To really ‘fix’ democracy, these wannabe saviors should leave it alone
By definition, democracy is messy. So why are many so-called ‘prominent thinkers’ insisting on tinkering with it when that’s precisely how it has eroded?
You know that there’s some serious soul-searching going on in Western democracies when American President Joe Biden hosts an entire summit to save it last December, and then Foreign Policy magazine publishes an article with contributions from “thinkers” on how to “fix” it.
Democracy seemed to be doing just fine until a series of events spooked the global elites around the same time.
What does Donald Trump’s election to the Oval Office in 2016, the pro-Brexit victory in Great Britain of the same year, the separatist victory in the Catalan Independence Referendum the following year, and the rise of the Yellow Vest anti-taxation protest movement in France all have in common? Each was a populist movement against seemingly harmonized agendas formulated in back rooms by the global elites and subsequently imposed on citizens across the Western world.
All of these events sprung up as a healthy democratic response to system failure warnings. Those warning signs included systemic corruption of free-market capitalism to the point of rampant corporatism, which gave rise to movements seeking to wrest back some control in a balance of power that had shifted too much into too few hands.