Bread and circuses. Everyone is comfortable and entertained to the point of drooling. They won't be leaving their cozy warm houses with TV and video games to do anything. Brain isn't built that way. If it were, there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic. It'll always be short-term rewards over long-term most of the time for most people.
On the other hand, none of this is sustainable in the long-run, so it'll all come crashing down and things will work out. We'll probably be dead long before then though. Gotta go through some rough shit first.
Anywhere with any real government though, it's dead. My theory is the period of classical liberalism in the world was largely a result of the brief period where firearms were the main form of warfare, which represented a short period in history where violence was most decentralized and the government had the least leverage. Before that it was years to train archers or swordsman, after that fighter jets/ missiles / technology tilted back in power of government. In the golden era of the age of the firearm one person was basically one vote of violence (giving the populace the greater leverage); whereas before/after that time each vote was heavily weighted by a government actor.
I grew up in a place you could call “rural South America” (specifically in a rural border town between Brazil and Uruguay) and at the time didn’t feel free there, but these days there’s a lot I think I could appreciate about the place if I were to go back (I’ve been living in the US for the past 13 years).
It's a very common usage in America, focusing on "Freedom from X" rather than "Freedom to do Y", the latter of which often needs some sort of societal protection, most often provided by said government.
What if it was a fake all along and was just a facade and social media exposed it?
So if all the world is against the establishment, it only makes sense that shit holes become better places and better place become shit holes.
That's it I suspect that these moments can be quite fragile. Turkey was crashed, Georgia was crashed, Belarus was crashed, Russia was crashed, Ukraine is fighting generational war, Serbia is teetering, Bulgaria is on to something but its only a spark ATM. However, the crashed ones also did not stabilize, they just become brutal and visibly oppressed and IMHO anything still can happen.
South Korea was a dictatorship just 35 something years ago. And its been run by criminals and oligarchs even as a democracy. SK is not an example you can use to say anything about democracy globally.
I think the true decline begun earlier though, around the Thatcher-Reagan era, with the erosion of all kinds of state ownership and control of our economy and broad attacks on organised labour.
Concentration of wealth and power was (and is) the highest in communist dictatorships - literally a handful (i.e. less than 5) people control pretty much everything in Cuba. North Korea is ruled with an iron fist by 1 guy - that is some concentration of power, right? In Communist Romania / East Germany power was concentrated in 2 people (a couple). In USSR power was concentrated in the 7 members of PolitBuro. In China power used to be concentrated in the hands of Mao Zhedong, now it seems it is concentrated in the hands of Xi Ping (but I could be wrong about Xi Ping. Maybe he shares some power with other people). I could go on forever, baby!!!
Capitalism has its problems but capitalism is quite fine all kinds of political systems - see German capitalism before, during, and following Hitler's rule.
Concentrations of power seem bad, regardless of the mechanisms that do the concentrating.
From the end of WWII until the fall of communism, the public in the West (as opposed to the elites) enjoyed much better treatment, and prospered more than ever before or since. This would include both fiscal gains, and the public's opinion being truly taken into consideration. This is mainly because the elites were afraid of people turning socialist / communist, so they gave them a reason to actually be invested in the system. Once that threat of communism evaporated, the elites could proceed to gut the majority as in the previous centuries with no fear whatsoever.
My comments:
I'm not sure I agree with that, though, too simplistic. On the other hand, I also think that people have a rose-tinted view of what "democracy" always was - with enough money / media control and a bit of time, you can convince the majority of anything, anywhere. Letting people prosper does make it easier. Maybe it did play a bit of a role. A counter argument is that (independent) media coverage made the Vietnam war unpopular, and then the US pulled out because of that, a miracle of democracy which never really came close to happening again ever after.
But I think the USSR itself murdered any real chances of communism's further spread in 1968, when they invaded Czechoslovakia. (The Hungarian thing in 1956 isn't nearly as important because of country's undeniable previous Axis affiliation; few had sympathy for that back then). The US and west in general couldn't get rid of their Woody Guthries, and their Klaus Fuchses, until USSR did it for them through sheer idiocy. But after that, was communism really a threat?
But I do think that the 1950s policies were affected by the war (+ Korean war) even more than communism itself. All these traumatized vets, desensitized to violence, were now back home, and the elites were truly afraid. But that doesn't seem like it brought democracy in today's sense of the word? There's a reason why feminism regressed in the 50s - letting men be little despots in their own (cheaply bought) homes was the least the government could do. But that seems to have lasted only until the mid 60s, then the Vietnam thing happened, ... Let's not go further.
mass de-regulation, tax avoidance, effective end of anti-trust killed it
social media was just the tool-of-the-day to break democracy
- Network (1976)