Politics

Democracy Always Has One Foot in a Fairy Tale and the Other in the Abyss.

We Still Rely on the Long-Term Strength of Democracies to Reverse Course When Things Go Wicked.

Artist: Sharanya Missula.
https://www.gallerist.in/conceptual-drawings/dichotomy.

Democracies neither rise nor get destroyed overnight. Iraq's invasion did not lead to democracy immediately after Saddam Hussein was removed. Instead, it led to the realization that other factors, apart from removing a corrupt authoritarian, were necessary too for democracy to grow. Similarly, the older and more rooted democracy becomes, the tougher it gets to deracinate it. However, all democracies more or less face one thing in common — the swing between euphoria and misery.

“Japan, early twenty-first century, you would still feel like you’d won the jackpot. Greece is in more of a mess, yet it too remains prosperous and peaceful by historical standards. There are many, many grimmer places than this. The crisis was never resolved, but the worst never happened either.”, says David Runciman in his book How Democracies Die.

One of the sources from where authoritarians derive their power is the “anticipatory obedience” [1]; they get this in abundance from their citizens, says Timothy Snyder in his applaudable work on democracy, On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth…