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Remarkable and frightening events are underway across Europe and the United States.

Under the banner of novel coronavirus control, democracies are restricting basic freedoms of movement, of association, of worship. They are enforcing local or nationwide curfews and lockdowns that will inevitably have a ruinous economic impact especially for small businesses that need cash flow. In the borderless EU, borders are suddenly back, and the EU is announcing a 30-day ban on outsiders entry.

These steps are unprecedented in peacetime and draconian. While Covid-19 is a highly infectious but low-mortality illness, many governmentsare benchmarking their responses on the very worst outbreaks Chinas Wuhan and Northern Italy.

Meanwhile, worst-case scenarios are being routinely bandied about by experts and regurgitated by politicians, panicking the public. Could there be another way to bring the virus under control without lockdowns or travel bans?

The EU and US are instigating extreme and frankly authoritarian measures while overlooking the experience of a fellow democracy that was, until last week, the second most infected country on earth.

That country, which has now slid down to fifth place on infection charts behind China, Italy, Iran and Spain, provides an exemplary record of pandemic control without trampling over basic liberties and commerce.

It has seen its numbers of new infections slip from the high hundreds last week to double digits all this week. Moreover, it has probably the lowest mortality percentage 0.7% among all countries that have suffered significant outbreaks of Covid-19.

It has managed these outcomes without locking down even its most affected city. While taking sensible precautions, it has not stifled social and economic activity and has enacted barely any travel bans.

The country? South Korea.

Much has been written of how Korea deployed mass testing of up to 20,000 people per day, offering immediate corollaries of early-stage isolation and treatment. Seoul had astutely leveraged technology, from drive-through test centers to self-monitoring apps.

Cultural factors were also in play. Korean governments have customarily had more of a Nanny State mentality than Western democracies. As a result, there has been minimal complaint about invasions of privacy such as, for example, when big data and GPS are used to track the movements of the infected.

And Koreans, like other East Asians, habitually wear dust masks to fend off pollution. Given near-universal wearage, it seems likely that those with the virus but asymptomatic have not infected others. Meanwhile, Western authorities caution against public mask use.

Moreover, Korea is, geopolitically an island, surrounded on three sides by ocean and on one by a fortified border. However, it has effectively emplaced health monitoring facilities and programs at all ports of entry.

But the above are tactics and conditions. What has been less written about is the overriding principle Seoul placed over virus control. That principle is democratic governance.

Korea as a democratic country, values globalization and pluralistic society, Vice-Minister of Health and Welfare Kim Gang-lip told foreign reporters last week.For these reasons, Korea is adopting a different model for responding to contagious disease outbreaks. The key tenet of our model can be defined as a dynamic response system for open democratic societies.

So, what has South Korea not done?

It has enacted no suppression even of a religious sect that kick-started mass infection and no lockdowns, even in the hot zone of Daegu. Bullet trains ran into, out of and through the city.

Although Koreans are subject to travel bans, restrictions and quarantines from more than 100 countries, the country has only halted incoming travelers from Hubei and Japan, the latter, for political reasons. All incoming travelers are screened on entry and provided with monitoring apps.

While mass gatherings are halted and museums, schools and universities are closed, shops, cafes, bars, gyms, etc, remain open. There has been no panic buying.

We have tried to avoid interrupting the daily life of the people, said Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Lee Tae-ho.

Even so, economic damage is mounting and emergency budgets are being mobilized. Downtown shopping precincts are near-empty.Lay-offs are underway. Small businesses Asia Times has canvassed taxis, shops, cafes and restaurants complain revenues are down 50% or more.

Compare this moderate response to the extreme Western measures, in which economic and social intercourse is being suspended largely or totally.

No government is a single-issue organization, but we are currently witnessing single-minded prioritization: virus management. Extreme political decisions are being taken at a time when the global economy is on the brink.

Markets that started turning bullish over the novel coronavirus and the related dry-up of Chinas supply chain had been on the rise since the 2008 global financial crisis, so were overdue for a correction, or overcorrections.

Then came the oil-war shock. Then, two of the worlds most vital economic zones the United States and EU started radically restricting transport and intercourse while stifling economies. Some $30 trillion has been wiped off global equity valuations.

