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?
Americans doing régime change, mostly
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.