It’s a happy face sticker put on the U.S. government’s drive for hegemony. From James W. Carden at theamericanconservative.com:
The “democracy vs. autocracy” framework will bring us to no good end—serving only as a pretext for intervention against both friend and foe alike.
Falsity defines our politics.
In 1961, the scholar and diplomat George F. Kennan observed that
There is nothing in nature more egocentric than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision to everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side is the center of all value.
In the realm of domestic politics, we are told that “our democracy is at stake” by politicians and prosecutors who are seeking, in the manner of Middle Eastern or African potentates, to jail the leader of the political opposition. As such, the untruth of what our current overlords claim about the allegedly perilous state of our democracy is clear enough.
A similar falsity characterizes America and its relations with the world.
In a 2022 speech in Warsaw, President Biden declared,
We are engaged anew in a great battle for freedom; A battle between democracy and autocracy. Between liberty and repression; This battle will not be won in days or months either. We need to steel ourselves for the long fight ahead.
The framing of international politics as a zero-sum battle between democracy and autocracy is a fairly new innovation, but it is easily disprovable—one need only look at Washington’s most treasured partners, such as Ukraine’s Zelensky (who has outlawed 11 opposition parties and canceled the presidential election in his country, citing the exigencies of wartime), or the murderous Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, or Israel’s Netanyahu, whose behavior hardly needs expounding upon.
The idea that the world is now riven between two camps is a purely elite project—one that, as polling data indicates, the American people are not buying. Nevertheless, over the past several years, our betters in the legacy and corporate media have conjured up a steady stream of what might be called democratic ideation such as this piece by the neoconservative publicist Anne Applebaum.
It becomes a religion like Marxism?
Doubtful humanity will ever have a true revolution for freedom.
It really is like the Snowden movie, the people give freedom a thumbs down.