Opinion | Nicholas Kristof: ‘Never Bet Against Democracy in the Long Run’ (2024)

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I’m Nicholas Kristof. I’m a columnist for “The New York Times,” and I’m also the author of a new memoir called “Chasing Hope.” Writing my memoir was a chance to reflect. And one of those reflections is on something that I think we don’t tend to think of at this moment, which is the material and moral progress that I’ve witnessed in my career as a reporter.

I used to sneak into Darfur back in the early 2000s to cover the genocide there. I couldn’t get a government pass to get through checkpoints in Darfur, but I realized that the UN workers were showing these English language credentials, and the soldiers only spoke Arabic.

So I put my United Airlines MileagePlus card on a lanyard, and I drove up to a checkpoint. And I showed my United Airlines card, and presto, the soldiers just waved me through. Eventually, I was stopped at a checkpoint, and the troops said that they wanted to hold my interpreter for what they called investigation. They said, oh, you can go.

But look, I couldn’t leave my interpreter because it was pretty clear that that investigation would end as soon as I disappeared with a bullet in his head. So the troops detained me as well. It was a frightening wait because they kept us in a detention hut. It was decorated with a grisly mural of this prisoner being held down and then impaled by a stake through the stomach.

Eventually, the soldiers’ commander arrived, and so he ordered me released. And then at that point, one of my captors who previously had seemed ready to execute me, sidled up, and he said, hey, can you get me a visa to America?

That memory comes to me because I’ve been thinking so much today about the despair and gloom that is gripping America. And this moment is just particularly dispiriting. We’ve got wars in Gaza and Ukraine. There’s a poisonous atmosphere in the country related to the turmoil on college campuses and to the presidential election. But what strikes me is that while we despair, people from all over the world are just taking desperate risks to come here. They may loathe U.S. policies, but they love the idea of America. That’s true even of people who hold us at gunpoint.

People, when they meet me, they expect to meet this dour, grim person because I’ve spent a career covering war, genocide, poverty. They think I’m going to be utterly depressing, but in fact, I emerge from those frontlines with hope, hope for the world and hope for America.

So let me make the case for hope in this country while acknowledging, yes, there are very real challenges ahead. And look, one of those challenges ahead is the possibility of a Donald Trump election. I think that hangs like a shadow over America. But it’s also true, I believe, that even if Trump were elected, I think America has a dynamism, an inner strength, that will allow America to survive four years of national misrule, chaos, and even subversion of democracy.

There are real risks ahead for the US, and one of the challenges is that there are dictatorships that have gained strength, particularly in China and Russia. But I’ve got to say that in my career, I’ve learned to doubt despotism in the long run.

And partly, that stems from my coverage of the democracy movement in China and that terrible night in June 1989, when Chinese army troops turned their automatic weapons on unarmed protesters in Tiananmen Square, including the crowd that I was in. You just never forget seeing soldiers use weapons of war to massacre unarmed citizens. That was a horrific night.

But just as vividly, I also remember this day five weeks earlier in the democracy movement. It was April 27, 1989, and Beijing students were preparing for a protest march from the University District to Tiananmen.

The students knew that this was incredibly dangerous. That evening, before they marched, some students spent the night, writing their wills in case they were killed. So that morning, I saw the roads lined with tens of thousands of the Wujing, the People’s Armed Police.

I slipped onto the Beijing University campus by pretending to be a foreign student, and I watched as this very frightened band of about 100 students emerged from a dormitory, parading around the campus with these pro-democracy banners.

And gradually, other students came out of the dorms and joined in, and they proceeded, just terrified, toward the gate to leave the university. There were rows of armed police that were blocking their way, but the students jostled, they pushed, and they finally forced their way out through the police onto the road.

Once that vanguard broke through, thousands more students materialized to join that march. So did ordinary citizens. So did faculty. By the time they reached Tiananmen Square, there were probably half a million protesters. And then they marched triumphantly back to the universities, cheered on by people of Beijing, screaming support.

And I will never forget that evening at the gate of Beijing University. Those students were met not by these phalanxes of armed police, but by these white-haired professors who were waiting for them, just crying, happy tears, cheering for them. And this one professor shouted, you are heroes. You were sacrificing for all of us. You were braver than we are.

That exhilaration that day obviously did not last. But in my reporting career, I’ve learned first not to bet on democracy necessarily in the short run because the challenges are enormous, but second, never bet against democracy in the long run, because in country after country, over the years, from Poland to Indonesia to Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan, I have seen that in the long run, there is a real force and yearning for democracy. So I’m betting that someday, I’ll see that democracy emerge, even in China, even in Russia, and elsewhere.

Look, no one can accuse me of ignoring the problems that beset this country or our planet because they have been my entire career. They’ve left me too scarred to be a classic optimist. But the Swedish development expert, Hans Rosling, he used to say that he wasn’t an optimist but a possibilist. And, in other words, he saw better outcomes as possible if we work together to achieve them. And that makes so much sense to me. It means replacing this despair that I now see in our country with a guarded hope.

So my message is that all the problems around us are real, and I understand why there is so much pessimism and fear. This is a grim time. There’s war. People can’t afford homes. Climate change risks boiling our planet. And we’re all pointing fingers at each other and shouting.

But take it from the guy who spent years, decades, covering even worse conflicts. We are just an amazing species, and we get ourselves into messes, but we can also get ourselves out, if we understand the challenges and our own capacity to fight back.

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