The Founders based the document on the philosophy that all humans were endowed with “natural rights.” (W.L. Dawn of the struggleĪn 1876 engraving of a John Trumbull painting depicts the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It has returned armed with new and hitherto unimaginable tools of social control and disruption that are shoring up authoritarian rule at home, spreading it abroad and reaching into the very heart of liberal societies to undermine them from within. It has returned as an ideological force, offering the age-old critique of liberalism, and just at the moment when the liberal world is suffering its greatest crisis of confidence since the 1930s. Authoritarianism has now returned as a geopolitical force, with strong nations such as China and Russia championing anti-liberalism as an alternative to a teetering liberal hegemony. Or, more accurately, it has reemerged, for authoritarianism has always posed the most potent and enduring challenge to liberalism, since the birth of the liberal idea itself.
Today, authoritarianism has emerged as the greatest challenge facing the liberal democratic world - a profound ideological, as well as strategic, challenge. Like so many of the theories that became conventional wisdom during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, this one was mistaken. We even got used to regarding them as “friends,” as strategic allies against the great radical challenges of the day: communism during the Cold War, Islamist extremism today. They might even evolve into democracies themselves, unlike the “totalitarian” communist states. Though hostile to democracy at home, they did not care what happened beyond their borders. Unlike communist governments, they had no universalist pretensions, no anti-liberal “ideology” to export. We believed that “traditional” autocratic governments were devoid of grand theories about society and, for the most part, left their people alone. Illustrations by Matt Chase for The Washington Post
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