‘American democracy is not a model for anybody right now’ and the US needs to learn from other countries who are doing it better

By John Haltiwanger

“America is back, ready to lead the world,” President Joe Biden said in late November as he introduced his foreign policy and national security team. The US is poised to “once again sit at the head of the table,” he said.

But Biden has been leaning on the tenuous assumption that the US still holds its place as the world’s leading democracy, and experts say it’s time for America to take a step back and listen to other countries whose democracies are in far better shape.

“The idea that Biden administration diplomats are going to go around the world saying ‘model your democracy after ours’ is terrible because it would display such a lack of awareness of the flaws in our system,” Archon Fung, the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, told Insider.