Let’s not turn this into a Trump thread, except to the extent it backs an assertion or other on-topic use. We have plenty of threads about Trump and what he’s doing.
What do you think is the reason for the decline in democracy, globally? How do you think it ends? How far do you think it goes?
As much as the US gets all the press, many have noted that an authoritarian right is gaining ground all over the world.
I think it’s being driven by:
-A sense of loss by the working class, even as they watch the rich get ever richer and more privileged.
-Western democracies have become both inefficient and ineffective. Just try and build a bridge or a subway line. Time was they’d just build it, and residents, workers, and the environment be damned. Now it takes a decade just to get through the permitting, lawsuits, etc.
-Mass immigration. People don’t like change. I want to avoid digging too deep into is it or isn’t it racism, but the levels of immigration have been much higher over the past decade or two, and people don’t like it.
FWIW, I think that at least some significant portion of the racism is a symptom, not a cause. I’ve personally seen people I never knew to be racist, and this includes people close enough to be honest, who’ve shifted towards MAGA and become more racist in the process.
So Communism never worked, probably couldn’t work.
But the various Democracies tend to get subverted to the Needs of Capitalism (Rich Oligarchs and rapacious Corporations) which then get too greedy and want too big a slice of pie. This is where the US is now. And to be fair, it seemed like in the 1970s Unions got too strong and had too much corruption. So the pendulum swings.
The places where Democracies work seem to be low density areas with a lot of socialism built in. Please see Sweden & Norway as examples that work fairly well.
My thought is in densely populated countries, Democracy doesn’t work well.
I think racism or religious persecution or anti-immigration are all just sadly human nature and not tied to any system of government, but exploited by Fascist and Fascist leaning governments.
So I hope world population is really declining and automation will reduce the need for cheap labor and somehow we grow the fuck up and institute shorter work weeks and a lot more support for people.
The fact that we have failed to address Global Climate Change for petty reasons is a pretty good indicator the current system is borked.
I think it’s being primarily driven by a class of super-wealthy oligarchs and plutocrats who have learned how to control and exploit the nascent tools of mass instant communication to enrage and inflame people with inflated claims regarding the points you mention, in a self-serving crusade to sabotage democratic ideals in order to weaken the forces that would otherwise stand in opposition to the wealthy people further enriching themselves.
Seriously, I think it’s not that Western Democracies are inefficient and ineffective - authoritarian ones are just as bad, just in different ways. Often with layers of fixers and insiders that need to be convinced (bribed) to allow access to the core decision making power, and then levels of other grift to get the project done, often poorly. See North Korea, or even (to a lesser extent) Evergrande’s collapse in China.
No, and possibly more cynically, I think that the problem for Democracy in general (Not just the west) is that it’s very difficult to maintain with a less-than-homogenous population (culturally, though racial elements make it easier to divide as well!) uneven education, and (echoing @What_Exit here) larger populations. All of the above create friction or fracture points, and there’s always someone looking to grab more power to themselves by riding popular sentiment.
Heck the Greeks give us the term demagogue, so it’s likely endemic to any such system.
But there are forces deliberately grinding down on the walls that were supposed to mitigate such things. The plutocrats, autocrats, corporations that only saw numbers, and the rest of the “me FIRST!” crowd all kept pushing until the walls started coming down.
And lastly (and possibly more GD-wise), it seems to me that a huge number of people (I couldn’t guess at percentages) are uninterested (possibly past the “their team” aspect) in Democracy. They don’t care, it’s too much work, they don’t want the responsibility. A similarly large chunk just wants things to go on as they’ve “always” been (even if it hadn’t been that way mere decades ago) but get a little better for themselves. Note the last word. They don’t want things to get better for everyone, because they need to be special, recognized for being outstanding, even if they’re not. Things getting better for everyone, means you’re NOT special in any way.
The last, in the USA’s worship of overblown individuality, is likely making the collapse HERE that much faster.
Corruption and racism. I know you asked about the world, and it can apply the same, but look at the immigration act of 1924 in the US that basically banned asians and made it difficult for latins to emmigrate. All based on fear and the “loss of the country’s homogeneity” (something like that). It stood until 1965, now TPTB want to go back, and are running the same propaganda campaigns.
