Democracy as a Moral Principle

KEVIN MALONEY: Good evening, everybody. My name is Kevin Maloney, and I serve as chief public affairs officer here at Carnegie Council. I am honored to welcome you all to the latest convening in the Council’s Values & Interests event series, which aims to interrogate the relationship between morality and power in the practice of geopolitics. Tonight’s fireside chat will feature Carnegie Council President Joel Rosenthal in conversation with Freedom House CEO Jamie Fly.

Jamie recently joined Freedom House after a multi-decade career working across the foreign policy, democracy, and humanitarian spaces, where he served as CEO of Radio Free Europe, held leadership roles at the German Marshall Fund, and worked within the George W. Bush administration at the National Security Council.

Before passing the program over to Joel, because we are at Carnegie Council I want to provide a bit of an ethical framing for tonight’s conversation. I want to share a short quote from Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen from his 1999 article, “Democracy as a Universal Value.” In the piece, Dr. Sen asked: “What is a universal value? For a value to be considered universal, must it have the consent of everyone? If that were indeed necessary, then the category of universal values might well be empty. I would argue that universal consent is not required for something to be a universal value. Rather, the claim of a universal value is that people anywhere may have reason to see it as valuable.”

In these words, I think Dr. Sen offers a very apt question and a claim to be interrogated in this transitionary moment of geopolitics and in our conversation here at Carnegie Council. With that, I am going to pass the program over to Joel.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Thank you, Kevin. What a great way to start our new season, and you can never miss by quoting Amartya Sen. Thank you also for arranging all of this. I like the title, and I hope this will make your speaking engagement here special, “Democracy as a Moral Principle,” to distinguish it from many other opportunities you might have to speak on this topic. Thank you all for coming. Jamie, thank you for coming all the way to New York to do this with us.

We are going to start a little bit lofty, as Kevin cued us to, then we will move into something more specific. I know that Freedom House is celebrating its 85th anniversary. Maybe you could talk a little bit about this. What I am interested in is the concept of freedom and how it was being used, mobilized, and empowered in 1941. Maybe you can talk about that origin moment and then link it to where we are in 2026 and how you think about that evolution in making it “meet the moment,” if you will, today. With that easy question, I am going to hand it to you for some remarks.

JAMIE FLY: Thanks, Joel, for doing this, and thank you to the Carnegie Council for hosting.

Freedom House was founded in 1941, at a moment when there was rising isolationism in the United States, there were active debates about the role of the United States in the world, and there were significant looming challenges, most clearly Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, that were threatening our democratic allies overseas. There was an ongoing effort by the FDR administration obviously to begin to bring the American public along with the idea that this was a fight that the United States should actually be engaged in.

Even though we have never been a governmental institution, there was a quiet discussion about what groups could do to help support that argument from the outside. Our cofounders, Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR’s wife, and Wendell Willkie, who interestingly had just run against FDR and lost the presidential election the year before, banded together to found Freedom House. Our initial efforts were mostly as an advocacy organization, so prominent Americans, not all from politics but also from business—we had people from Hollywood on our initial board—people of diverse political views but who agreed that America had an important role to play in the world, and that was a role in favor of supporting freedom.

The first campaign that we engaged in as an institution, starting in 1941, was a lobbying effort to build public support for U.S. intervention in World War II. For the first several decades we engaged in a lot of other similar efforts on issues like the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Marshall Plan to support U.S. allies after the war and reconstruction, but then over time also issues related to freedom here at home and U.S. democracy, so speaking out against McCarthyism, supporting the civil rights movement, and in those early decades becoming an umbrella organization that housed and even supported other institutions, including many in the civil rights movement. There was an original Freedom House right across from the New York Public Library.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: So it was not just a metaphor?

JAMIE FLY: No. I walked by a plaque yesterday honoring Wendell Willkie that faces the old Freedom House, which has now been destroyed unfortunately and does not exist, but in that building many other nonprofits in their early phases were given space and allowed to create and begin to do their work, including on U.S. democracy.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I was not going to ask this, but you opened the door: Do you still see yourself as an internationalist institution? In other words, in terms of not necessarily interventionist versus isolationist, but in 2026 how do you think about that question?

JAMIE FLY: It is an important part of our DNA, and I would say that is still who we are with parallels to the current moment with rising isolationism. Certainly you can see it on the right, but I think you see elements of it on the left too. There are very active debates in our politics and also fatigue amongst the public about the sense of whether America can achieve great things overseas and whether we should even try, so we are engaging in different ways in that debate, and as we move beyond our 85thanniversary we will certainly be doing more of that.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I want to turn to the domestic side. How does freedom the way you think about it relate to democracy? In other words, is democracy an intrinsic part of your concept of freedom?

