Democracy. Whiskey. And Sexy!
CrowdSource 6.30.2025
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: exporting democracy, by force when prudent.
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Nails in the Coffin of Democracy Promotion
Several American institutions promote democracy abroad. Under Trump, they are dying.
Grants Terminated. Last week, the White House advised the State Department “to terminate grants to nearly all remaining programs awarded under the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), which would effectively end the department’s role in funding pro-democracy programming in some of the world’s most hostile totalitarian nations.”
Cut and Fired.
lamented cuts to pro-democracy organizations Voice of America and Freedom House in March. In February, the White House fired 60 contractors working on human rights and democracy abroad.Defunded. In a recent report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Thomas Carothers writes: “The cessation of essentially all funding for democracy aid has crippled the nonprofit U.S. organizations that have carried out such work for decades, such as the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems.”
George W. Bush’s Crusade for Democracy
George W. Bush’s 2005 Second Inaugural Address was the strongest expression of the idea that the United States should promote democracy abroad — by force if prudent:
… it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
“Way Too Much God,” Reagan speechwriter
reacted at the time. “It was a God-drenched speech. This president, who has been accused of giving too much attention to religious imagery and religious thought, has not let the criticism enter him.”“Just the Right Amount of God,” responded then-Weekly Standard literary editor and poet
: “The speech was as clear an assertion of a particular Christian political philosophy as we’re likely to hear in these latter days.”“Democracy. Whiskey. And Sexy!” Prior to Bush’s second inaugural and before Iraq unravelled, a 2003 New York Times story from Najaf, Iraq, became (to some) emblematic of Bush’s democracy promotion strategy in the Middle East:
In the giddy spirit of the day, nothing could quite top the wish list bellowed out by one man in the throng of people greeting American troops from the 101st Airborne Division who marched into town today.
What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring?
“Democracy,” the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. “Whiskey. And sexy!”
Around him, the crowd roared its approval. Yet when the first round of welcomes to American soldiers and journalists were exuberantly, even affectionately completed, the people in the crowd had a more urgent request than liquor. They wanted water.
Political Scientists Debate
For over a century, nations have tried to impose democracy by force. How successful have they been?
“Forced to Be Free?” In 2013 paper, Alexander B. Downes and Jonathan Monten crunched the numbers to discover why some military interventions succeed in building a democracy (e.g., Japan in 1945) while others don’t (e.g., Afghanistan 2003-2021):
Decapitating a regime by removing its leader may appear to be a quick and low-cost means to initiate democratic change, but decapitation alone is unlikely to succeed. … Countries that lack favorable preconditions [for democracy] tend to be weak, and thus the immediate costs of toppling their regimes are low, making them tempting targets. But democracy is unlikely to take hold in these states, and the costs of intervention can grow astronomically in the wake of regime change because the conditions that hinder democratization are also those that increase the likelihood of civil war.
Exception and Rule. Downes and Monten’s article inspired an interesting response from political scientist William G. Nomikos, who argues that pro-democracy military interventions have usually been successful, and that the failure of recent American interventions is the exception to that rule:
… most interventions are far shorter affairs. Since 1918, all interveners, including the United States, have faced a full-fledged counterinsurgency … in only Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, the much more likely outcome has been the democratization of the target state.
Downes and Monten respond to Nomikos here.
Intervener v. Intervened. In 2016 paper, Downes and another coauthor, regime change expert Lindsey A. O’Rourke, explained why democratic nation-building can backfire so easily: “Whereas the intervening state (the principal) wants the new leader (the agent) to pursue policies that reflect its interests, once in power, the new leader is focused on ensuring his or her own political survival, a task that is often undermined by implementing the intervener’s agenda.”
From the Crowd
Counterexamples.
is not so sure about ’ confidence (expressed in this article) that cultural achievements can survive war and tyranny:
Do you think that “The West” as you defined it, all of it’s cultural achievements, would have survived the historical revisionism of Hitler and Stalin?Do you believe that Persia, and all of its accumulated science and wisdom, survived the modern brand of radicalism that now rules its territorial remnant? Did Ptolemaic Egypt survive Caesar’s fires or did it die with the Library of Alexandria and simply become a page in the history of Rome? Did Ancient Egypt live on continuously after the wars it lost to upstart empires, or are we still today trying to work out how they lived, how they built what they built, and who they were?
Maybe I am pro this war and pro that war. I do know that war won’t save us in the long run, but I am genuinely interested in your answer to these questions, because I think there are people in this world, and some inside the borders of The West, who wish to wipe its systems and values from memory.
“Typical Imperialism.”
(AKA “The Anxious Egyptian”) responds to ’s comment about Ptolemaic Egypt:
For the part about Egypt, I think Schumpeter has good insights in “Imperalism and Social Classes” he writes (p.25): “The facts enable us to diagnose the case. The war of liberation from the Hyksos, lasting a century and a half, had “militarized” Egypt. A class of professional soldiers had come into being, replacing the old peasant militia and technically far superior to it, owing to the employment of battle chariots, introduced, like the horse, by the Bedouin Hyksos. The support of that class enabled the victorious kings, as early as Aahmes I, to reorganize the empire centrally and to suppress the regional feudal lords and the large, aristocratic landowners—or at least to reduce their importance. We hear little about them in the ‘New’ Empire. The crown thus carried out a social revolution; it became the ruling power, together with the new military and hierarchical aristocracy and, to an increasing degree, foreign mercenaries as well. This new social and political organization was essentially a war machine. It was motivated by warlike instincts and interests. Only in war could it find an outlet and maintain its domestic position. Without continual passages at arms it would necessarily have collapsed. Its external orientation was war, and war alone. Thus war became the normal condition, alone conducive to the well-being of the organs of the body social that now existed. To take the field was a matter of course, the reasons for doing so were of subordinate importance. Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required. A will for broad conquest without tangible limits, for the capture of positions that were manifestly untenable — this was typical imperialism.” I think this is the fear in the case of Israel and US.
See you next week!
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Let's all remember, democracy in no way equates with freedom. Democracy is rightly called the tyranny of the majority. Except that, in truth, it is invariably the tyranny of a minority that has rigged the system so that they win every time, regardless of election results.
It is strange that we concern ourselves with freedom in other countries, while 'leadership' in the USA is hell-bent in 'educating' independence and self-reliance out of us.