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Is Liberal Democracy in Retreat?

Mar 30, 2018 Steven Pinker , Robert Muggah

Although democracy has spread from one country to more than 100 countries in the space of two centuries, it has also suffered setbacks along the way, and continues to face resistance to this day. Democracy, after all, is not inevitable, and yet it remains the best system of governance compared to the known alternatives.

CAMBRIDGE – Though some countries (and cities) are faring worse than others, the world is becoming safer and more prosperous overall – hard as that may be to believe. This is especially true of democratic countries, which stand out for their higher rates of economic growth and higher levels of wellbeing. Democracies also tend to have fewer wars and genocides, virtually no famines, and happier, healthier, better-educated citizens.

The good news is that a sizeable majority of the world’s population now lives in a democracy. Yet in some of them – not least the United States – the rise of populist, nativist political parties and leaders with authoritarian tendencies has created an unmistakable sense of pessimism, leading many to fear for the future of democracy. Are people right to be worried?

Democratic Sea Change

Many people forget that liberal democracy is a relatively new idea. Most of its core precepts – the separation of powers, human rights, civil liberties, freedom of speech and assembly, pluralistic media, and free, fair, and competitive elections – did not genuinely take hold until the twentieth century. Until a few hundred years ago, most societies had swung between anarchy and various forms of tyranny.

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Steven Pinker

Writing for PS since 2018
1 Commentary

Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and is the author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress.

Robert Muggah

Writing for PS since 2018
10 Commentaries

Robert Muggah, a co-founder of the Igarapé Institute and the SecDev Group, is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Future Council on Cities and an adviser to the Global Risks Report. He is the co-author (with Ian Goldin) of Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the Next 100 Years.

Illiberal Democracy or Undemocratic Liberalism?
Jeff Swensen (Stringer)/ Getty Images

Illiberal Democracy or Undemocratic Liberalism?

Yascha Mounk traces the rise of populism in Europe and the US to decades of expanding technocracy.

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Bevin Beaudet Apr 20, 2018

The article’s comment: “demagogues like President Donald Trump in the US gradually undermine checks and balances.” shows a disturbing ignorance of the rise of the deep state and rule by beauracy without representation in the US for many years. Most of this undemocratic movement was under other administrations, mostly liberal. The Obama rule by executive order is a prime example.
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Jesse James Pisanelli Apr 12, 2018

It really is incredible that anyone takes pinker seriously, other than those who wish to be told a feel good story through data(largely cherry picked, even Mehdi Hassan successfully challenges him on his own metrics, all the while never challenging Pinker's underlying ideology) and complete misunderstanding of history. (if you read his bibliographies, you will see that he is an utter joke). Any historian of the early modern and modern period who focus on the enlightenment paint a highly complex picture, and it has now been elaborated by sebastian conrad and others as an ongoing global process. There is really no need to go on, every serious thinker who has looked at his polemics does not take them seriously as scholarship (just read the critiques, or, if you have the time, read serious histories of the enlightenment - he sure as hell has not) History is a can of worms, those who feel threatened, wherever they may stand on the political spectrum, turn to narratives that simplify complex questions to quell their anxieties. And aside from his misunderstanding of history, the enlightenment and that there are a multitude of lifeforms/worldviews and conceptions of progress, he disregards the fact that all other forms of life (including those of a human variety) that don't conform to his narrow conception of progress and morality are increasingly alienated, polluted and disconnected- as well as living in unbearable slave like conditions (animals in factory farms etc). I doubt that he has had any close relationships with any disenfranchised people, cares for animal life very much...there are so many things that he misses that it is difficult not to see his intelligence - if his book does indeed represent his worldview and not simply an attempt to reap profits - as cheap and artificial (just flip through the bibliography if you need any proof)
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Robert Stephen Higgins Apr 11, 2018

More than a century ago liberals adopted a new goal- to create an ideal society. They took the basic groundwork from the socialists, particularly the maxim that every person is responsible for everyone else. Today, we have socialist liberalism that is becoming more strident, especially here in Canada. There are other dimensions to their ideology that are becoming increasingly odious. "Democratic" governments (supported by a minority) continue to make decisions based on ideology even when they go against the majority will. Those who are fed up with that start populist movements and they are increasing, much to the worry of liberals.
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Phil Johnson Apr 2, 2018

"Democracy isn't about optimal outcomes, it's about hedging downside risk."