JAMIE FLY: We focus primarily on the fundamental freedoms first. Obviously, that includes the right to choose your leaders, so democracy is an important component of that. We also look in our various research reports, including “Freedom in the World,” which is the leading democracy index globally, which has been running for 53 years. We have significant data to back up our research findings. We also look at how democracies are functioning, whether they are functioning, and whether there is balance between the different elements of democracies.

Obviously, not all democracies are the same. There are parliamentary democracies that do not have the inherent checks and balances that the U.S. constitutional democracy does, but we do look at whether democracy is meeting the demands of the citizens, and that is an important part of how we assess the state of freedom for the individual ultimately.

To look at our methodology, it is very much focused on the experience of an individual, whether their freedoms are being respected, and whether they can truly live in freedom. We call ourselves a “democracy” organization, but for us inherently it is about the fundamental freedom part.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I am curious. What do you do with this concept of “illiberal democracy,” the idea that you have voters, sometimes by large majorities, supporting illiberal policies which lead to unfree circumstances? Have you wrestled with that concept?

JAMIE FLY: We have. In our “Freedom in the World” rankings, we rank every country in the world on a scale of 100. Countries move up and down from year to year, depending on what is happening in the various categories we assess. There have been multiple countries, especially over the last decade, that are established democracies—our matrix is Fully Free, Partly Free, and Unfree—and some of the Fully Free countries have been declining. We have had 20 years of global democratic decline across all countries in the world, but even within the democracy category we have had established democracies—India, Hungary, Poland— including the United States where we have documented a 12-point decline over 20 years in our index, and a lot of those are examples of illiberal democracy.

I think in most cases the voters are not looking at the populist leaders they are electing assuming that is going to be the outcome, but we see democratically elected leaders taking that advantage to tighten their grip on power and make sure they can extend their time in office. We have documented that in our research as well, looking at how democratically elected leaders use tactics to extend their rule and overstay their terms. We have seen structural changes with gerrymandering and things like that as well. We have certainly been documenting those issues. It is not a “one size fits all” situation. I think each of these countries has gone through a unique dynamic.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Do you rank at all the different types of freedoms, in other words, like freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, or are you just descriptive and think that they are all sort of equal in terms of their weighting?

JAMIE FLY: We don’t place any one above the others, but, yes, we look at each of them in detail within those countries on a yearly basis and assess what has happened in those categories.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Are there any major trends you can report from your last report?

JAMIE FLY: Yes. The 20 years of decline. We hate having to paint a pretty bleak picture for two decades, so every year we are kind of the Bad News Bears of the democracy world, and we have many colleagues in other organizations who are always giving me a hard time when I am on panels with them because they don’t like to hear. People have been working with us for 20 years moving in the opposite direction, and then here we come in with our data and show where the trends are going.

Obviously, freedom of expression has been threatened in many countries over the last several decades. Freedom of speech is an issue, especially with access to independent information. Some of these are structural issues related to the fact that everyone now goes online to get their news and information and the collapse of independent media around the globe, so it is not just a U.S. phenomenon. I saw that firsthand as president of Radio Free Europe across 27 countries in Eurasia. It was the same story there that it is here, so that has had a major impact.

We have also had all kinds of issues like the rise of increased armed conflict in certain places, like Africa. That was one of the biggest drivers of a lot of the countries that were backsliding over the last 20 years there. You have coups, obviously, which are significant setbacks to any kind of fledgling democracy, but then when you also have instability and conflict that bleeds over across borders, threatens the stability of neighboring countries, and makes it more difficult for countries that might be Partly Free to make that progression to the next level.

One major issue that we documented in that report as well is the fact that the authoritarians, most notably Russia and China, but then also the lesser authoritarians like Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba, have all gotten savvier about how they repress their own people. We were talking earlier about how 20 years ago we all thought technology would come in and just spread democracy around the globe, and you saw hints of that with the Arab Spring being an organizing tool for those fighting for freedom, but we have now seen the authoritarians master that technology and turn it around to their own advantage to exert more control over the internet and just shut down the entire internet in a country like Iran, which is going through the longest Internet outage during the conflict for the very purpose of societal control.

Also, they are exporting those tactics that they have discovered to client states but also to countries where they just want economic influence and even reaching into established democracies, like our own or European democracies, to try to influence politics and try to shape our discourse using social media. Those are all things that we believe have contributed to those 20 years of global democratic decline.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Is your job harder now in the sense of the backdrop as an American in terms of what the current administration is doing and saying in terms of language? Our theme is “values and interests.” The president and executive authorities of this country are talking the language of interests and are somewhat dismissive of the language of values. Does that make your job harder? How does that bounce for you? I know you have been traveling, and I want to talk about your travels to other places.

