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What Comes After Democracy?
How can we avoid the many mistakes of today’s preferred method of governance?
Today’s world is very complex and most of the important issues appear to be beyond the intellectual capabilities of most of our citizens. Most of us vote on spurious grounds for candidates who are incompetent and unscrupulous. That’s why we’re seeing a tsunami of mindless populism sweeping the world and brushing aside the fragile norms of civilization.
A quick list of a few of the more blatant examples of blustering halfwits is enough to demonstrate that mindless populism is a global phenomenon: Brexiteers in the UK, Trump in the USA, Duterte in the Philippines, Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brasil, PiS in Poland, the AfD in Germany, Orban in Hungary, Babiş in the Czech Republic, Erdogan in Turkey, and of course Putin in Russia. All these, and many more, were democratically elected. All these, and many more, are fatally undermining their countries.
Take a bow, representative democracy.
The fact is, while it’s true that representative democracy was indeed better than queens and emperors, it was only a little better. As the world has become more complex, and as our mass media has trivialized and sensationalized everything, representative democracy has shown itself to be completely unfit for purpose. In a great many countries, special interests…
