https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1997-09-01/has-democracy-future?utm
| As Americans head to the polls in this year’s U.S. presidential election, many across the political spectrum believe that the future of democracy is at stake. Voters around the country have expressed grievances over the state of the U.S. political system and its failure to adequately address issues such as inflation, inequality, and global instability. Writing in 1997, the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. presaged such discontent. Despite the triumphalism of the West after the fall of the Soviet Union, he warned, democracy in the United States and elsewhere would confront major challenges in the years ahead. In the twentieth century, “the political, economic, and moral failures of democracy had handed the initiative to totalitarianism,” he wrote. “Something like this could happen again.” Should liberal democracy fail “to construct a humane, prosperous, and peaceful world, it will invite the rise of alternative creeds apt to be based, like fascism and communism, on flight from freedom and surrender to authority.” Schlesinger emphasized that humanity’s experiment with democracy was brand new in the grand scheme: “a mere flash in the long vistas of recorded history.” Over the next century, it would be put to the test; democracy “must manage the pressures of race, of technology, and of capitalism, and it must cope with the spiritual frustrations and yearnings generated in the vast anonymity of global society.” Even in the face of such challenges, he argued, “the great strength of democracy is its capacity for self-correction.” Still, “even the greatest of democratic leaders lack the talent to cajole violent, retrograde, and intractable humankind into utopia.” |
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