Choosing Freedom at the End of a Hard Year

A personal reflection on fear, autocracy, and democracy after a year that tested political assumptions across Syria, the United States, and the world.

2025—what a tumultuous, head-spinning year.

An Islamist movement unexpectedly takes over governance in Syria and, to the astonishment of many, begins to act with greater pragmatism and openness to the world than the allegedly secular modern regime it replaced. Suddenly, hope reenters a beleaguered country long denied it. A year that began with a bang now ends with one: the unconditional lifting of American and international sanctions, with Congress voting to repeal the so-called Caesar Act. For the first time in years, Syria’s reconstruction after a long civil conflict can begin in earnest.

Meanwhile, polarization in the United States deepens, widening fractures in a democracy once believed to be unbreakable.

For Syrians, for Americans, for global activists fighting for a better world—and for anyone who still dares to believe that democracy, fractured and maligned as it is, remains worth defending—2025 has been a year of vertigo.

I have lived this year on multiple frontlines: the Syrian one, shattered by warlordism and division, yet improbably held together by the stubborn hope of its people; the American one, shaken by polarization and democratic decay, yet still standing on the strength of its institutions and civic traditions; and the global one, where authoritarian regimes coordinate with growing confidence while democracies struggle to find coherence.

It has been a charged year—politically, personally, existentially. And yet, as I witness its end, I find myself returning to the same questions that have haunted much of my career as a pro-democracy activist.

Is freedom truly necessary—or is it merely a comforting story we tell ourselves, a carefully curated narrative that helps us cope with the darker impulses shaping political life?

Is democracy essential for progress—or can progress be achieved more reliably without it?

And the most unsettling question of all—one that Syria has forced me to confront for more than three decades—is this: Do people actually want freedom? Or do they prefer protection, belonging, and a strong figure who promises survival, even at the cost of their own agency?

And deeper still: do some merely want to trade places with the tyrant, not to end tyranny itself? Do they seek a version of authoritarianism that sanctifies their beliefs, justifies their supremacy, and elevates them atop the very hierarchies they claim to oppose?

This year-end confession is my attempt to answer these questions honestly—not as an idealist, not as a professional activist repeating well-rehearsed slogans, but as someone who has spent half a lifetime watching societies fracture, rebuild, and fracture again, searching for the patterns beneath the chaos and the motives beneath the rhetoric.

I write as someone who has seen autocracy from the inside and democracy from the inside—who has lived the fragility that binds them both, and the resilience that, over time, favors only one.

I. The Autocrat in the Mirror: Why People Fight for Their Own Chains

This year forced me, again, to confront a painful truth: In multi-confessional, multi-ethnic societies, autocracy often feels rational to those who perceive themselves as vulnerable.

Alawites in Syria did not fight for Bashar al-Assad because they believed in his vision. They fought because they believed that the regime's collapse meant the implosion of their world. The strongman has become a shield, the security state a surrogate identity.

The dictator often becomes the embodiment of the fear that haunts certain communities in a broken landscape. And so even the most oppressive system begins to feel like “home”—because the alternative is imagined as annihilation. In Syria, the tragic developments in the coastal mountains in the immediate aftermath of the regime’s collapse only reinforced this belief, and not only among the Alawites. Among other communities, including the Kurds and the Druze, skepticism toward the new authorities in Damascus deepened, shaped by long-standing fears, unresolved grievances, and uncertainty about what would follow.

This year, watching similar dynamics unfold in other countries, I had to confront how universal this pattern truly is.

People do not cling to autocrats out of stupidity or servility. They do so because they believe no neutral arbiter exists. Because they believe democracy is just another word for majority domination—or for the rise of a new, corrupt, and equally autocratic elite. Because they fear the ballot box might become a guillotine. And because, after all the sacrifices, they no longer believe that anything will truly change.

Under such conditions, opposition begins to appear irrational, even self-destructive. Acceptance feels safer than resistance; endurance is preferable to upheaval.

In the absence of trust, cynicism prevails—and freedom itself comes to be perceived as a source of danger rather than liberation.

II. The American Mirror: If Democracy Falters Here, Where Can It Stand?

The United States—the place I now call home—did not escape this year unscathed. Polarization deepened. Institutions strained. A culture of permanent outrage replaced civic dialogue. And the very legitimacy of elections—once the sacred core of democracy—became another battlefield.

Watching America struggle with democratic backsliding has been, for me, a personal shock. If it can happen here—in a country with centuries of constitutional continuity, abundant resources, and a strong civic tradition—then what hope is there for nations like Syria, where the foundations were never stable?

But after that initial despair, something else emerged: clarity.

