A 'house on fire': Biden democracy summit comes as US grapples with own democratic crisis

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden's democracy summit opened with lofty rhetoric and panel discussions about protecting human rights, bolstering good governance and countering authoritarianism.

It was Vice President Kamala Harris who talked about the elephant in the room: America's own tarnished reputation as a beacon of freedom and democracy.

“Here in the United States, we know that our democracy is not immune from threats. January 6 looms large in our collective conscience," Harris said Thursday in her address to world leaders gathered for the virtual summit, which closes Friday.

For democracy experts and advocates, the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol – in which an angry mob tried to stop the certification of a free and fair presidential election – was a stark illustration of the broader shortcomings in America's democracy.

Related video: Why the Jan 6th commission is so important for the future of US govt.

And critics worry that if President Joe Biden's summit — and the broader effort to protect open societies — is to succeed, the United States must first lead by example and address its own failings.

"While President Biden is hosting a global democracy summit, our own democracy right here is falling apart," said Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, a voting rights group. "You can't be the torchbearer for democracy while your own house is on fire."

Other signs that America needs to focus inward, critics say: rampant misinformation fueled by former President Donald Trump and his supporters claiming the 2020 election was fraudulent; new restrictions on voting access; widespread public distrust in American leaders and institutions; and growing political polarization that has left Congress increasingly paralyzed.

Albright and others say one of the most urgent issues is voting rights. Republican state leaders across the country have embraced Trump's election lies and enacted a wave of voting new restrictions. While GOP proponents say the new measures are needed to prevent fraud, voting rights groups say they are designed to suppress voter turnout and will disproportionately affect voters of color.

Harris called out gerrymandering of state and federal legislative districts and said the new restrictive voter laws were "part of an intentional effort to exclude Americans from participating in our democracy."

'Democracy needs champions': Biden calls on world to fight authoritarianism, corruption at inaugural summit

Across the country, Republicans and Democrats are competing to capitalize on decennial redistricting – scrambling to draw maps that insulate incumbents and give their candidates an advantage in the next elections.

"Gerrymandering is becoming more scientific, merciless, and cynical. Trust between the parties, and in democratic institutions, continues to decline, hitting ever more bleak lows," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning think tank out of Stanford University.

"And the readiness to use violence to achieve political objectives is growing, not only as expressed in public opinion polls but as evidenced by the January 6 insurrection by extremist loyalists of Donald Trump," Diamond said.

As the democracy summit opened in Washington Thursday, Black Voters Matter hosted demonstrations to pressure lawmakers to pass laws outlawing certain restrictions on ballot access, to end partisan gerrymandering, and to make campaign finance and lobbying more transparent.

Activists gathered in Arizona, California, Delaware, Georgia and New York. The New York demonstration, which took place in front of the United Nations headquarters, was designed to highlight perceived hypocrisy between Biden's rhetoric and America's democratic shortcomings.

A global 'democratic recession'

The events in the U.S. are part of a broader trend globally – a "democratic recession," as Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it. In his opening remarks at the summit, Biden called the trend a "backward slide" that can't go "unchecked"

For the past 15 years, the portion of the world population living in a fully "free" country has declined to less than 20%, the lowest point since 1995, according to Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group.

Since 2015, the number of democracies in the world has shrunk from 104 to 98, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a pro-democracy intergovernmental group based in Sweden.

"Authoritarianism has been on the rise for 15 consecutive years," said Michael Abramowitz, president of Freedom House. The group has documented threats to civil liberties for women, ethnic and religious minorities, and civic society in countries around the world, including erosion in established democracies like the U.S.

"Many authoritarian leaders are also trying to expand their reach well beyond their borders," Abramowitz said. "So we are very concerned about the state of global democracy, and we're glad that the administration is having this summit to try to focus attention on a very serious problem."

Freedom House's research finds the U.S. still has strong civil institutions and a durable political system in a global context. But it is being damaged due to "partisan pressure on the electoral process, bias and dysfunction in the criminal justice system, harmful policies on immigration and asylum seekers, and growing disparities in wealth, economic opportunity, and political influence," according to the group's 2021 report.

The U.S. should now be considered a "flawed democracy," according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a British research firm. The US ranked as the world's 25th most democratic country in 2021, according to the EIU, part of a downward trend for the country in recent years. The Economist attributed the latest drop to a decline in civil liberties during the pandemic and the spread of false election conspiracy theories.

Scholars can't pinpoint any single reason for global democratic backsliding, though some point to economic stagnation and growing income inequality, social media rife with misinformation and other fraught issues surrounding migration and globalization.

