In The New York Times, the work of political scientist Yascha Mounk is reviewed. This caught my attention:
Political scientists have a theory called “democratic consolidation,” which holds that once countries develop democratic institutions, a robust civil society and a certain level of wealth, their democracy is secure.
Which seems a little unlikely, as three variables are cited right in the definition – the institutions can be subverted, civil society can degenerate into extreme positions, possibly enabled by the wealth mentioned in the third position – and that last variable, wealth, can be affected by many things. To call such a democracy secure seems foolish from a logical point of view.
The article goes on to point out such examples as Venezuela, and I think it’s instructive to remember that the general citizenry, when the chips are down and they’re scraping bottom, isn’t going to cling to democracy absent a recent reminder of the chilling failures of the alternatives. The goal of any successful society isn’t, at baseline, to fulfill any particular ideology – it’s to be successful, to survive. If the citizenry is starving, or hopeless, or in some way dissatisfied, the ruling ideology is in trouble, and no amount of gesticulating to the God of Democracy will save it.
Quite possibly, the only successful treatment will be that most dreaded: experiencing the alternatives, possibly for generations.
So how is the United States doing? Mounk and his colleagues have developed an evaluation test.
According to the Mounk-Foa early-warning system, signs of democratic deconsolidation in the United States and many other liberal democracies are now similar to those in Venezuela before its crisis.
Across numerous countries, including Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States, the percentage of people who say it is “essential” to live in a democracy has plummeted, and it is especially low among younger generations.
Support for autocratic alternatives is rising, too. Drawing on data from the European and World Values Surveys, the researchers found that the share of Americans who say that army rule would be a “good” or “very good” thing had risen to 1 in 6 in 2014, compared with 1 in 16 in 1995.
That trend is particularly strong among young people. For instance, in a previously published paper, the researchers calculated that 43 percent of older Americans believed it was illegitimate for the military to take over if the government were incompetent or failing to do its job, but only 19 percent of millennials agreed. The same generational divide showed up in Europe, where 53 percent of older people thought a military takeover would be illegitimate, while only 36 percent of millennials agreed.
Those are some astounding statistics. I mean, with regard to “Army rule,” even 1 in 16 is astonishingly high; 1 in 6 is appalling. Sadly, at least in this article, Mr. Mounk’s work appears to be descriptive in this area, with no apparent attempt to discover the motivations for the answers. Perhaps this is better answered in another study; at the moment, we could speculate that the current bitterness between the Democrats and GOP is to blame, but that’s only speculation.
However, regardless of motivation, I believe this simple rejoinder to the serious person, Millenial or not, who thinks an autocratic government is the way to go, should be effective:
With a democracy, there are periodic, even frequent opportunities to make course corrections through non-violent means: the vote.
With an autocracy, the odds are very strong that if you don’t like how things are going, the only way to change them will be with a gun, with great risk to your life.
It’s true that a few autocracies have fallen apart relatively peacefully; but most are ended in bloody revolution, and sometimes those revolutions … fail.
So if you think an autocratic government would solve our problems … think again. If you’re wrong, we still end up in a black hole of misery for untold years. In a democracy, you just wait for the next vote and persuade your fellows that it’s time to change.
The real key for a democracy is honesty. That’s where it all begins. As we saw in the last election, between Trump lying every time he opened his mouth, and deceit flooding the Internet, and naive Internet denizens actually believing sometimes unbelievable crap, we are stuck with a government led by a highly inexperienced politician who is busy populating his proposed leadership team with similarly inexperienced zealots.
