The Clash Within Liberal Democracy: Israel, the United States, and the West

I.

Different as they are, Israel and the United States suffer from similar forms of political discord, social fracture, cultural dislocation, and ideological distortion. Their struggles to maintain cohesion and order, moreover, are more than their own. They illuminate contemporary liberal democracy’s discontents and underscore the need to renew appreciation throughout the West of the principles of freedom and democracy.

Israel is a small country of about 10 million in the Middle East. Located almost 6,000 miles away in North America, the United States is a global superpower with a population of some 330 million. Whereas Israel, not yet 75 years old, adopted a parliamentary system that operates without a formal constitution, the United States established a presidential system almost 250 years ago based on a popularly ratified written constitution. Israel faces a multiplicity of national-security threats in a region awash with authoritarianism. In contrast, great oceans and peaceful democratic neighbors surround the United States even as it must project military power around the world and maintain readiness to fight simultaneously on multiple fronts in different regions to advance its interests—and those of peoples and nations around the world—in preserving a free and open international order. The world’s only country in which Jews are a majority, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. By honoring its founding principles and constitutional imperatives, the United States has enabled its tiny Jewish minority—a little over 2 percent of the population—to flourish as has no previous Jewish minority.