The city of Athens between 507 BC to around 404 BC was the worlds only true democracy that I’m aware of. Their downfall was brought about due to their hubris and war mongering. The city never went two years without voting to attack someone. Eventually Sparta brought about their end by winning the Peloponnesian War and forcing an end to democracy and also the destruction of their city walls.
This is funny. Posts above kept mentioning Greece and I assumed they were talking about Athens. But this was what came to my mind, too. After the death of Pericles, the Athenians lost all sense of direction. They voted in any random asshat that promised them results, and then voted him out as soon as they found he couldn’t deliver. Funny thing was, there were plenty of decent plans to be found, but they collectively didn’t have the patience to follow any one plan to its conclusion. Worse still, leaders (such as generals and admirals) could be punished and exiled every time the mob wasn’t happy with their performance. This is never a smart policy because you end up purging your most experienced leaders.
At several points along the way, the Athenians had the Spartans on the ropes. They might not have delivered a knockout blow, but they could have negotiated generous terms. But the Athenians couldn’t stick with one leader or one plan long enough to get the results they needed.
nvm
If you asked a team of the most brilliant men on the planet to design a system more prone to self-destruction, you’d have had a hard time beating Carthage.
Unlike Athens, they had a mixed form of government that incorporated what we today would call democratic, executive, and oligarchic rule. But like Athens, the Carthaginians had a nasty habit of executing incompetent commanders. The problem was that “incompetent” really meant “didn’t read the minds of the Senate”. Thus, they had a bad habit of killing off good commanders who just got beaten once, or even who simply did something the Senate decided it didn’t want after the fact.
The net effect of this was to erode Carthage’s military ability. In some ways, Carthage was lucky that Hannibal sparked the Second Punic War, because he could easily have made himself King if he’d half a mind to. The Carthaginian Senate completely undermined their own position.
While not as systematic, Athens could shoot itself in the foot with the best of them. Like with the Sicilian expedition. Not only did they vote to invade an island larger than Greece itself while in the midst of a tense standoff against Sparta, not only did much of the onus for the invasion came from just one guy throwing money around, but they sued the commander of the expedition (that one guy) for a capital crime* right after* okaying it and just before it was due to leave. But refused to actually try him before he would come back from the expedition, basically reserving the right to kill him soon as he came back with loot and popularity.
You can’t make that stuff up. Of course, Alcibiades himself was the textbook definition of a magnificent bastard and a past master at turning his cloak. But still 
My history is a bit rusty, but after a quick refresher on Wikipedia, Alcibiades wanted to be tried before the expedition left (with his military allies still in the city) but was denied. He was then tried and sentenced to death in absentia on (very likely) spurious charges. Athens tried to recall him, but he escaped to Sparta.
The expedition is also a great example of voters latching on to ridiculously expensive proposals. Nicias tried to persuade the populace against the Sicilian expedition by proposing vastly higher troop and ship numbers than were currently on the table. Instead of shocking the Athenians into thinking it was way too expensive to be worthwhile, it made them think the plan was safe and feasible. They gave him everything he asked for. Extremely costly projects that are doomed to failure but sound expensive enough to work, doesn’t ring any bells in the current political landscape does it?
Oops
The other example that comes to my mind is the Battle of Arginusae. Short version: Some sailors drowned because a storm prevented their rescue. Even though the admirals won the Battle, many of them were executed because the mob was unhappy over the loss of life.
This was the kind of stupidity the Athenian system couldn’t deal with. You can’t let a mob second-guess the actions of leaders in ambiguous, risky, or highly specialised situations. Not only do you purge your experienced leaders, but the replacement leaders become risk averse and/or overly willing to please.
Our modern society deals with these problems by allowing experts to investigate and letting professional organisations like the FAA or the Bar Association judge whether their members are competent. We understand that certain topics like medicine, law, and war are just too complex and that a random person off the street cannot be expected to judge the quality of the work. The Athenians would not have tolerated these kinds of ideas. Their system lacked institutional safeguards and even things like an independent judiciary would have been unconscionable to them. Everything was judged by the whim of the mob, and the notion of placing certain things off limits or referring judgment to a panel of experts would have been intolerable to them. Their concept of “democracy” was extremely chaotic and anarchistic by modern standards.
The Americans and the British had one major safety valve, a place to dump malcontents: the Empire for the U.K and the Frontier was the US.
Saddam much perfered to buy off opposition and undermine them by investing heavily in development and public works in their areas.
Venezuela is such a pitch perfect demonstration of this quote that I can’t see how anyone would object to it as an example.
Chavez was elected and continually re-elected in free and fair, democratic elections (which Jimmy Carter claimed were run “the best in the world”). While the first election was a step into the unknown, subsequent re-elections were a clear mandate from the people for the Chavismo policies that have led to the current downfall.
The weaknesses in the Chavez government were all well known to the educated elite and everything that’s been happening subsequently was sadly inevitable. The drop in oil prices may have accelerated it by a few years but they merely exposed the failing state institutions, they were not the cause of them.
