The advanced levels which the democratic world has attained at the end of lengthy processes may have created the perception in the region that democracy is a distant concept; this perception can be addressed.
Ultimately, it's not our responsibility to turn Afghanistan into a 21st-century, vibrant, economic, liberal democracy with a little L. Our responsibility is to keep Americans safe, to make sure we don't have a failed state in a region. It's not our responsibility to reconstruct Afghanistan.
Liberal democracy is in regression all over the world, and it's a dangerous thing.
I think Russians today have a distorted picture of capitalism, liberal democracy and market economy.
I did not dwell on the issue of Europe during either the 2001 or the 2005 campaigns - despite it being a pivotal personal concern and despite seeing it as something of a litmus test for liberal democracy.
'Solutionism' for me is, above all, an unthinking pursuit of perfection - by means of technology - without coming to grips with the fact that imperfection is an essential feature of liberal democracy.
What we have to do is to definitively remove the last vestiges of power from those who treat terms such as 'liberal democracy,' 'free markets' and 'Europe' with suspicion.
The rise of populism has steadily coalesced movements of millions of people around its divisive us-against-them rhetoric, motivating so many more people to become active political campaigners and party members to champion the case for liberal democracy.
It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes.
The only way that we can win over potential jihadists to liberal democracy is by winning the battle of ideas.
I definitely think America should seek to lead and shape the world and make it safe for liberal democracy. I just don't think military intervention is going to get us there.
Only together do Europe and the U.S. stand a chance of keeping liberal democracy as the central doctrine for organizing world affairs.
There is no state with a democracy except Libya on the whole planet.
We must stand up for the principle of parliamentary democracy and not allow the government's failure in the Brexit process to be a licence for the U.K. to crash out of the E.U. without an agreement.
We will not put a lid on opinions. On the contrary, it is more important than ever that political debates are open and free, even on the most difficult issues. Especially on the most difficult issues. The task is to encourage controversial debates in a form that strengthens democracy.
Our leaders pay lip service to the freedoms that democracy provides while actually supporting an economic structure that imprisons its citizens under more and more debt.
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
Calling representatives every single day, arranging local community meetings, and marching in the streets every Sunday. It's not the path to glory, but it's absolutely essential to maintaining a democracy under threat.
We obviously - I'm from Michigan, so we saw a disproportionate number of these social media ads targeting us, targeting our population. So I want to close that loophole. That's my amendment, so that no foreign entity can buy an ad for or against a candidate in our democracy.
I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.
