The Future of Democracy

I grow increasingly pessimistic about the future of democracy. Donald Trump was voted into office by a democratic process. The United Kingdom risks, as I write, economic collapse because a poorly informed public voted for Brexit and the government has been unable to meet the people’s expressed desire while reassuring industry and the financial markets that the country has a rosy future.  In Brazil, a populist president is voted into power because of the perceived corruption of his predecessors and their inability to fix the problems that afflict the majority of Brazilians. His first acts are to claim climate change is a Marxist plot (OK, it was his foreign minister that said that but Bolsonaro didn’t immediately leap to his planet’s defense), and ‘declared war’ on indigenous people trying to protect their land and their way of life.

I used to think the future of democracy lay with China. Many would think this unrealistic, but if you consider the progress made by the Chinese government since the days of the Cultural Revolution, maybe not so much. The Chinese people now have prosperity and freedom they couldn’t have imagined fifty years ago. Imagine what their country could be like in another fifty years. I thought that at some time in the not too distant future, a group of men (and maybe women, though I don’t see many of them in Chinese politics) would sit down and consider the future of government in their country. The options facing them would be to maintain their current course, or to allow other parties to compete against the Communist Party. They would look at the failings of democracy in other countries and come up with an improved model for melding what people want with what is good and fair for them. But I gave up this idea when Xi Jinping effectively became president for life. Perhaps another victory for populism.

And of course there are stories here. There are two stories. A dystopian story of the rise of populists such as Trump and Bolsonaro, and a more optimistic story of their defeat by the tides of progressive resistance, and perhaps the emergence of a new, improved, form of democracy.