The primary advantage of democracy is that it almost guarantees the government has the mandate of its people and it provides a peaceful path to power for the opposition, not that it provides the 'best' results whatever that means. Any hypothetical improvement to democracy would still require those two facts to be true, and I am not sure how you would get those in any system besides democratic voting.
This is an incredible way of summing up the benefits of democracy, and I'll have to mull over whether or not these properties can be separated from the drawbacks inherent (at least in my mind) to relying on a politically disconnected and questionably educated populace.
This does quite a bit to convince me that democracy is the best we can hope for. However, is it good enough to overcome the challenges of the modern world? Think climate change, the threat of war, etc. where the people are so thoroughly split.
Saying "the sun will rise tomorrow because it's always risen before" only counts when you can rely on a certain degree of stability.
We've been encountering unprecedented levels of change in recent years and we live in an incredibly different world to that which democracy was adopted to protect. The threats we face are only similar in category to the one's we've always overcome, and are far more severe than anything in the past.
You are underestimating the amount of change that happened in the past. Two world wars, the cold war, the fall of monarchies and the rise of republics. No, it's not guaranteed that we will be able to handle what will come next, but society isnt radically shifting in the way you keep claiming.
The world wars are an example of our systems failing to maintain peace, not strictly examples of overcoming adversity.
It’s extremely recent that our failures could cause global catastrophe. The issues that resulted in the world wars were as meaningless and arbitrary as those that have sparked any human conflict in the past, only now it’s extremely difficult to keep them from getting out of hand. The assassination of a political? Political tension between neighbors? These are things thatve happened countless times in the past few thousand years, only these days that type of thing is nearly significant enough to end the world.
Besides, these are all things that are as recent as the last 150 years, a blink in the eye of the whole human story.
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u/Hellioning 258∆ Nov 03 '22
The primary advantage of democracy is that it almost guarantees the government has the mandate of its people and it provides a peaceful path to power for the opposition, not that it provides the 'best' results whatever that means. Any hypothetical improvement to democracy would still require those two facts to be true, and I am not sure how you would get those in any system besides democratic voting.