JAMIE FLY: I started my career in the George W. Bush administration during the Iraq War years, going to Europe, and I was initially working on trans-Atlantic relations during that period, which was a pretty brutal environment. There have always been, for the last several decades, aspects of U.S. foreign policy that have not been popular around the world. I do think obviously we are at a point if you look at all—we don’t do polling—that global analysis, but I have seen some of the opinion polls, so I do think we are at a low point right now in terms of perceptions of American leadership and American tactics.

For us as an institution, we are a respected global brand. Countries care about how Freedom House ranks them, interestingly, which is something I did not quite realize before I started at Freedom House six months ago, but I routinely now meet with foreign ministers, presidents, and others who are very interested in understanding our analysis of their democracy. They do not really care, to be honest, that we are an American institution doing this because we have been at it for so long, and I think they understand that we are objective in how we approach the methodology as we look at the state of their democracy.

The one thing I will say that has deeply troubled me in my time at Freedom House is that it is not just a U.S. phenomenon. President Trump is obviously on one extreme end with his view of these issues and focus on interests, but the thing I think we have seen happen over the last decades, because this worldview started in his first term, many other countries, including established democracies, are adopting the same approach. I think they are not as brazen and willing to speak publicly about how they are approaching the world, but if you look at the state of global funding for democracy assistance, it is in decline everywhere. It is not just a U.S. phenomenon.

Now they are not all doing Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and not all wiping it out overnight, but as I talk to major European donors, they are all cutting back in this space, and they did not surge support to fill the gap left by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) or by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the State Department, partly because they and their budgets are also under pressure and they are spending more on defense because of the United States’ unwillingness to support some of their European defense needs, but many of those governments are making hardheaded decisions about what is truly in their national interest.

The frightening thing I think from a Freedom House perspective is that they are not prioritizing democracy and values the way they were ten years ago. It also then leads to whether they are willing to advocate and speak out on behalf of these values, but then also individual cases—political prisoners and activists under pressure—so a lot of the authoritarians and a lot of the regimes that are targeting the frontlines of advocates for freedom are getting much more of a pass than they would have five or ten years ago, and I think many of these countries are unfortunately following the U.S. lead.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: You mentioned before we met today that you have traveled to both Poland and Hungary. I am curious to hear what you learned and if it portends anything in terms of trends of where things are going in terms of democracy.

JAMIE FLY: We look at this through the rankings, but also as an institution try to learn from a number of other countries that are going through transformation and we have been looking at some of these cases like Poland and Hungary, where you had populist governments that moved into power and then then you had elections that lead to change where some of the structural impediments that the populist governments put in place needed to be removed and undone.

Poland is one case with Law and Justice, a much shorter period than Hungary, where Orbán was in power for a decade and a half, but both are fascinating just because it is shown that it is incredibly difficult in a truly democratic way to undo some of the damage that can be done to democracy, and you have had heated debates in both Poland and Hungary when the Supreme Court becomes politicized, and then you need to unravel that. Is there a way to do it so that you are not violating the constitution in response? It becomes a pendulum swaying back and forth in each direction. That is one challenge.

Public media is a common theme in each of these cases, and you saw both in Poland and Hungary where public media became completely politicized by one party in power and essentially became the mouthpiece for the government and did not present a broad variety of views. Again, how do you undo that? In the case of Hungary, it was a much broader effort by Orbán to completely wipe out independent media and only allow and only create the economic structure to support pro-Orbán media.

I followed the Hungarian media situation quite closely when I was at Radio Free Europe because I took Radio Free Europe back to Hungary after Congress asked us to do that in 2019. That switched almost overnight with the new government because the key there was the money, and as soon as they redirected the state advertising budget, which was how Orbán propped up the pro- Orbán media, and again made it fair and the state advertisers were told, “Any independent media outlet that has an audience you should advertise with them and pay them.” The old pro-Orbán outlets basically disappeared and fell apart because they had no money anymore. They had no actual sustainable economic model. Now you have a vibrant Hungarian media landscape once again. People who had fled Hungary to go to other places to work in media are now coming back because they realize that the model has been restored.

The United States is obviously not the same in each of these areas even though you have had some similar efforts under the Trump administration to influence media and threaten media through the Federal Communications Commission, but there are some interesting lessons that can be learned.

The other thing, though, which is not something we document at Freedom House but just from a personal perspective, is that you saw in both Poland and Hungary, which I think will be much more difficult to copy here, is that a big part of the way the populists were defeated was by co-opting some of their positioning on hot topics. In both of those cases, immigration was key. The anti-populist forces actually co-opted the immigration positions of the populists. They did not do it in an extreme rhetorical way, but if you look at the substance of their immigration proposals, they are slightly to the right of the populace. Magyar in Hungary has essentially the same if not a slightly tougher policy on migration than Orbán did, and they took that hot-topic issue, which was driving and fueling a lot of the popular support, completely out of the election, and the populists were not able to wield it in the same way.

