The fundamental problem is, by its very nature, democracy cannot be imposed from above. If a society doesn’t have a tradition of democratic principles upon which to build, it’s very difficult to create a functional democracy overnight.
Those of us in places like Canada, the US and Britain often forget that the development of national-level democracy took place over the course of hundreds of years of gradually building up democratic processes at lower levels of government. We didn’t just go from Kings to Presidents/Prime Ministers in one big leap. But that’s what we expect other countries to do, like the aforementioned Wiemar Germany, and it doesn’t work all that well.
And especially in places where constitutionalism is barely emergent one has to be careful about people perceiving that somehow there’s a promise that establishing liberal democracy will just by itself improve things. Because when that does not happen, they’ll be receptive to the message that it’s because democratic governance is feckless and weak.
Re your examples, I would add Russia under Yeltsin and say that new democracies are weak. But it doesn’t mean that Tsarist Russia and Germany under Wilhelm II were better than what immediately replaced them (or that Wilhelminism would have stopped Nazism).
Here’s a quote from The Economist Jan 28th issue about a successful South African local politician.
A poll in 2021 found that two-thirds of South Africans “would be willing to give up elections” if an unelected government could provide security, housing and jobs.
The punchline being for people in craptacular countries, those 3 things are the bread-and-butter issues.
If you as the government can deliver them, you’re a hero. If you can’t, you’ll be replaced. Maybe by something worse, but people with very little can’t be bothered to sort out which charlatan is more likely to deliver on their promises.
…there are over 300 anti-trans bills on the docket right now all around America right now that include things like removing the right to healthcare, making it a crime for a transgender person to walk into the same bathroom as a child, there is a bill in Tennessee that will ban drag, in Montana they’ve passed a bill that “using a trans kid’s “legal name” and “biological pronouns” is not bullying”, there is a bill in Missouri that will “forcibly medically detransitions any trans person who is incarcerated.” Cite.
America hasn’t moved on. Its just picked new and “improved” ways to persecute the marginalised. The shit isn’t hitting the fan. Some of these bills have already passed, many more of them likely will, and with the Supreme Court now heavily weighted on one side of the issue we don’t really know how this will end.
Because we know that this has been in the planning for a very long time. And taking over the courts was always part of the plan. America incarcerates more people per capita than anywhere else in the world. Its over-policed by thousands of militant police agencies that openly and defiantly do all that they can to avoid civilian oversight.
The United States of America is already at the knife-edge of authoritarianism and has been since its foundation. And with increased Balkanization, I fear the descent will continue.
If that is so, such a sentiment must be devastating to millions there and everywhere.
Don’t get me wrong, I know that is so damn common all over the world.
But… there?
Eh, humans will human, I guess.
It just goes to what I said earlier. The implied promise that liberty should make things “better” for you… and the conclusion when whatever doesn’t do so, that then it is not real liberty and not worth keeping.
A poll which forces people into choosing between preset answers may not capture their actual beliefs. At least, in this case, I hope so.
How many of the two-thirds would agree with me that there never will be a real-world situation where giving up elections has something to do with providing security, housing, and jobs?
One interpretation, of such a poll, is that two-thirds want to convey that improving security, housing, and employment is extremely important.
Indices of the health of democracy show alarming deterioration since the financial crisis of 2007-08. One published by The Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister firm, has 89 countries regressing in 2017, compared with only 27 improving. Some surveys find that less than a third of young Americans think it is “essential” to live in a democracy. Small wonder that this year has seen a boom in books with frightening titles such as “How Democracy Ends” and “The People vs. Democracy”. - SOURCE
…with trans parents having to move states so their kids can live freely, with many people not able to access abortion where they live, with more people locked up per capita than anywhere else in the world, I don’t think the US is doing okay at all.
…if we are talking about authoritarianism, then I think the Balkanization on display here is a key part of this. As I just said in another thread, DeSantis is literally ordering the state schools to teach his version of history. Anti-trans legislation removes the right for trans people to access the healthcare they need. These are authoritarianism measures taken in states that are increasingly becoming more and more authoritarian by the day.
Was “stop and frisk” ever anything other than an act of authoritarianism carried out by an authoritarian tool of the state to reign terror on the Black citizens that lived in New York? And how exactly did it come to pass that the United States of America locks up nearly four times as many people per capita as they do in Australia? Was it an accident? Are Americans simply 4 x more likely to commit crime? Or is something else going on here?
The former President of the United States lead efforts to try to overturn the results of the last election. Those efforts literally included the storming of the Capitol. The US is not doing okay. It is one election away from authoritarian rule. There are several states that are trying to pass laws that make this fairly obvious.
If you are one of the 74% of people that are sitting in jail right now that haven’t been convicted of a crime, in a country that still has an exemption for slavery if they are part of the other 26%, if you are one of the many subject to different levels of enforcement based on the colour of your skin, living in a county that has made it practically impossible to vote, how are they living in anything else but an authoritarian dystopia?
Probably depends on the type of authoritarianism. I suspect that it’s better to have a wise king than it is to have a dumb-as-dirt president. Not mentioning any names here. Besides, it’s so much easier to get rid of a bad king!
This is not a simple issue. In American democracy (and this is not merely a contemporary development), there is a second prong of franchise that is essentially equivalent in effect to the unwashed masses. Capital is a powerful force in the capitol, amplifying the mass of the minority, and it pretty much always has been that way.
I see some posts above that conflate democracy with freedom: this is not only not a given (cf Iran) but also kind of a sleight of slate. The meaning of “freedom” varies from person to person, but it generally tends to converge on economic opportunity.
When combined with minimal oversight, “freedom” of this sort will lead to the very kind of capital distortion of democracy that we see in the US today. The US is not really a democracy at all, it is clearly a plutocracy/oligarchy, using pretty sounding words as a façade to cover its ugly reality. It mostly has been for 247 years.
Ultimately, the choice between autocracy and democracy is not a binary one, and most mod nations are not at one extreme or the other but more like some kind of intermediate goulash.
The practical reality is that the conviction-and-corrections system of “justice” is not really built to bring about actual justice, because its mechanisms are not designed to succeed at much other than to maintain castes. It is an ancient tool of the king, to punish his enemies for being his enemies, and does basically nothing to make society not worse. It is, in its present form, the antithesis of democracy.