On Monday, the Center for the Study of American Democracy (CSAD) hosted Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, as well as a senior fellow in global democracy at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Diamond’s talk focused on the rise of illiberal democracy worldwide and his analysis of how to combat it. 

CSAD Student Associate Henry Haile ’28 began the talk by introducing Diamond and his long list of accomplishments, including the 32 years he spent as a founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and the eight books on democracy and American foreign policy that Diamond has published. 

Diamond began his talk by attempting to prove the existence of democratic backsliding. His talk heavily utilized Freedom House statistics on the quality of a democracy. These statistics are aggregated by experts in regional studies who score freedom on a scale of 0-4 across 25 metrics, generating a freedom score out of 100 for 190 countries and 15 territories. Following the end of the Cold War in the early ’90s, statistics show that global freedom increased substantially and peaked in 2006, when 55% of recognized countries were considered electoral democracies. Since 2007, Diamond argued, there has been a wave of democratic backsliding into illiberal governments.

Diamond summarized his views on exactly why this is happening in his talk: “I will say I don’t think it’s an accident that this happened around the time that three things were converging: the backlash against the U.S. intervention in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of social media as a dominant form of communication.”

The wave of declining democracies, as Diamond described, is indicated by factors such as poor economic performance, weakened institutions and increasing authoritarianism. This authoritarianism, Diamond argued, manifests in anti-pluralism in the government elite and a scapegoating of national issues on a racial or ethnic minority. In many of the examples Diamond cited, established democracies were reduced to plebiscitary democracy. In these cases, citizens only vote once over a long period of time, usually in a less-than-legitimate election, and only to reassert an executive’s authority.

Diamond’s talk was not entirely pessimistic. Toward the end of his presentation, he offered a variety of “successful” methods to oppose democratic backsliding and a list of nine major lessons to be drawn from the talk, among them: “1. Mobilize broadly: Don’t try to out-polarize the polarizer in chief” and “6. Don’t let the populist hijack nationalism. Offer a liberal, democratic version of unifying pride in the country as a democracy.” Diamond believes that illiberal leaders are generally brought down at the ballot box and that broad opposition coalitions can achieve legitimate democratic reform, even though that often means major changes to the structure of a government.

Diamond ended his talk with a slide that said the United States needed to “Defeat Authoritarian Aggression in Ukraine” and defend Taiwan. Afterward, he fielded several questions from the audience on capitalism, democratic institutions, nationalism and AI. Diamond ended on a concerning note, warning students that if AI is not equitably regulated, there will be revolutionary pressure and reaction from unemployed masses: “In the end, it’s not going to be peaceful and it’s not going to be democratic.”