For us, given where we are as a country, it is going to be much more difficult for that sort of dynamic to play out in our politics, but it was a key part of the ultimate downfall of the populists.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Has this experience informed the work you will be doing looking at the United States in terms of threats to democracy here?

JAMIE FLY: It does. We factor it in. We apply the same methodology to the United States that we apply to every other country in our annual report. We are looking at ways as an organization where we can do more regular reporting on what is going on in the United States. Right now—just because of how fast the situation is changing here, which is one of the limitations of our model of Freedom in the World because it is a once-a-year snapshot, and when there is a lot in flux you can miss things if you are only looking at that once-a-year snapshot—we will probably have some more news later this fall about some new products that will look at the United States specifically on a more regular basis.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I want to ask a couple more questions, and then I am going to turn to the audience, so be ready, and these are more technology-focused. You already mentioned the early days of the Internet, when there was an optimism of technology being an enhancement to democracy. I think we are seeing now some of the more problematic sides of it. I am curious how you and your organization are looking in a broad way at that challenge to freedom.

JAMIE FLY: We as an institution have another product called Freedom on the Net, in which we look at the state of Internet freedom. We prioritize in our methodology the ability of the individual adult to have access to information freely on the internet, so we inherently as an institution are skeptical of government control on the internet, mainly because we see the potential for abuse primarily by authoritarians.

I mentioned before such things as shutting down the Internet, filtering, and I witnessed this firsthand as president of Radio Free Europe in places like Putin’s Russia where, up until February 2022, all the information that my organization provided in Russian was freely available to any Russian who wanted to log onto our website. You did not even need to use a virtual private network. Then almost overnight they began to close that pipeline of information. It has gotten smaller and smaller ever since, and now they are back to controlling the Internet in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. You don’t even have mobile Internet on many days, and they are directing everyone to Kremlin-controlled apps to ensure that only they have the oversight of where people get their news and information. That is a concerning ability of government for us, and we worry that even in democracies can be abused over time if governments are allowed to regulate internet access and information that people can consume online.

The flip side of that is that the U.S. government, particularly Congress, has not been able to keep up with the most advanced technologies. We never saw serious discussions about social media regulation despite the clear issues that were identified repeatedly, everything from foreign malign abuse of social media and influencing our politics to hate content, which now is rampant on key social media platforms and somewhat on others, and the impact on children and teenagers and their mental health.

Social media was an area where there was no regulation. I think we as an institution have always advocated for at least more transparency from the tech companies about their algorithms, about how this information that gets fed to you through your newsfeed actually ends up there, because I think that is a big part of the problem, that people do not have enough agency and choice in what they consume. They think they do. The platforms give the appearance and the allure that you are in charge, but the reality is that you have no idea what data behind that is feeding the algorithm decisions about what you are seeing.

Now with artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) there is going to be another debate, and the challenge there is how fast the technology is moving. Clearly our democratic institutions are up for that challenge as they are moving fast.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: You teed me up perfectly. I wanted to share with you something that crossed my desk from an author who writes for our journal Ethics & International Affairs, a guy by the name of Rob Sparrow, who teaches in Australia. I am going to read you a paragraph of this article. He talks about the term “algocracy,” combining “algorithm” and “governance.”

This is the quote: “Given contemporary enthusiasm for AI, there is good reason to fear that we may in the not-too-distant future become, if not slaves to the algorithms, unfree by virtue of being subject to the arbitrary power of those who design and/or authorize the use of the algorithms that will determine our individual and collective fates.”

I just wanted to share that with you, and I wonder if AI dominance is a threat to freedom in the world as you define it.

JAMIE FLY: It certainly is, and we have seen the leading edge of this in places like China, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using mass surveillance and deploying technology to control their citizens at every level. There is a lot of convenience theoretically for the average citizen in terms of their lives, how they can order food, and interact with government, but lurking beneath the surface is a very dystopian future where people end up losing agency.

As an institution, primarily what we are concerned about is how the authoritarians are already abusing this technology to limit the freedoms of their citizens. In cases like China, as I mentioned before with social media too, they export all of these tools to smaller wannabe authoritarians around the world.

I think there are questions within our own democracy as well. I worry, as someone who also worked in the Senate a decade ago, about our institutions’ ability to respond quickly. I saw earlier this week that there was talk possibly of a Select Committee on AI, which I think is a fantastic idea and might be the one sort of thing that can break through. You have seen elements of it with a Select Committee on China that was formed several years ago as a bipartisan effort to set up a “supercommittee” that does not have to work through the slow processes of the existing structures. If you get the right people on there and they have a clear mandate, maybe something could begin to come out of Congress in terms of some sort of limited—

JOEL ROSENTHAL: You are talking about regulation?