These things the right are doing are NOT unprecedented, so the alarm at MAGA is warranted but nothing new— they’ve been doing these things since 1790.
I would go a step further, and submit that it’s a direct result of anti-intellectualism, and an active degradation of our societal intellect, as a group. Things have increased in speed and intensity in the past few decades in this respect. (I personally blame, in no particular order, the Internet, social media, and reality television.) The need to belong to a larger group plays into all of that, and giving over your own intellectual curiosities and pursuits is part and parcel to the tribalism it entails. Once everyone chooses a side, well, the thinking stops, and the people calling the shots, who are often selfish in their desires, get to steer the sheep…er, ship.
The mistake that too many make is concluding that an incompetent democracy means that democracies are bad systems. The correct conclusion is that incompetent democracy needs to be improved.
Alas, I don’t believe we have enough people with the strength of conviction required to make democracy great again.
I think the biggest problem is that Democracy, and Liberalism more generally, has historically succeeded because of a number of factors, chief among them its ability to host its own criticism. All ideologies are flawed, but Liberalism’s tolerance of dissent means it can borrow from other ideologies. So a liberal country with a free market can borrow from socialism, and make certain industries publically owned (utilities, healthcare, etc); but a socialist society is not going to privatize particular industries where it predicts there will be benefits to doing so.
This is Liberalism’s greatest strength, but also its greatest weakness; because it is struggles to deal with bad faith actors. It’s like that quote from Dune where the guy explains that he demands freedom when he is weak, according to your values; and then imposes himself on you when he are strong, in accordance with his own values. The perfect example of this is the way that MAGA weaponizes calls for civility - Democrats are monsters for using the phrase “paint a target” but January 6 was totally fine.
The real problem is that by it’s very nature Liberalism is fighting these bad faith actors with at least one hand tied behind its back. And we shouldn’t even try to change that - again, this is a weakness, but it’s also liberalism’s strength. What we need are vigorous defenders of Liberalism who aren’t afraid to call out these bad faith actors, rather than systemic barriers.
The only exception is, we need a way for influencer accounts on social media to be verified somehow, so at the least we know how many of the big accounts are actually foreign. And media personalities should reveal any foreign funding their get. See: the Tim Pool situation - if you’re being paid millions of dollars by Russia to spew propaganda, we deserve to know.
The Swedish Democrats would like to have a word with you. They’re up to 20%
Good point, but the points I mention ARE real. While cities thrive, a lot of the former rust belt towns still suffer. The 93/128 interchange just north of Boston has been in desperate need of rebuilding for decades, but local groups have made it so hundreds of thousands of people waste millions of hours of time and gallons of gas because… reasons (well, property values of those who will now be close to the highway).
I’m fine with debate seeping in. I considered putting this there
I tend to think that the real determinant is how homogenous a society is. If you’ve got everyone there who has roughly the same background, history, viewpoint, religion, and everything else, you are much more likely to have democratic decisions that are closer to a consensus, or at the very least, palatable compromises.
But when you get differences in wealth, religion, race, history, background, geography, and so on, you start getting situations where democratic decisions and elections start feeling to someone like they’re getting screwed. And at some point, it likely starts to feel institutionalized, if you’re say… a minority group in some way. I imagine rural people in many countries feel this way, especially in countries with large urban populations.
I think you’re attributing a lot more intent and agency to the wealthy than they probably have. My suspicion is that they don’t have nearly the foresight, planning, or intent to do this stuff that people attribute to them. It’s far more likely that what we’re seeing is things along the lines of largely unintended consequences of emergent properties of this sort of communication.
I think this is a big one. If I had to hazard a guess, it’s because with the possible exception of something like a city council, most political decisions are pretty far removed from one’s daily life. In essence, we’re voting for someone else to vote somewhere else on our behalf. That’s a fairly abstract concept when you get down to it, and for most people, their daily concerns are much more prominent in their worldview. I think of it as being along the lines of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, except in the sense of relative economic or social stability/comfort and the consequent freedom to engage in political concern. People trying to feed their families from day to day aren’t worrying about whether or not Trump is breaking the norms of how Presidents are supposed to act, or whether he’s breaking laws in doing so. They’re worrying about how they’re going to pay for that bag of rice, or how they’re going to get childcare coverage when they’ve got to go to the doctor. As people become more stable economically and socially, they have the freedom to think a bit less close to the ground. However, some people choose not to, and others just don’t have the capability to think at a higher altitude.
