I’d grant that, but @DavidNRockies is correct as well. Yes, they aren’t trying to break the system precisely, but they’re pushing their own needs so hard that they’re recklessly bringing down the guardrails on a functioning Democracy in an effort to have more, More, MORE profit for themselves. Which has lead us to a failing democracy and increasing autocracy as a very predictable side-effect. Exactly @DavidNRockies reckless indifference.
I think a major cause is erosion of trust in the government. I was just reading about the measles outbteak and how many people simply don’t trust “experts” any more. They are expecting new outbreaks of polio, whooping cough and other diseases as a result. And that suggests that the breakdown on trust isn’t simply because people view politicians as largely corrupt. It is all mysterious to me. In the US some blame has to be attached to Reagan, but he was just echoing what people were starting to feel. I dunno.
Democracy is hard. Not only does a good citizen need to research a myriad of issues (many requiring an Economics or Sociology degree to understand) they need to engage with community and labor organizations, fundraising, campaigning, and canvassing. Meanwhile, all the other complicated aspects of our lives are conveniently being resolved by downloading an app on our phone. Spending too much effort and time working on democracy? There’s an app for that, too: Fascism.
Yes, where are people seeing this Democracy? The US is a representative republic. We have limited ability to vote for people to represent us on the larger stage and must trust them to do so well, or vote for new representatives. Once they get into power it is very hard to remove them usually due to them solidifying their support among business, interest groups, and other factions.
Again, where are you seeing this mythical Democracy? Does any country really have it? Has it ever really worked?
Democracy has always had a slippery definition, one that basically came down to not monarchy or dictatorship. In modern usage, republics are democracies and vice versa. If the U.S. is not a democracy then the word has no meaning. The word does and America is.
I also think too many people in this thread don’t remember that democracy has regularly been endangered in bad times. It happened in America in the 1890s, 1930s, and 1960s. It happened in Europe after the monarchies collapsed in WWI. Fledgling democracies all over the world, in eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia, found sustaining democracy difficult and often impossible. The internet did not invent extremism.
Unfortunately, democracy relies on consensus and cooperation. When things go bad people want results, which can be slow to nonexistent when no one person is in charge.
For two decades in the middle of the 20th century, sensible people became convinced that democracy was doomed worldwide. We survived barely, and that brought on a 50 year run of mostly good times for many people.
Why are seeing democracy erode now? Because we’ve seen it before.
Sadly, part of it is that infectious diseases make people more conformist, more disgusted and more hateful of outsides (as behaviors evolution built into us to make us less likely to catch infectious diseases). These innate desires for conformity, order, heightened disgust, etc make us more prone to authoritarianism. With Covid-19, this has been turned on worldwide.
Moreover, in both nations and US states, higher rates of infectious disease correlated with more ‘vertical’ laws – those that disproportionately affect certain groups, such as abortion control or extreme penalties for certain crimes. This was not the case with ‘horizontal’ laws that affect everyone equally.
“We find a consistent relationship between prevalence of infectious diseases and a psychological preference for conformity and hierarchical power structures – pillars of authoritarian politics,” said study lead author Dr Leor Zmigrod, an expert in the psychology of ideology from the University of Cambridge.
“Higher rates of infectious diseases predicted political attitudes and outcomes such as conservative voting and authoritarian legal structures. Across multiple geographical and historical levels of analysis we see this relationship emerge again and again.”
“We found that pathogen rates from over 20 years ago were still relevant to political attitudes as recently as 2016. If COVID-19 increases the allure of authoritarian politics, the effects could be long-lasting,” said Zmigrod, from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.
The effects of Covid-19 on authoritarianism will probably be felt until the 2040s or later sadly.
But aside from that, I would say democracies are inefficient at addressing problems like income inequality or standards of living. Corruption is hard to ignore at the top levels (pedophiles like Trump or UK politicians covered up pedophilia or engaged in it).
Immigration, esp from the middle east and africa, is pushing people to the right.
I do wonder what the rise of China plays in it. The west doesn’t have the monopoly on power and influence like they used to. Maybe this loss of status is pushing people to the right. But its happening outside the west too.
This chart doesn’t show consistent democratic backsliding across the globe though. Its only a few countries. But this chart doesn’t show the massive move to the right all over western europe either. Nor does it show the move towards authoritarian leaders in Russia and China. Nor does it show Israel’s move towards authoritarianism. So its not a complete chart.
This is the reason IMO. All the other stuff is just scapegoating and strawmen. The reason for the decline in democracy is the increase in inequality and the collapse of the middle class.
If this was true one would think the movement would be towards socalism, not fascism.
So it is a lot of factors and not just one.
I suspect governments have a lot less power over the economy than we think they do. Big structural factors like the greying of society and outsourcing to developing countries changed economies in many ways for the worse - and perhaps also there are limits to constant growth, or the problem is that without some kind of reset, rent-seekers capture more and more of the value created? Either way, people are unhappy with the mainstream parties who are unable to fix these deep structural problems, so they turn to radical ones.
Additional possibly crazy theory: the collapse of communism played a role, by discrediting left-wing economic theory. Now the mainstream choices for voters are capitalism with slightly less regulation, or capitalism with slightly more welfare state. They’ve tried both repeatedly and neither fixed their problems, but what else is on offer?
I think your causes are correct, and they are mostly driven by these structural changes.