JAMIE FLY: I am hesitant on too much regulation again because I think as an institution we do not want to overly limit these capabilities, but I think we need much more public conversation about them. The same issues I talked about with transparency for social media apply to the LLMs and the major companies developing the frontier models.

We know very little about how they are weighting the algorithms that are driving those frontier models. Now we have Chinese open-weight models that are flooding and in many cases copying what OpenAI and Anthropic are doing, but with the current frontier models where we are making the fastest gains there is not a lot of transparency about how they are structured. I think we are going to run into some of those same issues.

I think it is also leading to the same public skepticism now about the technology that we eventually saw about social media. If you look at the backlash that is growing nationally on both sides of the political spectrum about data centers, part of it is that people are hearing all this reporting about AI, seeing these rapid developments, they are worried that they do not completely understand it, and they certainly do not understand what the consequences might be for them and their families. Congress is the logical place and possibly the presidential election for a lot of these issues to be debated.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I have one last big question for you, and then we will open it up to the audience here and online. I do not want to be too dramatic about it, but it seems a little dark right now. Geopolitically, you are mentioning authoritarian states that are feeling some power and influence, and on the domestic side you have forces of illiberalism threatening democracy here in this country and around the world. Then we have the technology challenges as well, which at best are mixed. Where do you get your optimism from? We talked before, but where do you see things going? Give us some sense of that.

JAMIE FLY: I would say two things that are more optimistic. In our 20-year overview which highlighted global democratic decline what we found, though, is that fully established democracies are pretty resilient. I think something like 85 percent of the countries that were democracies in 2005 ended up still as Fully Free countries in 2025. That is a great track record. Our research generally has shown that if you reach that level of fully established, Fully Free country, you are likely to stay there, and all these issues we are talking about here, even with the Hungarys and Polands, you are fluctuating perhaps, but democratic institutions inherently, once they are established, are incredibly resilient.

My personal view, whatever my pessimism at times is about what is going on in the United States, is that I think we have seen elements in that even in our structure as various branches of the government have pushed back against the excesses of the others. I personally would like to see more of that, especially in Congress, again as a former Senate staffer. I think that institution has been in a much longer decline, even predating 2016. That needs to be reversed for our democracy to be fully healthy over time, but I think there is a certain resilience there.

That democratic decline I talked about that we did see was more in the Partly Free category. The fledgling democracies struggle to graduate, and a lot of them end up falling back, and that is partly because of the authoritarian pressures I highlighted.

On the incredibly optimistic side—and we need to remember this constantly—the authoritarians are incredibly brittle, no matter how powerful they look, whether it is Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela. They all are teetering on the edge at any one moment. Those regimes have had to tighten controls more and more. The fact that if you are in downtown Moscow and perhaps you cannot get mobile Internet is not a sign of strength.

By the way, Putin is worried about Russian people just being able to surf the web, and again that was not the case even 18 months ago. That is an important signal. There are more political prisoners today in Russia than there were during the height of the Soviet Union. Again, that is not a sign of strength from Vladimir Putin.

Finally, the thing that we have a lot of chance to work with at Freedom House and always inspires us, is that we work with a lot of those political prisoners, help advocate for them, and help them get released—dissidents, activists, and people who continue their work despite the pressure they are under and the fact that they are still being targeted by transnational oppression by the authoritarians even after they flee their country. We do a lot of work documenting those cases of the long arm of the CCP abroad.

They are an incredibly optimistic group of people. These are people who have lost everything and had to leave their home countries, and all of them always hope, and certainly me and I think us as an institution, because we keep the long view.

It always looks bleak in many of these cases, but there is still a lot of cause for optimism even about the near term I think in where some of these countries are headed because ultimately as an institution we believe in the fundamental power of freedom enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and our core historical documents. That is a powerful phenomenon ultimately that I think will outlast all of these authoritarian tactics even as they leverage new technology.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: We are going to open things up.

QUESTION: Thanks so much. I just want to ask a question about Freedom House itself and the branding you touched on earlier. How do you maintain the reputation that you do in an era when a lot of institutions and their legitimacy are being challenged, especially by maybe democracies that have slipped a bit or are falling a bit closer to authoritarianism, for example, in the United States, some institutions have been attacked by the government and their legitimacy challenged? I am wondering how Freedom House does that because you do deal in reporting on the democratic reputation of a lot of democracies. Have you had to deal with potential attacks in certain countries where their ratings have fallen? How does Freedom House maintain that reputation, and if not, how might an institution like it prepare for a potential one?