Whatever you think democracy is about, figure out a way to measure it, then make comparisons. My point is that our belief that democracy is the best form of government is an article of faith, not one based on facts, observations, or reasoning. This is probably why it's easy for college professors or Hollywood filmmakers to convince students that there are better alternatives!
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Gregor Flock Apr 2, 2018

You way wanna wish to start that fight in the USA against the utterly corrupt Democratic (Clinton, Wasserman Schultz etc.) *and* Republican establishment which represent "two wings of the same bird of prey."
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Gregor Flock Apr 2, 2018

"The continued spread of democratic governance" - as in Iraq or rather as in Libya?
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Gregor Flock Apr 2, 2018

Ugh, the next repetition of the lie that the USA is a democracy. Once again, the link to the 2014 Princeton study: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
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Gregor Flock Apr 2, 2018

They are turning away from *what falsely passes as* democracy you naive fools!
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Gregor Flock Apr 2, 2018

The utterly ridiculous implied claim here is that the USA was a democracy before Trump. NO IT WAS NOT (see the now direct link to the 2014 Princeton study: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf)
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Gregor Flock Apr 2, 2018

"highly demoralizing" *for which parties*? Those who had wanted to implement that 'democracywash' in Ukraine.
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Gregor Flock Apr 2, 2018

Huntingon on democracy? Are you guys for real?? From the wikipedia entry on Huntington (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington): "During the 1980s, he became a valued adviser to the South African regime, which used his ideas on political order to craft its "total strategy" to reform apartheid and suppress growing resistance. He assured South Africa's rulers that increasing the repressive power of the state (which at that time included police violence, detention without trial, and torture) can be necessary to effect reform."
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Gregor Flock Apr 2, 2018

Ahmagawd, the USA is NOT a democracy (http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746) so can you stop spreading that lie please?!
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j. von Hettlingen Apr 1, 2018

Steven Pinker and Robert Muggah seek to debunk the false belief that liberal democracy is “in retreat” even though it is in a global recession. According to the 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, less than 5% of the world’s population currently lives i a “full democracy” that provides for an electoral process, a functioning government and political participation. It also protects civil liberties and pluralism, promoting a strong civil society with a democratic political culture.
Around a third of the world’s population live under authoritarian rule, with a majority of those living in China. Overall, 89 of the 167 countries assessed in 2017 received lower scores than a year earlier. Western Europe accounts for 14 of the 19 “full democracies” that make up the ranking’s top tier. Yet the region’s average score slipped slightly in 2017, to an average of 8.38 points out of 10.
Norway has been ranked as the most democratic country since 2010. Due to its attempt to stop Catalonia’s independence referendum in October 2017, Spain is on the verge of becoming a “flawed democracy.” The unresolved murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, an anti-corruption blogger, had damaged Malta’s willingness to investigate “sensitive crimes.” France, remains a “flawed democracy” because it passed a law expanding the government’s emergency powers, after high-profile terrorist attacks in recent years. Although French voters elected Emmanuel Macron and not Marine Le Pen last year, civil liberties score had declined.
The authors point out that liberal democracy had only become the new normal in the second half of the 20th century, when the “core precepts – the separation of powers, human rights, civil liberties, freedom of speech and assembly, pluralistic media, and free, fair, and competitive elections” – made up today’s rules-based global order, that is now being challenged by anti-Western forces, led by China and Russia. “Until a few hundred years ago, most societies had swung between anarchy and various forms of tyranny.”
The authors highlight the different “waves” of democratisation in history, with the US leading the first wave in the 19th century. For decades since the French Revolution, the process remained a “stop-start affair.” Then Western European countries began to adopt the US model of “constitutional democracy,” which was widely admired for “its checks on executive, legislative, and judicial power and privilege.” There was an ebb and flow of the wave in the post colonial era after World War II in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
The Third wave “was more of a tsunami” following the fall of military juntas and totalitarian governments. In retrospect, “the immediate post-Cold War period seems like a Golden Age of democratic consolidation. But it was also a time when the staggering pace of change fueled new concerns about the genuine health of many newly democratic governments.” Critics say todays’ relapse into authoritarianism among “democratic converts such as the so-called Visegrád Group: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia” shows that the EU eastern enlargement may have been premature for many former Soviet satellites.
The authors say the “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan “were highly demoralizing,” as was the “failure” of the 2010-2011 Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa. The rise of democratically elected autocrats like Putin, Erdogan, and the election of Trump on the one side, and the empowerment of “unelected technocratic bodies like the European Commission” on the other, had prompted ordinary people – especially many youth in the West – to turn away from democracy.
Of the various forms of governance – “theocracies in the Islamic world and authoritarian capitalism in China” – Western liberal democracy (be it “presidential, parliamentary or constitutional-monarchial”), despite its flaws and imperfections, “has been so successful not just because of procedural institutions such as elections or checks and balances.” It is the idea of being able to voice one’s fear or concerns, to show one’s discontent or anger by taking to the streets, and most of all to make an impact and shape policy, that makes democracy so “contagious.”
According to Winston Churchill, “democracy is still preferable to the alternatives. Democracies, after all, allow people to dismiss their representatives without resorting to bloodshed.”
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Mark Feldman Mar 31, 2018

