The United States has Interfered in the Elections of other countries. So what?
Former CIA Director James Woolsey recently had an Interview in which he was asked by Laura Inghram whether or not the United States interferes in the Elections. He responded mockingly by stating “yes, in the interests of Democracy.
This immediately was used as a way to discredit the United States, as its Karma in a way because we Interfere in other countries. But expect others not to interfere in ours?
Well to start off, the United States has interfered in the elections of Dozens of Countries. So has the USSR/Russia. According to Carnegie Mellon University researcher Dov Levin, who created the infamous American Election Interference list in his own words said:
Russia or the Soviet Union since 1945 has used it half as much. My estimate has been 36 cases between 1946 to 2000. We know also that the Chinese have used this technique and the Venezuelans when the late Hugo Chavez was still in power in Venezuela and other countries.
So what moral High Ground would Russia have to Interfere in American Election? If by this same logic Russia has interfered in the Elections of dozens of other nations.
Dov Levin, the maker of the list when asked whether or not American Electoral Interference is good for Democracy responded by saying:
It depends upon if we are assisting pro-democratic side — could be like in the case of Slobodan Milosevic that I talked about earlier. I believe that that could be helpful for democracy. If it helps less-nicer candidates or parties, then naturally it can be less helpful.
In his actual Data Set he even admits
As noted in the main text, no evidence exists that countries with fragile democratic institutions are more likely to be the targets of such interventions than ‘full’ democracies. Breaking down the analysis to specific interveners, the U.S. was somewhat more likely to intervene in nondemocratic countries while the Soviet/Russians were more likely to intervene in more democratic countries.
Nevertheless, lets ask the real question. Are all cases of Electoral Interference bad? Is all Democracy inherently good? The Simple Answer is no, and history shows us exactly that.
I’ll begin by quoting our founders on democracy. James Madison, in Federalist Paper 10 said that in a pure democracy, “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Virginia Gov. Edmund Randolph said, “that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.”
John Adams said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Alexander Hamilton said, “We are now forming a Republican form of government. Real Liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship.”
The word “democracy” appears nowhere in the two most fundamental documents of our nation the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Our Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4, guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” If you don’t want to bother reading our founding documents, just ask yourself: Does our pledge of allegiance to the flag say to “the democracy for which it stands,” or to “the Republic for which it stands”? Or, did Julia Ward Howe make a mistake in titling her Civil War song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Should she have titled it “The Battle Hymn of the Democracy”?
What’s the difference between republican and democratic forms of government? John Adams captured the essence when he said, “You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.” That means Congress does not grant us rights; their job is to protect our natural or God-given rights.
For example, the Constitution’s First Amendment doesn’t say Congress shall grant us freedom of speech, the press and religion. It says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”
Contrast the framers’ vision of a republic with that of a democracy. Webster defines a democracy as “government by the people; especially: rule of the majority.” In a democracy, the majority rules either directly or through its elected representatives. As in a monarchy, the law is whatever the government determines it to be. Laws do not represent reason. They represent force. The restraint is upon the individual instead of government. Unlike that envisioned under a republican form of government, rights are seen as privileges and permissions that are granted by government and can be rescinded by government.
To highlight the offensiveness to liberty that democracy and majority rule is, just ask yourself how many decisions in your life would you like to be made democratically. How about what car you drive, where you live, whom you marry, whether you have turkey or ham for Thanksgiving dinner? If those decisions were made through a democratic process, the average person would see it as tyranny and not personal liberty. Is it no less tyranny for the democratic process to determine whether you purchase health insurance or set aside money for retirement? Both for ourselves, and our fellow man around the globe, we should be advocating liberty, not the democracy that we’ve become where a roguish Congress does anything upon which they can muster a majority vote.
Take Iraq for example. Iraq is ostensibly a democratic country, but like many other countries’ is one that is authoritarian, corrupt, and religiously biased. Why didn’t democracy yield a better outcome? There is direct relationship between liberty and democracy. In order to have democracy, a state must value individual liberty and subscribe to liberal values.
