A recent NPR/Ipsos poll found that 64% of Americans believe ....
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| Democracy At Risk? |
.... US democracy is at risk of failing, and the fragility of America's democracy is what alarms foreign observers of the country.
The false conspiracy perpetrated by former US President Donald Trump, that he won the 2020 election (aka the Big Lie), has both weakened and polarised the political system. So now the USA has become virtually ungovernable in many respects. Voting has actually been made more difficult in many of its Republican states, where false or exaggerated claims of voter irregularities in Democrat controlled states, has prompted the tightening of voter registration laws.
US citizens, and voters in the West generally, no longer appear to know how to spot real news from fake news, and how to avoid baseless conspiracy theories that undermine the strength of democracy itself. We may be at the point, like central Europe in the 1920's and 1930's where democracies are replaced by autocrats and dictatorships.
In the 2020 US Presidential election, one of the most angrily contested and polarised in recent history, only 62% of eligible voters bothered to turn out and vote. If democracy is to survive, it must be seen to deliver for its people. But there's another side to that social contract between the state and its citizens. We as citizens have to deliver for democracy as well by turning out to vote.
However that isn't a guarantee in itself of democracies survival, for instance, 70% of the Hungarian electorate turned out to give the authoritarian leader and Prime Minister Victor Orban 54.10% of the popular vote, and another term in office. Adolf Hitler had got only 43.91% of the German vote in 1933, but still declared it evidence enough that no further elections were required.
But even though some democracies are fairer than others, even the worst of them, to echo Winston Churchill, are worth protecting against the alternatives. In a war they didn't choose, Ukrainians are fighting, and dying, for the right to free elections, to the rule of law, and an impartial media, for the right to be a democratic country. Their bravery puts to shame those too lazy to vote in a democracy.
So lets remind ourselves what Churchill said:
'Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
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