Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/americas/western-liberal-democracy.html

According to the Mounk-Foa early-warning system, signs of democratic deconsolidation in the United States and many other liberal democracies are now similar to those in Venezuela before its crisis.

Across numerous countries, including Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States, the percentage of people who say it is “essential” to live in a democracy has plummeted, and it is especially low among younger generations.

Support for autocratic alternatives is rising, too. Drawing on data from the European and World Values Surveys, the researchers found that the share of Americans who say that army rule would be a “good” or “very good” thing had risen to 1 in 6 in 2014, compared with 1 in 16 in 1995.

That trend is particularly strong among young people. For instance, in a previously published paper, the researchers calculated that 43 percent of older Americans believed it was illegitimate for the military to take over if the government were incompetent or failing to do its job, but only 19 percent of millennials agreed. The same generational divide showed up in Europe, where 53 percent of older people thought a military takeover would be illegitimate, while only 36 percent of millennials agreed.

i think i still believe in democracy but as of late it's not hard to see why ppl might find it unnecessary or even harmful

Worth noting that the party that leans anti-democratic in this country is also the one doing most of the gerrymandering and vote suppression.

i.e. a fuller commitment to democracy might actually have prevented a trump win

and a gop congress

As a term, "essential" is pretty open to interpretation tbf. If I were to take that sentence literally, it is pretty clear that democracy is not essential for people to live.

i'm not sure that's relevant since it's tracking a decline over time. however the respondents interpreted the question they think it's significantly less essential now than it was since the 30s.

they got people to say how important democracy is on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being "essential", so the way they've formatted the results "people who don't think democracy is essential" = everyone who voted anything from 1 to 9, I think?

so there is a change corresponding with age, but probably less dramatic than it first appears

where do you see that they had people rate it on a scale from 1 to 10?

also that doesn't speak at all to the other troubling indicators such as

Support for autocratic alternatives is rising, too. Drawing on data from the European and World Values Surveys, the researchers found that the share of Americans who say that army rule would be a “good” or “very good” thing had risen to 1 in 6 in 2014, compared with 1 in 16 in 1995.

If I'm reading the graph correctly, it's not tracking a decline over time but tracking differences between age groups. 1930s-80s refers to DOB.

(xp)

yep. the graph is saying people born in the 1930s view democracy as more "essential" than people born in the 1980s

for some odd reason

where do you see that they had people rate it on a scale from 1 to 10?

I saw someone discussing it on twitter. there's some details on page 7 here:

http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Foa%26Mounk-27-3.pdf

(um, on page 4 on the pdf, rather. but it says page 7 at the top of the page)

I'm sort of playing devil's advocate, but it could just as easily mean that younger people are more critical and have been less conditioned by Cold War-era experiences and propaganda when it comes to i) how 'democratic' their own countries and the existing international order are and ii) whether the existence of other 'undemocratic' countries is actually going to lead to a nuclear apocalypse that will make life impossible.

I got nothing re Americans' increased appreciation for military rule, though.

because as americans we've been fellating the military steadily ever since 9/11

of all institutions in this country, the military is the only one polling over 30%

http://www.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx

Because people don't serve in it.

I am pretty worried about what BRUMPXIT means for democracy, not just because I think Loomis is right about how McCrory is setting the example for other GOP incumbents to follow from here on out, but for the potential loss of faith in democratic systems that all this shit is causing in the young & impressionable.

I guess we'll see which way the pendulum swings on Sunday, when Austria has another opportunity to vote in the first far-right head of state since WWII. I'm not feeling hopeful.

That seventy-year gap seems to be an awfully big contributor to the rise of these sentiments. There's hardly anyone around anymore who had first-hand experience with this shit back in the day. History's boring! Democracy's lame! It's time for something new and fresh and exciting!

I think people's indifference runs a little bit deeper than "ugh, lame". democracy is increasingly appearing to fail people on many levels, from the economic to the actually feeling like they have a say in how their country is run.