As Fareed Zakaria presents in his essay, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” not all democracies are liberal. Illiberal democracies are on the rise in many parts of the world, from Pakistan to Malaysia, to Russia, and beyond. Governments that have not invested in liberal values may have a democratic structure, but they are considered illiberal democracies. For, true democracy is more than a method of electing political leadership and approving laws and budgets through an elected, legislature.
The spirit of liberal democracy lies in the notion that the ultimate sovereignty in a state belongs to the people who, in complete freedom, build and democratically elect a government to serve them. It has been demonstrated in many states that there is a strong correlation between liberty and democracy. In order to have democracy as it is defined and practiced in the west, governments and societies must have liberty first.
Liberal democracies are founded on the principles of liberty, absolute sovereignty of the people, and the rule of law.Without this relationship between liberty and democracy, you will have illiberal democracies. Instead of exporting and championing for Jeffersonian democracy, we should consider the relationship with liberty and democracy.
What Happens when a country has Democracy, but no Liberty?
It is worth recalling the mass appeal that both the Nazi and Communist parties had in Germany in the early 1930s during the twilight of the Weimar Republic. In the German national election on July 31, 1932, Hitler’s National Socialists emerged as the largest party represented in the parliament (though not a majority), while the Communist Party came in a strong third behind the Social Democrats. In the last free election, on November 6, 1932, before Hitler came to power the following January, the Nazis lost seats, but still were the largest parliamentary party, with the Communists still in third place but gaining on the Social Democrats.
Neither the Nazis nor the Communists were shy in letting the German voters know what was in store if they came to power. Indeed, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises observed in 1926 that many Germans “are setting their hopes on the coming of the ‘strong man’ the tyrant who will think for them and care for them.” Men have sold their freedom, even through the ballot box, when they have been seduced by the promises of political paternalism.
We need to remember that democracy, in essence, is merely a mechanism for the peaceful selection of political officeholders. As such, it is certainly superior to revolutions and civil wars. As has often been said, democracy replaces bullets with ballots. Its inestimable importance for this purpose should never be discounted or forgotten.
The task of government is to secure the individual in his freedom from violence and coercive interference; to protect his life, liberty, and property from aggression. When it goes beyond this his liberty has been abridged, even when that government is democratically chosen.
The triumph of democracy around the world will be a hollow victory if it does not grow out of the more fundamental idea of liberty. Otherwise, men will continue to live under a tyranny the tyranny of electoral majorities.
How has Democratic Communism led to Tyranny?
World War II had not yet ended when the Soviets began to demonstrate their intent to gain control through both democratic and less democratic means.
As a show of communist rule and Soviet domination, sixteen prominent leaders of the Polish anti-Nazi underground were brought to trial in Moscow in June 1945. Their removal from the political scene precluded the possibility of a democratic transition called for by the Yalta agreements. The trial of the defendants, falsely and absurdly accused of collaboration with the Nazis, was watched by British and American diplomats without protest. The absence of the expected death sentences was their relief. The exiled government in London, after Mikołajczyk’s resignation led by Tomasz Arciszewski, ceased to be officially recognized by Great Britain and the United States on 5 July 1945.
These observations resulted in two critical documents that would set the conditions for all future US actions:
The Sources of Soviet Conduct (also commonly known as the “X Article” and the foundation for the US’s “containment” strategy against the Soviet Union.)
Clifford-Elsey Report (This report provided Truman with the background of wartime relations with the Soviet Union, insight into existing agreements, and most important, detail on “Soviet violations” of agreements with the United States…The first mention of the concept of “restraining and confining” the Soviet influence appeared in the Clifford-Elsey Report.
After the war, Soviet influence continued to spread, predominantly through overtly “democratic elections” but more explicitly through the use of state security to limit the available options to those approved only by the Soviets.
In Bulgaria and Romania in June 1947, based on the accusations of plotting against the government, which were fabricated by the secret police, the chief leaders of the opposition were arrested, accused of a variety of crimes in a series of show trials, and sentenced to long prison terms.