Amid this perfect storm, lockdowns are a questionable one-size-fits-all response that does not prioritize the key at-risk populations, which is those with existing health conditions and above all, the aged.

It is clear where peril is concentrated. A study by the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, University of Oxford & Nuffield College, notes: Covid-19 mortality risk is highly concentrated at older ages, particularly those aged 80+.In China, case-fatality rate estimates range from 0.4% (40-49 years), jumping to 14.8% (80+ years). This is consistent with the data from Italy as of March 13, where the reported CFR is 10.8% for those 70-79, 17.5% for 80-89 and 21.1% for those over 90, with only six deaths under the age of 50. Thus far, only 3% of deaths have occurred in those under age 60.

Why, then, are resources and systems not tailored to this demographic?

Essential hygiene, distancing, caution and monitoring protocols essential for the protection of the aged can be laid over existing family care and social welfare care frameworks. Greater attention to the needs of the aged could feasibly emerge as a positive byproduct of the Covid-19 crisis.

Were that done, low-risk members of the population could be freed from lockdown to continue breathing at least some oxygen into economies.

But lockdowns are increasingly the order of the day. B2C sectors travel and tourism, hospitality and retail, catering and leisure, sport and entertainment face devastation.

Big players, such as airlines, will likely benefit from bailouts. But these sectors are heavily populated by small, family-run businesses that require cash flow: Shops and BnBs, restaurants, cafes and bars, gyms and leisure operations.

The hit to Italys economy one heavily based upon Mom n Pop operations is barely imaginable.

Who are influencing media and government? A handful of professional epidemiologists who have become talking heads in global media are forecasting 70-80% infection rates. These data points are being regurgitated by leaders such as Germanys Angela Merkel.

But not only do we know now that some models for prior pandemics were overstated, some influencers are positing absolute worst-case scenarios.

Two distinguished epidemiologists are providing much of the commentary around the Covid-19 outbreak, Dan Strickland, a retired US epidemiologist, told Asia Times, noting that their predictions carry much weight with media and policymakers.

However, both are choosing to describe the worst-case scenarios of the outbreak, likely out of an abundance of understandable caution, Strickland continued. Not all agree with those assessments, but at this point, US state and local governments are preferring that highly cautious mindset for setting policy.

In the EU, governments seem spooked by the Italian death toll. But Italy has the oldest population in Europe and its death rate, hovering at more than 5% is well north of the average which a very recent study calculates at about 1.4%.

Big picture data is telling. Global infections now number just under 200,000 cases. They will no doubt exceed that by the time you read this. In a global population of 8 billion, the number of infected would have to soar to 80 million just to reach 1%.Fatalities at present are under 8,000, or 0.00001% of the population.

If, in time, professionals estimates are proven badly skewed, they and the officials who took worst-case scenarios at face value and used them as bases for policymaking must consider their responsibility.

Long term, they may have cried wolf if a truly existential pandemic appears, their predictions may be jeered at and ignored.Near term, they may find themselves blamed for massive economic carnage.

And economic carnage is real. It means income losses, redundancies, bankruptcies, business closures, poverty, shattered hopes and related traumas. And recessions are deadly.

A 2018 study by the National Academy of Science of the USA found stresses from the 2008 recession literally lifted US blood pressure. A 2016Lancet study found some half a million cancer deaths worldwide were linked to the same recession. A study from Oxford found more than 10,000 suicides were linked to the recession.

More? Post-recession austerity drove 10,000 suicides in the EU and US, 10,000 British families into homelessness and one million people into depression, according to a report in The Guardian in 2013.

A Covid-19-prompted recession now looks a certainty. How long it will last is unknown. If the virus peaks in April, there is the possibility of a bounce back, driven by pent-up consumer potential exploding, and a V-shaped recovery in the summer. But that is speculation.

What is more certain is those at mortal virus risk fall into clear percentiles. Those at risk of economic fallout represent a far wider category. The upcoming recession could feasibly kill more than the virus.

Given such grave potentialities, national governments must focus beyond single issues. They need to calibrate risks, prioritize aims and consider all options from broad and multiple perspectives before acting and then, acting with prudence, not panic.

In that they have sound case studies notably South Korea, but also fellow Northeast Asia democracies Japan and Taiwan to benchmark.