Democracy in America is not failing because democracy itself is flawed. It is failing because democracy requires continuous maintenance, and the country has gone decades without tending to its civic roots.

I finally grasped something I had previously understood only in theory: Democracy is not a stable state. It is a practice. A discipline. A type of moral athleticism. When societies abandon the discipline, the structure withers.

What’s happening now is not the death of American democracy—it is the painful reminder that it cannot survive on autopilot. And that realization strengthens, not weakens, my belief in it.

III. A 250-Year Test: What the Long View Reveals

At this year’s end, I found myself thinking in centuries, not news cycles.

If democracy cannot justify itself over 250 years—the age of the United States—then it has no right to claim legitimacy.

So I looked at the long view:

• Over 250 years, democracy in America expanded rights—not perfectly, not consistently, but undeniably.

• Over 250 years, power changed hands peacefully, again and again—even through crises, wars, and profound national trauma.

• Over 250 years, the system self-corrected, sometimes painfully, sometimes incompletely, but always through mechanisms internal to the system.

Now contrast that with the 250-year arcs of authoritarian models:

• Tsarist + Soviet Russia: collapse, repression, stagnation, collapse again.

• Imperial China to Mao: cycles of implosion, warlordism, famine, purges.

• The Ottoman Empire to the modern Middle East: coups, dictatorships, civil wars.

• 20th-century fascisms and communisms: movements that flared and burned out within decades, leaving devastation in their wake.

Autocracy performs well in the first decade. Sometimes, even the first generation. But it cannot survive the third. It relies on the competence of a single mortal human being. It collapses when that human dies, fails, or loses touch with reality.

Democracy, by distributing power and allowing structured conflict, avoids the catastrophic failures that autocracy produces with terrifying regularity.

Over the long term, the pattern is consistent: authoritarian systems may generate rapid gains, but only democratic systems are capable of sustaining them.

IV. What This Year Taught Me: Freedom Is Not an Emotion

For much of my life, I defended democracy because the contrast with its opposite made its necessity seem self-evident. I operated on a set of assumptions shaped by experience, historical memory, and the failures of authoritarian systems. But this year forced me to reassess those assumptions.

Intuition and moral conviction are not enough.

Idealism alone will not convince the frightened Alawite, the disillusioned American, the cynical youth, or the rising middle classes of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

This year forced me into a colder, more analytical frame. And the conclusion I reached is this: Freedom is not inherently necessary for all. But it becomes structurally necessary if you want durable progress, resilient institutions, and dignity that cannot be revoked by decree.

You do not need democracy to build roads.
You do not need freedom to raise GDP.
You don’t need pluralism to promote literacy or expand basic services.

But the moment a society aims for anything beyond material throughput, the calculus changes.

For scientific innovation, you need dissent.
For technological leadership, you need openness.
For dignity that outlasts rulers, you need rights that don’t vanish when a leader gets paranoid.
For justice, you need mechanisms capable of correcting errors without civil war.
For stability, you need institutions that do not collapse when one man’s heart stops beating.

Democracy is a design solution to the inevitability of human fallibility. Autocracy is a bet that the right person will show up—and stay sane—forever. This year taught me which bet is safer.

V. Why I Still Choose the Democratic Idea

So here I stand, at the end of a difficult year, a Syrian-American activist in a wounded world, renewing a commitment that is neither naïve nor sentimental.

I choose democracy not because I believe people are inherently noble. They are not. Fear governs much of human behavior.

I choose democracy because it is the only system that does not require humans to be better than they are.

It does not depend on saints.
It does not depend on one man’s wisdom.
It does not depend on any group’s permanent dominance.

It depends on:

• mechanisms

• constraints

• distribution of power

• the ability to correct course without burning the whole house down

In other words, it depends on structures, not saviors—structures that can be strengthened, adapted, and improved.

In Syria, in America, and across the world, the road to democratic revival is long and uncertain. But the alternative—more efficient, enlightened autocracies—has been tried, again and again, in every civilization, on every continent: They rise faster. They fall harder. And they leave ruins deeper than any democratic failure.

I am ending this year convinced again not of democracy’s perfection, but of its necessity.

Not because of blind faith, but because of evidence.

Not because of wild emotion, but because of experience.

Not because I want a comforting story, but because I have watched what happens when societies put their trust in strongmen instead of institutions.

Democracy is fragile.
Democracy is flawed.
Democracy is endlessly disappointing.

And yet—it is the only system that gives us a fighting chance at dignity, stability, and progress that can outlast our fears.

That is why, at the end of this long and disquieting year, I am still here.

Still writing.
Still believing.
Still choosing freedom.

Not because it is easy—but because it is the only path that does not end in darkness.

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