Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash
It is easy to forget that democracy is not a common way of doing things.
At the end of 2020 when US citizens queued up at polling booths in record numbers, I
Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash
It is easy to forget that democracy is not a common way of doing things.
At the end of 2020 when US citizens queued up at polling booths in record numbers, I was reminded that the right to vote is very recent in historical times. Women in the US, for example, had no such rights until the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed by Congress on June 4, 1919.
The US had seen 29 of its 45 Presidents before this vital change.
Historically, most societies were run by authoritarian regimes of one sort or another that limited personal freedoms. Democracy, that so many of us take for granted, is actually a mid to late 20th-century phenomenon and by no means universal.
Here is one metric of democracy over time, the Polity scale ranging from -10 (hereditary monarchy) to +10 (consolidated democracy).
By Ultramarine at en.wikipedia – Own workTransferred from en.wikipedia, Public Domain,
In short, democracy has risen exponentially since the 1800s.
Remarkable as this trend is, many historians know how fragile democracy might be in a modern world.
Democracy is fragile
The dangers to democracy have been around for some time, think how close Donald Trump came to shattering it in the US, and the warning signs, the historians argue, are
- the spread of misinformation
- the politics of internal enemies and
- politically motivated violence.
The spread of misinformation is just about everywhere.
Anybody with a smartphone can record a video on any topic, put it up on Tick-Toc and before y