Global Trends in Democratic Values—Jeffrey Goldberg at the Z3 Conference 2017
Listen to Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, at the Z3 Conference 2017 as he critically examines the then-current and future state of democracy in both the United States and Israel. Discussing the undermining of democratic norms and institutions, technological disruptions, globalization, and the impact of inferior leadership, Goldberg provides an unflinching analysis of the threats faced by democracies then with shocking relevancy in 2025.
About Our Speaker
Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic and the moderator of Washington Week With The Atlantic. He joined The Atlantic in 2007 as a national correspondent and in 2016 was named the magazine’s 15th editor in chief. During his editorship, The Atlantic has set new audience and subscription records, and won its first-ever Pulitzer Prizes. In 2022, 2023, and 2024, The Atlantic received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence from the American Society of Magazine Editors, the top award in the industry. In 2020, Goldberg was named editor of the year by Adweek, which also named The Atlantic magazine of the year. Before joining The Atlantic, Goldberg served as the Middle East correspondent, and then the Washington correspondent, for The New Yorker.
Video Transcript
Thank you for that kind introduction. I want to talk to you today. It's not gonna be a very hopeful conversation.
I'm not a Rabbi, so I'm not obligated to end on a high note, and I'm gonna end on an extremely low note. But I'll get you there gradually. if an invitation to speak at a conference on the future of democracy had been extended to me a couple of years ago. I might've thought I would be attending a meeting that was substantially theoretical or academic in nature.
And if I've been told that the subject in particular had been a study of democracy in Israel and the United States, I would've argued that the threat to democracy was more immediate and more severe in Israel than here in the US. Today, of course this issue isn't theoretical in nature. The assumption that many of us have made about the durability and stability and exportability of American democratic ideals and practices have proven to be, at least in part faulty and empirically dubious.
As some of my friends in this room know, and I have a lot of friends in this room and a couple of enemies as well no, not enemies just pleasant adversaries. I've been accused from time to time of having fallen under the undue influence of Barack Obama. The people who have made this accusation are mainly people who have fallen under the undue influence of Sheldon Adelson.
But I'm just gonna put that aside. it's true that in some areas I've come to admire the philosophical underpinnings of Obama's worldview. In particular I've come to believe as Obama does or did as we may one day discover that, borrowing from Martin Luther King Jr., The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. In other words, I shared Obama's core belief. The core belief, of a remorselessly, analytical and rational man, that progress is somehow inevitable. It comes in bursts, and sometimes the arc that we're talking about is overly elastic, and sometimes human beings still exhibited enormous capacity for irrationality.
But the Obama view was that history was akin to an arrow that flies in one direction. Until it hits its target. And that target, of course, the ultimate target is what we have come to call the end of history. As you might also deduce, I've also found myself swayed by the thinking of Francis Fukuyama, the great political theorist. His 1989 essay, "the End of History in The Last Man," advanced the view that liberal western democracy is the final inevitable destination of humanity.
Fukuyama wrote, and let me quote here, "what we may be witnessing," and remember, this is 1989 that he's writing this- "what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such, that is the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
Now you didn't have to be a western triumphalist to believe this. And I was a western triumphalist, and I still am in many ways. I had that feeling early in my life because in 1986 I spent some time in the Soviet Union with Refuseniks who educated me very quickly on the absurdities and cruelties and the fatal contradictions of the communist system.
it seemed from the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late eighties and 1990 onward through the 1990s and up at least until the opening days of what we know as the Arab Spring. That Fukuyama's core observation was self-evidently true. Today. I don't think any of us can say with any degree of certainty that our common human future is democratic.
I think all of us can count moments over the past two years in which we thought that maybe history is not an arrow flying forward in more or less straight fashion. Perhaps the arc of justice does not- the arc of history does not bend toward justice. But as my friend and colleague at the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has argued the moral arc bends toward chaos.
