Have we considered the possibility that this is what a mature liberal democracy looks like? Peak democracy was WWII, we seem to have been sliding towards authoritarianism since then.
Until 1968, every new play in Britain required a licence from the Lord Chamberlain's Office before it could be publicly performed. There was no legislation attached to this, so the Lord Chamberlain could censor as he chose.
Can you imagine introducing such a rule today? How about applying for a license before launching a website?
It was the moral panic of the time.
In 1959 we got the Obscene Publications Act and that got used quite a bit during the Thatcher years with a new moral panic - video nasties. Video nasties weren't just Chainsaw Massacre stuff they also had a thing to say about society.
Police raided quaint little video shops and did their best to enforce the law, sometimes getting it wrong, well, often getting it wrong.
This only encouraged the market in 'Video Nasties' so in 1984 they brought in a new law to get this moral panic under control.
You could say that the law had been updated for the medium of the era - VHS cassettes - and that they could not be bothered with the stage any more.
However, the stage is a public place, you have people congregate in an audience and they could be a dangerous rabble. In 2000 we got the Terrorism Act and that followed on from the Criminal Justice Act that had came along earlier in the 1990's to make it illegal for more than four people to get together to listen to 'repetitive beats'.
There are plenty of laws regarding what you can and cannot say online and people have been prosecuted for saying not so nice things on Facebook. You might not have to apply for a licence to run a website but that is not so enforceable when you could put your website online in a country far, far away.
Actual censorship has got a lot more refined over the decades. As has propaganda. A lot has gone on over the last twenty years of widescale internet usage, however it will be a while before we find out what this is.
You don't have that, but in Germany and Austria you must include your full name and address in any website you publish, which creates sort of the same effect.
I think that we are at a time where there is more public input, whistle-blowing, outcry over corruption, democratic processes, and so forth than ever before in history.
I daresay that we are also at an information age; a time in which we can identify authoritarianism, and argue and critise it from the comfort of our couches and for the larger part without fear of death.
We should not confuse the matter: to think that the sum of our current challenges imply the lesser to be the sum of historic challenges.
(Personally, I'm happy to be an elitist, provided it's an open elite that anyone can join)
Or perhaps that was your point and I misinterpret your words.
The whole point of representative democracy is to put a firewall between the "the masses" and decision-making, while allowing them some influence.
Historically, party and other elites have also largely controlled who was in a position to become a representative in the first place, although that stops working when the elites become completely out-of-touch with the electorate (hence Trump).
We're so polarized that families are starting to hate each other based on their political views.
I think a successful government is one that ensures the highest level of education for the largest amount of people, spends $0 on international affairs until ALL domestic affairs (like poverty, healthcare, etc) are covered or at least miniscule as to affect less than 2% - unless a 'true' war is initiated i.e. we're physically attacked by a nation (not terrorists that are from a specific nation), and regime change 'just because' is not even a consideration.
I think a successful government would also give 0 kickbacks, deductions, and rewards to any specific business or industry (except perhaps food/farming as needed for weather/crop performance considerations as we all need to eat). Money and corporations should have 0 access to politicians.
The fact is if you look at a graph of politics over the past 100 years, and how often the people get policies enacted that are 'popular' vs how often the rich do it's basically a flatline for us, and a progressive diagonal for them.
Popularity has nothing to do w/ politics --until we get more 'popular' non-career politicians into D.C. BrandNewCongress is an interesting organization trying to do just that for both Republicans and Democrats. It's like if X-factor judges could be bought and some nazily person who can't sing at all wins instead of the popular vote. The show would be cancelled in a heartbeat. But that's how America is ran.
It's to lower the expected costs of power transfer from "catastrophic" to "routine".
Ballots, not bullets.
I feel sorry for the guy going down for the leaks.
A NewsCorp journalist was the first to be raided.
It's not a mature liberal democracy, maybe it was one time. It's just that power always tries to acquire more power and obviously any not __perfectly__ designed political system will always end up authoritarian and undemocratic.
There was the US and everyone else was a non-democratic empire or a colony of the empire.
Surreal that needs to even be said.
You might say that they were at their peak for the majority of their population maybe, but I think that's the normal, intended outcome of democracy.
uh... Do you mean the time just before WWII, when most European nations were either Fascist or Communist? Or do you mean the time just after WWII when all of Europe was destroyed?
That being said, history is written by the victors.
As opposed to the democratic governments the Soviet Union supported? Give me a break here. The Soviet Union pushed for disastrous political systems based on their own autocratic socialist model, and funded ideological guerrillas to destabilize the nation if it didn't wholly adopt their ideology.
I cannot understand how people can look at history and be completely blind to the actions of Soviet Union.
Pointing out that the spread of democracy post-WWII was mostly confined the defeated states in that conflict, and that neither victorious side did much to support democracy elsewhere and even the "free world" often did the opposite, isn't a defense of the Soviets.
That's the point, though. The USA did exactly the same thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
I am not blind to the bad actions of the USSR. I'm just also not blind to the bad ones of the USA and its allies during the same time period.
It's in the interest of those who control the present narrative.
