I think they're assuming the representative democracies actually exist.
In the U.S. (from what I've seen - I'm envious of those with commanding knowledge of the situation) there are occasional elections with very limited, pre-chosen slates of candidates that most people don't know personally. The last time I tried to contact my district city councilperson (albeit in a fairly large city), a secretary answered my email.
There's also the assumption (not to deny the stated correlation) that satisfaction is tied to economic welfare. My opinion is that while this is necessary, it's hardly sufficient, and a major issue is not only economic inequality but a general inequality in opportunities to have any sort of influence in societal operations. I think it would be better if more people could be big fishes in little ponds. The professional class that makes up the media is defacto big fish and has a bias and blind spots to this.
Furthermore, I believe a better description of what exists in the U.S. at least is that we have a representative oligarchy - elected officials primarily representing and serving rich business interests.
Please understand that this is not really a moral judgement on my part - it seems entirely predictable and probably unavoidable for this to happen in an age of breathtaking material and technological abundance coupled with confusion about larger social questions.
> How people feel about the way democracy is working is strongly related to how they believe their economy is working.
The chattering classes in the West have completely taken their focus off raising living standards in favour of a number of other ideological goals. Energy and industrial policies across multiple democratic countries are in an absolute shambles to the point where we're being challenged by Russia of all countries. Over the past decades the US has adopted a strategy of printing money which is a very bad sign in a leading economic power.
I can see why people would be dissatisfied by democracy right now; I certainly am. The leadership classes aren't focused on prosperity. I hope we stick with it though, it is still a better approach than the alternatives.
>Over the past decades the US has adopted a strategy of printing money which is a very bad sign in a leading economic power.
Are you kidding? If you have to print unbounded money, your economy is shit. No country that has done that has remained a "leading economic power" for long.
>I can see why people would be dissatisfied by democracy right now; I certainly am.
Democracy (any flavor) vs other systems is a red herring. When shit isn't working people look at the wrong things. At the end of the day, they chose to buy cheap goods and import everything vs. a more balanced protectionist approach. We can point fingers at corporations profiting from that but they couldn't actually force people to destroy their own country. What I'm trying to say here is that no system of government can work if people are fundamentally unwise or immoral. An authoritarian system would not be better than what we have, because shit usually rises to the top.
The people who complain about this are hypocrites. If they really, really cared about this, they would have rallied to fix this. Instead I see people so the opposite. A lot of them are spreading hate in the name of fighting imagined hate. The other ones are gold bugs or Bitcoiners, who prefer living off of working people's labor without contributing anything themselves.
It generally feels that the modern Western nations are ready to drop democracy for more or less trivial reasons, like moderately higher inflation (I'd go out on a limb and posit that it's inflation and its downstream effects that sour the mood specifically since 2021). At the same time the Western democracies went through way more serious economic upheavals in the past and yet democracy itself was not questioned. What is different today? For example, why didn't the US go Nazi after the Great Depression?
> For example, why didn't the US go Nazi after the Great Depression?
It flirted with it, as did most of Europe. Some nations shook out as fascist, some saw communist revolution, and some (barely) maintained the liberal capitalist democracies and republics while applying extensive socialist reforms like the New Deal. Whether the differing outcomes of that period were incidental or preordained is debatable.
After WWII, fascism and explicit expansionism largely fell out of favor as viable ideology, and we saw the bipolar heel-digging and soft/proxy power competition of the Cold War.
Then, after the collapse of the USSR, we had one surviving ideological framework dominating world-scale politics and it (inevitably) did not deliver enough equity and prosperity for people to accept that it was good enough.
So, like 100 years earlier, people are again looking around at other options.
There's no precedent to suggest that any one form of governance or economy can indefinitely keep all people settled and secure. Every one promises some kind of utopia, but all do so only speculatively.
In frank answer to your question:
> What is different today?
Nothing.
