we were all surprised at the enormity of the Hamas victory.

Shocked, shocked that a guerrilla group whose 1988 charter pledged the complete destruction of its neighbor and was explicitly antisemitic not only won big, but had no more use for the democratic tools that had propelled them to power.

Sharansky knew at the time that the election results were a disaster. From the perspective of 2025 that is an understatement. Maybe Hamas would have taken Gaza anyway. Maybe they would have taken the West Bank too. Maybe the P.A. would have been destroyed. But given that we can now draw a straight line from that free-and-fair vote of 2006 right to October 7, 2023, it is hard to overstate the damage caused by that bipartisan moment of free-and-fair democratic idealism.

So Syria should take it slow. But still, the shocking, lightning-quick downfall of the Syrian dictator is the best news democracy has received in a decade. Maybe democracy can find new footing in Syria, maybe in Iran, maybe in Lebanon…maybe back in Gaza and the West Bank, where polls now show that Palestinians are tired of war - and are souring on Hamas. Maybe. But we’ve got to save it here first, for the rest of the world to take notice and follow. And that won’t be easy.

Assessing the damage to democracy in the U.S.

What’s to become of democracy here?

First of all, it must be noted that Trump did not win the votes of half of all Americans. He won 73.6 million votes - fewer than in 2020 - 49.9 percent of the total of 155,211,283 votes cast. So he did not win a majority of the votes cast. And close to 90 million of the voting-eligible population didn’t vote. Add it all together and the roughly 245,211,283 Americans who did not vote for Trump comprise about 70 percent of those who could have voted.

Therefore, just 30 percent of the country voted for him. Some mandate!

While it’s nice to know that 70 percent of Americans did not vote for an anti-democratic agenda, those 90 million nonvoters’ apathy is troubling.

These questions are also troubling:

• Can elections in the second quarter of the 21st century still be reasonably free-and-fair?

• Has the infrastructure of free-and-fair been so tainted by technology that it has given malign forces a permanent unfair advantage?

• Has it become too easy to game the system?

Jimmy Carter and the Big and Little Lies

The viability of our form of government has been debated since long before there was social media, long before there was A.I., and long before there was a United States. But something seems more menacing this time around. Rousseau and Hobbes could differ on human nature and the degree of brutishness of civil society, and Machiavelli’s ideas on morality in leadership were, well, Machiavellian, but neither they nor Jefferson, Franklin, Madison and Lincoln could have imagined the world of Russian bots and viral Tiktoks, where it is often impossible to distinguish reality from the Big Lie.

Forget Big Lies, Jimmy Carter promised never to lie at all to America - not even Little Lies - and given how unelectable he became by 1980, no presidential candidate after him has dared to make that same pledge. His “Malaise” speech (where he never said that word) has become the textbook example of how a president should never level with the American people. No one has since, at least not without a pollster by his side.

Carter also admitted, in an interview with Playboy, “I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times." He said this while running for President. The contrast to Trump is just staggering, whose infidelity, marital and otherwise, was never confined to the heart. But even beyond Trump, who at least is truthful enough not to say he never lies, honesty has become a liability in our democracy. Or perhaps worse, it’s become irrelevant.

People used to be taken in by smooth talkers who lie, the Harold Hill types from The Music Man. Now they are becoming prisoners to algorithms that know more about them than they do, conjured by billionaires with an unlimited thirst for power, for whom a lie is simply a means to an end. The smooth talkers are now virtual, and their humbug is smoother than ever. The updated, Professor Harold Hill 2.0 has become a ChatGPT avatar of himself. Even his dishonesty is dishonest, with “his” words spoken from an inauthentic artifice that has never set foot in River City, that in fact has no feet at all. When the liar itself is not real, falsehood becomes both the form and the content, the medium and the message, and truth becomes elasticized to the point where authenticity no longer exists.

But that’s a small sacrifice when billionaires can get huge tax breaks.

And what we lose from all this are not just bowling leagues and filled church pews. We lose the integrity of the ballot, the door-to-door retail campaigning; democracy - the last bastion of the real.

Somehow we have to bring the discourse back to the fundamental values of our democracy: leadership guided by truth, justice and temperance - which are all prime religious values.

Is there reason for hope?

I have a naive belief that human beings can still sniff out a fraud when they see one. They may still vote for one (as happened this year), but we can tell the difference. Integrity still matters. It couldn’t win out this time, against all those severe headwinds. But I have reason to hope that it will in the next round. And then, maybe we can begin fixing our system.