But WWII did take a few rather large European empires with disenfranchised colonies, and turn their member states into independent, (at least temporarily) functional democratic nations. It also produced semi-global representative-democratic “treaty organizations” in the form of NATO and the UN, which, again, were at least temporarily functional and taken seriously and used to enact changes by the will of their members.
(Really, though, the member nations of NATO/the UN just all had a good temporary working relationship due to being either on the same side of the war, or being made powerless by the means of their defeat, so these bodies were just a formal representation of the way their leaders were already talking to one-another at the time. As soon as everyone in these nations got newer leaders, these bodies stopped “working”—because it was never the bodies themselves that functioned in the first place.)
Outside of the Axis powers .. did it? How? Which countries? The more I try to think of a list the more I come up with examples that were due primarily to local action (e.g. India), their own wars (Kenya, Algeria), or happened a lot later than 1945.
Well, quite. Given the role of the Soviet Union in grinding down the Axis forces until the counter-invasion was feasible, and their subsequent seizing of half the territory, you could equally say it was a victory for Communism. No, the victory in the war wasn't really due to the political systems of the belligerents - and democracy was suspended in the UK during the war.
The real long-term benefit was the installation at gunpoint of constitutions written by idealists on the defeated powers, and the construction of transnational free blocs (NATO and the EEC, in contrast to the Warsaw Pact).
The democratic post-colonial transition in the victorious powers didn't really happen until about 1968. Britain and France had to shed their colonies, with another few hundred thousand killed along the way. America had to give up on Vietnam and grant civil rights to its Black citizens. Australia and South Africa had to give up on their official policies of racial discrimination. France had its collapse and re-establishment of the 5eme Republique, after a narrow brush with military dictatorship. Greece, Spain, Portugal remained as Fascist dictatorships into the 1970s! The UK had a small civil war, complete with security services murdering in secret, troops shooting people dead in the street, and the near extermination of the entire government in a terrorist bombing.
Post-war democracy in the post-colonial Middle East states was barely even tried.
To me, the high point of liberal democracy was the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center.
Let's not forget that the Soviet Union enabled WWII and was an initial aggressor along with Nazi Germany.
>To me, the high point of liberal democracy was the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center.
This underscores how much political systems are influenced by the empires of the day. When Soviet Union and America were the superpowers the world was split between democratic and communist governments. When America became the sole superpower, that accelerated the move to liberal democracy.
.. in the short term. And it worked for those countries west of Kiev. It did not stick in Russia.
The problem is that the US has always had its internal tension between the official liberalism ("all men are created equal"), the colonial racism ("except those guys"), economic freedom for the individual, and economic freedom for the megacorp. It exports all four of these, and sometimes the wrong ones win in another country. The banana republics got the racism and capitalism. Russia got hyper-capitalism with poor rule of law, enabling its collapse into a Mafia state.
It had a good stock of poor rule of law already from Soviet times, and hyper-capitalism - or even feodalism - was what it had before USSR was formed.
What do you mean in the short term? Since WWII there has been a steady global acceptance of democracy. You don't think that was something that just happened by accident? This is something to consider for those that want America to simply stay within its border and let nations fight it out to solve their problems.
Your characterizations are also highly skewed. They are reminiscent of conspiracy theorists that attribute all malice to one entity they hate. For example, American didn't export hyper-capitalism to Russia. The Soviet system was a humanitarian disaster for decades and when it collapsed it led to internal chaos until Putin showed up. There was good-faith effort on the part of America and Europe to stabilize the nation and bring it into the community (not just for altruistic reasons - Russia is a very important country).
I'm not sure what the distinction between individual economic freedom and 'megacorp' (your term) economic freedom actually is. America (just like Britain before it) has pushed for global trade - on balance that's a good thing.
Yes. The original label of the 'Third World' was applied to non-aligned nations. Those nations were still influenced by the global order created by US and Soviets, and later just the US.
>There were also plenty of military dictatorships, authoritarian one-party-states and theocracies, and a fair share of those were firmly in the USA's sphere of influence.
That's right, and not the point. The initial state of the world (for our purposes, let's start with the period between WWI and WWII but the earlier you go the more it reinforces my position) did not begin with all democracies. It began with a tiny number of democracies[1]. In the posted link you can see we went from democracies representing between 5% and 10% of world governments to more than half. Don't tell me it just so happens to be that the world adopted the political system of the major super-power. You can also look at it another way, America will exert strong pressure for democracy and market-based economy but it may not succeed and sometimes practical considerations take precedence (like the fact that the nation was locked in an existential struggle with the Soviet superpower - which had no qualms in pushing their ideology on the non-aligned world)
I completely agree that the high point of liberal democracy was the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center.
Since then, every year the Western democracies resemble more and more with the socialist countries they were criticizing so much 30 years ago, both in their economies dominated by monopolies and in the surveillance of their citizens and in the restrictions of the citizens' rights.
I don't believe a legitimate democracy can have any power greater than the individual. To extrapolate, "The government may do x." If you replace 'government' with an individual, that is the guideline. For example 'Jose may tax your income.' Obviously, Jose may not do that.