Most of the poverty and misery in the world is due to bad government, lack of democracy, weak states, internal strife, and so on.
We in the United States are very often - since we are a democracy and we have national interests, we've often made the mistake that a democracy has to adopt America's interests, and that is a contradiction because a democracy basically is people deciding what their interests are.
I call government that works the best for people open society, which is basically just another more general term for a democracy that is - you call it maybe a liberal democracy. It's not only majority rule but also respect for minorities and minority opinions and the rule of law. So it's really a sort of institutional democracy.
I chose America as my home because I value freedom and democracy, civil liberties and an open society.
If we care about universal principles such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law, we cannot leave them to the care of market forces; we must establish some other institutions to safeguard them.
We can speak of the triumph of capitalism in the world, but we cannot yet speak about the triumph of democracy. There is a serious mismatch between the political and the economic conditions that prevail in the world today.
A full and fair discussion is essential to democracy.
To my mind, there is a solution which has to do with democracy, because democratic governments are subject to the will of the people. So, if the people will it, you can actually create international institutions through the democratic states.
Democracy, by its very nature, can't be imposed on people. Democracy has to be the people deciding for themselves.
Advocating democracy has, by other people, often been taken as a form of imperialism, and not without some justification. So the important thing in a democracy is that it doesn't necessarily have to agree with what America's interests are, and it doesn't necessarily have to be serving American interests.
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