While Chavez did have a substantial grip on the media, it wasn’t like it was complete enough for people not to be aware of the downsides of Chavismo. The opposition has been clear and consistent in its criticisms of Chavismo through multiple elections and were never able to win the majority of votes.
While there are many other examples which we can bring up, Venezuela fits to such a tee that if Ayn Rand had written it up as a piece of fiction, even her fans would have deemed it “a little too on the nose”.
Another example state would be Nauru, where the discovery of guano deposits basically turned the tiny island nation into the worst parody of a petrodollar state until its exhaustion in the late 90s. in recent years, it’s been forced into increasingly shady deals in a quest for hard currency to back up it’s welfare state. They did a deal with the Australians to be a mandatory detention spot for refugees and a murky deal with the Americans as some kind of CIA forward operating base.
I’m not super familiar with the state of the nation today and the opinion of the average Nauruan on the entire state of affairs but their standard of living have dropped the fastest of any country on earth. According to the economist, during Nauru’s heyday
“There are no taxes of any kind in Nauru. The government employs 95% of those Nauruans who work. Schooling and medical care are free. If Nauruans need treatment that neither of the two hospitals on the island can provide, the government pays to fly them to Australia instead—though Ausaid, an Australian aid agency, recently warned that Melbourne hospitals would turn away Nauruan patients unless the country’s medical bills are settled. Students who want to go to university are also sent to Australia on the government’s tab. Electricity, telephones and housing are all subsidised.”
You could possibly add places such as Detroit and 1970’s New York(and others) to the list. It should come as a shock to no-one that an electorate and their political masters don’t always make prudent fiscal decisions.
Are you referring to modern Greece or Ancient Greece?
I recall reading something where Plato theorized that democracies ultimately evolve into tyrannies. His theory goes that as the people gain more and more freedom, any form of equality becomes unactable. People seek equality of outcome rather than opportunity and rational discourse becomes impossible because all opinions are valid and equal. Eventually a demagogue appears who appeals to the people’s passions, rather than their reason and he assumes absolute power with predictable results.
Then again it may have just been an article in the New Yorker trying to retroactively apply the rise of Trump to something the author vaguely remembered about something he read about Plato in philosophy class.
But again, other than his theories, it seems to me that Plato wouldn’t have had a lot of real world historical examples to refer to. And to a certain extent, it would be like the Wright Brothers postulating on the future of air travel in the 21st century.
A good example, although Chavez’s Venezuela came long after Plato, the Founding Fathers, Heinlein or Rand.
The Founding Fathers recognized the dangers of a democratically elected leader corrupting the system to stay in power (like Chavez) they created our elaborate system of checks and balances.
I like to think they also thought the people were idiots too. Which is why the Senate gets 2 members per state instead of it being based on population like the House, they created the Electoral College, Senators serve for 6 years, there are term limits and Supreme Court judges serve for life.
No. Plato lived through the latter stages of Peloponnesian Wars. He got to see Athenian politics disintegrate into a series of fractious demagogues. He knew exactly what he was talking about. Check out some of the posts above.
Two others:
If you copy your Constitution from, say, the US, but the rest of your legal system is direct inheritance from a different legal tradition, you can end up with some seriously fundamental mismatches within the legal framework itself.
If you copy what someone else did closely without a true and deep understanding of the whys and wherefores, you can end up with some seriously fundamental mismatches between the legal framework and the society on which it has been imposed. There’s a huge difference between using someone else’s work as inspiration and maybe “starting point for discussion” and lifting it whole cloth.
One Latin American country (I think it’s Nicaragua) tossed the whole Spanish legal system; everybody else took Spanish law and updated it, at most levels.
In my opinion, Venezuela doesn’t qualify as a dire predictor of a loss of democracy due to spendthrift policies. While it is suffering due to economic policies, and there is an erosion of democracy, the erosion came first. Even Weimar Germany would be a better example because you could reach for an argument that the loss of confidence in democracy due to hyperinflation was an influence on Weimar’s subsequent collapse much later on. But if the erosion of democracy happens first, then it’s not possible.
Answering the OP is a lot easier than people have made out.
All adages from Heinlein are wrong.
What do you count as an erosion of democracy and what’s your evidence that it came first? Yes, Chavez had unusually inappropriate control over the media and yes, the state certainly did more to help its supporters get to the polls but on the scale of Latin American democracies, these are pretty par for the course.
It seems from our best available evidence that Venezuela was not a puppet dictatorship with sham elections like Iraq. Yes, maybe Chavez would have won with say, 55% support instead of 63% support if he were a little more high minded but it seems hard to deny that Chavismo was a popular belief genuinely held by a significant proportion of the population.
Would an eroded democracy have allowed the opposition MUD to win 60% of the parliamentary seats in the 2015 parliamentary elections? Maduro’s handling of the recall referendum, for sure is a violation of democratic principles but it’s also happening at the very tail end of an unpopular regime.
Now that Venezuela’s a basketcase, people seem to want to pin the reason on any number of external causes and conspiratorial smoke filled rooms. But, at the core of it, the Venezuelan people, with full and accurate foreknowledge, directly through their will, enabled the policies that formed the basis for the current crisis.
I dunno. There generally isn’t such a thing as a free lunch.