"democracy" is too vague a term to usefully discuss in any detail imo

leaving aside the efficacy of voting, in the UK at least the scope of democracy i.e. the commons has been shrunk over the long term. I think you could make a good case that this has been inversely correlated with increased suffrage - even the likes of peter hitchens agree on this point. ppl sense that most aspects of the world they live in are beyond the horizons of party politics even though this is inevitably downplayed & not reflected by political rhetoric. without regular reform this is inevitable, but as far as I can tell all modern western govts are built more for stability than flexibility.

Is it possible that people who respond that they'd be ok with military rule just have no idea what that means?

It means the military RULES, duh.

democracy is increasingly appearing to fail people on many levels, from the economic to the actually feeling like they have a say in how their country is run.

yeah when I saw these results I didn't necessarily see it as a popular embrace of autocracy so much as perceiving that "democracy" as currently practiced fails on its own terms

The problem being that so many people who feel that way decide that attempting to fix a broken system has less appeal than smashing it to bits and replacing it with...I dunno, whatever! Because different is always better.

Because the problems are largely caused by power differentials that the existing systems are set up to protect

Austria not going Nazi (yet!)!

https://twitter.com/AP/status/805445655539892224

every election is going to be like this now

Yeah, I felt more relieved about that than I would like to.

http://i.imgur.com/GjnWi8x.jpg

Mr Mahdalik singled out Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, for contributing to the party’s defeat after he said on Fox News on Friday that Mr Hofer would hold a referendum on Austria leaving the European Union.

“That didn’t help us, it hindered us,” he said, saying that an overwhelming majority of Austrians support EU membership.

Casting his vote in his home town of Pinkafeld earlier on Sunday, Mr Hofer ruled out a referendum and said: “I would ask Mr Farage not to interfere in Austria’s internal affairs.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/04/austria-election-norbert-hofer-cusp-becoming-europes-first-far/

Some good news at last.

It will be clearer in the next couple of days what happened, but voter turnout was extremely high. Woman, the young, and pensioners went VdB, men. the less well-educated, and older working people went Hofer. Super clear country-city split as well going the way you'd expect. I personally think that ultimately Hofer went too nasty in his campaigning even for conservative church ladies who think VdB's a communist.

Thought the men/women split was especially significant. 62% of women voted for VdB, versus 44% of the men.

Here's a good analysis (in German, but you and google should figure it out together): http://derstandard.at/2000048754159/Wer-wem-seine-Stimme-gegeben-hat

Renzi out.

I got nothing re Americans' increased appreciation for military rule, though.

― Spiritual Hat Minimalism (Sund4r)

they haven't experienced it and don't know what it's actually like. america is in a situation where a lot of people are thinking "man, it couldn't actually be worse than donald trump running the country, could it?"

of course it could and would.

I'm disturbed by the reflexively martial tone of RW people expecting to be thanked for their military service or that of their relatives ALL THE DAMNED TIME. Is this a post-9/11 thing? Previous generations of military people did not shill for gratitude in this way. It's gross, especially when someone barges into a social media thread about BLM/guns/politics in the expectation that we'll all stop whatever we're doing to kiss some camo ass. Most of my friends are polite and do acknowledge them, but I'm suspicious of rightward drift in ordinary discourse and the role these people are happy to play to enable it.

only time i've ever thanked someone from their service was a Disney employee dressed as a green plastic army man from toy story when i was at disneyworld last year

i was informed by a passing floridian that i was 'disrespectful'

loooooooooooool

stephen colbert frequently thanks people for their service with non-military people presumably in order to mock the claustrophobic platitudinous imperative to do so with military people and also with military people because of that imperative or because he sincerely means it or both

xxp a+ would lol again

This seems a very American thing to do.

Only in its specifics - see the UK tabloids' tic of referring to servicemen and women as HEROES whenever mentioned.

Yes, that's just tabloidspeak, nobody really falls for that. In the UK, if somebody was to say "But I was in military" people would just shrug their shoulders and say, "So"?

I assume this is to do with the difference in patriotism between the USA and the UK and possibly numbers going into the services, which has always been fairly low in the UK. Also, in the UK, in the services, you are serving Queen and Country, the monarch comes first, so fuck that for, er, a game of soldiers.

the main thing that bothers me about 'thank you for your service' is the implication that active involvement in the military is inherently of value, which I've got a pretty fundamental problem with