By Ian Rosenzweig
I’ve grown up in a divided America. My eighth grade classroom was a battlezone during the 2020 election cycle, when it became normal for peers to cut each other off because their opinions differed. Motivated by both ideology and a desire to preserve my friendships, I began to search for compromises wherever I could find them. It became my mission to bring people together not through adapting to one ideology, but through understanding and synthesizing multiple. I founded a youth nonprofit, the Global Compromise Collective, where I work with teenagers around the world on learning to think objectively and negotiate toward middle ground solutions.
Today, I work as an International Bias Research Assistant at AllSides, where I’ve learned that finding that middle ground is only possible when perspectives from across the political spectrum are heard. By examining media and political spectrums abroad, I found that democracy relies upon shared truths and mutual understanding. A wide variety of perspectives allows for healthy consensus.
But global democracies are not thriving — and the United States isn’t doing them any favors.
On the world stage, the United States commands both unspoken and spoken influence. A permanent member of the UN Security Council, a most favored nation by the WTO, a leader in NATO, and the world’s largest economy, the U.S. holds international power. And as the longest-standing global democracy, older than any current European democracy, the U.S. is a symbol of the right of citizen self-governance. Leading by example, the nation tacitly shapes international democratic trends.
In 2025, the United States’s democracy is not functioning as smoothly as it once did — and not because President Donald Trump’s election represents tyranny, as some feel, or because some protest that Kamala Harris was nominated without a primary election process. Rather, the inability of politicians and citizens in the United States to remain open to collaboration or compromise is threatening the stability of the nation’s representative government.
Personally, in this moment of national uncertainty, I’ve found clarity in a somewhat obscure source: a framework provided by historian and philosopher Hans Kohn. Kohn lived under Austro-Hungarian autocracy when the First World War broke out, and he later focused his research on nationalism. In his 1957 work Is the Liberal West in Decline?, Kohn asked if the key features of democracy — and the lack thereof — contribute to examinations of past and present regimes that are non-democratic (or, "illiberal" in a historic sense).
I first encountered Kohn’s framework in a class I took on twentieth century European dictatorships. His analysis was used to explain how the liberal regimes established after World War One fell, one by one, until Europe was rife with dictatorships.
In Political Ideologies of the Twentieth Century (1966), Kohn lists the qualities of a democracy and citizens’ democratic way of life. He includes, among other criteria, “mutual regard and compromise,” “a legitimate partner” in an opposition party, and having voters who are open to more than “one party” or “one dogma.” These criteria are not just useful to examine illiberal European regimes; they can test the health of liberal regimes as well. And I find that the United States is lacking in all three criteria.
