Source: https://v-dem.net/documents/44/v-dem_dr2024_highres.pdf page 7
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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What happens when democracy itself becomes a partisan issue? What happens when Democratic Values don't correspond with continuous economic growth (or, at least, the appearance of it as reported by your news outlet of choice)? What happens when democracy becomes unpopular and demagogues are seen as a social good?
It's a paradox of sorts. If a savvy enough media campaign or a cynical set of bureaucrats can turn people against the mechanisms of self-representation, how can a democracy survive?
John Locke would tell you it can't.
People largely don't deserve democracy. They tend to choose kings, so long as they don't remember being ruled by one.
I don't think people have a lot of agency in a liberal democracy. In my experience, the politicians tend to select their voters - via gerrymander and disenfranchisement and strategic GOTV.
Popular views are poorly represented, but the avenues for opposition are walled in by State and private police forces.
This sours people on what feels increasingly like a farce, and poisons popular opinion against the idea of a true functional democratic system.
Sure, a good autocracy will always be more effective and fairer than a good democracy. The greek already knew that.
They also knew that a bad autocracy will always be worse than a bad democracy.
And you have no idea what you will get with an autocrat, they change over time, they make new enemies out of you, what is good for some is bad for others...
So democracy is not just about giving people what they want or representing their views, it is about damage limitation between all the established "mafias" vying for power and a ruleset for peaceful evolution.
To make it worse, some modern societies hide de facto autocracy or oligarchy under democracy, which may sour you towards democracy.
Autocracy is good for the cronies. The theory of Democracy is that you make everyone a potential crony and create political incentive for a broad egalitarian base of support.
But in practice, this doesn't work. Cartels are an effective tool to undermine democracy via Divide and Conquer of the natural social subunits.
Mafias build strong bonds of trust and shared economic advantage at the expense of their neighbors. They form internal patronage networks that promise more than a fair share of reward for compromised ideology and ethics. They also foment superstition and FUD that polarize people against one another.
The perception of hidden selfish cartels operating underneath broad egalitarian institutions is what ultimately undermine them.
That is why mass media has such a major role to play in democracy. And why privatization of media ultimately leads to a failed democracy.
The Greeks thought that. By actual empirical measures democracies do unambiguously better, beyond what can be explained by individual leaders. It comes down to autocracies never actually being one man rule, because the lower downs have their own agendas and palace intrigues, too.
The rest of my comment addresses that. The "good king" father figure does a lot of heavy lifting for autocracy in people's subconscious (even Plato's haha), but it is inevitable for a "benevolent monarch" with the mandate to "fix everything" to turn sour and abuse power, the variance of one single individual's performance and world iew is too high. Aristotle writes about some of this too.