I hope the authors are right.

I wonder, though, what Thomas Jefferson would say if he looked around today and saw Fox News, Facebook posts, etc...combined with poor basic education for so many people. From the following, I think I know what he would say.

“…Preach…a crusade against ignorance…improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against…evil, and that…kings, priests and nobles…will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance…” T. Jefferson

How prescient he was.

The authors' deep belief in reason is appropriate, but as Jefferson well knew, education is the foundation of reason.
- Ariel Tejera Mar 31, 2018
  
  Hi, Mark. Commenting on your post. I would love to share your view, certainly. But it's difficult, if we look back to history. Disastrous WW1 burst around Germany, the most educated and socially advanced power in Europe at the time, killing alongside, and forever, the European rationalist dream, I think. Today, Europe is of course extremely well educated, has significant social justice and a powerful and pervasive democratic apparatus, reduced religious fanaticism, and has the E.U. to prevent internecine debacles. It is a wonderful example, indeed, of the reach of what we may call Western Values, or "education". Well, we may ask ourselves: will it work ?
  - Phil Johnson Apr 1, 2018
    
    Ariel, the only "European rationalist dreams" were those of Plato, the medieval Church, communism, and the various other theological ideologies that were actually rationalist. The phrase "the European rationalist dream" is a retrospective imagining by modernists, who projected an imagined classical rationalism onto empirical scientific humanists because they were unaware that "rationalism" and "science" are opposites, not synonyms. This is the trick by which they blame the failings of their own Romantic philosophical predecessors on science.
    - Phil Johnson Apr 1, 2018
      
      Well, leading scientific people were still Rationalists going into and during the Enlightenment, eg Descartes, Leibniz, but by the 19th century, intellectuals had divided into, roughly, the rationalist, religious romantics and empirical scientists.
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Ariel Tejera Mar 31, 2018

I just wonder if Democracy is fit to solve global problems. Each democracy is rather local, national. That's a built in limitation, as problems and solutions must be dealt with by groups of people that share some common ground, otherwise called "culture". So, a democracy won't work if its society can't synchronize with itself. Culture allows for sharing meaning. Simply said. You create a federation of different peoples such as the E.U. and synchronization stops working. Now: if the major challenges of humanity today are inherently global, then national, isolated solutions are of course, uneffective. What to do ?
- Phil Johnson Apr 1, 2018
  
  The current conceptualization of democracy, in which one person gets one vote on each issue and one binary decision must be made which will apply to the entire governed area, may not be fit for global problems.
  
  But one person, one vote, one outcome, is not a defining characteristic. Democracy is, abstractly, any decision-making mechanism which gathers information from everyone rather than from just a few people. For example, the free market is literally a form of democracy.
  
  We need theoretical study of democracy, to optimize it to make better decisions. An obvious place to begin is to apply knowledge about how to design neural networks that learn to make better decision, to building democracies that learn to make better decisions. In such democracies, legislators would set goals, fitness functions, and learning rules rather than legislate answers directly. (For instance, rather than legislate district boundaries, they would agree on an algorithm to set all district boundaries.)
  - Ariel Tejera Apr 1, 2018
    
    Dear Phil. Man, you've mastered your stuff. And I agree with you, precisely on the urgency of adapting the current design of "democracy" , and empower it to work outside of the local, national context, and thus become able to face the global challenges to civilization itself. Cheers.
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- Ariel Tejera Mar 31, 2018
  
  Take the case of Trump. He is a creator of "meaning" all the way, he proposes meaningful paths of action to his voters, and they really love that. Even as mere "experts" stay horrified at the possible consequences.
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Phil Johnson Mar 31, 2018

An interesting and well-researched article, but with several points I think need correcting:

- "Even more recently, authoritarian governance in new democracies such as Hungary, Poland, and Turkey, and in old democracies such as the US, have set off alarm bells." Considering that half of the American people would consider the Obama administration more authoritarian than the Trump administration, this is a ridiculous comment, and one that trivializes the real injustices suffered by people under real authoritarian governments.

