Now comes John K. Glenn, senior director at the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy, relayed from a recent substack post by Timothy Snyder, with all links active:

We need to renew the story of why freedom and democracy matter: not in the abstract but here and now and why it matters for the world we hope to build for our children. We cannot hope the facts will become obvious and naturally prevail. As one former policymaker put it recently, “democracy has become the incumbent in an age of anti-incumbency.” We need to show that what could be lost is vital.

People living in democracies are more secure, prosperous, and safe than those in unfree settings – and declines in freedom lead to declines in prosperity and security, and create a more dangerous world.

The evidence is clear:

Democracies are more secure: A large body of research supports the democratic peace axiom that democracies do not fight wars against each other. They are also less prone to civil war compared to autocracies because they are better at absorbing and channeling discontent through legal and institutional means.

Democracies are more prosperous: The link between freedom and well-being is well documented. Countries with greater freedom in 1995 tended to be more prosperous decades later. The reverse holds as well. Venezuela’s decline in freedom since 1999 under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro has resulted in one of the steepest economic collapses in the world, rivaled only by Syria, Belarus, and Russia.

Democracies are safer: As Amartya Sen observed, there are “no famines in democracies,” because free societies are better equipped to make course corrections that dictatorships cannot. The Freedom and Prosperity Indexshows that democracies consistently outperform autocracies on all human development metrics, including health and education. Notably, this holds among low-income countries as well: democracies rank seventeen places higher than autocracies on the Human Development Index, with 25% lower infant mortality rates and children attending two additional years of school on average.

[…]

We must renew the positive story of democracy and its advantages, and we can do so humbly and with respect for cultural differences. We must elevate and support the vital voices of people around the world fighting for their freedoms and their rights. We must challenge authoritarian narratives and create new opportunities to work together in common cause.

We must make the case that when people around the world live in freedom, they can build more secure, more prosperous, and safer societies for themselves — making the world more secure, more prosperous, and safer for all of us.