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.
Mutual regard and compromise: While much research — like a 2023 Pew poll that found 57% of Americans believing that disagreements between the two parties get too much media attention — shows a surprisingly united American people, another Pew survey in the same year showed that 61% of American adults “say having political conversations with people they disagree with is generally ‘stressful and frustrating.’” As a result of that stress, 45% of American adults say they have “stopped talking about political and election news with someone as a result of something they said,” according to a third Pew poll. That poll also showed that Americans who follow the media “very closely” are most likely to withdraw from political discourse. A healthy democracy requires that stress and frustration be translated into productive dialogue. Until Americans make that sweeping shift, our democracy will continue to fracture.
A legitimate partner in an opposition party: The average American citizen can hardly be expected to be open-minded when our politicians struggle to find common ground in the halls of Congress. When Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) announced her decision to leave Congress last March, she blamed her decision on the polarized environment she faced. “Because I choose civility, understanding, working together to get stuff done, I will leave the Senate,” Sinema said, adding that compromise had become a “dirty word” on Capitol Hill.
Indeed, bipartisan legislation that passes congress and the Executive Branch is hard to come by. But examples of partisan inability to compromise are easier to find. In 2024, a bipartisan immigration reform and border security bill, which reformed asylum policies while providing concessions to the left regarding foreign aid, gained national attention after President Trump spoke out against it and Republicans rejected it.
It’s not the case that bipartisanship is gone completely, especially in local politics. The National Governors Association brings state and territory leaders together to share best practices despite ideological differences. But our more influential voices — national party leaders — are responsible for Americans’ perceived divisiveness, all but declaring that the opposition is not a “legitimate partner” in governance: In October, Donald Trump called Democrats who had investigated him “the enemy within,” and then-President Joe Biden called Trump’s supporters “garbage.”
Openness to more than one party or dogma: American citizens follow the lead of their elected officials in their habits and attitudes toward opposition parties and ideologies. One Pew poll found that, between the 2020 Presidential Election and the 2022 midterms, just 6% of voters crossed party lines or voted for a third-party candidate. Furthermore, 95% of registered Republicans and 92% of registered Democrats voted for the same party in 2022 as they did in 2018. This consistent support of a single party, although not necessarily a sign of closed-mindedness, has at least partially arisen from the media — especially digital media — bias. Despite companies like AllSides and publications like Tangle, media bias is pervasive. And according to a literature review from the Reuters Institute, ”like-minded political content can potentially polarise people or strengthen the attitudes of people with existing partisan attitudes.” As access to multi-dimensional, truth-based news is harder to find, Americans’ openness to more than one party or dogma suffers.
So, as the United States nears its 250th birthday, can it pass the test of Kohn’s criteria? A United States that struggles to maintain key elements of democracy can no longer project the superiority and power of its governing philosophy to the outer world. With the world’s leading democracy stumbling, it makes sense that the end of 2024 saw democracy in crisis elsewhere.
In December 2024, French democracy showed a struggle to meet Kohn’s criteria. Charles Lichfield, the deputy director and C. Boyden Gray senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center, wrote that “the French Parliament chose chaos over compromise on the budget,” and Gérard Araud, a former ambassador of France to the United States, wrote that “a majority [in French parliament] agrees only on one issue—the refusal of compromises.” It seems that scholars familiar with the French government believe it raises a red flag surrounding Kohn’s “ability to compromise” principle.
Worthy of note because of France’s key role in NATO, the no-confidence vote against French Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s government represented the struggle of one of Europe’s foremost democracies to fulfill its democratic values.
December also threw South Korea into turmoil after former President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law and was impeached. His successor, acting President Han Duck-soo, has also been impeached. South Korea’s strategic location in the east makes it an important democratic ally of the west. But just like the government in America — which fought to defend South Korean democracy in the 1950s — South Korea’s government is incapacitated by division. Prior to the crisis, Yoon’s conservative agenda was blocked by parliament, while his party alleges that parliament blocked his agenda as revenge for investigations into majority leadership. At the root of the issue are two polarized parties, failing to legitimize their opponents and refusing to compromise. A government willing to collaborate could have avoided the insurrection that threatened to collapse a long-time symbol of democracy in a hostile region.
Also in December, Germany — another major European democracy and the most populous nation in the European Union — faced its own challenges as Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a vote of confidence after his coalition government collapsed in November. The German people have now elected a new government, but the failure of a government to maintain a parliamentary coalition is not a failure of the people to express their voice. Parliamentary government and proportional representation rely on leaders to come together after their elections — when they don’t, they violate Kohn’s “partnering with an opposition party” principle, and democracy suffers.
But even as Europe’s democracies struggle, they at least remain conscious of their responsibility as leading global democracies and their impact on global stability. They understand that amidst a war against Russian tyranny, Europe cannot afford to see democracy fracture. The Georgian Dream party recently took power in Georgia as protestors and leading opposition politicians claimed Russian interference and illegitimacy. As another democracy appeared unstable, France and Germany, joined by Poland, condemned “democratic backsliding” and called for the peaceful treatment of protestors and opposition. Through all the noise, Georgia’s budding democracy is struggling to achieve Kohn’s "openness to more than one party” principle.
International democracies are suffering from various breaches of Kohn’s criteria, but the United States is showing signs of democratic backsliding similar to those that South Korea, France, and Germany are experiencing. Lichfield’s and Araud’s commentary on the French government closely mirrors Senator Sinema’s departing words about the U.S. Congress. And though American government doesn’t dissolve when leaders disagree, it stagnates, as shown by the series of debt ceiling showdowns between Republican House leadership and the Biden administration. The American government’s inaction and inability to compromise send a message to global democracies that the United States is increasingly incapable of fulfilling its own democratic values, only able to set an example of dysfunctional governance.
If the United States is no longer able to exercise its unspoken influence by leading by example, it cannot afford to give up its spoken influence by withdrawing from international affairs. An agenda that cuts support from democratic allies in NATO and Ukraine's war against autocratic imperialism threatens to leave global democracies vulnerable to the increasingly hostile illiberal forces, like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.
The United States must recognize its responsibility in a global landscape rife with fragile democracies. Two key steps will inform a nation that reclaims its mantle of democratic leadership: mending domestic democracy by aspiring to Kohn’s principles of compromise and open-mindedness, and actively standing up for democracy abroad.
Ian Rosenzweig is an incoming freshman at Princeton University, where he plans to study in the School of Public and International Affairs. He also serves as an International Bias Research Assistant at AllSides and he is the Founder and CEO of the Global Compromise Collective.
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