- You repeatedly claim that democracy is superior to other forms of government, but there is no evidence. No one has seriously studied the question. Choose a metric that says how good a government is, whether that's incarceration rates (whoops--democracy loses!), executions, per capita GDP, lifespan, quality of life, liberty, crime, environmental quality--whatever, but choose a metric and measure it for different, /comparable/ nations. You can't compare the US in the 20th century to the Roman Empire and conclude democracy is better. Can democracy today do better than Singapore? Convince us.

- You claim as an indicator of "democracy" that "capital punishment could be abolished completely around the world in less than a decade." Yet support for capital punishment is nearly 100% in most parts of the world. It's about 55% in the US, and that's the lowest it's ever been. How is the enforcement of a minority viewpoint, or its gradual imposition via continuous cultural warfare against the lower classes, an indicator of democracy?

- The threat to democracy in the US today comes from the left, not from the right. As you say, "Mounk and others fear that young people, including in the West, are turning away from democracy." This is correct--and it's true because those young people are listening to the hegemonic cultural message that we need less democracy and more centralized power to protect minority rights and to combat "capitalism". After Trump's election, it was those on the left, not those on the right, telling people that the democratic process had failed and that they needed to fight against its outcome. Marxism, post-modernism, and the cultural hegemony of urban culture are the greatest threats to democracy today, and you don't find them on the right.

(There's another angle to this, the ever-present leftist impulse to centralization and unification into bigger and bigger governments, which stems from the West's underlying Platonism and the deep-seated, unconscious conviction that creation of a world government is the proper way to approach the One. But that would take a long time to explain.)
- Alan S Apr 1, 2018
  
  - You repeatedly claim that democracy is superior to other forms of government, but there is no evidence. No one has seriously studied the question. Choose a metric that says how good a government is, whether that's incarceration rates (whoops--democracy loses!), executions, per capita GDP, lifespan, quality of life, liberty, crime, environmental quality--whatever, but choose a metric and measure it for different, /comparable/ nations. You can't compare the US in the 20th century to the Roman Empire and conclude democracy is better. Can democracy today do better than Singapore? Convince us.
  
  Phil, I like your comments, but I think you're missing the point on this one. Democracy isn't about optimal outcomes, it's about hedging downside risk. I think it would be difficult to argue that democracy is better than a "good" king. The problem is the "bad" kings. Although democracy will never be as efficient as Singapore, it will never be as awful as Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao.
  
  Democracy is a distributed system of decision making. Distributed systems are inherently inefficient, but they are also more resilient. A single point failure in an autocracy can have disastrous results. No single point failure in democracy has the same effect.
  
  Everyone is up in arms about Trump, but, if he is a failure, what damage has he actually done? Cut taxes and increased the deficit? Not really alone on that one. Tweeted some mean things? I prefer someone who is too incompetent to hide their misdeeds to his predecessors who could. Colluded with the Russians to ensure his victory? Bullshit. The entire Russian collusion narrative is a red herring. Furthermore, if you think this is the first time Russia has tried to interfere in American politics, you haven't been paying attention.
  
  The entire democracy is failing narrative is sensationalism from a press dying for relevance.
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- Andrew (Andy) Crow Mar 31, 2018
  
  " The threat to democracy in the US today comes from the left, not from the right."
  
  There's a 'left ' in the US ?
  
  Left behind perhaps.
  - Peter Schaeffer Mar 31, 2018
    
    AC, the economic left is relatively weak in the U.S. However, cultural Marxism (identity politics, post-modernism, etc.) is fanatically enforced in much of the U.S. Take a look at the Larry Summers's affair and the Damore memo if you have any doubts. The U.S. is far-left in cultural terms, generally right-wing in economics. Try to publicly mention "biology" in the U.S. and you will suffer the consequences. A professor wrote a book about this. The title was "The Blank Slate". In the book, the author showed that a worldview divorced from reality dominated all intellectual discourse in the U.S.
    - Andrew (Andy) Crow Mar 31, 2018
      
      Fair comment. The buggers are all barking.
      