Perhaps there's no arc at all. Perhaps humans just toggle back and forth forever between sets of bad ideas. Perhaps people, even American people, don't fully venerate the ideas that undergird our Democratic experiment. I'm gonna try to limit myself to a discussion of events in the two countries that preoccupy us today, the United States and Israel.
then I'm gonna try to provide you quickly with a partial set of reasons why the Democratic arc may be bending back on itself The United States and Israel, both countries have maintained their status as democracies for a very long time. One, obviously for much longer than the other.
Though Israel's democracy is by no means young anymore. American democracy has traditionally been more extolled and venerated more than Israel's. And that's in part because Israel's democratic system is not applied equally across all of the territory that Israel controls. That is a subject for another separate conference.
it must be said in fairness that Israel has maintained its democratic norms inside the green line for many years while surviving in a particularly ruthless and unforgiving part of the world. America is blessed with Canada and Mexico as neighbors. Mexico as a neighbor Israel would kill for a Mexico.
One big bridge. No walls, just a big bridge. Israel's had no such luck in choosing such neighbors. Both countries, Israel and the United States are today under threat. They are, particularly in the case of Israel, under threat from the outside, but the threats from within are, many. Anti-democratic forces in both countries are working assiduously on two fronts simultaneously to weaken the structures and behaviors associated with democratic rule. In both countries, these forces are arguing for changes in the laws and regulations that protect the independence of their judiciaries; the independence and vitality of their free press; the separation of church and state; synagogue and state in the case of Israel; and the principle of robust legislative oversight. In both countries though, these attempts to undermine the law have mainly failed to date.
Something we've learned in recent days is that these institutions are resilient. they have a kind of staying power. It doesn't mean that things won't change, obviously but we do see strength and maturity in these institutions. Where these forces are having far greater success is in the undermining of democratic norms.
These are the unwritten rules and customs that we agree to honor the voluntary restraints on our own behaviors and the behaviors of our leaders that serve the interest of consensual governance, social cohesion, and civil disagreement. I'll give you a couple of examples from Israel and the United States.
I. The first is from Israel. An example. You are all familiar with a breakpoint in the history of Israeli political behavior that occurred on election day in 2015, the election that returned Benjamin Netanyahu to power. Until that moment I had been the camp of Netanyahu skeptics, let's say skeptics, who nevertheless believed that precisely "Rosh Kasheh" Bibi was a kind of a "Rosh Kasheh" that's an Atlantic term, "Rosh Kasheh", with impeccable revisionist credentials he was the leader who was gonna make the hard dealwith the Arabs. But when under electoral pressure, he told his supporters that, quote," Arab voters were coming in droves to the polling stations." I realized that this was a person who would violate.
Whatever Democratic norm needed violating in order to ensure his personal and party success. I don't believe that any of his predecessors, including Menachum Begin and Yitzchak Shamir would've made such a naked and divisive call. This is a direct assault launched by a national leader against a group of his own country citizens based on their ethnicity.
I will note that this incident has lost its capacity to shock because of the subsequent behavior of Donald Trump, but at the time, it seemed to me, at least, it's quite revolutionary. So about Trump. We're gonna go right at it. Like other members of the dreaded MSM, the mainstream media, I could not quite believe even after it happened that Donald Trump could win the presidency simply because he had violated too many of the norms of acceptable political behavior, too quickly- sometimes during the campaign, you remember there were two or three incidents a day in which we were seeing something completely novel on his part. Some of these norms that he violated were of the type that Netanyahu had violated in 2015, the description of Mexican immigrants as rapists, the demonization of Muslim Americans, and so on.
But the moment I realized that Trump had upended norms, I thought were inviolate, holy, even in American, in the American secular sense of Holy came when he attacked John McCain's war record. The fact that Trump did this and then grew in popularity with his base meant that the notions of respect and restraint- two of the crucial pillars of civil society- no longer had salience for a broad swath of the American voting public.
Had another real experience with Trump era norms, violations at a number of rallies, Trump rallies that I went to where the norms violations were occurring left and right. I had a particular experience right after Trump was elected when a senior official of the Trump transition team the incoming Trump White House called me to make a demand on me.