It’s disruptive, and it reduces the sense of community that leads people to vote for the good of society rather than just for themselves. The US solved this problem in the most direct way in the 1920s by drastically cutting immigration, but mainstream parties can’t/won’t do this today, partly for economic reasons (low birth rates have created a shortage of working age adults) and partly because of international commitments towards refugees and a moral belief in helping others.
This is the biggest reason for the rise in far-right parties in Europe: if the mainstream ones persistently refuse to do what the majority wants, they will start to look elsewhere, even to unsavoury options.
Many people still remember socialism or things they associate with it (eg overly powerful and corrupt unions) and they didn’t like it. The people who remember fascism are almost gone now.
Socialism does seem more popular among the young, who haven’t seen it in action.
This is something that’s become painfully obvious in the past 10 years. The deterioration of public services, even the most basic ones, is blatant.
I live in an affluent Western European country. I like to say that our regulations and procedures used to be bureaucratic and slow, but somewhat effective. Now, they’re bureaucratic and fast, but shockingly ineffective.
In less than a year, I’ve had
- 40% of the trains I took running over an hour late without any explanations ;
- a package I had to send urgently refused by the post office because their payement system had been down since the day before ;
- a very stern-looking gentlemen telling the crowd at the population registry on two non-consecutive days that they would probably not be able to take anyone because… the ticket dispenser was out of order ;
- my bank refusing to take my cash because… they just don’t do that anymore, in addition to being unable to issue a credit card in my name and to exchange currency (what service do they still provide, I wonder).
- the electricity cut off for a week in my apartment because my account had unexplainably been transfered to someone I don’t know ;
- instructions to obey an infuratingly strict garbage collection schedule for more efficiency, only to see literally dozens of garbage bags lining the streets for weeks ;
- articles mentioning drug-related shootings a couple of times a week (used to be a couple of times a year) ;
- warnings that public servants may not get paid in the near-future because of governmental mismanagement.
Everyone I’ve talked to has noticed the same things.
What’s scary is that, confronted with this utter collapse of the most basic services, many people are starting to talk about the need to “bring back order” and “punish those responsible for this mess”.
I routinely make fun of conspiracy theories, but if there’s only one I’d be willing to believe in, it’s that this is orchestrated.
It’s not true in a lot of parliamentary democracies either, the ones in which you have a weak Head of State, either elected or monarchical, with the Prime Minister having the most real power. The people don’t directly choose their leader then, either.
You would think that. Except part of that process of increased inequality was the disappearance of the working class, as well as the middle class (due to outsourcing of manufacturing). And socialist movements rely on a working class with a sense of identity, and that doesn’t exist anymore in the Western world.
As well as (or because of that) the left wing parties of the west have basically abandoned anything that could be considered socialist (or anything that might actually address the underlying economic inequalities that are destroying society), and the fascists have moved in to take over that part of the electorate.
Not particularly relevant to the OP but what is that?
It’s not for nothing that people used to say, “Mussolini made the trains run on time.”
(Whether he did or not is irrelevant; people think fascists will whip things into shape.)
The department that issues all your official documents where I live. ID cards, passports, birth, and marriage certificates, those kinds of things.
The internet and propaganda media has done an incredible amount of damage at radicalizing and dividing people and you guys aren’t giving it nearly enough credit. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and similar propagandists are very responsible for laying the ground work with what we’re seeing with extreme tribalism and detachment from the truth about conservatives, and most of their fascist policies are to fix made-up problems by that propaganda network. The internet made things worse in that it allows people that were previously ostracized as racist/kooky/shitty in their normal lives to all meet up and radicalize each other. Social media corporations fed them more and more radicalizing propaganda - either neligently in the name of engagement or more maliciously as a deliberate effort to stir a “culture war” that made sure people were too busy to notice that the rich controlled the vast majority of media and ways we communicate and wealth disparity was hitting record levels. If not for Fox News and that entire echo chamber, and if not for social media and algorhythmic content, we would not have mass movements towards fascism nor would conspiracy theories and reality denial be so widespread and mainstream.
I’m sure all the socioeconomic factors and immigration play a role, but it’s mostly because conservatives are easy to scare, easy to manipulate, and there have been huge media networks to feed them this fear and tell them what to do with it going on decades now. Rupert Murdoch is not the sole actor, of course, but he is probably more responsible for the decline or reversal of progress in Western civilization of any person on Earth.
Besides what others have mentioned, I believe it is a side effect of the progress of technology. for some centuries technology put pressure on society to liberalize, since a freer and better-educated society was more economically productive and out-competed their opponents. As well, the available technology made it easier for people to organize and harder to control them. But that’s changing; increasing automation means there’s less and less reason to given people any freedom or education, and technology is progressing in a direction that makes it easier rather than harder to control the populace.
The result is a society where authoritarianism increases, ignorance is encouraged, and the ability to fight back agaisnt it constantly decreases. I’ve come to the conclusion that the past few centuries of liberalization were an aberration, and society is moving back towards its natural state of extreme hierarchy, tyranny, and cruelty. Permanently, barring the collapse of civilization.
never mind…
It shows the difference between European (German?) and anglophone culture. Rather than being a sign of the decline of society, it would just be taken for granted in America or Britain that any such place (e.g. DMV or post office) would be terrible and dysfunctional 