Democracy's mid-life crisis

Let's hope he's right. I wouldn't be so complacent, Trump seems to be moving more and more from being a personally obnoxious dick to an unashamedly institutional fascist.

Democracy isn't dying, but it is having a very unpredictable mid-life crisis. That's the view of David Runciman, head of Cambridge University's politics department, who has been trying to explain the current state of Western democracy, in an era of Drumpf, social media and widening economic division.

Prof Runciman, taking ideas from his recent book How Democracy Ends, has been speaking about one of the biggest questions: Is our system of democracy beginning to fall apart?

He sees democracy as being in middle age, where voters feel in a rut and like the idea of a major change, but don't really want anything fundamentally different. He likens Drumpf to a flashy motorbike bought during a mid-life crisis.

"We want a change without changing." There could be "odder and odder" people winning elections, he predicts. But it's because we think that the political institutions are so robust, that it won't really do any damage. "We vote for Drumpf because we think democracy is durable and can withstand everything we throw at it."

"There seems to be quite a lot of historical evidence that without economic growth democracies struggle. If people are not feeling better off, they look for politicians who are further and further on the outside." In poorer countries, this can lead to political breakdown. But in relatively stable Western countries, it's more likely to create disillusionment rather than revolution.

"Affluent, stagnant societies can keep going with dysfunctional democracies for a long time," he says. "And we might be at the beginning of that." He argues that the durability of democracy is making people complacent about the need to protect and nurture it.

"It can survive, but it's being hollowed out. It's a system that is tired and struggling to deal with some big challenges, but it's not going to snap in half. We could be thinking about how politics could work better," he says, at a local, national and international level. But instead Western democracies are in the phase of switching leaders rather than changing systems. "Try another clown," he says.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45939984