So if you like the whole liberal democracy thing over alternatives, you might want to
make sure you're fighting for it, so that your community (whichever that is) ends up as one of those that hangs onto it through this next round.
People being dissatisfied with "the way democracy is working in their country" are not necessarily ready to drop democracy, just as people dissatisfied with their lives typically don't commit suicide.
Someone who's simply disappointed that other people don't vote more like them could also answer the survey question this way.
What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'.
One man can be wiser than a million, but it is likely that one man doesn't know enough to tell a million how to live their lives the best way. Do you want one man unilaterally deciding that we need to go fight to the death in some war?
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In the U.S. (from what I've seen - I'm envious of those with commanding knowledge of the situation) there are occasional elections with very limited, pre-chosen slates of candidates that most people don't know personally. The last time I tried to contact my district city councilperson (albeit in a fairly large city), a secretary answered my email.
There's also the assumption (not to deny the stated correlation) that satisfaction is tied to economic welfare. My opinion is that while this is necessary, it's hardly sufficient, and a major issue is not only economic inequality but a general inequality in opportunities to have any sort of influence in societal operations. I think it would be better if more people could be big fishes in little ponds. The professional class that makes up the media is defacto big fish and has a bias and blind spots to this.
Furthermore, I believe a better description of what exists in the U.S. at least is that we have a representative oligarchy - elected officials primarily representing and serving rich business interests.
Please understand that this is not really a moral judgement on my part - it seems entirely predictable and probably unavoidable for this to happen in an age of breathtaking material and technological abundance coupled with confusion about larger social questions.
It is. People tolerate more corruption when it does not affect them directly.
The chattering classes in the West have completely taken their focus off raising living standards in favour of a number of other ideological goals. Energy and industrial policies across multiple democratic countries are in an absolute shambles to the point where we're being challenged by Russia of all countries. Over the past decades the US has adopted a strategy of printing money which is a very bad sign in a leading economic power.
I can see why people would be dissatisfied by democracy right now; I certainly am. The leadership classes aren't focused on prosperity. I hope we stick with it though, it is still a better approach than the alternatives.
Are you kidding? If you have to print unbounded money, your economy is shit. No country that has done that has remained a "leading economic power" for long.
>I can see why people would be dissatisfied by democracy right now; I certainly am.
Democracy (any flavor) vs other systems is a red herring. When shit isn't working people look at the wrong things. At the end of the day, they chose to buy cheap goods and import everything vs. a more balanced protectionist approach. We can point fingers at corporations profiting from that but they couldn't actually force people to destroy their own country. What I'm trying to say here is that no system of government can work if people are fundamentally unwise or immoral. An authoritarian system would not be better than what we have, because shit usually rises to the top.
The entire western world has adopted this strategy.
Deleted Comment
It flirted with it, as did most of Europe. Some nations shook out as fascist, some saw communist revolution, and some (barely) maintained the liberal capitalist democracies and republics while applying extensive socialist reforms like the New Deal. Whether the differing outcomes of that period were incidental or preordained is debatable.
After WWII, fascism and explicit expansionism largely fell out of favor as viable ideology, and we saw the bipolar heel-digging and soft/proxy power competition of the Cold War.
Then, after the collapse of the USSR, we had one surviving ideological framework dominating world-scale politics and it (inevitably) did not deliver enough equity and prosperity for people to accept that it was good enough.
So, like 100 years earlier, people are again looking around at other options.
There's no precedent to suggest that any one form of governance or economy can indefinitely keep all people settled and secure. Every one promises some kind of utopia, but all do so only speculatively.
In frank answer to your question:
> What is different today?
Nothing.
So if you like the whole liberal democracy thing over alternatives, you might want to make sure you're fighting for it, so that your community (whichever that is) ends up as one of those that hangs onto it through this next round.
Someone who's simply disappointed that other people don't vote more like them could also answer the survey question this way.
Robert A. Heinlein