Is This the End of the Age of Democracy?

Three Hard Questions About What Kind of Future We Have — And What Kind We Deserve

Image Credit: erhui1979

One of the things that worries me these days is…that we can see the Age of Democracy drawing to a close. Democracy’s declining at the rate — the staggering rate — of about 10% a decade or more right now. And that raises a number of questions. Why? And where do we go…from here?

You don’t have to think too hard about democracy declining as a steep reality. Imploding, though, is more accurate, given this rate of decay. America’s Supreme Court just fell — willingly — for a hoax, and then took civil rights away from everyone. A dissenting Justice wrote of the return of “No dogs and Jews allowed” style…segregation. 

In beleaguered Britain, LOL, the lunatics are in charge, and they’re killing off, among other things, the NHS — it took nearly a century to build, and just a decade plus to destroy. Britain’s water system just collapsed, for heaven’s sake. Turkey, India, China, Russia. Europe’s mature social democracies, once beacons, are one by one falling to the far right — Italy, Sweden, Finland. It’s just a matter of time, given these trends, before the last few holdouts, France and Germany, crumble that way, too.

And then what?

I want you to really understand the problem. Not hysterically. Not by accusing me of hyperbole or “doomerism,” which we’ll come back to. What I’m speaking to you about are factual, empirical realities. We are now living in a world where the End of Liberal Democracy is happening before our eyes. At current rates of decline, it takes place well within our lifetimes. Think about just casually — as, if current trends hold, and there’s little reason to think they won’t. Europe’s last few proper social democracies go hard right, that’s it, there are no more mature, full democracies left on the planet, save maybe Canada. That’s a bleak picture, yes, but it’s also where we are.

All that raises questions. Surface ones, and deep ones. Why — on both levels? Let me discuss them briefly.

I recently said that “everything the far right touches dies” — again, not my opinion, just an apolitical fact. Politics is what you believe, evaluating politics is factual reality. There isn’t one example in history, really, of a far right society being able to endure, prosper, or do much beyond collapse — America’s the most obvious example, Britain’s joining it, and yet Europe’s recent flirtations with fanaticism tells us it hasn’t learned that lesson. Why not?

When I say “liberal democracy,” it means three things. Economic, political, and sociocultural liberalism. All of those are now in steep, startling retreat across the globe. Just think again about America’s Supreme Court. It erased civil rights, just like that — “No Jews and Dogs allowed” now perfectly legal…again. A giant step backwards in terms of political and sociocultural liberalization that it’s hard to even grasp. The undoing of civil rights, which are the linchpin of sociocultural and political liberalization: here, we live in open societies, where everyone has access to participation in public life.

Our societies are increasingly rejecting all that. Take Britain’s immense folly of Brexit. What was it? It was a violent reaction against liberalization — again, political and sociocultural. No, we don’t want to think of ourselves as dirty Europeans! Britain First! And we don’t have to have the right to live and work in Europe! Who needs that? LOL. It turns out, that was Britain’s biggest mistake in centuries, and so, here Britain is, collapsing. The point is that Britain rejected liberalism, in the most modern of modern forms — being part of the EU — in a violent, histrionic frenzy, a moral panic, a fever of nationalism and supremacism.