JAMIE FLY: It is an important question. We do get criticized all the time by countries and governments that do not like our rankings. The team has told me many stories about the days after we release Freedom in the World every year. Occasionally staff arrived at the office in the morning to find people waiting in the building lobby from embassies who do not ask for an appointment in advance but show up to lobby us in person with their complaints. I think in the last release earlier this year we noticed an uptick immediately in the days that followed in certain countries in social media—I won’t mention any names here—we skyrocketed in mentions in the 48 hours after because you see the troll farms activating and trying to go after Freedom House with their complaints about our rankings.

I was at an international conference about six weeks ago and got seated next to—again, I won’t mention the name of the country—a cabinet official from a very small African government, who I think had asked to be seated next to me because he ended up spending the whole lunch lobbying me and asking, “Why do you guys rate us so low?”

The interesting thing is that Congress—they have not enshrined Freedom House by name in this—for certain U.S. assistance packages you have to meet certain democracy standards, and traditionally some of these U.S. institutions have used Freedom House rankings. This country in particular had been denied U.S. assistance because they did not meet the democracy rankings, so for them it was a very acute issue. They do not hold elections in that country, so my response was, “Well, maybe if you start holding elections, you might start moving up.” But it is usually good-natured.

I think the bottom line is that we adhere to a very clear methodology, and we are very balanced and objective in how we do our research. We are not an opinion organization from that perspective, so if we stick to our own standards, it is much more difficult I think for people or governments to dismiss our rankings. I think we are generally respected for that adherence to our methodology and to the rigor of our approach.

QUESTION: Thank you for an interesting conversation. You spoke about AI and potential risks. How do you use AI in your work? I assume that in order to do this study of so many countries you have to go through a huge amount of data. I guess AI could help you go much deeper and look for trends that are not obvious.

JAMIE FLY: We are debating that constantly right now. The answer is that we are not using it enough, but we are actively looking at ways to use it more. We want to be very careful about any of the issues of using AI for writing and things like that, but you are right. We have 53 years of data from Freedom in the World, we have data from Freedom of the Net for many years, so you can find things in those data sets using AI that a human analyst would have taken much longer to ever see in the trends analysis.

We are right now working with a number of companies who are willing to work with nonprofits to make some of their tools available hopefully for free or at a reduced rate to do some trial projects. We are still in an experimentation mode.

The other way we have looked at using it is that we have some unique trackers that look at global incidents and have databases of things like transnational oppression. Some of the sources we use are in multiple languages. Some of them are obscure outlets that cover these issues. This is another area where AI tools theoretically could be incredibly helpful, scraping on a regular basis global Internet data and pooling together information that can be reviewed by our staff which otherwise again would have taken hours or days for them to do themselves. We are looking at doing those sorts of things in all of the areas, but it is still very much in the pilot phase.

I have only been there seven months, but I think we like many institutions were initially very cautious in the early days of AI because of worries about privacy and worries about where any data would go that we would share, and we are still worried about those sorts of things. We don’t want our proprietary data feeding the major LLM companies and them just grabbing it and using it for their own purposes. But now, as the technology has developed, we have evolved our posture on AI to allow us to experiment more in these areas. I think in the next year hopefully we will have some new things that we can do with our data based on the work we are doing right now.

QUESTION: Thanks for a really interesting conversation. I was struck by what you said about the export of authoritarian playbooks. In some ways it took me back 15 years, when I did a study on the diffusion of democracy. This was during a brief moment when digital technology was facilitating this diffusion, 2011, 2012. We looked at a number of different channels through which this might occur, like immigration networks, communication networks, and shared language.

What are the ways beyond client states in which illiberal democracies or authoritarian tactics are diffusing? In particular, given the threat that AI poses to information retrieval by citizens, where you are going to lose due to the fact that there is one answer rather than a bunch of Google results and also because it threatens the business models of a number of news media—AI by itself could be threatening the diversity of information retrieval. Do you see AI export as one of those mechanisms? Is this largely deliberate or is it just happening, where one country sees another and absorbs it?

JAMIE FLY: I have a lot of thoughts from my time at Radio Free Europe watching across Eurasia how the Chinese and Russians have exported some of these capabilities. We at Freedom House believe that the United States and other democracies should be bold in their efforts to export democracy and support fledgling democracies, and we—the United States and other governments—have failed quite a bit, and that has partly led to the 20 years of democratic decline. Now we are in an even more dire situation because our own government and other governments are stepping back from a lot of that funding and basically ceding even more space.

