I tend to agree -- it seems to me that democracy creates ecological conditions favorable to long-term survival, because the risk of destruction under dictatorship is asymmetric with respect to the probability of prosperity.
Democratic checks-and-balances assume the inescapability of despotic buffoons who rise to power either through force or sometimes even through the people's choice (while it's good to believe in the wisdom of crowds, one must always account for its lapses). I think these are very realistic assumptions.
Hand-waving things away with your absolutist statement is what truly seems naive. IMO there is far more nuance than you suggest.
Democracy seems to work well for some types of problems but not others. What happens to democracies when faced with threats that manifest over very short timescales? They aren't nimble enough to respond in time. This is most evident in larger democracies; look at US/India responses to COVID. Countries like Taiwan are democratic and still succeeded, but they are small and they utilized methods that would be characterized as authoritarian here in the US.
What about problems where the consequences of decisions have a large time-lag? There is no incentive for democratic policymakers to address them. Global warming is the obvious example.
I question whether democracies can handle these kinds of
issues. More worryingly, I think that as humanity's capabilities continue to increase, these kinds of problems are going to be more and more frequent.
Countries like Australia, South Korea and New Zealand have had exemplary COVID-19 responses. It has nothing to do with whether you are a democracy or not and everything to do with the competence of the government.
And the people of the US will have an opportunity to vote in a few months on whether the response was adequate or not. I don't see the people of China having a similar opportunity for example.
I mentioned that I believe problems manifest as scale increases. Do you think there is a difference between implementations of democracy in a large country vs a small one? I do.
To clarify after some further thought - I think the bureaucratic burden scales much more drastically in a democratic system. In a large democracy all decisionmaking becomes mired in a swamp. Of course all governments will require more and more delegation and bureaucracy as the population grows, but IMO to a lesser degree in an authoritarian system, because there is no need to come to a broad consensus before making choices.
Additionally, complexity also scales. A dictatorship relies more on the common sense of the dictator while a democracy relies on a set of written laws that grows with complexity over time. A single party does not need a contract while at least two parties must engage in a contract called a written body of law in order to come to an agreement. This "contract" is edited and amended over time with no limit to how complex it gets.
In fact, that complexity balloons to a point where only experts can understand the law (lawyers). It also grows to the point where the law is so complex that it can become internally inconsistent and develop loop holes that do not serve the original intended purpose of the law.
This allows for entities to exploit these loop holes. Of course only entities with enough money to afford the "experts" to find the loop holes and exploit them will be able bend the laws to their advantage thereby causing only the rich and elite to become more powerful.
The above is the basic theory about the anthropological progression of your typical democracy. Growth in complexity of a body of law to the point where only the elite can afford to hire specialists to take advantage of said law.
That is the main danger of democracy. Excess Complexity to the point where only people who can afford specialists to change the law can exploit it to their advantage. Complexity of law also leads to all kinds of other phenomena that niche experts and common people can take advantage of as well. For example constructors that take advantage of property law.
The scary thing about the theory above is that there is a TON evidence of this. Almost every modern democracy in the world suffers from ALL of the problems above. Literally find me one that doesn't.
I live in Melbourne and her arrest is widely supported. Our city is in a severe lockdown and at a tipping point between New Zealand style suppression and US style chaos.
Just because she is a white, pregnant woman does not mean that she has the right to break the law and compromise the safety of the community.
Because the reaction to her arrest is a good example of white lady in distress.
Whether you agree or disagree with her arrest and release like two hours after this sort of stuff happens all the time with police but it's a big deal if it's a white lady.
Just for the record im not sure I agree with her arrest but you know... Bigger things to worry about
One thing about a democracy, if poor choices are made and poor leaders are selected, it’s only temporary until the next wave of elections. But in a dictatorship, or even something that masquerades as a democracy but is not, those choices may go unchecked for decades.
> One thing about a democracy, if poor choices are made and poor leaders are selected, it’s only temporary until the next wave of elections.
With sufficiently bad choices in a democracy it ceases to be a democracy before the error is corrected. Also, even when that doesn't happen, its possible for a choice to be bad but repeated in a democracy.
> With sufficiently bad choices in a democracy it ceases to be a democracy before the error is corrected.
I’d like to see a real world example of what you mean. Because while lots of countries have elections, when leaders are allowed to arbitrarily extend their reign past with their laws allow, then I would agree with you. But those are the countries that I consider falling under the category of “masquerading as a democracy“.
> I’d like to see a real world example of what you mean.
The German Enabling Act of 1933.
> when leaders are allowed to arbitrarily extend their reign past with their laws allow
What if they just use the provisions in the fundamental law that allow changing the structure or terms of government?
A state can either have a thanatocracy in which the dead dictate the details of government to the living, or it can have process by which even the fundamental law can be changed. If it has the latter, that process can, within the preexisting democratic system, be used to terminate democracy without anyone exceeding the power allowed in law.
That seems a bit tautological to include the outcome in the definition. By that logic there are democracies today that will sometime in the future become “masquerading” that we can’t know yet.
You can't predict the future of any country of course, but you can certainly use its past to inform such a distinction. The moves by China and Russia, for example, to lengthen the reign of their leaders, while in the U.S., no matter what has happened to its leadership for the entirety of its history, no one has ever exceeded the time they were allowed before another election risked that tenure.
Some views suggest that the political structure of the United States is in many respects an oligarchy, where a small economic elite overwhelmingly determines policy and law. Some academic researchers suggest a drift toward oligarchy has been occurring by way of the influence of corporations, wealthy, and other special interest groups, leaving individual citizens with less impact than economic elites and organized interest groups in the political process.
A study by political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern University) released in April 2014 suggested that when the preferences of a majority of citizens conflicts with elites, elites tend to prevail. While not characterizing the United States as an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy" outright, Gilens and Page do give weight to the idea of a "civil oligarchy" as used by Jeffrey A. Winters, saying, "Winters has posited a comparative theory of 'Oligarchy,' in which the wealthiest citizens – even in a 'civil oligarchy' like the United States – dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth- and income-protection."
In their study, Gilens and Page reached these conclusions:
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it. ... The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
— Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, 2014
E.J. Dionne Jr. described what he considers the effects of ideological and oligarchical interests on the judiciary. The journalist, columnist, and scholar interprets recent Supreme Court decisions as ones that allow wealthy elites to use economic power to influence political outcomes in their favor. "Thus," Dionne wrote, in speaking about the Supreme Court's McCutcheon et al. v. FEC and Citizens United v. FEC decisions, "has this court conferred on wealthy people the right to give vast sums of money to politicians while undercutting the rights of millions of citizens to cast a ballot."
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote:
The stark reality is that we have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people. This threatens to make us a democracy in name only.
— Paul Krugman, 2012
I would say, again, that the answer is complex and multifaceted. It is not exactly clear whether authoritarianism or democracy is better. One thing is clear though... both are far from perfect.
Democratic checks-and-balances assume the inescapability of despotic buffoons who rise to power either through force or sometimes even through the people's choice (while it's good to believe in the wisdom of crowds, one must always account for its lapses). I think these are very realistic assumptions.