SUMMARY
- Less than two months before the 2024 presidential election, Georgetown University hosted an online panel titled “Is Democracy a Democratic Form of Government?”
- Panelists included the vice president of research at Freedom House, a U.S. State Department-funded nonprofit tracking “democratization” and freedom worldwide.
- Freedom House received approximately $80 million from the U.S. taxpayer in 2024.
- Panelists complained about online disinformation, the U.S. electorate’s lack of “media literacy,” and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s ownership of social media platforms.
- “I don’t know why Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg is to be preferred to Joe Biden or Merrick Garland,” remarked one panelist.
- The panelists also called for greater judicial oversight of western democracies.
Ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election—where most polling analysis pointed to a Donald Trump victory—Georgetown University convened a panel to examine the question: “Is democracy a democratic form of government?” The panel’s coordinator, Sanford J. Ungar, director of the Georgetown Free Speech Project, described the title as “ironic.”
The panel featured Ronald Krotoszynski, a University of Alabama law professor and former clerk for Frank M. Johnson Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, along with two members of the UK’s House of Lords, both representing left-leaning parties.
Also participating was Adrian Shahbaz, vice president of research and analysis at Freedom House, who oversees the organization’s annual reports and special studies.
Freedom House, primarily funded by the U.S. Department of State, has spent the past decade sharply criticizing populist right-wing governments worldwide. The organization has asserted that Hungary, under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is “no longer a democracy,” and has accused El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele—widely credited with transforming his nation from a cartel stronghold into the safest country in Latin America—of eroding democracy and freedom faster than any other leader in the region. Notably, both Bukele and Orbán have secured large electoral majorities in free and fair elections.
In 2024, Freedom House received $80 million in government grants, accounting for 88 percent of its budget.
The panelists largely agreed with the Freedom House perspective—that democratically elected leaders who reject liberal principles should nonetheless be considered non-democratic. Throughout the discussion, participants expressed concern about the electoral success of populist movements in the U.S. and abroad, and explored strategies to curb this growing political trend.
“A Marketplace of Political Ideas Full of Sewage”
“Many devotees of MAGA view themselves as supremely committed to democracy and democratic self-government, and the Republican party in Alabama, which is MAGA -dominated, achieves 60-70 percent results,” said Krotoszynski.
“I think this goes to a bigger question that we haven’t really addressed as to whether democracy itself is a desirable, at least unfiltered, uncut democracy, is it a desirable form of government?”
The law professor went on to complain about alleged misinformation, asking “how do we operate democracy in a marketplace of political ideas that’s full of sewage?”
The Freedom House panelist went on to outline precisely the type of ideology he considered to be undemocratic:
“You see this in the United States, you see it in places like India, throughout Europe with the rise of the far right. There is a sort of ethnic nationalism that is coming about and the supremacy of one people over another. And these anti -globalization ideas are channeled into that to say that we as a people need to take back power.
And it’s either taking back power from billionaires, or it’s taking back power from these international bodies, whether that’s Brussels or the United Nations or the WTO, or it’s taking back power from immigrants, essentially, or these others within the LGBTQ community. You know, there are all of these conspiracies about all of these actors working in unison with one another somehow to reject the power of the majority. And I think it’s really interesting to see, starting with somebody like Viktor Orban in Hungary, but also Modi in India, Donald Trump in the United States, is they’re using this similar narrative.”
“An Ocean of Disinformation and Misinformation.”
Panelists were in agreement that their side of the political aisle needed to re-exert control over Silicon Valley tech companies. One of the House of Lords panelists, Baroness Chakrabarti of the Labour party, complained of “n imperium of billionaires who are so wealthy that they are wealthier than countries,” repeating the media narrative that Elon Musk was guilty of “inciting riots in the north of England and in Northern Ireland,” a reference to the UK riots of summer 2024 — sparked not by Elon Musk but by longstanding, unaddressed public concerns over mass migration and crime.