At the turn of 1946–47, the Hungarian communist-controlled secret services initiated a campaign against the leaders of the Smallholder Party, which held significant positions in the government and in the parliament (in the 1945 elections the party received 57 percent of the vote). The Smallholders were accused of fomenting an anti-government conspiracy, and the Hungarian Communist Party used the accusations to put their rivals on the defensive. In their minority position, the communists could not command sufficient political clout to move against the Smallholders. The job was left to the Soviet military authorities in Hungary, who, at the end of February 1947, arrested the party’s General Secretary, Bela Kovacs and, in the course of the investigation, fabricated materials on the alleged participation in the plot of several party leaders, including the Prime Minister, Ferenc Nagy.
Communist party members held officially a third of the positions in the new government, but counting their secret members and sympathizers who nominally represented other parties, they controlled more than half of the government posts. Relying then on their position in the government, the communists used well-tested police methods of accusing opposition parties of engaging in antistate activities to eradicate political dissidence completely.
Similar methods were used in Czechoslovakia. During the second half of 1947, the communist-controlled secret police services leveled accusations of anti-government conspiracy against several non-communist parties in the ruling coalition. This offensive concluded with the February 1948 coup, which was orchestrated by the communists themselves and led to the destruction of all of the other parties. In Bulgaria and Romania, remaining groups in the legal opposition were entirely eliminated in 1948; in Hungary this process extended until the beginning of 1949
So by 1949, the Soviets had clearly demonstrated that democracy was easily manipulated to get Soviet allies into power and to then use that power to eliminate any opposition. This would mean that the Communists could continue to host “elections” but without fear of ever losing control. This technique served the Soviets well as over the years any counter to “democratic elections” (for example in Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam) were seen as hypocrisy on the part of the US and its Western allies as well as an appeal to right-wing totalitarianism. The reality being that those who were alive at the time saw precisely how those elections were handled and what their results were. They, therefore, crafted foreign policy to prevent such sham elections and the “salami tactics” that went with them. This is the modern day equivalent of calling Russia or Syria a “Democracy”.
Liberty Not Democracy
Former Soviet dissident and Israeli government minister Natan Sharansky is helpful here. In a Wall Street Journal interview, he noted, “Democracy is a rather problematic word, because democracy is about technique. I would prefer freedom.”
Freedom! The movie “Braveheart” has William Wallace calling out for freedom, not democracy, moments before his death. People in the British Isles and the United States had to fight for freedom before they developed democracy. Freedom includes freedom of religion, speech, assembly and the press. Without those, democracy quickly becomes mobocracy.
What’s the U.S. to do in the face of despair and ignorance? Foreign policy realism should not mean accepting dictatorships as inevitable. Instead we need to use all instruments available to promote religious and intellectual liberty. This will be a difficult process, but we have no alternative, for dictatorship means disaster for Muslim countries and more terrorism throughout the world and so does democracy without liberty.
Democracy is a good thing, but when we pursue it without proclaiming liberty throughout the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof, we turn this good thing into an idol.
Contrary to the platitudes we have heard from many Western politicians since the 1910’s, democracy is not necessarily positively correlated with freedom. Certainly, there are many countries living under totalitarian regimes wherein a democratic system would increase the level of freedom enjoyed by citizens, since the citizens would presumably vote to increase their freedom. However, a pure democracy is mob rule; it allows 51% of the people to vote themselves the income of the remaining 49% (the old adage “democracy is two wolves and sheep voting to see what’s for dinner” comes to mind). Without a strong rule of law and limited government to protect citizens’ freedoms (both from the government and from fellow citizens), democracy can just as readily be used to vote away freedoms. Democracy as a determinant of freedom is thus highly dependent on other factors.
Perhaps James Taggart said it best: “When important issues affecting the life of an individual are decided by somebody else, it makes no difference to the individual whether that somebody else is a king, a dictator, or society at large.” Democracy can be a tool of oppression (if you happen to be in the minority) as surely as a tool to promote individual freedoms.