This came complete with yelling and cursing that I do something I was not predisposed to do as the editor of the Atlantic. He didn't like something about my magazine and he wanted me to change it. I've been yelled at and cursed at a lot. I used to be a reporter in Israel, obviously. And I've also done a fair amount of yelling and cursing.
I'm not suggesting that I was shocked by this behavior, but I'll tell you what was different. I had never received such a blunt demand from a White House or a White House transition team. I told this person that this is not the way it works in American journalism. And I suggested that he write a letter that he communicate in some civil way with me, and that I would respond accordingly.
He then sort of cut off our access to the administration, and not just in terms of interviews but physical, access to the White House and Federal Executive Branch offices. If I didn't do what he was asking me or demanding that I do, and I remember as a very, as a break point moment for me, I remember very distinctly saying to this person, " you can't say this."
Embedded in that comment was. Entire history of free press's interaction with an executive branch. And he said, I can say whatever I want to say. And the truth is, he could. It was true. There was no law that said he had to treat the press in a certain way. There was just accepted norms.
We are now 268 days into the Trump presidency. There were 1,192 days left of the term. And most days, bring us something wholly new in our shared democratic experiment. I'm trying now as a journalist not to focus so much on what he says. I'm trying not to go to Twitter at 6:00 AM to look at his latest statements, although most days I actually do.
But what I'm focused on is the reaction of our political and leadership class to the things that he says. Last week, if you recall, for instance, he tweeted, "it's frankly disgusting, the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write and people should look into it." This, of course, is a norms busting sort of thing to say.
One that I should note mimicked with substantially more indirection and politics by Benjamin Netanyahu. In response to this Trump tweet. The speaker of the house was askedto comment on it and Paul Ryan said, quote, "I'm a constitutional conservative and I'm just gonna leave it at that."
The problem lies in the weak response by a person who knows better as much as it lies in the original provocation. To put it simply, democratic values wither and die if they are not nurtured by the leadership of our democracies. If our leaders don't lead, if they don't advocate for constitutional principles—the protections offered by the First Amendment come immediately to mind—then we should have no great expectation that our children's generation will understand them and value them. The question before us then the question for this conference is, why is this happening and why is it happening now? Allow me in the few minutes I have remaining to outline a handful of reasons.
The causes of our democratic deterioration are all interrelated. Each cause is fed by other causes and feeds others in turn. The first is the most superficially obvious: the inferior quality of national leadership across many democracies. This audience will understand immediately what I talk about when I bring up the subject of Israeli politics.
Israel is a miracle in so many ways, so many sectors of Israeli life. Health and technology and agriculture, food and music and literature are superior. Really extraordinary things are happening. They draw the most talented people, the most energetic people. And Israel, as every day in Israel is a week somewhere else.
The intensity of the place is extraordinary. The one area in which we've consistently seen deficits in quality in recent years is in the political sphere. Now, I just wanna be clear, I am not criticizing all Israeli politicians. Some of my best friends are Israeli politicians. But we're not seeing sufficient numbers of quality Israelis drawn to politics.
There's a term for a system in which the most unscrupulous people in a society rise to positions of political power. It's called a kakistocracy. Norm Hornstein- it's Greek, it doesn't actually mean what it sounds like-Norm Ornstein recently wrote about this phenomenon in the Atlantic,
He described these people as wholly indifferent to the laws and norms of democratic society. They lack fidelity to both the large norms and laws that govern a society and the small ones as well. tom Price's private air travel. The now former health and human services secretary is of a piece with larger issues like Donald Trump's proposed Muslim travel ban.
Inferior leaders are also defined by their inability or unwillingness to grapple seriously, honestly, and publicly with the profound changes brought about by technological disruption and globalization. These changes are a second cause of democratic deterioration. Globalization, and technological advancement when combined with government policies that are indifferent to those who have not benefited from sudden and dramatic change cause disaffection, cynicism and disillusionment with the democratic system and the democratic process. No politician can stop globalization or technological disruption. Those who promise their supporters they can, through wholesale restrictions on free trade or by the creation of more jobs in the mining industry are playing a grifters game. We are right now, and this is a fascinating moment to live through if you're not suffering from this moment.
