What keeps my hope for democracies in the world is an observation I made after reading The Year 2000 by Joseph Goebbels written on 25 February 1945. He more or less said that Stalin wasn't bound by the rules of democracies then he would succeed after all. I like to analyze such predictions because you know the outcome and you can guess what was wrong when someone wrote this. My version is that democracies have values kept while transitioning from a state to a state (after elections) while dictatorships change in many respects. It was visible in the Soviet Union, every new ruler brought a new system despite the fact that they all claimed to fight for the same goals.
Democracies never end up in dictatorships? How much historical data do we have on that? I'm pretty sure at least brazil was democratic and then was ruled by military dictatorship (juntas) for a long time. 1940s Germany as well right? I just realized I've never seen the breakdown on that for any length of time, lets say going back to the first republics?
I don't know, it seems like a lot of European countries with a pluralistic party system are heavily "Christian Socialist" (pro free market, pro property ownership, pro capitalist, pro safety net) and they don't seem to be any more prone to slide into dictatorship?
I've actually have never read a compiled lists of stats of what types of government make a country impervious to dictatorial rule.
We are in agreement then, democracies can fall for lots of reasons. They also have the potential to be very successful.
My point is democracy as it stands today is very young and if you only compare it against the failed attempts of Communism you will miss almost all of civilized human history.
Democracies have collapsed and transformed into non-democracies and vice versa many times. States are shaped by their conditions, democracy does not seem to be any more of an attractor than various flavours of monarchism.
If you look at the past century, democracies have been more successful, but if you look at the past millennium, dictatorships have done just fine.
The fact that Democracy has had a really good run for the past 100 years is nowhere near a guarantee that Authoritarianism won't rise again for the next 100.
Democratic societies are democratic until they're not. And the systems put in place when they're democratic don't suddenly disappear alongside democracy.
It is actually very rare for dictatorships to turn into democracies.
In the last half century give or take some years, half of Europe and Latin America nations have successfully and peacefully made this transition. And only Venezuela has returned to dictatorship.
Do you think Putin will ever be overthrown?
No idea. Formal democracy is still in place, so there's hope.
The end of WWII led to Germany, Japan and Italy becoming (or returning to) democracies. As well as your later examples of South Korea and Taiwan, it's understandable that it seemed like the end of the cold war could also lead to some similar results. Maybe by 97 that optimism had faded, but for a while Russia looked like it was heading towards democracy.
Yeah - democracies are downright miraculously stable in comparison to dictatorships. Look at a period of 200 years of the US - one civil war. Look at the history of England. If you say its "civil war" you need to be more specific than even by century!
Stability of dictatorships is a "trains run on time" style Big Lie.
There's a saying that democracy is not when a government gets installed by fair elections, democracy is when a government gets removed by fair elections.
Hitler was democratically elected as well, that is not sufficient to label his regime as democracy.
I did say most failed democracies turn into other forms of government, which I think is broadly true. Consider Weimar Germany, Russia, and Zimbabwe as examples of this tendency. And while this is somewhat unfalsifiable, you could argue that any failed democracy that is still democratic is bound to eventually turn into another form of government eventually, or just to collapse into a completely failed state and de facto anarchy or civil war, like Haiti or Lebanon.
I definitely agree that many countries aren’t really capable of being successful democracies. Lee Kwan Yew famously thought this was true of Singapore, and judging from what he did with the place I wouldn’t argue with him. You should also consider failed attempts to establish democracies, such as Afghanistan.
Well, the examples you have mind are likely not “democratic societies” (even though they often put a “Democratic“ in their name for good measure).
But then, if you look at the US from the new deal to Reagan or most of Western Europe from WWII to the 80s, you have an idea of what a planned[1] democratic society looks like. And then the scarecrow is less powerful as an argument, isn't it?
Also, Communism hasn't been defeated by the power of the Free Market. It has been defeated by the appeal of democratic societies living under a welfare state system.
When all a democracy has to offer is a free market but no shared well-being, dictatorship is around the corner. (You can already see it with the rise of populists leaders all around the western world).
[1] there used to be so much more planning compared to what goes now that from today's perspective I feel it's fair to call that “planned societies”.
Democracies can't really be condensed into one political moment; that is why they are so effective against dictatorships. Dictatorships have to make sense to one person.
The usual pattern is authoritarians do something stupid, democracies do something stupid but also erratic, then time passes then the democracies reorganise to try something new and the dictatorship gets stuck in a rut. Eventually the democracy tries something that works to the amazement of all observers. The authoritarians are still pushing the same tired old plan of failure.
Democracy doesn't have any secret sauce for making good decisions. Large groups of people are actually notoriously stupid. But they are much more responsive to situations where the government's official plan is obviously not working and the evidence is rolling in.
You are mostly right, except the democracy part: that does not mean anything. Greeks had democracy 25000 years ago and it did not go so well, a certain very famous dictator was elected to power and a present day Russian president as well. On paper they are all democracies, in practice there are degrees of bad or fake democracies all over.
Democracy in Russia apparently didn't work, as in failed to preserve itself.
You can think of democracy as of a good thing or a bad thing, but either way it's not a thing that universally wins, once introduced.
We should notice that democracy had failed to preserve itself in the past in many European countries, notably Italy (1920s), Germany (1930s), Greece (1970s), to say nothing of Latin America. Most of the time it was later restored, one way or another.
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