Alternative to Democracy

Having suffered through decades of middle-class economic stagnation combined with an ever-increasing and unattainable gap between everyday citizens and the rich and powerful among other trends – disrupting the harmony essential to maintaining the ethos of liberal democracy – the promises of life offered under a liberal democracy no longer seem all that attractive or even imaginable. And it is an unfortunate reality of the 21st century that at least in the majority of the Western World especially in well-known liberal democracies such at the USA, Great Britain and France, our rapid and unforeseen technological drive and era of innovation has not facilitated an evenly dispersed economic evolution that has filtered equally to the masses. Indeed, despite the great strides made in the well-being of humanity in the past half-century, people are not as better off now relatively speaking compared to their predecessors or past generations from the mid- to late-20th century. This is important to understand, because history has shown us that democracy successfully emerges only as a by-product to other social and economic achievements.

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So how should we go about matters relating to democracy, freedom, and economic prosperity in the 21st century, knowing democracy is not as blissful and resolute as it seems? The crucial element we have to consider, according to Robert D. Kaplan, is not the name the system goes by, but how the system actually works (Kaplan, 2018). Thus undemocratic or hybrid regimes, no matter how illiberal, will still be treated as legitimate if they can provide security for their subjects and spark economic growth. And as Kaplan foresaw, they will easily find acceptance in a world driven increasingly by financial markets that know no borders (2018).