We are right now living I we're exiting in epoch in human history as Hannah Rosen and others have pointed out. We are leaving the age in which male upper body strength would be able to guarantee a family and income and a living. For men who are left behind by robotics and globalization, tribalization political extremism and the abandonment of democratic norms, these hold a certain allure. Our political class refuses to grapple in an honest way about the future of work, which makes workers susceptible to the charms of demagogues. Polling data shows that if people who live in a democratic system do not believe that their children will have better lives and more opportunities than they have, will lose their faith in the system that governs them.
A third reason has to do with the changing nature of the information we receive, changes that also have to do with technological advancement. Now, I'm a defender, of the mainstream media. We have flaws that are too numerous to mention, and we've always had them as gatekeepers.
The media have at times limited participation in the democratic process. But this gatekeeper function, which has deteriorated in the internet age, had one huge benefit. Before the internet. The media served as a filtration system, keeping out a great deal of insanity and false information from political discourse.
20 years ago, a person like the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones would've had to stand outside the IRS building, handing out mimeograph sheets filled with his conspiracy theories. Now, thanks to technology, he has millions of listeners and followers. This is not to say that extremism did not exist before the rise of the internet. the internet in particular, the velocity at which bad information travels now have made the spread of information incredibly easy. the new gatekeepers, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and so on we've barely collectively begun to assess the effects of this new technology.
Anti-democratic forces, especially those headquartered in Moscow have figured out our weaknesses and have exploited them already. And we haven't seen the worst of it. By the way. A profound challenge to democracy is now on the way new technologies that will allow their users to mimic our voices and manipulate video in such a way as to make it seem as if we're saying something we're not, are almost here.
Imagine a situation in which Donald Trump's voice and image are manipulated to make it appear on video that he's calling for an immediate nuclear attack on North Korea. What would you do if you were the North Korean leadership and you saw such a convincing video? By the time the widely distrusted authorities get around to making the case that the video is indeed fake, it might be too late.
The fourth cause is the abandonment of restraint in the interest of partisan gain. If in the recent past our discourse was driven by the front page of major newspapers, today it seems as if our discourse is driven by the comment section and by the angriest people on Twitter. We are perpetually enraged and the anger enraged drive the international conversation.
I look at the way Israelis talk to each other, Haaretz and Israel Hayom outdoing each other and demonizing the other. And I'm struck by the observation that Israel isn't a single country, but a collection of temporarily and uneasily, cohabitating tribes. This level of anger and invective and tribalization tear apart the social compact.
We are atomized now in ways that we weren't before, and we see this in the United States as well. The number of Democrats who say that they don't want their children marrying Republicans and vice versa is at an all time high. In 1960 it was 4%, four and 5%. Now it's in the high forties and rising to a majority.
There's one final factor I have to mention. And this is a feature and not a bug of human behavior. We have a loathing for boredom and predictability and a human need for drama and dissension and righteousness. George Orwell if you haven't read Orwell's Review of Mein Kampf, you should, you can find it on that dreaded internet.
Orwell wrote Why so many people wrote eloquently about why so many people found Hitler an alluring figure. let me quote from him, "the fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. Hitler knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth control, and in general common sense. They also, at least intermittently want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty parades." Fukuyama understood this as well. His widely misinterpreted essay, The End of History Springs a surprise on us, at the very end, the very last section of the essay, and it's a surprising conclusion that obviates much of what he had previously argued about the actual end of history.
The end of history he wrote, will be a very sad time.
The struggle for recognition; the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal; the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring courage, imagination, and idealism. We'll be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.
" I can feel in myself," he wrote, "and see in others around me a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again."
History seems to be starting once again. Democracy is not inevitable.
