MicroWaveThe United States loses its status as a liberal democracy: ‘Trump is aiming for a dictatorship’
BuffaloxWorldwide, democracy has regressed to its lowest levels since the mid-1970s
I’ve been saying over and over again here, that it’s generally been going backwards since the 70’s. This goes for democracy, respect for human rights and minorities, and the peace movement.
And many people here simply don’t believe it. (I’m guessing younger ones)
Let’s talk about what this really means, though. Why would that happen?
Could it be anything like:
- Because power is a fickle structure by nature and therefore democracy is an unstable system?
- Because technology advanced so fast that it yields control to whomever sits at its forefront?
- Because society chose not to make theoretical laws for technology that had yet been invented?
- Because (e.g., Russian) state propaganda was allowed to become so powerful that it actually destabilized global democracy?
- Because we were naïvely assuming we had a stable democracy, when in fact we never really did — it just hadn’t been under enough stress to show its flaws?
- Because institutional capitalism with monarch style governance is an economic system that necessarily leads to authoritarianism?
- Because the libertarian value tolerance of debate is an ill founded ideology, and we actually need more intolerance (e.g., limitations on free speech)?
- …
What’s the next big realization here for mankind?
I mean, sure. But shouldn’t something be said about what that means for democracy? Would it be:
“Democracy only works if you don’t try regime changes in foreign states, otherwise it starts to experience a phenomenon where the democracy withers”
…?
I’m doubtful it’s that simple. If it is, then democracy seems rather unstable in its current form. All it takes is one bad leader to trigger a chain reaction toward failure? Again, I’m doubtful.
There’s got to be a bigger story here.
The rich people are in an exclusive club and collude without meeting because what’s good for one is good for the other. They’ve also been a big driving force for change in the world from consumer based economic models to “supplier” based models. IE themselves.
When you put it that way, it sounds like democracy requires a global effort to continuously thwart such collusion, such wealth, maybe such exclusively? Something… It sounds righteous to me, but also like something that can become equally oppressive in perhaps many different ways.
What you describe is something that I understand to have been the case for most of human history, if not all of it. How do you resolve that issue? And, if that’s really the issue, what do you make of modern democracies?
Democracy grew out of too much power to the rich, though since day one they’ve been thwarting it where they can.
I honestly don’t have real answers for this, I just know of the problem.
You seem to miss the fact that we lost control of society with both political parties being captured by the oligarchy, unions being infected with the mob and beset by law enforcement, and all other parts of the long game of the business roundtable of 1971 to seize control.
Everything you mention is after the fact. We were disunited, and rallied around controlled opposition.
Yeah but even don’t really get to the root of things. Did that happen because we had not accounted for its possibility when constructing the democracy? Was that always happening? Is oligarchy a naturally occurring problem and foe to democracy?
Why were they able to seize control at all, if we had a function democracy before then? Surely if it were a “functioning democracy,” then their seizure of contr would have been democratically acquired — right? Obviously wrong, but why?
We need a second hippie revolution. And I don’t mean the half-assed “comebacks” from the late 90s and 2010s, a real movement that actually influences policy.
Hippies were a CIA OP to distract the left from organising and doing drugs instead.
Hippies did fuck all and then ended up voting for Reagan.
It’s not just younger ones. I talk to a large group of boomers and they are all in the same boat of “everything is fine, we’ll just vote the next election. We’ve had presidents like this before.”
We’ve had presidents like this before.”
On that they are seriously mistaken, of course there have been bad presidents like Bush, but Trump is a whole new class of bad.
I hope they are right, and that all this can be solved by a simple election, but I’m not betting on it.
Yeah I really don’t think so. The damage is already done to democracy. I can believe we used to have a shared common decency. But it’s been rotting for a while now.
Plus boomers aren’t known for actually fixing problems. The things I bring up to them, their responses are always like “well we will figure it out sometime” as they continue doing what they want. So uhhh… I don’t have a lot of confidence.