The View from Kenya

The chances are good that you are not tormenting your soul over how we Americans look to Kenyans. You have more important things to torment your soul about-- like how much damage Nancy Pelosi did on her Taiwan trip.

Besides, you hate China, with an uncommon hatred, because you know that it’s the right thing to do. Everyone agrees that America is great and that China is evil. 

And yet, while we are patting ourselves on the back and puffing up our self-esteem, we might take a quick second and glance at how other people in other parts of the world see America and see our democracy. 

Is America still the world’s role model or has that mantle passed to China?

Uh oh.

Anyway, New York Times journalist Farah Stockman was attending a dinner party in Kenya. The assembled convivants represented the best and most educated Kenyans, people who are or will be leading the nation. That means, to be clear about it, she did not collect the views of average citizens; she polled a select elite group. Plato would have called it a Symposium, for what that is worth.

At the least, we can say that they are disillusioned about America. And for good reason. They watch the clown show that is American democracy and think that they do not really want it. They see who is leading the great American nation and declare that they do not want to be led by such a group.

So, if you care about how we look to the rest of the world, how we look to those who see us from the outside, we should care about what the people at this dinner party in Kenya told Stockman.

Stockman opens her essay thusly:

A Kenyan friend of mine who graduated from Harvard Business School recently told me that the United States is a good place to get an education, but “it is no longer a leading light.”

“We are looking elsewhere, not just the West,” she said. “Democracy? I don’t believe in it.”

She made the comment at a dinner party I attended in the garden of a gated neighborhood in Karen, a wealthy Nairobi suburb earlier this summer, as Kenyans were preparing to elect a new president. Nearly everyone in attendance was a Kenyan who had graduated from a top American school and gone on to an impressive career in finance, business consulting or government service. They were technocrats and intellectuals, preoccupied with how the continent’s cash-strapped governments can deliver better health care, education and jobs to about 1.4 billion people.

The group agreed in general that the American model, democracy uber alles, had failed them. It turned public life into constant political drama and had not delivered results:

They aren’t looking to the United States for pointers. The American political model has not produced the results that Africans have been hoping for and now seems to be failing America itself, they told me. The people I met that night all spoke of American power in the past tense. (Most spoke to me candidly, with the understanding that I would not identify them by name, since the sentiments they expressed could cause a stir at their jobs.)

Stockman explains that America is paying a price in prestige and reputation for its political dysfunction. She is writing for the New York Times, so she blames it all on Donald Trump. She does not blame any of it on the Biden administration or even on that famous son of a Kenyan father, one Barack Obama.

Now, you would have thought that Kenyans would have been gaga over an American president whose father was Kenyan. Apparently, not so much. No one seems to care about Barack Obama II:

Their comments underscored the heavy geopolitical cost of American political dysfunction at a time when the Biden administration sees an epic competition between democracies and autocracies, especially with China. Globally, the perception of American decline is eroding confidence in democracy itself.

So, these Kenyans are seeing that democracy no longer works. It no longer produces promised outcomes. It turns groups against each other and divides a nation against itself. 

In the past, Kenyans admired America:

In the past, the Kenyans I met expressed admiration for the United States and gratitude for U.S. assistance in midwifing Kenya’s democracy. In 1992, Kenya held its first multiparty elections in over two decades, after Smith Hempstone, who was then the U.S. ambassador in Nairobi, threatened to cut off aid unless the opposition was allowed to participate. Many American foreign policy analysts at the time believed that, with the Cold War over, every nation would eventually embrace democracy.

This means, not to be too churlish, that we ought to question the collective wisdom of our foreign policy analysts.

Of course, Stockman blames it on Donald Trump, but she has the good grace to notice that American cities are crime ridden. They are all governed by Democrats:

Today, the United States has become more of a cautionary tale than an exemplar, with Donald Trump’s claims of a rigged election, the attack on the capitol on Jan. 6 and the near daily news reports about mass shootings. 

And, of course, while the Western media is all-in on denouncing the Chinese Belt and Road initiative-- which builds infrastructure in developing nations-- the Kenyans see things differently:

Meanwhile, China has become the biggest player when it comes to financing infrastructure in Africa. It’s also not unusual to hear African leaders and even a few Western scholars arguing that the Chinese system of meritocratic autocracy is a better route to middle income status for countries such as Kenya.

Note the word-- meritocratic. We are fast in the process of replacing our meritocracy with an idiotocracy. Say what you want about China, but its leaders are not stupid enough to dumb down the ruling class.

Polls suggest that the average Kenyan prefers the American model, but those are poll results. The results of a poll taken around the dinner table would have been different:

In a separate survey, the group found that the percentage of Kenyans who saw the United States as the best model for development declined from 49 percent to 42 percent between 2014-15 and 2019-21. That was still far higher than the 23 percent who preferred China as a model. But I sensed a shift.

It does matter to these people that China, in its post-Mao phase produced more wealth and reduced more poverty than anyone had ever done in such a short period of time. 

So, the people Stockman spoke to were pragmatic:

For the most part, the leaders they looked up to the most were not paragons of Western-style democracy but rather leaders in the global South who have succeeded despite bucking Western criticism and advice.

Some pointed to the success of the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, who turned his genocide-stricken homeland into one of the most efficiently run countries in Africa. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, who unveiled the biggest public health insurance program in the world, and Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, who transformed a tiny outpost into one of the wealthiest and least corrupt countries in Asia, both inspired respect.

As I said, it’s about balancing benefits with costs:

Sure, the dinner party guests admitted, Mr. Kagame has been accused of killing critics and silencing dissent, but he’d also overseen a dramatic rise in the life expectancy of his people, from 31 years in 1995 to 69 in 2018. Partisan political competition in a country where half the population had tried to kill the other half would be courting disaster — until or unless such divisions healed, one guest declared. Modi, despite being democratically elected, was viewed more skeptically, since weaponizing the Hindu majority against the Muslim minority risks tearing India apart.

What’s the problem with democracy? Why, the Kenyans do not understand why an eighteen-year-old who knows nothing about anything should have the same vote as a person who has held down a job and who is supporting a family. An interesting thought, one that our founding fathers would have echoed:

Kenyans I spoke to last month complained that Americans promote democracy selectively, when it serves their own interests, and that the concept is too narrowly defined. Indigenous models should have been considered self-government, too. Many African villages had been run by effective councils of elders before colonizers came. Now they’re stuck with rules that give an 18-year-old who has never raised a child or held down a job as much of a voice as a 65-year-old.

Stockman closes with a telling and important remark. Democracy can be a beacon for other people in other parts of the world, but only when it has competent leaders and when it works. It does not serve as a role model when the best it can do is issuing mandates and sanctioning other countries:

And those of us who still believe in democracy — as I most certainly do — ought to realize that we’ll win more supporters by modeling competence than by issuing mandates.