Alas, though, the time for that may already be past.

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Democracies Covid-19 cures could be worse than the disease - Asia Times

How do you hold primaries when much of the countrys being asked not to go out in public? Its another thing to sort out on the fly with everyone open to practical compromise.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has postponed all village elections, scheduled for Wednesday, until April 28 the date still set for New Yorks presidential primary.

We are dealing with an unprecedented challenge, but I think it is a signature of a stable democracy that elections happen, Mayor de Blasio said before postponing the March 24 special election for Queens borough president. Indeed, its worth taking the time to figure out how to vote safely.

Cuomo has moved to make absentee voting available to everyone and to extend the application deadline to the day before the primary. Were no fans of vote-by-mail but its all fair, in these extraordinary circumstances. As the saying goes: Needs must when the devil drives.

Indeed, the state Board of Elections needs to craft vote-by-mail and drop-off ballot procedures before April 28, in case the shutdown lasts that long.

The Legislature can pass the necessary laws, making it plain that this isnt absentee voting, which the state Constitution severely limits, but special emergency voting. (Reformers who want vote-by-mail for all elections need to resist the urge to exploit this crisis: Compromise.)

Other states are doing their own experimenting, as the epidemic hits nationwide.

The Democratic National Committee, which is mulling penalties for states that change their rules suddenly, needs to back off, too: Its a crisis, and people are doing their best. Both parties should be figuring out how to hold conventions via video, if it comes to that.

Tech-savvy campaigns are hosting virtual town halls in place of in-person events. Social media and virtual phone banks are replacing in-person canvassing.

Some of these innovations will persist even once normalcy returns. We hope to see familiar in-person Election Day balloting again the norm, but the emphasis for now is on making democracy work while under duress.

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Making democracy work during this crisis requires everyone to compromise - New York Post

llustration by Joey GuidonePortrait illustrations by Sam Kerr

Democracy and capitalism coexist in many variations around the world, each continuously reshaped by the conditions and the people forming them. Increasingly, people have deep concerns about both. In a recent global survey, Pew found that, among respondents in 27 countries, 51% are dissatisfied with how democracy is working. Further, Millennials and Gen Zs are increasingly disinterested in capitalism, with only half of them viewing it positively in the United States.

In The Business Case for Saving Democracy, Rebecca Henderson argues that the failure of each system is married to the other, and that to rebuild a strong free market we are going to have to strengthen democracy. But do other observers agree?

To learn more about the complex global relationships of democracy and capitalism and why global opinion of the two appears to be waning Harvard Business Review, with Henderson, reached out to top economists and political scientists who study democracy, and who are from, live, or work in countries that are struggling with it. We asked them these questions: Do democracy and capitalism need each other? Why or why not?

Heres how they answered.

Isabelle Ferreras

Tenured fellow of the Belgian National Science Foundation, professor at the University of Louvain, and a senior research associate of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School

Clearly not: Capitalism, as we can see across the globe, is compatible with all different kinds of political regimes: liberal democratic, communist, autocratic and now illiberal democracies, too.

Democracy is a system of government based on the recognition that people are equal in dignity and rights and should therefore have equal political rights. This ideal can be applied to entities of any size.

Capitalism is also a system of government, but an unequal one. It grants political rights based on capital ownership. Its core institution is the firm, which is made up of two classes of investor: capital and labor. In capitalist firms, political rights to govern are held by capital investors only, through the legal vehicle of the corporation. The only citizens that matter in the extractive logic of the capitalist firm are those who own capital in other words, shareholders. They exercise the power and reap the bulk of the financial returns, while labor investors (i.e., workers) are disenfranchised and the planets resources exhausted.

Capitalism is not naturally meant to support the free market. The market is an exchange mechanism that is legally and culturally produced and secured by the state. Its superiority in coordinating supply and demand has been proved, but it is seldom acknowledged that the market economy is compatible with both democratic and capitalist governments at the firm level. Capitalism and democracy both need markets, not each other.

This confusion has created the illusion that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand, when, in fact, they contradict each other. Todays political leaders (democratic or not) are scrambling to hide their powerlessness to reduce inequalities or save the planet in the face of transnational capitalist corporations. One result of this is crumbling democracies. We have a clear choice before us: either expand our democratic commitment to include corporations, through democratizing them internally (by including the representation of labor investors along the current representation of capital investors), or forfeit our democratic rights to those who own capital a possibility looming on the horizon, particularly in the United States.

