The ‘Crisis of Democracy’ Is Overhyped Ask the professional hand-wringers: Would you rather be in Iran? Venezuela? China?By Walter Russell Mead
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-crisis-of-democracy-is-overhyped-1535412315
As Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan lashes out against the “interest-rate lobby” for his country’s economic crisis, as Nicaragua’s dictatorship mobilizes against its own people, and as Venezuela’s socialist utopia sinks deeper into chaos, it’s remarkable how often we hear that a “crisis of democracy” is the defining political story of our times. And as Vladimir Putin’s persistent economic failures force him toward deeply unpopular pension reforms, it is even more remarkable how many people attribute this ostensible crisis to Russian cunning and might.
Admittedly, there are signs that consent-based political systems aren’t operating as smoothly as they should, including the rise of extremism and anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party, the collapse of the political center in scandal-plagued Brazil, Viktor Orbán’s determination to build “illiberal democracy” in Hungary, and the disruptive and polarizing Trump administration in the U.S. More generally, according to Freedom House, civil liberties and political rights have declined in 113 countries and improved in only 62 since 2006.
But the failures of authoritarian states are often far graver than the problems that preoccupy the professional hand-wringers of the liberal West. There are no crises in the democratic world that match the economic meltdown in Iran, the hellish conditions in Syria, or the turmoil in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where efforts to eliminate an Ebola epidemic are hampered by armed militias.
Even China, often described as the poster child of the new authoritarianism, is failing key tests of governance. Chinese censors are scrubbing images of Winnie the Pooh from the internet; the Bear of Very Little Brain is said by some to bear a subversive resemblance to Xi Jinping. But the authorities seem paralyzed when it comes to more consequential issues.
Chinese leaders know that their country suffers from massive overinvestment in construction and manufacturing, that its real-estate market is a bubble that makes the Dutch tulip frenzy look restrained, that both conventional debt and debt in the shadow-banking system are too large and growing too rapidly. But even as the Communist Party centralizes power and clamps down on dissent, it dithers when it comes to the costly and difficult work of shifting China’s economic development onto a sustainable track. Chinese authorities have tried to tackle some of these problems, but often retreat when reforms start to bite and powerful interests push back.
Authoritarians without the authority to restructure the economy—this is not what Chinese communism was supposed to produce. Neither China nor any of the other major dictatorships offer a model that can reshape the world the way liberal democracy has over the past two centuries. Mr. Erdogan’s Islamist democracy is a sham; Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian socialism is yielding only starvation and violence. The Saudis are scrambling to reform their oil-funded monarchy before it implodes, and Cuba is stewing in the historic failure of its socialist project. The 21st century is many things, but Springtime of Autocrats it is not.
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