I do indeed agree this is a major problem even if I’m not sure if I agree with the main claim. The rise of fascism in the last decade and expectation that it will continue is extremely evident; its consequences for democracy are a lot less clear.
The major wrinkle in all of this is in assessing anti-democratic behavior. Democracy indices not a great way of assessing democracy for much the same reason that the Doomsday Clock is a bad way of assessing nuclear risk: they’re subjective metrics by (probably increasingly) left-leaning academics and tend to measure a lot of things that I wouldn’t classify as democracy (eg rights of women/LGBT people/minorities). This paper found that using re-election rates there has been no evidence of global democratic backsliding. This started quite the controversy in political science; my read on the subsequent discussion is that there is evidence of backsliding, but such backsliding has been fairly modest.
I expect things to get worse as more countries get far-right leaders and those which already have far-right leaders have their democratic institutions increasingly captured by far-right leaders. And yet...a lot of places with far-right leaders continue to have close elections. See Poland, Turkey,Israel if you count that. In Brazil they even lost election. One plausible theory here is that the more anti-democratic behavior a party engages in the more resistance they face—either because voters are turned off or because their opponents increasingly become center or center-right parties seeking to create broad pro-democracy coalitions—and that this roughly balances out. What does this mean for how one evaluates democracy?
Finally, some comments specifically on more Western countries. I think the future of these countries is really uncertain.
For the next decade, it’s really dependent on a lot of short-term events. Will Italy’s PM Meloni engage in anti-democratic behavior? Will Le Pen win election in France, and if so will she engage in anti-democratic behavior? Will Trump win in 2024? How quickly/far will the upward trend in polling for Germany and Spain’s far-right continue?
I know the piece specifies the next decade, but more long-term, the rise of fascism has come quite suddenly in the span of these last 8 years. If it continues for a few decades (and AI doesn’t kill us all) then we are probably destined for fascist governments almost everywhere and the deterioration of democratic institutions. But how long this global trend will last is really the big question in global politics. Maybe debates over AI issues will become the big issue to supplant fascism? IDK. I’d love to see some analysis of historical trends in public approval to see what a prior for this question would look like; I’ve never gotten around to doing it myself and am really not very well informed about history here.
I do indeed agree this is a major problem even if I’m not sure if I agree with the main claim. The rise of fascism in the last decade and expectation that it will continue is extremely evident; its consequences for democracy are a lot less clear.
The major wrinkle in all of this is in assessing anti-democratic behavior. Democracy indices not a great way of assessing democracy for much the same reason that the Doomsday Clock is a bad way of assessing nuclear risk: they’re subjective metrics by (probably increasingly) left-leaning academics and tend to measure a lot of things that I wouldn’t classify as democracy (eg rights of women/LGBT people/minorities). This paper found that using re-election rates there has been no evidence of global democratic backsliding. This started quite the controversy in political science; my read on the subsequent discussion is that there is evidence of backsliding, but such backsliding has been fairly modest.
I expect things to get worse as more countries get far-right leaders and those which already have far-right leaders have their democratic institutions increasingly captured by far-right leaders. And yet...a lot of places with far-right leaders continue to have close elections. See Poland, Turkey, Israel if you count that. In Brazil they even lost election. One plausible theory here is that the more anti-democratic behavior a party engages in the more resistance they face—either because voters are turned off or because their opponents increasingly become center or center-right parties seeking to create broad pro-democracy coalitions—and that this roughly balances out. What does this mean for how one evaluates democracy?
Finally, some comments specifically on more Western countries. I think the future of these countries is really uncertain.
For the next decade, it’s really dependent on a lot of short-term events. Will Italy’s PM Meloni engage in anti-democratic behavior? Will Le Pen win election in France, and if so will she engage in anti-democratic behavior? Will Trump win in 2024? How quickly/far will the upward trend in polling for Germany and Spain’s far-right continue?
I know the piece specifies the next decade, but more long-term, the rise of fascism has come quite suddenly in the span of these last 8 years. If it continues for a few decades (and AI doesn’t kill us all) then we are probably destined for fascist governments almost everywhere and the deterioration of democratic institutions. But how long this global trend will last is really the big question in global politics. Maybe debates over AI issues will become the big issue to supplant fascism? IDK. I’d love to see some analysis of historical trends in public approval to see what a prior for this question would look like; I’ve never gotten around to doing it myself and am really not very well informed about history here.