Political Quotes

“Senator Merkley and I serve on the Foreign Relations Committee together, and what we have watched together, over the course of our time on that committee, is a reversal of what was called by some scholars ``the end of history.'' There was this idea that democracy was going to be triumphant in the world; that in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, democracy--participatory, open democracies--and capitalist economies had, effectively, won the fight and that it was just a matter of time before the rest the world was living in a system like ours that respects the rule of law and allows for those who want to protest their government to do so under the protection of law. And much of our outreach to the Communist Party in China during the 1980s and 1990s came under the presumption that even China would eventually fall under the crushing weight of an advancing democracy. We now know that to not be true because we are at a moment in time in which we hear on the Foreign Relations Committee uninterrupted testimony of countries that we would have, even just a decade ago, accepted and named as a democracy, starting to slide away from the rule of law, away from the protection of speech into something else. Now, you don't go from a democracy into an autocracy overnight. So many of the countries we are concerned about are in that transition. We hope that an active United States, playing a role for democracy promotion in the world, can help pull them back.…”