Isabel V. Sawhill

Senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution and author of The Forgotten Americans: An Economic Agenda for a Divided Nation

Capitalism and democracy absolutely need each other to survive, but right now it is democracy that is most threatened.

Capitalism is the right way to organize an economy, but its not a good way to organize a society. Markets do a good job of allocating resources, fostering dynamism, and preserving individual choice, but they cannot solve climate change, too much inequality, or the plight of workers whose jobs have been destroyed by trade or technology. When government fails to address these or other systemic problems, democracy begins to lose its legitimacy. In desperation, citizens turn to populists on the right or the left. If these leaders then prove unable to keep their promises, trust in government erodes further. Political instability begins to threaten capitalism itself.

We are now seeing that spiral in action. Dissatisfaction with democracy in the U.S. has risen by one-third since the mid-1990s and now includes about half the population, according to the Centre for the Future of Democracy at Cambridge University. It was the white working class, whose counties had been ravaged by a loss of jobs, that elected Donald Trump in 2016. Yes, his supporters had cultural anxieties (opposition to immigration in particular) in addition to economic ones, but theres no denying the surprisingly strong county-level correlation of votes for Trump with long-term economic distress, very low employment rates, plant closings related to trade, and the location of the opioid epidemic.

Now the U.S. is in the midst of another presidential campaign and the signposts of instability are rising on the left. If Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination this year, it will be clear that it is not just the working class that is fed up but also young people and progressives, who believe the system is corrupt and that only a democratic socialist can save the day. But a Sanders revolution would almost surely disappoint his voters further, since enacting most of his proposals is politically infeasible, leading to more fraying of trust in government.

Fewer than half of 18- to 29-year-olds now support capitalism. They are right that markets without guardrails do not produce a healthy society. But a government that overreaches by trying to replace the market in areas like health care or job creation will not restore that trust. This is the balancing act we face.

Archon Fung

Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Of course they dont need each other.

Ancient Athens and the revolutionary United States were democratic but not capitalist, and China practices what some call state capitalism without democracy. To be provocative, let me pose a different question: Can democracy and capitalism coexist?

Democracy is a system of government in which people make the laws and policies together as equal citizens. But under capitalism, capitalists tend to like to make the laws and policies. The new Oxford dictionary defines capitalism as an economic and political system in which a countrys trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit. Thats simply not democracy.

In societies that contain elements of both democracy and capitalism, the challenge is to maintain political equality against the economic inequality that capitalism tends to produce. Capitalist democracies with greater political equality tend to look less capitalist; Im thinking of northern European countries with more-generous social safety protections, stronger unions to counterbalance the political power of businesses, higher tax rates, and more-egalitarian labor market and distributive policies. Indeed, those places are commonly called social democracies rather than capitalist democracies. And the places that are more capitalist tend to be less democratic. In the United States, for example, the political scientist Martin Gilens has shown that over many decades, numerous public policies have been very responsive to the wishes of those at the top of the income distribution but not at all to the bottom 80% of Americans.

Reetika Khera

Indian development economist and associate professor at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

While neither capitalism nor democracy exist in their ideal form, especially today, what democracy promises is more appealing to me than what capitalism promises. For instance, unlike democracy, capitalism does not even strive to achieve equality.

The failings of democracy are all around us. The rise of authoritarian government in India and the revolting levels of social and economic inequality are signs of this. Too often the not-so-invisible hand of crony capitalism is apparent in this. Yet, Indian democracy even infirm and fragile has shown its value and provided glimpses of potential to achieve social change: Since the countrys independence in 1947, life expectancy at birth has more than doubled, from 32 years in 1951 to 66 years in 2011. Another glimpse: In 2017, a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India reaffirmed the right to privacy as a fundamental right, paving the way for striking down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalized same-sex relationships.

