Democracy doesn’t disappear. Citizens just stop showing up and government is left to the elites

Winston Churchill once remarked that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Really? We might begin by asking the question, “If democracy is so great, why is its failure rate so high?”

The Athenians who invented democracy discovered that it had a very short shelf-life, perishing in less than 200 years. The democratic elements of the Roman Republic were erased by the senatorial class. The city-states of the Italian Renaissance fell into the hands of powerful oligarchs and bankers like the Medici. The French Revolution of 1789 lapsed into authoritarianism, followed by the rule of a general who crowned himself an emperor.

The First World War was to make the world “safe for democracy,” and sure enough, 1919 saw the appearance of nine new republics. By 1939, only Finland remained a democracy. In the post-war period we can see the same mass failure of democratic states in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Arab world. History suggests that democracies rarely collapse all at once; they more often decay slowly as citizens cease to........

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