Something I’m seeing in a lot of smart people (and stupid ones too, usually for different reasons) is a loss in faith of democracy.

In one sense this is simple: Democracy hasn’t been delivering for going on 50 years now. Things keep getting worse.

The graphic below is illustrative, but wrong:

It’s wrong because I think everyone knows now that inflation, as measured in the West, is vastly understated. Wages have been rising slower than costs. I feel it on my own life, I have more income than I did ten years ago, and I can’t afford the lifestyle I had before: we’re talking simple things, like mostly eating cheap cuts of pork for meat, and not beef or even chicken. Consumer goods are sometimes cheaper, but usually not, but even when they are they break and are so expensive to repair with all the fancy digital crap in them that it makes more sense to throw them out and by a new one.

Tuition is way up. Medical is way up. In countries where it’s free or cheap, the quality is way down due to defunding, since our elites wants for profit medicine and the first step is making the public alternative crap. Food is up. Housing and rent are way up. Cars are way more expensive (real price, not hedonically adjusted.)

People see that nothing good seems to happen in democracies: life gets worse and worse. When something good does happen, some right wing government gets in power and reverses it, but more often right wing governments make everything worse and liberal governments don’t reverse anything they do, they just accelerate at a slightly slower pace.

So people are looking for alternatives.

This isn’t strange or unusual. In the post-war period many nations wanted to be democracies. They looked at America and Europe and assumed that democracy was part of what made them well off.

Today the shoe is on the other foot: we see how well China is doing. We read how cheap healthcare, food and housing are and we think “it must be the party system.”

The obvious advantage of the party system is that you can do long term policy. When you see nations which did industrialize after WWI what stands out is that they did so in de-facto one party states, places that were run for decades by the same party like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

They see that oligarchs have bought democracy, that what people want doesn’t matter to outcomes, unless elites also want it and that in China the population actually feels that the Party pays attention to what the people both want and need.

So they reason that we should switch to party systems because they seem superior. A sardonic twist on how everyone was down on the Party after the fall of the USSR.

The USSR shows that Party systems aren’t a panacea: they can fail too.

But, basically, democracy is going to keep taking hits and keep becoming less popular. It has failed on multiple fronts: sent industry to china, let housing prices get out of control, knew about climate change and not only didn’t do anything, but accelerated it. Geopolitical stupidity like creating the conditions for a Russia/China/Iran de-facto coalition and multiple insane wars from which ordinary benefit benefited not one whit.

As climate change gets worse and worse it will discredit both Democracy and Capitalism. I don’t think the Chinese have done nearly as much as they should have or could have, but with their heavy electrification program, their mass planting of forests and so on they’re the only nation which has done anything significant. Not good, but better than us.

Democracy has proven unable to reign in capitalism. China executes or life imprisons billionaires who break the law, we bail them out and immunize them from their crimes by fining their companies, but not them, leaving them still rich.

It all adds up to a horrid indictment of our system, and people are not going to put up with it forever. Liberal capitalism and liberal democracy, and perhaps democracy almost entirely, will be replaced by Party systems throughout the world over the next couple generations, starting, I’d guess, in about 15 years or so.

Failure, greed and incompetence have consequences, and the democracy will one of the casualties of our elites depravity.

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