Similarly, the reality of capitalism is troubling. Be it car manufacturers who fudge emissions, banks that move drug money with impunity, or, in India, business tycoons who flee the country when their debtors come knocking, living by the rule of law and equality before the law do not appear to be the norm. When powerful capitalists are not violating laws, they buy influence to shape the law-making process to their advantage (e.g., by scuttling basic worker-protection initiatives) and carry out legal theft. In decades past, the sugar and tobacco industries sponsored friendly research to cover up the ill effects of their products; today we see the tech industry doing something similar, including undermining free and fair elections, the foundation of a functional democracy.

Do democracy and capitalism need each other? Capitalism needs a pretence of democracy more than democracy itself. Increasingly, I feel that plutocracies pass themselves off as democracies. In plutocracies, capitalism is consolidating its wealth and power while maintaining a charade of democracy.

Manuel Agosin

Professor, department of economics, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Chile, and former dean of the faculty (20102018)

Capitalism can survive without democracy for a long time, as exemplified by the experiences of China, Russia, Turkey, and other authoritarian states. However, capitalism without democracy usually favors corruption and control over resources through means other than merit, such as party loyalty.

That said, in the short term, we have seen democracies being abused for personal gain in many mostly democratic countries. The many cases of mega corruption that have come to light in democratic countries in Latin America (Lava Jato, or Car Wash, in Brazil, and the Odebrecht cases all over the continent) are ample evidence of this. Even the United States has been far from impervious to the subversion of democracy by a would-be autocrat.

By emphasizing individualism and personal gain, capitalism tends to breed market concentration and a long series of abuses, as the Great Recession clearly showed. Individuals and corporations are continuously tempted to evade or to use loopholes in the law. The financial sector is particularly prone to this type of behavior, since it allows market participants to reap gains not only by producing services that people need but also by the clever manipulation of financial engineering. More often than not, such creativeness produces nothing of value for society; rather, it often engenders conditions that create financial crises down the road.

This is why only a true democracy can correct the ills of capitalism, such as lack of competition and a skewed distribution of its rewards, through the use of state power. Strong democracies have checks and balances that can put a limit to what capitalism can do: courts where cases of uncompetitive markets, corruption, and subversion of democracy can be tried and punished. In fact, the maximum benefits of capitalism can be fully reaped only in a democratic society. And so the most pressing challenge for democratic societies is this: how to ensure that finance serves the real needs of citizens rather than lining the pockets of those who are lucky to win at the financial game.

Steven Klein

Assistant professor of political science at the University of Florida; beginning June 2020, lecturer in the department of political economy, Kings College London

The past 30 years have shown that capitalism does not need democracy to take root: In China, the introduction of capitalism has not lead to an expansion of democratic rights, and authoritarian governments in other countries like Hungary have also enthusiastically embraced capitalism.

At the same time, its clear that capitalism does need democracy to save it from itself. The financial crises in the United States and Europe show how democratic institutions have been called on to come to capitalisms rescue.

Historically, we know that democracy and capitalism can evolve together. Merchant city-states like Florence and Amsterdam had forms of representative government, and in Great Britain, the development of democracy protected the interests of the rising merchant classes against older vested interests. Yet countries like Great Britain only ever saw a partial democratization, with property qualifications to vote, and it was widely thought that universal suffrage would destroy property rights and, by extension, capitalism. Elsewhere, the eventual collapse of democracy in Europe was tied to the needs of capitalism: The German chancellor Heinrich Brnings austerity policy of the 1930s, an effort to keep Germany on the gold standard and so part of global capitalism, helped propel the Nazis to power.

The organizing principles of democracy and capitalism differ. Democracy rests on the belief that everyone should have an equal say in decisions that affect them. Capitalism doesnt. Instead, it bases production around the profit motive and the capacity to enter and exit relationships based on opportunities. This is the heart of the tug they have on one another: Realizing an ideal of equal voice will mean limiting the ability of individuals and firms to abandon their economic and political relationships even if democratic decisions dont favor them. We know what the outcome of this tension is: Capitalists often turn to authoritarianism before they accede to a new regime of democratic checks.The Big Idea

About the author: Laura Amico is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review.

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Do Democracy and Capitalism Really Need Each Other? - Harvard Business Review

Freedom House, the Washington-based think tank, opened in 1941, with a mission to counter isolationism in America and fascism around the world. It was conceived as a bipartisan project; the honorary chairs were EleanorRoosevelt, the First Lady, and Wendell Willkie, who had been the Republican Presidential nominee in 1940and lost to Roosevelts husband. Over the years, Freedom House studied a broad spectrum of threats to freedom, from McCarthyism to Soviet oppression. Since 1973, it has published Freedom in the World, an annual country-by-country report that has been called the Michelin Guide to democracys development.

The latest edition was published last week, and, as you might expect, it recorded the fourteenth straight year of deteriorating freedom around the world; sixty-four countries have lost liberties in the past year, while only thirty-seven registered improvements. (India, the worlds largest democracy, has seen some of the most alarming declines.) Its assessment of the United States is also disturbing. In 2009, the U.S. had a score of ninety-four, out of a hundred, which ranked it near the top, just behind Germany, Switzerland, and Estonia. In the decade since, it has slipped eight points; it now ranks behind Greece, Slovakia, and Mauritius. Looking at the United States, Freedom House analysts note the types of trends that they more customarily assign to fragile corners of the globe: pressure on electoral integrity, judicial independence, and safeguards against corruption. Fierce rhetorical attacks on the press, the rule of law, and other pillars of democracy coming from American leaders, including the president himself.

Explaining what, exactly, accounts for this decline is the work of a growing body of literature. Much of it focusses, of course, on the tenure of Donald Trump, but, interestingly, some scholars and advocates tend to identify a point of origin well before the election of 2016. According to Protect Democracy, a legal-watchdog group dedicated to combatting the rise of authoritarianism in America, the growth and spread of democraciesthat defined the 20th Century peaked in the early days of the 21st; since 2005, the state of democracies around the world has receded.

One of the most frequently cited theories for this change is depicted in whats known as the elephant graph. The graph, which the economist Branko Milanovi popularized, in 2013, is, in fact, a chart that shows income growth by stratum (or, in technical terms, by percentiles of the global income distribution) in the twenty years leading up to the 2008 global financial crisis. The graph got its name because it looks like an elephant: on the left, there is a plump body of rising incomesChina, India, and other beneficiaries of globalizationand, on the right, a rapidly rising trunk, which reflects the spectacular fortunes of the worlds top one per cent. The most politically significant part of the elephant is in between: the bottom of the trunk, which shows the stagnant incomes of American and European working and middle classes. Those groups have proved to be fertile bases of support for populist rebellions against democratic traditions that, from their vantage point, now appear false or obsolete.

Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, cites the elephant graph as part of the reason for Americas democratic decline. But I think finance only tells part of the story, he said, because there are other factors that need to be accounted for. Instead of invoking an elephant, Bassin visualizes a volcano. At the base, there are massive underlying conditions that are changing in the same way that the Earths tectonic plates shiftclimate, migration, globalization, tribalismand lava flows into the base of the volcano. At the layer above, you have what I think of as accelerants, like the rise of social mediathings like Russian interferenceand democratic distortionslike partisan gerrymandering. The cumulative effect of those accelerants, he said, has been to fuel skepticism about the functioning of American democracy, because they have warped or thwarted the effect of the popular will. Bassin continued, At the very top of a volcano, there are supposed to be a bunch of checks and balances that hold back the heat and force. But we have a Congress that has basically abdicated its congressional obligations of oversight of the executive, and an executive who openly claims to be above the law. So youve got the lava exploding out the top of the volcano.

Its a bleak image, but, in Bassins view, the metaphor also contains the promise of some realistic interventions. In the three years since Protect Democracy started, he said, Weve been able to have some success at the top of the volcano, where its narrow, trying to fix some of those checks and balances. The group has filed a range of legal actions that have resulted in national injunctions, including blocking Trumps use of emergency powers to build the border wall, and Administration efforts to slow low-income green-card holders from gaining citizenship. In December, Protect Democracy organized a statement, which eight hundred and fifty legal scholars signed, asserting that the President had committed impeachable offenses.

In some other countries that have registered a decline in democracy over the past decade, such as South Korea and Poland, demonstrators have flooded the streets in opposition. In the United States, by contrast, the largest public protest in the name of democracy was on the first day of Donald Trumps Presidency. The erosion has been gradual enough that many Americans have become inured to it, numb to the alarm. First, they stopped paying attention to the tweets. Then they found it easier to ignore the rallies and the random acts of transgression. American legal activists seeking to stop the slide documented by Freedom House consider that, since Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial, he has entered a more audacious phase. In the latest gesture of pressure on the press, the Trump campaign has sued the Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, for libel.