Freedom House also has confidence in the indomitable nature of the human spirit, giving them some reasons for optimism on the democracy front for 2025:

Around the world, people made great sacrifices to demand respect for their basic rights.

In Venezuela, opposition activists worked to field a candidate, backed by a unified front, to run against strongman Nicolás Maduro in the July presidential election. Maduro was declared the winner by a partisan electoral council, even though opposition vote tallies showed their candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, well ahead. Venezuelans showed their bravery by protesting Maduro’s sham victory, while authorities responded with arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances, including of children.

In Georgia, people turned out in large numbers to protest their government’s resurrected “foreign agents” law, voice disapproval over the suspension of EU membership talks, and express anger over claims of fraud during the October parliamentary polls.

In China, which is ruled by one of the world’s most repressive regimes, we documented over 7,800 acts of protest since 2022.

And in Belarus, whose regime has shuttered independent media, organizations like Nasha Niva persist, reporting from exile. The list of courageous examples goes on.

This is all bodes well for human rights, but none of these solves the problem of tainted elections. In fact, Maduro is set to begin his third term, China is as repressive as ever, and Belarus is ensconced in Putin’s pocket.

The Democracy Report makes this final point:

We have seen similar democratic declines before, and past declines were reversed. People fought previous phases of autocratization in the 1930s and 1960/70s, turned the tide, and pushed democratic rights to unprecedented heights. We can do it again.

The threat this time is compounded by technology, money and an entrenched cult of personality, but this too will pass.

Why is saving democracy a moral / religious imperative?

If you’ve got some time, an entire issue of the journal Daedalus from 2020 is dedicated to the topic of “Democracy and Religion.” You can download the pdf for free.

This passage from the Babylonian Talmud gives us a glimpse into the ancient rabbis’ strong feelings of communal empowerment and shared leadership. (Bold indicates actual Talmud text, non-bold is contextual commentary)

With regard to Bezalel’s appointment as chief designer of the Tabernacle in the wilderness, Rabbi Yitzḥak said: One may only appoint a leader over a community if he consults with the community and they agree to the appointment, as it is stated: “And Moses said unto the children of Israel: See, the Lord has called by name Bezalel, son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah” (Exodus 35:30). The Lord said to Moses: Moses, is Bezalel a suitable appointment in your eyes? Moses said to Him: Master of the universe, if he is a suitable appointment in Your eyes, then all the more so in my eyes. The Holy One, Blessed be He, said to him: Nevertheless, go and tell Israel and ask their opinion. Moses went and said to Israel: Is Bezalel suitable in your eyes? They said to him: If he is suitable in the eyes of the Holy One, Blessed be He, and in your eyes, all the more so he is suitable in our eyes. (Berachot 55a)

My colleague Rabbi Marc Greenspan further amplifies Rabbi Yitzchak’s ruling, showing how Jewish tradition views government as a human partnership with God.

Where Torah predicts that Israelites would want civil rulers instead of priests and prophets, Moses told the people: “[B]e sure to place over yourselves the king that God elects for you” (Deut. 17:14-15). The canon records that God chose the first king, Saul (1 Sam. 9:16-17). The second king, David, was chosen by God but confirmed by “all of Israel’s elders” (2 Sam. 5:3). The third king, his son Solomon, ruled in David’s bloodline but “all the people” together ratified his accession (1 Kings 1:39). Given this democratic shift, Rabbi Yitzchak opined that not even God could select rulers without consulting the people (Berachot 55a).

From this rabbinic perspective, each generation becomes progressively more democratic as institutions take root and norms become entrenched. That needs to happen in our world as well. Everything needs to be seen as a step toward building partnerships, between ourselves and our community, and with God.

Nelson Mandela, who had every reason to give up on the hope for true democracy, wrote, “Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death."

Monday, January 6 will be a very sad and scary day for so many people. January 20 even more. We know some bad things are coming “on Day One.”

But a ruthless dictator fell in Syria just a few weeks ago.

The great American pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick put it best, saying, “Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.” Over the next four years, we’ll need many more words like that from the pulpits and pundits of America. Lots of ordinary people will need to stand up and show extraordinary courage.

And that’s what will see us through.

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Here is the first part of Friday’s front-page article by Scheindlin:

1.