latest study suggests once again that democracy is fragile

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(clicky)liberal democracy on decline around the world
[excerpt] Yascha Mounk is used to being the most pessimistic person in the room. Mr. Mounk, a lecturer in government at Harvard, has spent the past few years challenging one of the bedrock assumptions of Western politics: that once a country becomes a liberal democracy, it will stay that way. His research suggests something quite different: that liberal democracies around the world may be at serious risk of decline.
Mr. Mounk and Mr. Foa developed a three-factor formula to determine the fragility of a given nation's democratic institutions. Mr. Mounk thinks of it as an early-warning system, and it works something like a medical test: a way to detect that a democracy is ill before it develops full-blown symptoms.
The first factor was public support: How important do citizens think it is for their country to remain democratic? The second was public openness to nondemocratic forms of government, such as military rule. And the third factor was whether “antisystem parties and movements” — political parties and other major players whose core message is that the current system is illegitimate — were gaining support. If support for democracy was falling while the other two measures were rising, the researchers marked that country “deconsolidating.” And they found that democratic deconsolidation was the political equivalent of a low-grade fever that arrives the day before a full-blown case of the flu.

check out the link for more specifics of which countries are deconsolidating. America is only the latest example, after Venezuela and Poland.

attached poll is for edumacational purposes only

"...Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." - John Adams

Democracy and "Liberal Democracy" are two very different things. One is true Democracy the other is Liberal oligarchy. In a so-called Liberal Democracy it doesn't matter how you vote, because in reality the whims of the ruling political oligarchy are pursued no matter the result.

sorta like "good cop" and "bad cop" - or like what anesthetists like to say to their patients- "come along quietly..."

Just for the record. The United States of America is a Republic, not a Democracy. We have democratic procedures for electing our representatives in congress and for choosing electors to elect the the President and Vice President. Our Constitution requires that all States have a republican form of government which means government under law and a democratic means of choosing governing officials in the several states. Again, each state is required to be a republic.

That means that the government operates under Law and not under the decision of a momentary majority. Direct Democracy may work for small towns but it does not work for large sovereign units.

IMHO amuurica long has had an authoritarian streak, thousands of miles wide at times.

We are told that America was created as a Republic, to avoid the evil of Democracy.

We are taught that we need to elect "learned people" to make the wise decisions for us, rather than voting on every issue.

the problem is that, all too often, the "learned people" make decisions that benefit only them and theirs. freedom and ignorance cannot co-exist, this is really biting us in the @$$ right now.

I never paid much attention to leftists liberalism and the DNC before the election started. But what I've come away with is, there seems to be a lot of control agenda involved. Like supposed liberty through conditioning and controlling society on what's supposed to be the only allowable way to think and speak. And I think as far as fragility goes, the DNC is on the edge of shattering into oblivion. I believe a lot of people are unable to see so called democracy for what it really is, which actually isn't democracy, but closer to what it espouses to be against.