      And heavily armed. What could possibly go wrong?
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- Phil Johnson Mar 31, 2018
  
  Correction: According to Gallup, American support for capital punishment was lower than 55% for most of 1957-1973.
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Michael Parsons Mar 30, 2018

The disillusianment is with party political 'democracy' so called, that marshalls support by mass elections. Elections are evidence of oligarchy only - because to enter or win you need money, patronage, and claques of supporters. Basically what we see is rule by money power, and the appeal to democracy is made to divert attention from the actual mechasim of domination by well-financed small establishment groups.
Democracy took root in Athens with direct popular decision making and choice by sortition (i.e. selection of office-holders by casting lots, very carefully insulated from interference by the oligarchy). The rejection of democracy is evident to day in the resistance to referendums ( with claims that the people are too stupid, ill-informed, intractable etc. to rule) and the farce that follows referendums in the EU shows the deep-rooted hostility of the political elite to democracy and popular rule. Along with this goes the specious pretence that 'ruling' requires a special kind of expertise that marks off the chosen from the choosers.
In fact while we may need experts for particular tasks like war, health service etc and should choose among them, we do not need experts to tell us where the State should go next - any more than we need a captain -however technically proficient- to decide on the destination of a voyage we are paying for.

The so-called crisis pf the West is no more than people waking up to the farcical nature of our 'elites'; and the 'crises' are the elites' desperate attempts to cover themselves - false claims to WMD, attacks on Libya, currently absurdities about the ''Russian threat' - anything to distract from their unpunished crimes and to to create conflicts which, even at the expense of thousands of lives, will open new fields for their money-making and for resource-grabbing and tax-rip-offs by the few.
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barry hindess Mar 30, 2018

The authors should be aware that few political scientists outside Harvard now take Huntington seriously. The three waves of democracy is one of many tendentious views of history. No excuse for presenting it as fact
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barry hindess Mar 30, 2018

"because the alternative .... was even worse." A slogan in place of an argument. Few populations have ever been offered the choice between repression and anarchy. Hobbes' argument in Leviathan should not be read as history
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nigel southway Mar 30, 2018

The article was an epic fail in terms of defining the difference between Liberal democracy and plain old democracy and then went on to confuse the two.…

Democracy….a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives:

Liberal democracy…..a democracy based on the recognition of individual rights and freedoms, in which decisions from direct or representative processes prevail in many policy areas.

We have left leaning liberal minded elites that shout foul if we just apply plain old democracy based on the simple will of the people…

They threaten insurrection if it does not meet their view of society.

They want us to follow a limp wristed multicultural journey that spawn’s children that can choose to become minorities and even choose their own sex and want to be supported in an over entitlement ridden spoilt and over reached minority and victim focused world… no wonder they are confused!

They encourage a global village and economic free trade mentality at the expense of the national citizens who grow tired of the liberalization of trade that is destroying hard earned prosperity.

They encourage social norms we have always held close, to be shouted down by the suppression of free speech through the so called political correctness under the cover of hate speech avoidance.

We see our centers of learning turning to mush in terms of not being allowed to question all extremities of social and political and even economic argument and concepts.

The best line for a plain democracy decision process was by Mr Spock on Star Trek who said: “The needs of the many out-weigh the needs of the few”.. that’s the best definition of a plain old democracy.

So, let’s focus on the simple majority view…get a leadership that says what it means to do. Then, vote that leadership in, and get on with it. what’s wrong with that?

This brand of democratic liberalism being pushed by the elites, who will seek to question the democratic views of the people, is a form of entrapment and is Anti Free!

Politics must be free to allow the leaders to choose how they should act. It is not a religion read from tablets of stone… it’s a process to manage situations. Get used to it.
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Peter Schaeffer Mar 30, 2018

This question has a remarkably easy answer. The dominant power of the 21st century will be China. China is neither liberal nor democratic. This represent a significant change from the last 2-5 centuries where the dominant global power has been Liberal, European, Christian, etc.

There is nothing 'wrong' with this. China is earning its place in world. Even if it was 'wrong', rightness and wrongness don't matter. Power (in all forms) is flowing to China and the world can't change that.

The other great rising power in the world is India. India does not appear to be as illiberal as China. However, it is probably not a coincidence that the India has become less liberal as it has become more successful. I am not suggesting success has made India less liberal (that may be true). However, the reverse appears to be the case. The illiberal BJP is better at running India than the liberal Congress party.

In the West (the U.S. and Europe), liberalism (racial, sexual, ethnic identity politics) is ever more closely associated with failed/failing economic and political systems and ever rising inequality. The fact that liberalism has been used as a 'protective coloring" for a regnant and failing neoliberalism has made liberalism ever less credible.

