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If you look at the past century, democracies have been more successful, but if you look at the past millennium, dictatorships have done just fine. The fact tha
by landryraccoon 6y ago
If you look at the past century, democracies have been more successful, but if you look at the past millennium, dictatorships have done just fine.
The fact that Democracy has had a really good run for the past 100 years is nowhere near a guarantee that Authoritarianism won't rise again for the next 100.
- zepto 6y agoThis is only true if the recent success of democracy is random, and not systematic.
- landryraccoon 6y agoI'd like to believe that Democracy has systematic benefits, but we don't have enough data points to say that for sure. You can easily argue that the rise of Democracy in the 20th century is simply because the United States won world war 2 and the cold war, and all other countries adopted Democracy just to emulate the US. If Germany had discovered the atomic bomb before the US (which arguably could have happened if history were just slightly, randomly different), the world could be radically different. We could all be arguing right now that Democracy is just too weak to survive.
- zepto 6y agoWhat? The US wasn’t the only country with democracy before World War 2.
- landryraccoon 6y agoThere have been democracies since the ancient era. I'm saying that before World War 2 you wouldn't generally consider Democracy to be the default paradigm for how nations were governed.
- zepto 6y agoThat’s reasonable, but I don’t think it’s fair to say everyone else just emulated he US. There were many other democracies, and pro-democracy movements that preceded WW2 and had nothing to do with the US.