Democracy
The Foundation defends and advocates for liberal democracy. It believes in the primacy of individual rights, born out the ideas of the 16th century Protestant Reformation that individuals should be free to follow their conscience and must not be compelled to follow official belief systems. From these principles flow the idea of freedom of thought that underpins the freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion that are hallmarks of liberal democracies.
The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries advanced the principle of freedom of conscience to establish the scientific method and secure the idea that reason, and not dogma, is the basis upon which human progress must be built.
Such ideas, combined with the protection of property rights and the rights to the fruits of one’s labour, enabled entrepreneurship and the extraordinary technological advancements that have lifted humanity out of poverty and misery. People living today in liberal democracies enjoy the highest levels of prosperity and wellbeing in human history.
The primacy of individual rights and the worth of the individual are unique to the Western liberal order. All other political ideologies are built on its antithesis, putting groups, whether determined by ethnicity, race, socio-economic status, or religion, above the individual. Under such systems the natural order is for one group to overwhelm or dominate the other, resulting in zero-sum outcomes. Liberal democracies, however, subscribe to the rule of law, ensuring that all individuals have equal protection under the law to prevent arbitrary governance and the abuse of power.
In liberal democracies the State draws its domestic authority not from the ability of one group to oppress another, but instead from elections that provide legitimacy to what power the State does exercise. Free elections are in turn anchored by the political pluralism that flows from the free exercise of individual conscience that in turn manifests as a diversity of opinions, political parties, and other interest groups. As an additional safeguard against the abuse of political power liberal democracies contain checks and balances between the exercise of judicial, legislative, and executive power to prevent the concentration of state power that might enable its abuse.