This is from Pew's research, and they stopped collecting data at 2016. I don't know why, maybe it's just too embarrassing. But my guess is after 2016, according to what I read in news reports, Tunisia's situation had gone even much worse. And now we have a new regime, I'm not predicting whether this new leader will succeed or fail, I'm just saying there has been a big change, because it has been so bad. Tunisia was where Arab Spring began and was billed as a shining example of the Arab Spring, and later the only success story of the Arab Spring. This is very confusing, the data and the facts are very confusing.
Then, come back to the summit of democracy that's about to take place next week, China is not on invite list. But 110 places were invited, very diverse group of countries, very different in historical development, culture and economics. I just ran the numbers, how they did with one of the most pressing crises of our times, the Covid-19 pandemic. These 110 invitees accounted for 4.4 billion population, which is 56% of the world's population.They had 4.2 million fatalities, which is 83% of the world's total. Unfortunately, these countries handled it badly. Three most prominent players in this group, The U.S. had 3/4 million deaths; Brazil, 610,000; India, 470,000. And by the way, the U.S and India, each respectively claim that one is the oldest democracy in the world, and one is the largest democracy in the world. So, what is going on with democracy？
I'm not an expert, I'm not Larry Diamonds, but I want to, from a businessman's perspective, venture a diagnosis.I studied the methodologies that are being used by Freedom House, and V-Dem and those institutions when they evaluate democracies. And I found something very interesting, they only measure a particular set of institutional procedures. And these procedures strike me as very specific to liberal politics and liberal societies, certain kind of elections, freedom of press, just liberal values. It seems to me that the disconnect is, maybe they're measuring liberalism, not democracy. They're measuring one kind of democracy called liberal democracy, and at that they're only measuring the liberal part.
We all know that democracy long preceded liberalism by at least a couple of thousand years. The democracy in ancient Greece was decidedly not liberal. And many scholars argue China’s Confucian values have a lot of democratic elements, but China is not liberal. Liberalism only exists, only was born at the onset of the modern era.During the enlightenment, a lot of great thinkers like Locke, Montesquieu, Mill, they proposed revolutionary ideas about how to govern human societies. And they centered around a set of values that we now call liberalism. The individual being the center of the universe, autonomous, private property was virtually sacred, a procedural take on the rule of law, and these values became political institutions that we call liberal institutions.
