This man cannot remain in power- Vladimir Putin must go

Ukraine: The Stakes for Democracy by 
Michael Waldman in Brennan Center for Justice

The World Is Falling In Love With Ukraine. It’s Beautiful—And Painful—To Watch

The war in Ukraine reminds us that our own democracy is worth fighting for. Do not take democracy for granted. 

We are all mesmer­ized, horri­fied, furi­ous about Russi­a’s barbaric attack on Ukraine. The human toll, the wanton viol­ence aimed at civil­ians, the 2 million refugees . . . the inspir­ing sight of ordin­ary people mobil­iz­ing to fight for their homes . . . all impel us to care so deeply.

Some­thing else stirs our hearts, too: Ukraine is a demo­cracy. Russia is a dictat­or­ship. So the battle for Ukraine today is the front­line of the fight for demo­cracy.

This broader conflict has been years in the making, though not always visible. Demo­crat­iz­a­tion swept the world in the late 1980s. In just a few years, East­ern Europe had nonvi­ol­ent pro-demo­cracy revolu­tions, the Soviet Union collapsed, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and elec­ted pres­id­ent of South Africa. Even in China, a massacre in Tianan­men Square was required to preserve the regime. Liberal demo­cracy, accom­pan­ied by free markets, seemed the wave of the future.

Demo­crat­iz­a­tion now faces a global back­lash, a retrench­ment. In Turkey, in India, in the Phil­ip­pines, in Hungary and Poland, lead­ers were elec­ted and revealed them­selves to be auto­crats. In China, Xi Jinping has hoarded the Commun­ist Party’s power into his own hands.

For a decade, we watched Vladi­mir Putin stir trouble. He backed Brexit and threw his weight around in the French pres­id­en­tial elec­tion. And of course, in 2016 he inter­vened in our elec­tion, hack­ing Demo­cratic emails to help elect Donald Trump. The pres­id­ent whom Putin backed, in the end, tried to over­throw Amer­ican demo­cracy.

It long seemed savvy to say that Putin simply wanted to sow chaos. In fact, he invari­ably backed author­it­arian forces. They often spoke in the language of anti-immig­rant nation­al­ism and reli­gious ortho­doxy. Putin wasn’t just making trouble — he was waging an ideo­lo­gical war for right-wing social and polit­ical values.

It’s easy to forget that Putin’s help came as Trump removed support for Ukraine from the Repub­lican plat­form in 2016. His campaign manager, Paul Mana­fort, was being paid by pro-Russian olig­archs. And Trump’s first impeach­ment was promp­ted by his corrupt bid to black­mail Pres­id­ent Vlodymyr Zelensky, threat­en­ing to deny milit­ary aid unless the Ukrain­ian concocted smears against Joe Biden and his family. (I write about it in the journal Demo­cracy in a review of Rep. Adam Schiff’s book.)

Ukraine is far from perfect. It’s corrupt and domin­ated by olig­archs. Like Russia it has a bloody ethnon­a­tion­al­ist history. But when Ukraine — the coun­try from which my family fled after anti-Semitic pogroms that killed tens of thou­sands — elec­ted a Jewish pres­id­ent without batting an eye, it suggests some­thing very differ­ent and very hope­ful lives there.

No illusions: Evil Vladimir Putin will try everything to bomb the Ukraine into submission

If noth­ing else, the emotional outpour­ing for Ukraine can remind us of why we must fight for our own demo­cracy. When Zelensky and his people talk about “free­dom” and “demo­cracy” they aren’t just spout­ing slogans. They are risk­ing their lives. The images from Kyiv display the beauty and the power of a system based on the accu­mu­lated choices of millions of citizens, and why we must fight for it — and that fight is some­thing we must wage here, in our own home, as well.