None of this new. For quite some time, scholars have pointing out that the dominant ideas of the establishment amount to PC Lysenkoism. A society based on PC Lysenkoism can not be expected to long survive. Let me quote

“One trend is a stated contempt among many scholars for the concepts of truth, logic, and evidence. Another is a hypocritical divide between what intellectuals say in public and what they really believe. A third is the inevitable reaction: a culture of “politically incorrect” shock jocks who revel in anti-intellectualism and bigotry, emboldened by the knowledge that the intellectual establishment has forfeited claims to credibility in the eyes of the public."
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Robert Wolff Mar 30, 2018

Re: Harvard’s Yascha Mounk warns that liberal democracy is giving way to “undemocratic liberalism."
What we are experiencing in postmodern democracies is the loss of individual autonomy. We have to fit into a system that is largely a prescription for life dictated by large institutions and thus determined by a small number of people who are 'Stewards' of postmodern society.
Consequently, we are created by the system. The system is not created by us. Whether that is "good" for us is the real question, which the article mentions. But whether it is "good" for us is irrelevant to the fact that it erases our sense of autonomy in creating our own reality.
We must play a role in the reality created by historical others, and led by those in powerful positions who control large institutions. The final question is, does giving up our autonomy to "live better" in accordance with someone else's prescription make us "happier"?
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Andrzej B. Mar 30, 2018

A question from IQ test:
Liberal democracy is in relation to democracy like:
A) weelchair to chair
B) rocking chair to chair
C) electric chair to chair
D) chair and democracy have nothing in common
- nigel southway Mar 30, 2018
  
  what's your point?
  - Andrew (Andy) Crow Mar 31, 2018
    
    To make you think ?
    
    Works for me. I don't understand the question either.
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Oeufs Bruns Mar 30, 2018

So what do we do about capitalism and democracy being almost entirely contradictory? Continue to marvel at how far we've supposedly come?
- Phil Johnson Mar 31, 2018
  
  "Capitalism"--what does it mean? That people who control capital control the means of production? No; that was true under feudalism, and in ancient Rome and Egypt. That production is managed by private individuals? No; that was also true under feudalism, and mercantilism, and fascism.
  
  Capitalism means that the person who owns something can choose whether or not to sell it. That means, in turn, that the person who owns something can choose the minimum price she'll sell it for. This includes labor, by the way--you aren't allowed to sell your own labor under Marxism.
  
  So all capitalism means is "the free market"--a system in which you have property rights, and you can sell your things if you want to, and don't have to sell them if you don't want to.
  
  Any system that is not capitalism either forces you to make things you don't want to, work at jobs you don't want to for wages you don't choose, or sell things when you don't want to sell them.
  
  Democracy and capitalism are both distributed decision-making systems. In "capitalism" (free market economics), prices are set by the equilibrium between buyers and sellers. In democracy, policies are set by the equilibrium position between the viewpoints of the population. Democracy and capitalism are not only not contradictory, they are analogous, as each is simply, by definition, the class of distributed decision-making algorithms for their domain. They generally have analogous advantages and disadvantages.
  - Andrew (Andy) Crow Mar 31, 2018
    
    Interesting parallels between the 'democracy' of ancient Rome and that of the USA today.
    
    The plebs get to vote, but it doesn't make much difference.
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David Donald Mar 30, 2018

Steven Pinker does no one - but himself and his publisher - any favors by weaving a narrative that ignores the many economic and social causes of populism, so that ordinary people are presented as merely unfaithful, ungrateful and unintelligent. As an advocate of democracy sans demos, Pinker would like to obviate efforts that might have arisen in a better political culture and primary system to cure America's deep structural problems. He seems to be auditioning for the team of the next Bill Clinton who might enter after the Trump circus to push Americans even deeper into their morass of unequal income, education, health care, and safety.
- P. Kamath Mar 31, 2018
  
  Poker is very knowledgeable in Psychological studies , remember!
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- Andrew (Andy) Crow Mar 31, 2018
  
  I wouldn't argue with the Pinker premiss that the world in on average better for most people (as an average). Deceptive things averages.
  
  But the general tenor is rather along the lines of what Caitlin Moran describes as 'blithe'.
  
  I share your disquiet, David Donald.
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Gerald Silverberg Mar 30, 2018

One has to admire Steven Pinker for being the eternal Panglossian.

However, when the two oldest beacons of democracy, the UK and the USA, are backsliding, concern for democracy acquires a new quality. Imagine that this had happened in the 1930s. Fascism would have won hands down.
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