Harvard research suggests an entire generation has lost faith in democracy

We don't have democracy, we have liberal democracy there is a significant distinction. People have lost faith in liberal democracy because they feel it's no longer looking out for their interests but the interest of the minority. Whether that's the rich or other groups, for the lower classes this is framed as a racial struggle. The issue is not that they have no experience with other forms, it's that liberal democracy is suppose to protect the minority from the majority, but it seems the opposite problem is now the case. The majority feels it needs to be protected from the minority.

Either the system caters to that, or people are going to rebel. You need to protect the minority because they are good for the economy and the masses. Until the masses no longer feel that this is the case. That's what the so-called pseudo-elite don't understand. The relationship is one of power sharing, not of ownership. This is not a normative statement, this is a realist statement. This is how things work in the real world.

We have no experience with this, other than perhaps Fascism, because liberal democracy has not had this problem before. In that there has been constant growth and therefore employment for its entire history, sharing the power between minority and majority. You can close your eyes to this, but if you have a bunch of unemployed people that feel dis-empowered as a group they are going to react. First they are going to react by electing the likes of Trump. When that doesn't work they are going to react with force. Unless you do something about the way that they feel about the political situation.

As Mark Cuban said, money makes everything better. They don't have money, they are reacting.

democracy being the best choice is so ingrained in us from childhood, questioning it becomes painful. its like finding out about santa. cognitive dissonance comes into play, and any critical thinking is squashed. its hard for people to even question democracy in a hypothetical environment, it being the fairest is almost established as a basic law of physics.

even the title of the article ... "lost faith" seems to imply its a bad thing to question democracy.

They also allow to spread fake information which we are learning that it can be really, really bad.

Yeah, but we're outnumbered.

Amen!

It might depend on the interpretation of "legitimate", and make more sense if "are legitimate" is interpreted as "ever legitimate". For example, could a military coup in North Korea be "legitimate"?

They give some more detail in their linked earlier paper:

Similarly, while 43 percent of older Americans, including those born between the world wars and their baby-boomer children, do not believe that it is legitimate in a democracy for the military to take over when the government is incompetent or failing to do its job, the figure among millennials is much lower at 19 percent. In Europe, the generation gap is somewhat less stark but equally clear, with 53 percent of older Europeans and only 36 percent of millennials strongly rejecting the notion that a government’s incompetence can justify having the army “take over.”

http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Foa%26...

While still striking, and while I still wonder whether generational differences in terminology are a factor, the addition of "when the government is incompetent or failing to do its job" does make it more plausible.

Well, consider the recent attempted coup in Turkey. The Western media definitely has portrayed the military in a sympathetic light and the Government/Erdogan less so. Not saying that's right or wrong - but it implies to me that not everyone will see these issues as black or white.

You can have a highly stable democracy without civil rights. Just look at the United States