The Crisis of Democracy [pdf]

The setting is 1975, but the ideas are familiar:

"There has been a substantial relative decline in American military and economic power, and a major absolute decline in American willingness to assume the burdens of leadership. And most recently, the temporary slowdown in economic growth has threatened the expectations created by previous growth, while still leaving existent the "postbourgeois" values which it engendered among the youth and intellectuals."

"The system becomes one of anomic democracy, in which democratic politics becomes more an arena for the assertion of conflicting interests than a process for the building of common purposes."

I've just skimmed it so far, and found distasteful their general theme that the "crisis" is that there was too much of it, and the kids would not "Respect Mah Authoritah". However, they did include a dissent, which also brings up many themes that are still timely in 2020:

Appendix I.B "Excerpts of remarks by Ralf Dahrendorf on the governability study"

"Is growth presumably growth of a gross national product? Is this the only kind of expansion of human life chances which we can think of in free societies?"

This seems to be a thoughtfully critical take on it:

... This general "crisis of democracy," the commission held, resulted from the efforts of previously marginalized sectors of the population to organize and press their demands, thereby creating an overload that prevents the democratic process from functioning properly. In earlier times, "Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers," so the American rapporteur, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, reflected. In that period there was no crisis of democracy, but in the 1960s, the crisis developed and reached serious proportions. The study therefore urged more "moderation in democracy" to mitigate the excess of democracy and overcome the crisis. ...

The Trilateral Commission study reflects the perceptions and values of liberal elites from the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the leading figures of the Carter administration. On the right, the perception is that democracy is threatened by the organizing efforts of those called the "special interests," a concept of contemporary political rhetoric that refers to workers, farmers, women, youth, the elderly, the handicapped, ethnic minorities, and so on-in short, the general population. In the U.S. presidential campaigns of the 1980s, the Democrats were accused of being the instrument of these special interests and thus undermining "the national interest," tacitly assumed to be represented by the one sector notably omitted from the list of special interests: corporations, financial institutions, and other business elites.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Necessary_Illusion...