We are doing some work right now to look at lessons learned from that period when it comes to U.S. democracy assistance and pooling some experts together to come up with ideas about where U.S. democracy assistance should go going forward. I believe we actually need to look at what the authoritarians have done. I think historically we have said, “Oh, we are not them, we are not going to act like them,” but if you look at the tactics they use, they are very sophisticated, and I think there are elements we need to adopt in how we approach this.

For one thing, they are incredibly flexible and nimble, which you never could have said about USAID or pretty much anything funded by a U.S. government agency. We are very bureaucratic. We invest in things for years if not decades. We do not admit that something is not working and cut off the funds.

What I watched the Russians do in almost every country, like Moldova or Central Asia is, they went in, and if it was something in the information space they would dabble, try things. They would launch a new brand and try it for three months, and if it got an audience and was working, they would double down. If it did not, they would just cancel and move on as if it had never happened.

It was almost impossible to do that. I had a $150 million budget at Radio Free Europe, and I tried to start instituting elements of that, but because of reporting structures and oversight mechanisms no one wanted to admit defeat after such a limited period. But if you have guerrilla sensibility in some of these tools, that is the way the CCP and Russians have gone.

They have done the same with technology investment. There I think they have just taken advantage of the fact that U.S. technology was often much more expensive and out of reach for many countries, so many countries, fledgling democratic states in Africa, central Asia, or the Balkans probably did not want Chinese tech, just like they did not want Chinese infrastructure, but they had no other alternatives. U.S. companies were not investing, European investment was not what it could have been, and it was not organized and state-directed in any way, so you did not have the U.S. government coming in or even offering them anything.

That is one thing where I will give the Trump administration some credit. They have prioritized economic statecraft like you would not believe. The problem is that they are doing so without any discussion of values. They are not even bringing the values piece into it.

I actually think there is a way to integrate smarter U.S. economic statecraft with a values conversation, but right now we do not have it either. That is another key aspect I think of why the authoritarians have been so successful.

The final thing I will say on AI is that I am personally not sure where I have landed on this yet. There is an ongoing debate now in Washington about the open Chinese model that I mentioned earlier. There are a lot of national security professionals who believe we should do everything possible to limit the spread of those Chinese models and focus on the closed U.S. models. The problem, though, is that we are going to have the same issues with the closed models, the frontier models. They are so expensive that many U.S. companies are starting to go to Chinese models for a lot of their work because they do not want to pay for all the tokens to process their data needs.

I come out of the national security world, and I understand all the national security concerns about the Chinese models, but I fear we could get into this environment again where China essentially controls the technology for the developing world and is using it to advance its own goals, and we have walled ourselves off and made ourselves feel good about limiting our own use of those models, but we have done nothing to help bring others along.

I think there are glimmers of hope there. There are initiative from the administration like the Pax Silica initiative that the State Department has been pushing to try to make U.S. tech available to countries that otherwise would not be able to afford it, but I think that is an important part of the equation so that we do not end up repeating some of the mistakes we have made over the last 20 years.

QUESTION: You mentioned the extension of executive power at the expense of Congress in the American political system. Are there any particular countries, past or present, that we can look to for strategies of how Congress or parliament or elective legislative bodies are able to regain some of their constitutional powers?

JAMIE FLY: Because of how unique our structure is compared to, say, a lot of European-style democracies that are parliamentary where you do not have these concerns about the power of the executive versus the parliament, the problem is here and the solution starts at home too. I am not sure there is a lot we can learn from others.

I think a big part of our problem is social media-related and the way that our politics operates. The incentive structure has completely changed. Again, I worked in the Senate from 2013 to 2017 and I saw this play out. There was a pre-Trump phenomenon already. Many members of Congress were not doing serious legislating or serious committee work.

It was remarkable. When you were behind closed doors, as staffers often were with senators in a committee room, people actually rolled up their sleeves, you could get bipartisan compromise, we could compromise at the staff level and our bosses could compromise at the senator level. As soon as the TV lights went on and you were in a public hearing, it was all for TV and eventually for social media. So it was performative, and it was not usually serious anymore. That is a big part of it.

The other piece that is incredibly important, especially in places like the House, is gerrymandering and the way that most House seats are not even competitive anymore, so you have a tinier and tinier group of districts where there is any real competition, and in the rest of those races the real competition is in the primary and that has dragged both parties to the extreme, so you have fewer and fewer House members who even show up in Washington ever interested in sitting down and accomplishing things.

These are all things that can be addressed. They cannot be addressed all at once, but there are different approaches to tackle each of them, and there are things like money in politics that are fueling all of these, but I think we just need to start chipping away at those sorts of issues to make real progress over time.