These people are just fine with being in a situation where they basically avoid the law, work their jobs and take care of their families, and that’s all they’re looking for. They only care about politics when they are hungry, can’t find a job, or are being persecuted.
What I’m getting at is that I doubt it’s some kind of mustache-twirling situation where Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg, Alice Walton, or Jeff Bezos are sitting around scheming up ways to subvert our system for our own gain.
Much more likely to me is that a lot of what we’re seeing is inadvertent and emergent consequences of the use of the Internet and technology to do things combined with the huge scale of some of these enterprises relative to their predecessors.
With virtually unlimited soft money, dark money, PACs, think tanks, advocacy groups, lobbyists, I think the difficulty would be in quantifying it and attributing it with any precision, but not in identifying it as a factor.
Think of the funding for, and the impact of, just the Federalist Society, to name but one.
In a nutshell, democracy requires trust. More so than any other form of government.
For various reasons, trust is eroding fast. Really fast. Both sides (in multiple nations, not just the USA) believe the other side is actively out to harm and destroy them.
So with faith in democracy gone way down, the system erodes fast.
I’m not saying stuff isn’t happening, I’m saying it’s not necessarily consciously directed by the super-wealthy with the intent of messing up the system.
I mean, if Jeff Bezos funds a PAC to advocate on behalf of Amazon, that’s self-interest. Same for soft money. I doubt he’s aiming for destabilization, as much as he’s aiming for a business climate that’s friendly to Amazon in particular.
If you look at the Constitution, we were founded as a Republic. Look at the California flag: “California Republic”. Even a century after the Constitution was written, we were still holding on to the idea that “Republic = Good”.
If you read what the Framers of the Constitution were debating, you’ll see that they were actively and deliberately opposed to “Democracy”. They thought it was a path to self-destruction.
That said, “Democracy” means something different now than it did then. It used to mean, “Rule by popular vote.” Now it means, “A place where the President is elected by the people.” Which…is 1) just a particular form of Republic and 2) not true of the United States since the President is elected by the Electoral College.
But we should ask why Democracy became something else? If we’re a Republic, we’re happy being a Republic, we had an express intent to be a Republic, then why would someone modify “Democracy” to squish it over enough to barely apply to our country - if you squint a bit - and advertise it strongly enough that everyone forgets that we were actively trying to avoid that for the first century plus of our existence? Why would they try to skew us towards “the will of the people should be followed, exactly”?
Caudillo exist in democracies. They don’t in republics. If you’re a person in politics - the type to build a political machine, gerrymander your distict, etc. - then you’re also the sort of person who looks across the landscape and notices that democracies yield more power to politicians than republics do.
I was thinking democracy requires both shared values and a shared reality, but I’ll have to concede that it really boils down to trust. I can’t trust someone who looks at me and tells me it wasn’t MAGA who stormed the capitol on January 6th. I can’t trust someone who tells me with a straight face the United States/NATO is to blame for Russia invading Ukraine. I just can’t trust tens of millions of my fellow Americans who have no problem with people being snatched off the streets and imprisoned without benefit of due process.
Yeah, I’ve long wondered if popular election of Senators was a good decision or not for much the same reasons.
It’s anti-popular democracy, but it’s arguably going to be less beholden to the whims of the people than a system where the Senators have to stand for re-election by the general public.
And that’s kind of the crux of the thing; how much should the general public be trusted? Arguably they can’t be; too many are ignorant and lazy to make informed and considered decisions. When a candidate’s height is a serious consideration for voters, that tells me that it’s pretty questionable. But at the same time, there are lots of very valid arguments for universal suffrage as well.
I kind of feel like that’s what republics were set up to remedy; they were representative governments, but not necessarily democratic governments, and by design tried to avoid the excesses and caprices of the general public.
My thoughts were that I can’t trust people whose reasons for voting for a candidate is because their pastor told them to vote that way, or who vote for the taller candidate, or who vote for racist reasons, or who don’t understand basic science.