How Democracy Can Fail Us and What to do About It

Every society has to answer the core questions of power: With whom does it rest? How is it wrested? How is it expressed? To answer these questions, humanity has experimented, at different times and in different places, with different forms of government; tweaking, syncretizing and discarding systems as we go along. Democracy has come to occupy a sacrosanct place in the global political conversation. A mere mention of its name in said conversation provides the sometimes-specious patina of legitimacy to the political system or process in question, so much so that perhaps the world’s most repressive nation, calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea; and Russia’s authoritarian leader proclaims Russia to be a sovereign democracy. No system of government has come to have the sort of appeal democracy has today. Considering the many lives sacrificed to topple authoritarian military dictatorships and usher in self-government for the citizen, democracy appears to be a system worth dying for, and, if you take the United States’ putative goals in Nicaragua, Iran and Afghanistan at face value, apparently one worth killing for.