So what I wanna say to you today in opening this conference is welcome to the end of history. Thank you very much.
I like that I'm gonna read these questions. Please speak to the norm that the press must speak, the validated truth, not opinion, and that the press has broken this norm.
I don't believe there's such a thing as the press. People talk about the media as if the New York Times, ABC. Breitbart, Mother Jones magazine, and the Home Shopping Network are all part of the same group. There are a bunch of competing entities that are serving different populations in different ways.
I would say that the, what I would like to think of is the mainstream media or the quality press. I think we try, we often fail, but we try. To get the validated, empirical, observable truth. There's obviously a place for opinion and as long as opinion is marked as such, and as long as the opinions themselves are grounded in some observable reality I have no problem with that.
How about the power of social media to connect us directly to current events? I watch a live stream of the Arab Spring. Is there any advantage to a lack of media filtration? Yes. the democratization that has been brought about by the rise of the internet, the flattening of discourse has been in many ways, good voices that you never heard you hear.
Now that there are good voices, there are people who are trying hard to bring in. Marginalized viewpoints, marginalized communities. And that's a wonderful thing. The Arab Spring I happened to be in Cairo at that time, and it was flabbergasting and joy filled.
People were using Twitter to direct demonstrators away from snipers. people's lives were being saved through the use of social media. this is very complicated. as much as we might regret, we in the mainstream media were for. 30, 40, 50 years having a very polite dinner party with each other.
And then the barbarians came over the wall and sat on the table. But a lot of those, quote unquote barbarians, I'm being sardonic, obviously had a right to be at that table. What I'm talking about now is the velocity of bad information versus the velocity of good information where, you don't want to over chlorinate the pool, but you also.
Recognize the need for some level of chlorine. You want some level of filtration. You want people to be able to identify bad information. And in the way information now is packaged, there's no sure way to know, especially if you're not in the business and you're only a part-time consumer.
There's no sure way to know what you're getting. And that is a problem, and that is something that the companies out here obviously have to double down onin terms of getting ahead of a problem.
This is the last one. "Is it the most frightening norm discarded the preservation of social political stability?" Yeah. I'm not exactly sure I understand the wording of that but I would say that stability. Is a moral value in a kind of way. And that's why I talk a lot about restraint.
And I regret in the early days of Twitter, the way I use Twitter. You get into these fights with people and then you say things that can't be pulled back. you can delete it, but it never goes away. we don't think about the consequences of having to live with the people we're attacking.
when you see politicians talk about each other, you realize that the breaches caused by their words are not fixable. and again, you can't legislate restraint.
You can't legislate maturity. the temptations of social media are huge and social media is very crowded. in order to get attention on social media, sometimes you have to yell. But once you yell and go across a certain line. You can't come back. I saw this in Trump rallies where people are saying the most heinous things, especially to female reporters.
These are fellow Americans. Our job as American citizens, I think, and I'm speaking now just as a citizen, not as a journalist is to try at the very least to live in the shoes of the person you think you hate.
this question has come up very repeatedly. Whether all of the people who voted for Donald Trump are racist, right? there's a strong component on the alt-right that is quite self-evidently racist.
One can make the argument that people who voted for Donald Trump had to ignore certain aspects of his record, not only on race, but on women issues, on business issues and all the rest. And people are accountable for their decisions. I would say this though, there's a difference between Richard Spencer, the head of the alt-right, and an unemployed coal miner whose wife is addicted to opioids.
The guy is 50 years old. Has no capacity to be retrained, to become a computer programmer. sees the authority that he has in his family, dissipate, sees his community in a state of collapse and heard someone say on the national scene that I will come and fix your problem.
I have a very hard time blaming that person for the decisions that person. And so we have to try to understand people who voted for Donald Trump. I think the reverse is true. The people who voted for Donald Trump have to understand that patriotism takes many forms. And that people who stand for norms are actually standing for principles that will help them in the future.
And I will leave it at that and say thank you very much.