Her concerns were echoed by Krotoszynski, who complained of an “ocean of disinformation and misinformation” in the U.S., arguing that the Biden administration regulating social media would be preferable to leaving Musk and Zuckerberg in charge.
“We have Elon Musk perpetrating it with deep fakes of Kamala Harris in a Communist Party outfit. And so we have these media moguls in the US, who under the First Amendment appear to be able to permit or censor whatever they wish. I don’t know why Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg is to be preferred to Joe Biden or Merrick Garland. Censorship is censorship.”
The law professor went on to complain about the lack of “media literacy” amongst the U.S. public — a buzzword that has been promoted by the censorship industry and its allies in the U.S. federal government for years to push their ideology into American schools.
“If you want free speech and democracy, you have to have an umpire”
The panelists also agreed on a common recent theme in the censorship industry – the need to empower judges to block and penalize elected politicians, given the electoral success of populists.
We’ve seen the results of this approach in countries that have powerful independent judiciaries — 400 indictments against Donald Trump prior to his election victory, the 27-year jail sentence (effectively a life sentence) against former president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and, in France, the five-year ban on holding public office against National Rally presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.
The alarming recent track record of judges seeking to jail popular politicians or prevent them from standing in election was not a concern for the panelists. Krotoszynski compared judges to neutral referees overseeing a football game: “if you want democracy, You have to have an umpire that checks the worst impulses of the incumbent legislators,” he said.
Baroness Chakrabarti said the recent success of populists had shaken her faith in the “gentleman’s agreements” of politics in the UK, which does not have a written constitution or independent judiciary.
We don’t have an entrenched Bill of Rights. Many of us took the view for years that that was okay. We had a nice evolved gentleman’s agreement of a constitution. I used to take that view. I’m not sure I take it anymore because I think the problem with a gentleman’s agreement is what is the agreement when the gentlemen have all left the room.
And the sort of assault on rights and freedoms and even the judiciary and lawyers that I’ve seen in recent years in the UK, forget other scary places, has been really quite something. So you’re right, the threats to what I think of as democracy, which has the rule of law and fundamental rights and freedoms at its heart, the threats can come from left and right.
We use this word populism a lot. We throw it around. We call people hard left and far right. What do we mean by that? For me, the definition of somebody who is a populist threat to democracy is someone who does not believe in those institutions, does not believe in the rules of the game.
“Does require us to regulate the media much more tightly”
On the matter of press freedom, panelists contradicted each other seemingly without noticing.
At the start of the panel, Freedom House’s Adrian Shahbaz said that restrictions on press freedom, including laws meant to contain “fake news,” were a sign of democratic backsliding:
We generally see it starting within restrictions on civil liberties. So, you know, we generally start to see the passage of laws that restrict what journalists are doing, increased obligations on academics, on the private sector as well. So there’s a legal component of this where it’s almost a gradual heightening of laws and regulations to and essentially to restrict or even criminalize certain parts of civil society. We see that. I think India is a really important example of this, where you have all sorts of laws, laws on foreign contributions, laws on tax, laws on on elections, where are on the spreading of so -called false news that are then weaponized against government opponents.
Yet later in the panel, Shahbaz offered no comments when William Wallace, a UK Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords, said the press ought to be regulated “much more tightly than we’ve done in a number of countries until recently” due to recent changes in the information ecosystem, in part because of the rise of social media.
Freedom of the press is one of the most difficult things we all have to cope with in democracies now because we want a free and diverse media but what we have are profit-driven media and the new very powerful tech companies which have interests in biasing what you hear.
We in Britain are watching the Nevada court case on the future of the Murdoch family holdings and therefore the future of news corporation and the ownership of some important newspapers and broadcasting companies in the UK as well.
So how we make sure that what your average half -interested voter learns about what’s happening in politics and what the major issues and difficulties are does require us to regulate the press and the media much more tightly than we’ve done in a number of countries until recently.
Watch the full panel here.
