The single most famous document expressing America’s commitment to freedom in the world must surely be President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech of 1941, calling for US resistance to Nazi and Japanese aggression. The freedoms Roosevelt spoke of were freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear, which he defined in terms of the permanent abolition of aggressive war.

This statement is so familiar that few notice an extraordinary omission. The freedom to vote – electoral democracy – is not included. Indeed, all these freedoms can be present under mild and civilised autocracies (though not, of course, totalitarian systems) as well as democracies; and the last two, alas, can be absent in ill-governed, impoverished and chauvinist democracies.