When these principles were first codified in 1776 and in 1789, in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they embodied a uniquely American creed. But they drew heavily from European Enlightenment thinkers. And the founders advanced them as universal values. Since America’s founding, the principles of equality, freedom, and government by and for the people have been increasingly embraced around the world, particularly since the mid-1970s, when democracy began its spread from being mainly a Western phenomenon to a global one, in nearly 120 countries today. During this period, the number of liberal democracies—with good protections for political and civil freedoms under a rule of law—also steadily increased, from 57 states in 1994 to 79 states in 2005 (about 40 percent of all the world’s states). And that is where it remains.

Over the last decade, democratic progress ground to a halt and freedom has been receding, for a number of reasons. The debacle of American intervention in Iraq, which was justified in part as a “democracy promotion” exercise, soured the U.S. and other Western publics on the goal of trying to support the spread of democracy, even by peaceful means. The shambles in Iraq, the rise of China, the aggression of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and the tentativeness of American leadership have also diminished American prestige and influence in the world. And in poorer countries, democracy has struggled against long odds due to weak states, massive corruption, and low levels of education.

You can’t beat a surging ideology with no ideology or higher sense of purpose. In the face of the persistent challenge of violent Islamist extremism and the global recession of freedom, what the world has needed is a powerful reaffirmation of the universal relevance of liberal values. Instead, the democratic West has been retreating into moral relativism and illiberal impulses.

The assault on liberal values has been a defining feature of the democratic recession. During the past decade, democracy has typically ended not with tanks rolling in the streets or the president shutting down parliament, but rather in suffocating increments: with a regime steadily rigging elections, limiting opposition rights, taming independent media, and criminalizing the work of independent organizations. This was the playbook by which Putin took Russia from a quasi-democracy into a personal dictatorship, dependent on xenophobic nationalism and international conflict for its legitimacy. The script has been copied in varying degrees by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, his populist authoritarian soulmates in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, and by Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, among others.

With the lavish aid of financial inducements, Putin and his oil-rich fellow autocrats in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have been attracting support from a growing number of European politicians. But worse than material cooptation has been the unabashed admiration for Putin’s illiberal rule from the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, along with many other right-wing anti-immigrant European politicians. In October elections, Poland’s far-right Law and Justice party stormed back to power after eight years, with its leader, President Jaroslaw Kaczynski, evincing admiration for Orban’s chauvinistic concentration of power. It remains to be seen if Kaczynski and his party will erode democratic freedoms, pluralism, and the rule of law with the zeal and skill of Orban, but the early signs are disturbing.