People criticize the Trump administration’s view of executive power, but the danger is, and we have seen elements over the years with the use of Executive Orders going back to the Obama administration, that once Executive Branch officials start to use these tools, the next president usually does the same thing, maybe not as extremely as President Trump is doing it, but it is very difficult for Congress to pull back that power unless you change some of the underlying structural dynamics. When it comes to the congressional piece, I do not think that is going to happen quickly, but we do need to start seeing some progress at a low level in some of these individual areas to start moving us in the right direction.

The final thing I would say is that I am much more optimistic about the courts. Again, as a former president of Radio Free Europe, the only reason some of those institutions, which have been threatened by DOGE and the administration—the National Endowment for Democracy is a partner of ours—have survived is because of the judicial branch. They looked at the law that Congress passed, and they made sure that funding continued. That did not happen in every case, but the Trump administration went along with those rulings despite a lot of speculation that they might ignore them. I think, at least with that branch, we have seen them assert, for the most part, their actual constitutional responsibility, but for me Congress is the big piece.

Until Congress gets into a better position, Americans’ confidence in democracy is going to continue to decline, because when they look at how democracy is functioning many of them first think of Congress, and you have seen public opinion polling about Congress being abysmal now for more than a decade, and some of that frustration with Congress is its inability to get anything done.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: We have some great questions from the chat and we have a sizable virtual audience. I am going to share a couple that we can close with before we adjourn the formal session.

This one may pick up on what you were just talking about, Jamie: “I was wondering if we could hear more about new AI-enabled mass surveillance in non-Chinese settings. I am very interested in an ethical discussion on the limits of surveillance within liberal democracies, especially those still concerned with preserving human rights.”

JAMIE FLY: We worry about that at Freedom House with any of these capabilities because we see at one extreme the way authoritarians are using it, but as I mentioned before they can be abused by democratic governments as well. Even for data privacy, Europe has regulations that are fundamentally more extreme than here in the United States. We have legal safeguards, but there are massive holes in them in terms of the information that is collected legally on American citizens on a daily basis. This is not Freedom House’s view or Jamie Fly’s view.

The area that troubles me the most is the commercial data that every one of us is providing to companies whenever we do anything online, data brokers who are mining and selling that data. I think the general public has basically no awareness of what is happening. Through every account they have, every click they do online is being monetized, and as far as I understand there is next to no legal structure. There is some consent usually in terms of clicking through, accepting cookies, and things like that, but people do not understand what they are agreeing to when they do that.

There have been some debates starting in Congress now. There is talk of a Digital Bill of Rights related to that. There is obviously a lot of lobbying against that from that industry. I think that is a place where we start having a conversation to at least have more transparency and raise awareness so at least Americans know.

The interesting thing is that the commercial data I am talking about can also be purchased by our own government. I know there are a lot of conspiracy theories, but the U.S. government cannot actually spy on an American and look at their activities online without the requisite warrants or legal process, but they can go to the same data that every company can buy and buy that data about you just as they can about a foreign citizen for national security reasons. There is a loophole there. I am sure there are some internal safeguards within various law enforcement agencies about how they can or cannot use that data, but there are major gaps that could be closed to deal with those concerns.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: We will close it out with this last question: “What advice do you give to young adults who still believe in a global, collaborative, democratic, connected world given the current landscape?”

JAMIE FLY: I have two teenagers at home, and the main thing I hope for young people is that people need to be engaged politically. That is the biggest thing I am concerned about. Again, we do not do polling, but in our reporting we have noted various generational issues about perceptions of democracy. As you have in certain countries, including our own, institutions which are not seen as functioning, people start to check out and believe that there is no point in being active participants in their communities or running for office or even voting. I think that is the biggest danger ultimately to democracy, that people do not understand the stakes.

One thing we can do at Freedom House, and we are trying to do more of this, is highlight those voices from much more repressive environments to speak frankly about their situations because I think many young people—clearly we are in a different situation compared to the Cold War, where probably people were learning on a regular basis what was going on behind the Iron Curtain, what life was like theoretically in the Soviet Union, and now the world is much more diffuse. There are a lot of threats that are very different.

There is some conversation about what is going on inside China or what life is like in Putin’s Russia, but it is not as immediate perhaps as it once was, so what we at Freedom House try to do is remind people about that situation and highlight those personal stories to drive home the fact that this is what the stakes are and this is why we are blessed to live in a vibrant democracy and to have these fundamental freedoms, but it is still incumbent upon us to actually take advantage of that and use them because if we don’t, there is a much darker alternative that we could be headed toward.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: We are very lucky. Freedom House is a very important democratic institution, and you are bringing new life to it, so thank you for that. Thank you for sharing your experiences with us tonight. With that, I am going to adjourn the formal session, but I will urge all of you who are here in person to join us upstairs to continue the conversation at our reception. Thank you, Jamie.