Diamond says the democracy summit presents a major opportunity for Biden to reverse that trend, though the success of the summit may be limited by the participation of some countries with poor governance and human rights records.

"The opportunity is to heighten attention to the gathering crisis of democracy around the world and mobilize collective resolve to address it. The challenge is that addressing it will require action by a number of governments that are themselves responsible for democratic backsliding," Diamond said.

Abramowitz said the U.S. remains "the most significant and influential democracy in the world."

"People fighting for freedom look to the United States for support whether it's the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong or the protestors in Belarus," he said. "And for all our other problems, I think the United States could still play a positive role in helping to stimulate a democratic revival in the world."

Biden and his aides have said they're keenly aware of the threat to democratic institutions at home and abroad, and they see the summit as a way to rally democracies to a common cause.

"The good news is President Biden has very clearly identified that the contest between democracy and authoritarianism is the central battle of our time," said Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that opposes authoritarianism in the U.S.

Biden, however, "has not matched his recognition of the problem with a level of political capital, especially on addressing the threats facing democracy here at home that is commensurate with the danger he's identified," he said.

Learning from abroad, leading at home

Getting more creative about how to protect democracy at home and abroad may mean the U.S. needs to learn from other countries' experiences as it tries to regain its leadership on the issue, experts argue.

"The obvious elephant in the room is that we're falling short on our own very principles that we're lecturing others about, and I think that this is becoming more and more complex and wrought," said Laura Thornton, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund.

"I was hoping that we could knock some heads together to think outside the box because, obviously, democracy is declining around the world. We are using old strategies, and we need to start rethinking what democracy means," Thornton said.

Concern over protecting American democracy extends well beyond Washington. Local election officials, once considered dutiful civil servants, are now on the frontlines of fights over election security and the targets of violence over false claims of fraud. That backlash has caused some officials to look abroad for ways to rebuild trust and ensure elections remain free and fair.

"From the conversations I've had with election officials, I'm hearing more of an appetite to peek up like ostrich pulling their head out of the American sand and looking around and saying, 'Oh, you know, maybe we could learn from countries that have gone through similar things'," Thornton said.

Yet voting rights advocates argue that such intimidation, coupled with more restrictive voting laws, cannot be overcome without more forceful action from the federal government, which they've yet to see.

"Joe Biden has a certain worldview which makes him unable or unwilling to see the threat and therefore fully lean into filibuster reform and the legislative strategies that are necessary to get us out of this mess," Albright said.

The filibuster is a procedural hurdle in the Senate that requires 60 senators to advance bills to a full vote. Using the filibuster to obstruct legislation has become increasingly common over the past few decades amid polarization and led to gridlock in Congress.

Democracy reform advocates and several Democratic lawmakers argue that abolishing the filibuster would pave the way for more responsive governance and for pro-democracy policies to be enacted. Critics argue abolishing the filibuster would only further polarize the chamber and cause frequent, radical swings in national policy.

The White House has rejected the notion that Biden doesn't appreciate the threat to civil rights posed by the latest wave of voting laws. "He wants to make voting rights a reality," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a December press briefing.

Biden has signed executive orders instructing federal agencies to help register voters and expand access to the ballot. And he supports several voting rights bills that have stalled in the Senate, including the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act, the first legislation Democrats introduced this Congress.

Biden also supports bills that seek to limit abuses of power by the executive branch by requiring greater transparency for federal agencies, bolstering ethics standards and put limits on some presidential powers.

But Biden has declined to push Democrats to end the filibuster to pass those measures through the Senate, a step that some centrists in the party, including West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, also oppose. 

Old values, new tricks

The U.S. has long been criticized for not living up to its stated liberal democratic ideals; Soviet propaganda during the Cold War highlighted U.S. treatment of Black Americans during the Civil Rights movement.

The treatment of racial justice protestors in the U.S. in 2020 and the backlash to Biden's victory have renewed criticism from autocratic leaders in China and Russia that American democracy is not a functional model.

The democracy summit is one salvo in Biden's campaign to counter those critiques.

"The United States' greatest tool in the arsenal of democracy is its example," Bassin said. "And right now, that example has been grievously wounded by what's happened in this country over the last five years culminating in, of course, the visible events of January 6 that were broadcast all over the world."

"And the U.S. cannot achieve a level of credibility anymore on democracy until it restores American democracy to be a paragon for the world to follow," Bassin said.

Follow Matthew Brown online @mrbrownsir.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden democracy summit comes as US fights its own democratic crisis