Context From The Talk

Freedom and Democracy.

We’re in a new era. It’s an era of return to great power competition. We’ve got resourceful, dedicated, and to some extent, narratively if not ideologically driven, powerful authoritarian adversaries who are trying to dirty up, sully, discredit and reverse the very idea of freedom and democracy. We have to push back.

I think there are a striking number of parallels between where we were at the peak of the Cold War, particularly around 1960, and where we are now. And one of them was, around 1960, we got back a sense of purpose and self-confidence and energy in waging this ideological struggle. It is that! It is a struggle for freedom, for the open society, for the equal worth of every human being.

And against all these sources of illiberal ideas, whether they’re radical Islamists, whether they come in the Kremlin version of a kind of white Christian conservative nationalist European stand against the rest of the world, or whether they come in the form of, if not Communism, then the China model of authoritarian capitalism being superior.

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