Anne Applebaum writes:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Within weeks of their publication in July 1776, those words spread around the world. In August, a London newspaper reprinted the Declaration of Independence in full. Edinburgh followed. Soon after that, it appeared in Madrid, Leiden, Vienna, and Copenhagen.

Before long, others drew on the text in more substantial ways. Thomas Jefferson himself helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, issued by French revolutionaries in 1789. The Haitian Declaration of Independence, of 1804, drew on both the American and French precedents, calling for the construction of an “empire of liberty in the country which has given us birth.” In subsequent decades, declarations of independence were issued by Greece, Liberia (the author had been born in Virginia), and a host of new Latin American nations. In 1918, Thomáš Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, signed a Declaration of Common Aims of the Independent Mid-European Nations at Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, using the Founders’ inkwell.

On that occasion, a replica of the Liberty Bell was rung, not because any American president or official had asked for it to ring but because Masaryk had been inspired by the story of the American founding. He evoked the Declaration not because of any pressure applied by U.S. foreign policy, but because of Jefferson’s words and what they signify. Since 1776, Americans have promoted democracy just by existing. Human rights and the rule of law are in our founding documents. The dream of separation from a colonial empire is built into them too. Our aspirations have always inspired others, even when we did not live up to them ourselves.

In the 20th century, we moved from simply modeling democratic ideals to spreading or promoting them as a matter of policy. We did so in part because the language of democracy is in our DNA, and when we are confronted by autocrats and despots, we use it. Woodrow Wilson, when arguing for entry into the First World War, said America should advocate the “principles of peace and justice” in opposition to “selfish and autocratic power.” In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to America as an “arsenal of democracy” determined to aid British allies against the Nazis: “No dictator, no combination of dictators, will weaken that determination.”

During the Cold War, we connected words such as freedom and rights not just to our military strategy but to our national identity, to our culture. We were advocates of free markets, a free press, abstract expressionism, and jazz, and we exported those things too. Plenty of people wanted them. Willis Conover, the host of Voice of America’s nightly jazz broadcast in the 1960s and ’70s, had an audience of 30 million people, mostly in Russia and Eastern Europe. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950, pulled together anti-Communist intellectuals from all over Europe into a single movement.

Many people found our language hypocritical, and they were right: Americans were perfectly capable of backing dictatorships while talking about democracy. The contradiction between the ideals we said we fought for abroad and their failure at home bothered foreigners as well as Americans. In 1954, the Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that argued in favor of desegregation because, among other reasons, racist laws prompted “doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.” [Continue reading…]