Poland, Post-Communism, and America the Beacon

For those who survived authoritarianism in the 20th century, America was the Shining City on a Hill. Under Trump, we're abandoning that legacy.

By Trygve Olson

This is the second in an eight-part series on the lessons I've learned confronting autocrats over the past twenty-five years. From post-Soviet capitals to American battlegrounds, I’ve seen how authoritarianism grows — and how democracy survives.

In 1995, I said yes to something I didn’t fully understand. A friend at the International Republican Institute asked if I’d go to Poland to help with a get-out-the-vote campaign modeled after MTV’s Rock the Vote. I didn’t have a passport. I’d never been abroad. But something about it — maybe curiosity, maybe instinct — told me to go.

What I found when I got there was intoxicating.

Poland was just a few years out of Soviet control. Democracy was young, rough around the edges, but full of energy. There was this collective breath of possibility. And everywhere I went, from smoky university classrooms to that gleaming Taco Bell in downtown Warsaw, people wanted to talk about America. Not in the abstract, but with reverence.

I sat with Polish college students who wanted to know how our government worked. How campaigns were run. What freedom of speech actually meant. What checks and balances looked like in real life. To them, we were still the Shining City on a Hill — flawed, sure, but aspirational. We were the country that had won the Cold War. The model.

That kind of idealism was contagious. You couldn’t help but feel the gravity of it. For the first time, politics didn’t just feel like a game. It felt like service. Something sacred. Something that mattered beyond elections.

That trip changed my trajectory. It’s why I joined IRI. Why I kept going — to Lithuania, to Belarus, to Georgia and Ukraine. I wanted to be part of helping build something that looked like the best of who we said we were.

And the truth is, none of that work would’ve happened without American support. The program I was part of in Poland was backed by USAID. And the person who greenlit it in the early 1990s? Liz Cheney. While I can’t speak for Liz, I can say this: My time in Poland helped shape how, as a conservative, I came to understand why Trump must be confronted.

Today, we’re squandering that legacy.

Trumpism, and the isolationist withdrawal that’s come with it, has gutted the very kind of soft power that once made America transformational. It’s not just about moral high ground — it’s about practical influence. Those programs USAID funded weren’t charity. They were investments in a freer, safer world. They were strategic. And they worked.

We’re abandoning that — and the consequences will be long-term. We’re not the country young Poles looked to anymore. Not because we changed our policies. But because we stopped believing in the idea that our example mattered.

Poland taught me that democracy is both precious and fragile. That hope can spread. But so can fear.

And that when others look to you as a beacon — the worst thing you can do is turn off the light.

Trygve Olson is a strategist, pro-democracy fighter and a founding Lincoln Project advisor. He writes the Searching for Hope Substack. Read the original column here.

---