When I first set foot in the Netherlands back in 1992, it wasn’t the unpredictable weather or the unfamiliar tongue that caught my attention, but rather the evident affluence permeating Dutch society. Coming from a place marked by scarcity, the prosperity I witnessed in Western Europe seemed like a whole new world.
If I had to encapsulate the atmosphere of the 1990s in a single term, it would be trust.
People had faith in the integrity of their democratic systems. While elections were significant, they were not life-or-death battles. Generally, citizens felt that policies reflected their choices, especially when their preferred party garnered enough seats to influence the political agenda.
Expectations of absolute triumph were nonexistent; instead, consensus was the core of political life—so deeply rooted that many saw it as a national characteristic to be celebrated.
Transitions of power occurred with dignity, regularity, and a sense of inevitability, allowing everyday life to carry on seamlessly.
From my perspective, the entire exercise looked like a remarkably dull affair. Voters cast their ballots, the numbers were tallied and the politicians retired to backrooms to compromise. Elections were orderly acts of civic routine rather than moments of national crisis. This was not only true of the Netherlands but of all Western Europe.
Over time, however, I noticed subtle shifts. These were not dramatic ruptures of the kind I had known in parts of Africa, where an election could shatter a state overnight. Europe remained peaceful and prosperous.
Yet beneath that orderly exterior, developments were unfolding that would eventually redefine the relationship between citizens and the state. The decisions that mattered most were becoming increasingly detached from the will of the people.
When I arrived in the Netherlands in 1992, what struck me first wasn’t the weather or the language, but the unmistakable prosperity of Dutch society
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (right) was born in Somalia, raised in Saudi Arabia, Kenya and Ethiopia and fled to the Netherlands to escape a forced marriage. (Pictured: In the Netherlands in 1993)
In the Netherlands, the country I had come to see as a sanctuary of institutional sanity, I watched a strange submission unfold. Its entry into the European Union did not come through a single clear democratic decision, but through a steady accumulation of concessions, each small enough to seem harmless on its own, yet together producing a structural change that few ever explicitly agreed to. Sovereignty was not surrendered in a single moment, but in increments.
The nation ceded its monetary policy to adopt the euro, opened its borders under the Schengen Agreement and gradually transferred more judicial authority to Brussels. Power was transferred to a distant, impenetrable bureaucracy, insulated from the public and justified by a cold logic that no ordinary citizen could challenge. Even as a Member of Parliament, it felt as if we were participants in a system whose destination had already been decided for us.
When I moved to the United States in 2006, I found a political culture that bore no resemblance to what I had known before. The democratic process in America was loud, intensely adversarial and driven by a fierce clash of opposing interests.
The scale alone was staggering. Elections were not confined to national parliaments but extended into every layer of public life: school boards, district attorneys, judges, governors, state legislators. I quickly realized that politics was a continuous, decentralized force shaping the republic itself and I rather liked it.
The strength of the American model is best understood by looking at two pivotal moments that occurred on opposite sides of the Atlantic in 2016. In that year, Britain held a referendum and America held an election. Britain’s vote lent the establishment a bureaucratic nightmare to manage. America’s vote handed the insurgents a presidency to wield: twice! The British system translated revolt into paperwork; the American system translated revolt into power.
In Britain, the Leave vote was a single referendum that then collided with parliamentary rule, party discipline and extensive international obligations. Ten years on, as anyone following British politics knows, voters did not get what they had voted for. The borders, the lighter regulation and the economic growth never arrived; instead, the verdict was managed, renegotiated and diluted into the same opaque, technocratic system the voters had rejected. It was, in miniature, the very pattern I had watched unfold in the Netherlands: sovereignty conceded not in one dramatic vote but through a creeping process, largely hidden from the electorate.
In America, that same insurgent energy found expression in a federal republic where recurring elections enable voters to reaffirm – or withdraw – their mandate at regular intervals. By re-electing Trump in 2024, American voters gave permanence to what had once been dismissed as a protest. And this time, the system produced the exact trifecta that eluded Britain: tighter borders, lighter regulation and renewed growth
The contrast captures my central point. Britain’s revolt was absorbed, while America’s was sustained. The republic offers no guarantee that voters will win on the first try, but it firmly ensures their verdict can never be buried or ignored. It keeps power contested, visible and recoverable until a free people can translate their choice into reality. That, more than any claim to calm or orderly perfection, is what still distinguishes the 250-year-old American republic from the world’s most established democracies.
The men who gathered in Philadelphia possessed a deep, almost scriptural understanding of human nature – recognizing both its capacity for greatness and its inherent fallibility. They understood that a lasting covenant must channel conflict, not outlaw it. It is that pragmatism that keeps the American experiment responsive, turbulent and remarkably adaptable.
Leave supporters hold signs and flags on Westminster Bridge in June 2016
Thousands of people participate in a ‘No Kings’ protest in Manhattan in October 2025
While European systems increasingly manage their politics through closed-door governance, the American system keeps decision-making in the arena of public contestation. Where others demand efficiency and seamless alignment, America accepts friction, fragmentation and outright contradiction because it knows they are the price of distributed power.
This does not mean the American system is without danger. The very openness of the system can be exploited by those who would undermine it. But what makes it vulnerable is also what makes it strong. Its willingness to tolerate deep disagreement is precisely what safeguards its power of renewal.
Indeed, one of the most remarkable features of the American republic is its capacity for self‑correction. Over two and a half centuries, it has expanded the franchise, confronted internal injustices and navigated radical economic transformations, all while preserving the foundations of constitutional rule and popular sovereignty.
To endure for another 250 years, America must ensure that neither the people nor their institutions become trapped by permanent power. Its future will be secured not by preserving every decision, but by preserving the freedom to revisit them.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Founder of the AHA Foundation and Contributor to the Restoring the West Substack.
