(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Liberal Democracy Needs a New Approach [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2023-02-07  

In addition to the West’s four main democracy indexes, discussed here, major global opinion polls show that citizens are losing faith in democracy. Younger people are especially dissatisfied. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however, because citizens want change in their political systems without knowing how to get it:

“ ‘The prevalence of polarising [sic] attitudes among millennials may mean advanced democracies remain fertile ground for populist politics.’ ‘The populist challenge must shock moderate parties and leaders into action beyond cosmetic rebrands. If it does so, populism may still prompt democracy’s rebirth, rather than the onset of its gradual decay,’ he said.”

— From “Faith in democracy,” quoting Dr. Roberto Foa from Cambridge’s Department of Politics and International Studies.

The data for the study Foa was referring to came from over 160 countries and was published by the Centre for the Future of Democracy at the University of Cambridge. Notice in particular how Foa calls for the moderate political center to change beyond “cosmetic rebrands.” Liberal democracy needs a new solution, but the political center is sticking its head in the sand as usual.

— Here’s a December 2021 article from the Pew Research Center, “Global Public Opinion in an Era of Democratic Anxiety:”

“In part, the current moment of anxiety about liberal democracy is linked to frustration with how democratic societies are functioning. Pew Research Center surveys have consistently found large shares of the public in many countries saying they are dissatisfied with the way their democracy is working. And for many, this dissatisfaction is leading to a desire for political change. A median of 56% across 17 advanced economies surveyed in 2021 say their political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed. Roughly two-thirds or more express this opinion in Italy, Spain, the U.S., South Korea, Greece, France, Belgium and Japan.”

This Pew report found that the United States is no longer seen across 16 advanced economies as “a good model of democracy:”

“Overall, international publics see major challenges for American politics and society, even at a time when attitudes toward the U.S. have significantly improved following Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Across the 16 advanced economies surveyed, a median of just 17% consider American democracy a good model for other countries to follow. A median of 57% think it used to be a good example but has not been in recent years. And around a quarter say the U.S. has never been a good example. The belief that democracy in the U.S. has never been a good model for other nations is especially common among young adults.”

The Pew report also says there is widespread enthusiasm for “more democracy and a stronger voice in the political system.” People want change, in other words, but they don’t know how to get it. There is still a generally favorable attitude toward democracy even when it is mixed with skepticism and frustration.

— Gallup has done extensive polling on immigration in the Americas. Currently, the number of Latin Americans who want to migrate to the United States is over one-fifth of the US population.

This is simultaneously a crisis of democracy at home and abroad, a regional indicator of the world’s mass-migration crisis, and a multi-pronged crisis for sustainable development. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have a plan for dealing with this problem at scale: the Republicans merely want to tighten border security, which will rapidly lead to more draconian measures as has happened in Europe, along with a surge in right-wing politics as conditions deteriorate; the Democrats, on the other hand, are failing to send adequate resources to the border states, or to be honest with Americans about the magnitude of the immigration crisis, and their pledges to address the systemic causes of immigration aren’t convincing anyone.

— In a 2020 Atlantic piece, “This Is How Democracy Dies,” Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa say “people around the world are collectively losing faith in democratic systems.”

“A new report from the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Democracy, which one of us—Foa—co-authored, provides a broader look at this issue, and the conclusions are not hopeful, to say the least. The report analyzed data collected across 154 countries, 3,500 surveys covering more than 4 million respondents, and half a century of social-science research. Satisfaction with democracy, according to the report, has eroded in most parts of the world, with an especially notable drop over the past decade. Public confidence in democracy is at the lowest point on record in the United States, the major democracies of Western Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. In some countries, including the United States, this metric is now reaching an important threshold: The number of people who are dissatisfied with democracy is greater than the number of people who are satisfied with it.”

What this diary and my previous one on global democracy indexes point to is that liberal democracy is in serious trouble. Liberal democracy needs a regime-level solution, we’re talking something on the order of a Second American Revolution. For example, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index ranks the nations of the world on a 1-10 scale. Ten is the best a democracy can currently do. The crisis of liberal democracy implies that we need to make that scale go to something like 13 or higher. In other words, we need a way to make democracies much better and stronger.

But, who has new ideas? The right is overwhelmingly the problem, the political center is sticking its head in the sand as usual, and, while the left has lots of economic ideas, they don’t have a political solution equal to the task. All you have to do to understand this is survey the left-leaning think tanks, academic institutes, magazines, and journals.

From the Roosevelt Institute, to the Renew Democracy Initiative, to Washington Monthly, to the Democracy Alliance of big-money liberal donors, to reports like the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’s “Our Common Purpose,” or the AAUP’s call for a New Deal for Higher Education, or the Aspen Institute thinking about a year of national service for all citizens (seriously, is that the best idea rich people can come up with?)—you could spend the next year of your life surveying all this and more (yep, I’ve done it), and, I’m telling you, nobody has a solution equal to the scale of the crisis of liberal democracy.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/7/2151601/-Liberal-Democracy-Needs-a-New-Approach

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/