There are still eight months to go until the election, with no obvious check on the Presidents behavior in place. Many experts fear that Trump will veer even further from the traditions of American governance. Bassin suspects that he will, but also thinks that Americans are gaining a new awareness of their own role in preserving democracy. Theres been a phenomenon throughout the Trump Presidency of people casting about, looking for a savior, Bassin said. Was it going to be Robert Mueller? Jim Mattis? John Kelly? And, of course, all of those figures have let us down because, at the end of the day, the Founders understood that the only ultimate savior for the experiment of self-government is the savior described in the first three words of the constitution: We the people.

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Why Democracy Is on the Decline in the United States - The New Yorker

Many citizens in the replica democracies of the East began to feel that their own cultural and religious traditions were being disparaged by an obligatory conversion to foreign attitudes, values and institutions, including secularism and multiculturalism. A public embittered by the Wests treatment of its Eastern neighbors as second-class Europeans began rallying to populist demagogues who posed as defenders of authentic national identities. Their signature slogan was: We dont want to be copies! We want to be ourselves! Resentment against democratization as imitation has proved particularly toxic in Central and Eastern Europe where democratization coincided with the process of European integration, which in practice meant that voters could vote political parties in and out of power but that laws and policies never changed since they were set in Brussels.

Third, the three-decade Age of Imitation that began in 1989 inflicted serious damage on liberal democracy in the West by putting to sleep the self-critical faculties of its leading politicians and political commentators. Busy trying to democratize others, Western policy elites became complacent toward the failures and deficiencies of free-market democracy in their own societies. This uncritical idealization of the state of democracy at home was the direct result of the Wests preoccupation with democratizing others. It is not by accident that the National Endowment for Democracy, a symbol of Americas commitment to democracy worldwide, has no mandate to work on problems within the United States. (Though this is also the reason it still enjoys bipartisan support.) This failure to look inward made efforts to export American-style democracy into an easy target for charges of hypocrisy.

The Wests one-sided focus on the struggle for democracy abroad made Western advisers shy away from discussing the ongoing struggle for power within democracies themselves. Liberals who overemphasized individual rights and voluntary market exchange, spoke about power only when discussing authoritarianism, genocide or corruption. Otherwise, their message has seemed to be that, if the government does not abuse its authority, the asymmetry of power relations characteristic of every society is of negligible importance.

Taking hold in the two-decade heyday of liberal hegemony following 1989, this sanitized image of liberal democracy has become the favorite straw man of illiberal politicians today, including the president of the United States. It explains why they repeatedly insist that all relations in society are power relations, that right doesnt matter, that politics is a zero-sum game, that there are no impartial institutions and that fraud is just a clever way to win elections. This cynical perspective, which has now gained a receptive audience worldwide, represents a backlash against the excessive promises made by liberals after 1989. Democracy promoters insisted, unrealistically, that politics and economics, with a little good will, could easily become a win-win game, that periodic elections guarantee that citizens will control politicians, and that impartial institutions could overcome the unfairness associated with asymmetries of power in society. The ease with which these illusions were dashed was another factor opening the door for the steamrollering of illiberal forces to political power.

Western-style democratic capitalism has many well-known virtues. But having been put on a pedestal for post-Communist countries to admire and emulate, it lost all critical distance to itself, dismissing sensible warnings, for instance, about the downsides of military interventionism abroad and economic deregulation at home. By defining democracy as the ideal state of society and the only possible path to prosperity, the post-1989 consensus paradoxically undercut the most basic advantage of democratic governments. Democracies are not and cannot be satisfaction machines. They do not produce good governance the way a baker turns out doughnuts. What democracies offer dissatisfied citizens is the right to do something about their dissatisfaction. That is why a chastened democracy, having recovered from its unrealistic and self-defeating aspirations to global hegemony, remains the political idea most at home in the current age of dissatisfaction.

Ivan Krastev is a contributing opinion writer, the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Stephen Holmes is a professor of law at New York University. They are the authors of The Light That Failed: A Reckoning.

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Of Course They Gave Up on Democracy - The New York Times