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Improve Democracy or loose out to Autocracy

The world order in the period immediately following the Second World War can be characterised by a competition of political cultures between Democracies and Communist countries. However, from the 1980s onwards this changed dramatically; communism collapsed, global trade expanded extraordinarily and a new culture of neo-liberalism emerged in the West. For a while it appeared that the Western political culture: democratic, capitalist and liberal, had proved so successful that it would be the political culture that all nations would strive to achieve.

It hasn’t proved to be the case. China embraced capitalism but not democracy, showing it was perfectly possible to grow economically without embracing liberal values.

At the same time democracies, because of their natural focus on short-term problems, failed to adapt to the accelerating rate of change. The adoption of neo-liberal philosophies widened the gap between rich and poor. Rust belts emerged in the West as the result of the decline in local manufacturing. The gig economy created a new under-class of exploited labour. The rich began to amass wealth outside the nation state where it couldn’t be taxed. Mass immigration from poor to rich countries fuelled tribal instincts. Autocrats allied with businessmen exploited feelings of nationalism to roll back democratic processes.

Autocracies versus democracies Communism may have proved a failure but democracies now had a new competing political culture, which I will call autocracies. They are characterised by an alliance of a country’s political and economic organisations, often supported by state security services. They may be nominal democracies but the elections are fixed. Their appeal is to nationalist attitudes: to revive old glories fuelled by a hatred of other nationalities or religions. In the past decade: India, Hungary and Turkey have all gone down this path. Trump would like to take the USA down the same road. They are categorised on the attached chart from Our World in Data as electoral autocracies

There is a more extreme form of autocracy which Anne Applebaum calls Autocracy Inc. They have kleptocratic financial structures and a complex of security services- military, paramilitary, police -and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda and disinformation. These countries include Russia, China and Iran.

This is a dangerous period; cross-country co-operation has declined and there has been a corresponding rise in quasi-tribal conflict between nations, religions and racial groups. Democracies are still the best places to live, but to survive they have to look to where they have failed in the past and learn from their mistakes. At the moment this isn’t happening.