In this exchange, Bayard Rustin defends his public challenge to Soviet human rights abuses, arguing that economic security without freedom of speech, assembly, or dissent is not true justice. While acknowledging America’s own failures, Rustin underscores the democratic “utility of politics,” insisting that the ability to openly challenge power—and win accountability through courts and public pressure—is essential to any genuine struggle for human rights.
Eldridge Cleaver's "Why I Left the U.S. and Why I Am Returning": A Revolutionary's Reckoning with Democracy
Cleaver’s essay recounts how seven years in exile shattered his faith in authoritarian revolutionary ideals and led him to recognize the imperfect but real accountability mechanisms within American democracy. His experiences abroad, combined with Watergate and the Church Committee revelations, convinced him that the U.S. still allowed forms of dissent, scrutiny, and self-correction absent in the regimes he had fled.
