As US democracy stumbles, the world watches and wonders
His words were striking, but the imagery even more so: French President Emmanuel Macron, voicing U.S. allies’ shock and alarm at this week’s mob invasion of the U.S. Capitol, was framed by two national flags – the French tricolor and the Stars and Stripes.
For Americans, their flag can mean many things: national pride, unity, celebration – or, like so much else beset by today’s bitter political divisions, tribalism, hostility, and anger.
Yet in the rest of the world, friend and foe alike, it has come to symbolize one thing above all: democracy. A world power whose influence has derived not only from military and economic strength, Big Macs, and Hollywood movies – important though all these have been to America’s global reach – but from a political culture rooted in individual rights, freedom of expression, fair elections, the peaceful transfer of power. All of this subject not to the whims of any one political leader, but to the rule of law.
At a time when democracies worldwide have found themselves on
