Why We’re Underestimating How Much Trouble Democracy’s (Really) In

I Hate To Break This to You, But Our Civilization’s Having a Democratic Implosion

Image: Our World in Data

Look at the chart. See the light blue dip? Right at the end? That’s implosion.

What should we expect from our future? Will things ever…get better? One of the great trends sweeping the world today is the sudden, rapid decline of democracy. And it’s hard to put into words just how much it’s changed our world. By now, most of us just glumly expect there to be a party that’s hostile to democracy, spouting Big Lies, scapegoating innocents, inciting violence, and openly building authoritarian institutions.

Is all this just a phase? Is democracy going to…make a comeback? Or is this a secular trend that’s going to define the future? Are we just going to live in an authoritarian world? If you think I’m exaggerating, let me do a short list of countries hit by the anti-democratic wave. America. Britain. Italy. Sweden. Finland. India. The Philippines. Turkey. Hungary, Poland, Russia. Myanmar, China. I could go on for another paragraph. It’s not a joke, and it’s something that we need to take seriously, and here I speak especially about my fellow social scientists and observers.

To answer this question well, we need to start from ground zero. That’s because the way that people, especially in the West, tend to think about democracy is wrong. I don’t mean that in an insulting way, just a…deliberate one. To understand the future of democracy — whether or not it has one — we need to understand its past and present with accuracy. So first we need to bust a few myths, with some disconcerting facts.

If I asked you how much of the world lives in a democracy, what would you say?

The majority of the world has never even come close to living in a democracy. We in the West have a skewed view of how far and wide democracy really spread. The numbers, when you look at them, the facts, are alarming and startling. Just somewhere between 5 to 10% of humanity has ever lived in a full democracy. That means ones with robust democratic functioning, norms, systems, values. Just 14% of the world lives in full democracy today, and that number only increases to 38% if we include ones that are “flawed” democracies. That means ones where civil rights are still under threat, civic engagement’s low, and there are ongoing problems with basic systems functioning.

Stop and think about that for a second. Be honest with me and yourself. Were you wrong when you answered the question? In my experience, most people are. We have a kind of cognitive bias when it comes to democracy — having been told stories of its rise and primacy for so long, those stories being ingrained into us, we overestimate, often badly, just how far and wide democracy spread.

In other words, democracy’s always been a luxury of and for the minority of humankind. We need to really understand this, and understand it gravely and well. Because right now, even those nations who have been democracies, and achieved this capstone, are squandering it. In the rich West, we make the assumption, flippantly, that it’s just a phase, all this authoritarianism, this fascism-lite, or fascism-for-real, because we tell ourselves that democracy is what’s “normal.” And sooner or later, things must go back to that state.

But that’s not remotely true. Democracy is not the norm. Everything else — every other flavour of human folly, from theocracy to the hate of fascism to the brutality of authoritarianism is what’s normal. Democracy is very, very much the anomaly and the aberration. And yet because we’ve come to believe in the myth of democracy’s triumph, versus the reality of it’s rarity, all that is precisely why we, especially in the West, undervalue it. We have forgotten what an accomplishment and treasure it really is, overestimating just how common it is, to the point of wrongly, badly wrongly, believing that it’s “normal.”