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Education Quote by William Greider

"Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own"

About this Quote

A polite sentence with an accusation baked into its grammar: the problem isn’t that Americans lack the right lesson plan for exporting democracy; it’s that they’ve misplaced the thing itself at home. William Greider’s verb choice, “restore,” is the tell. It assumes democracy isn’t a trophy you win once, but a system you can let corrode through neglect, capture, and complacency. The line lands like a receipt, not a slogan.

Greider wrote for an era when “democracy promotion” was a bipartisan brand, often sold alongside military intervention, IMF conditionality, and corporate globalization. His point isn’t anti-democratic; it’s anti-hypocrisy and anti-marketing. The subtext is that America’s global confidence has functioned as a distraction from domestic deficits: money’s gravity in elections, the shrinking power of labor, voter suppression by design, media consolidation, an economy that treats citizens like consumers, and institutions that feel answerable upward rather than outward.

The sentence also flips a familiar Cold War narrative. The U.S. liked to frame itself as democracy’s teacher, a moral exporter. Greider insists legitimacy is reciprocal: you can’t credibly evangelize self-government while your own version looks increasingly pay-to-play or structurally exclusionary. “Teach” implies authority; “restore” demands humility.

What makes it work is its strategic narrowing. It doesn’t argue about Iraq or coups or NGOs. It sets a simple precondition that’s hard to dodge: if you want the world to believe your ideals, your country has to look like it believes them too.

Quote Details

TopicJustice
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Greider, William. (2026, January 17). Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/americans-cannot-teach-democracy-to-the-world-66424/

Chicago Style
Greider, William. "Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/americans-cannot-teach-democracy-to-the-world-66424/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/americans-cannot-teach-democracy-to-the-world-66424/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.

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Americans Cannot Teach Democracy Until They Restore Their Own
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William Greider is a Author from USA.

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