Which purpose it serves depends greatly on the existence of a constitution or analogous document guaranteeing individual rights, and strong rule of law to enforce such a document. Also relevant is how much the voting public happens to value individual liberties in a given voting year. This makes “degree of democracy”, at best, neutral as a predictor of freedom, and at worst, a confounding factor.
How does this Relate to US Electoral Interference During the Cold War?
Now that we’ve established that Democracy is not always inherently good, and could just as easily be used to usher in Tyranny. Lets see how this relates to the Cold War by using the Fact Check Article by Martin Williams.
One of the earliest examples of covert US interventions came with Italy’s 1948 election, when the CIA helped the Christian Democrats beat the Communist Party.Nearly 50 years later, a former secret agent admitted: “We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their political expenses, their campaign expenses, for posters, for pamphlets.”
The Washington Post has reported the CIA’s operation also included “forging documents to besmirch communist leaders via fabricated sex scandals,” and “spreading hysteria about a Russian takeover and the undermining of the Catholic Church”.
The United States aided the Party in favor Liberty over the side in favor of Tyranny. What is Objectionable about that? Had the United States sat on the sidelines and done nothing, Italy would have been subjected to even more mass murder and genocide under a communist regime as they had under the Regime of Benito Mussolini. Was it Anti Democratic for the United States to Intervene in the Election? Maybe. Was it Pro Liberty for the United States to do so? Absolutely. And that’s exactly what American Foreign Policy should consist of.
Over the years, many of America’s interventions have involved ploughing funds into their preferred candidate’s campaign.
For instance, throughout the 1950s and 60s, the US secretly financed the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, despite denials from party leaders. Former intelligence officials have said America’s aim was to undermine the Left and make Japan one of Asia’s most strongly anti-communist countries.
Again. What’s so bad about Aiding a Liberal Party on the Side of Liberty over a Party in favor of Communist Tyranny? The “Left” in this instance were Violent Communists who would establish a regime in Japan similar to that of Pol Pot’s which consisted of Mass Murder and Genocide. Who cares about Democracy if Democracy can just as easily lead to Tyranny and Mass Repression?
And, in 1990, $400,000 was given to organisations Czechoslovakia, which were leading the revolution against Communist rule, and which become political parties for the country’s first free elections in decades.
Again. Whats wrong with Aiding those in Resistance to Communist Oppression and those who would wish to establish a free country over a communist tyranny? Another case of America fighting for Liberty
Funding was also provided for parties in Albania. According to reports, one US diplomat explained: “If Albania votes for socialism in this election, a lot of Western investors and governments are going to direct their aid elsewhere.”
Yes, it would make Albania much poorer and likely lead to mass murder and repression. Once again, another case of America fighting for Liberty and not Democratic tyranny.
In Response to the Whataboutism regarding Russia’s Interference in Americas election
We often hear America has no moral High Ground compared to Russia because we also interfered in the elections of other nations.
To examine this, we must understand the intent.
Russia seeks to undermine the free world and American Leadership in International Affairs. That’s what they attempted to accomplish according to the Assessment from the Intelligence Community.
America seeked to defeat Democratic Tyranny by supporting candidates and parties in favor of Liberty and Freedom.
America and Russia both had two radically different motives for Electoral Interference. One is objectively good, and one objectively bad. Unless of course you’d like to see a world where Russia takes over the role of the United States as the leader of the World.
Conclusion:
In the Cold War and even after the Cold War. The United States was on the side of Liberty, not Democracy. As it should have been.
America needs to revise its rhetoric and actions to put advancement of human liberty, including economic freedom, in the forefront of its global agenda. This does mean support for democratic governments and institutions within countries that help preserve liberty. Democracy should not be seen as the end goal in itself, but only as a mechanism, if properly constructed, to help create, preserve and enhance liberty.
No it was not wrong for America to interfere in these nations democracies. Why? Because its goal was to promote liberty, not tyranny like the Soviet Union and Autocratic Communist Parties.
For more on Liberty vs Democracy and the Tyranny of Majority Rule:
“The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world millions of despairing men, women and little children victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish. Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes men who despise you enslave you who regiment your lives tell you what to do what to think or what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the 17th Chapter of St. Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.”
