Guest Column: Camden Conference Message: Facts Matter

Camden Conference Message: Facts Matter

The theme of “Democracy Under Threat” spoke to current events.

By Ronald M. Bancroft, Feb 25, 2025

The Camden Conference prides itself on being prescient. Its planners select their conference topic a year before the event. Yet more often than not that topic is “hot” by the time of the conference. By that standard, this year’s conference, “Democracy Under Threat: A Global Perspective,” could not have been timelier, and coming just after President Trump’s unprecedented firing of the chairman and other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conference timing could not have been “hotter.”

The conference Feb. 21-23 assembled another unusually qualified and articulate group of speakers. They made an impression from the opening bell: the keynote address by Maria Ressa, the courageous Philippine digital journalism leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Ressa led the fight for press freedom in the Philippines during the autocratic regime of Rodrigo Duterte.

Her message to us in America to counter the overreach of President Trump was, hold the line, build coalitions, and keep the focus on facts, even in the blitz of disinformation from social media. Ressa jolted us with her passion and energy.

Energy was needed as we started the plenary sessions with an informed primer on democracy from New York University Professor David Stasavage. He reminded us that the foundations of effective democracy came from the Romans and their 400-year republic. Our founders examined the Roman experience in depth and were particularly concerned with insulating the fledgling American Republic from the causes of Rome’s eventual demise: the decline of power of the Senate, their principal governing body; the growth of strong and sometimes violent divisions; and the difficulty of recognizing the true impact of their decline until it was too late. The analogies to our present time were sobering, but then Stasavage added, in case we had missed the message, how low trust in American government had fallen in the past 80 years, from 70% approval in 1960 to under 20% today.

As we were trying to digest the meaning of this, Matt Goodwin, professor of political science from the University of Kent, jolted us with a compelling narrative on the growth of national populism in Europe. He was both spellbinding and scary. He described the rapid growth in much of Europe of populist leaders, noting that they focused on the peoples’ distrust of political institutions, their feelings of relative disparities in opportunity, and on cultural issues driven by the immigration wave of the past 10 years resulting from war and unrest in Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan and Africa. All of this has upended traditional political parties and led to a situation where 60% of the voters in Europe have changed parties in the past 10 years.

In short, populism is strong and growing. Though Goodwin was speaking of Europe, it was clear that similar forces were a big part of the rationale for the victory of Donald Trump in 2024.

What followed were case studies of Hungary’s Victor Orban and Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro that underscored the effectiveness of the populist playbooks. All of this was unpleasantly familiar as we already have heard President Trump and his minions gleefully relate all they have learned from Viktor Orban, in particular, for their Project 2025 narrative.

Hold the line, build coalitions, and keep the focus on facts, even in the blitz of disinformation.

This all added up to an unnerving dialogue for day one of the Conference. It was much discussed over dinner with the eight friends who join us each year at Camden. I think all of us went to bed feeling anxiety for American democracy.

The following morning brought hope, first from Mainer Colin Woodard who gave us a wonderful history lesson that took us back to our roots as a nation. Woodard reminded us that we have always been a collection of “Nations” or regional cultures. From our beginnings we have struggled with those for whom “individual” liberty was dominant and those for whom the “common good” was preeminent. What has held us together has been a set of shared ideals coming from the Declaration of Independence and the development of our Constitution.

Woodard is working with a team of academics to better define a contemporary “American Promise.” This story will embrace “who are we,” and “what do we believe in.” This story of contemporary “American promise” will be released nationally on March 12 as part of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. A compelling narrative is urgently needed. We can hope that Woodard and his team will make a significant contribution.

Our final speaker was Hal Brands, professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Brands wrapped up our dialogue on democracy with a review of American involvement in the world, starting with our entrance into World War I, an entrance that turned the tide and led to an Allied victory. That was followed by our key role in World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan.

That led to what has been perhaps “the best 80-year period in the history of the world.” Brands argues that the willingness of the U.S. to take a global leadership role after World War II has been nothing short of miraculous. Our investment in rebuilding Europe, in developing strong global alliances, in being willing to deploy our own troops in Europe and Asia have all helped make the past 80 years a special period. He acknowledged that America has made mistakes and missteps along the way, but there is no question but that America has made the world a better and safer place.

We who have been fortunate to grow up in this era, and I am one, recognize the value of America in the post-World War II world. But many who grew up in the last 40 years haven’t seen how bad things can be without a strong American presence. Certainly President Trump does not value this era of American leadership, even though he has benefitted mightily from it. He seems intent on moving back to “Fortress America.” Brands warned us that a return to that era will take us back to a world where armed conflict was the norm rather than the exception.

This was a better note to end on — a note of hope and a plea not to turn our backs on the world. Still ahead are challenges of a president who seems intent on using the Orban playbook to strengthen his own power. But as Mainer George Mitchell often reminded us during the Watergate era, we are a nation of laws. We are now dependent largely on our legal guardrails to hold during this onslaught. It will not be easy. Let us be guided by Maria Ressa’s words: “Facts matter, hold the line.”

Other highlights of the Conference included:

David Elcott, retired Professor of Public Service at NYU, gave us valuable reflections on the role of “faith” in our Democracy. He noted the tensions between Christian Fundamentalists and the Constitutional separation of Church and State. Elcott suggested we could not “have it all” in Liberal Democracy. We are struggling to find out what a theology of Democracy looks like.

Joshua Tucker, Professor of Politics at NYU, discussed a study he led to determine the impact of social media on the US election of 2020.His team conducted this study in collaboration with a team from Meta/Facebook. The study, somewhat disappointingly, did not detect undue influence of social media on that election. Though a rigorous analytic study, these findings were disputed by Maria Ressa, suggesting that subsequent disclosures by a former Facebook employee suggest that social media did indeed spread false information that had an impact on that election.

John Shattuck, distinguished former Ambassador to Hungary and Jennifer McCoy, Carter Foundation expert on global elections, both contributed much to an understanding of how Democracy dies in the framework and patterns of a Victor Orban in Hungary and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Theirs was a sad tale from which the Trump Administration has learned many of its unfortunate tactics.

Ron Bancroft is a longtime Conference attendee and former Press Herald columnist, Cumberland.