Is Democracy Done?
The NYT recently did an interview on Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Yarvin believes that something like a monarch is a better way to go. So is he right?
The Democracy Index shows precisely how the world is fairing in terms of the degree and extent of democracy and you have to say that per capita more people live in non-democracies than democracies.
There are legitimate concerns that US Democracy, by delivering a democratic victory to Donald Trump, will lead to the erosion of democratic processes and institutions.
Consider too that the European Union is not very democratic? Ask anyone who they voted for in the European Commission presidential election? The answer is “no-one” because there is no EU Commission presidential election. Ursula von der Leyden was nominated by the European Council (an unelected cabal of has-been politicians) and then rubber-stamped by the European Parliament. The EU fears direct democracy!
Plus, the autocracies of China, Russia, and Iran have formed a solid axis committed to defeating and destroying western democracies. The BRICS geo-political partnership is an alliance of countries that prefer a more autocratic mode of governance and want to challenge western economic hegemony.
In Jesus and the Powers, Tom Wright and I wrote about the dangers of democracy being undermined by progressive “civic totalism” and also by conservative “Christian Nationalism.”
It’s tragic that many people in the west want to abolish democracy just so they can permanently prevent the other side from even winning. A kind of “burn the village to save the village” type of argument.
I am old enough to remember the late 80s and early 90s, how after the end of South African apartheid, after the fall of the Soviet Union and collapse of Communism in eastern Europe, after the world united to defeat Saddam Hussein, that there was a great time of political optimism.
Francis Fukuyama had declared The End of History? in the sense of the end of conflict over which political system is the one system that works. The answer was liberal democracy. It had defeated fascism, then communism, and was the last system standing. Liberal democracy was the victor and the only future for a successful nation (okay, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist).
But what happened next? The rise of political Islam and Islamic jihadism, nationalism in Europe, ethno-tribal violence in the former Yugoslavia, plus genocide in Rwanda, a resurgent Russian dictatorship (Russia has been a dictatorship since the 1300s, so no surprise if you ask me). The internet did not bring us together, rather, it magnified our political fragmentation and created an instrument for political fratricide. China’s economic prosperity did not translate into political liberalism, quite the opposite, it became more authoritarian. The GFC showed that there is still in western countries a massive wealth inequality. At the height of the crisis, the wealthy were protected while the plebeians were exploited to prop up corrupt banks and a kleptocratic finance system. The so-called Arab Spring was a flower that bloomed for a few hours before being ruthlessly mowed down by tanks and gunfire.
Maybe democracies are dying and will die?
But I am slightly more optimistic!