02-20-2017, 01:51 PM
(02-20-2017, 11:59 AM)TeacherinExile Wrote:(02-19-2017, 01:28 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: I don't normally read articles on The Daily Beast, but as I was grazing headlines today, this one caught my eye: "The Screwed Generation Turns Socialist"And as a follow-up to this post, especially as it relates to Millennial attitudes toward liberal democracy, and a detectable rising support for authoritarian alternatives:
The thrust of the article was about making distinctions among the generations with some supporting data. It even gave a nod to Strauss & Howe. The nascent embrace of socialism by Millennials has been revealed in previous surveys. What truly riveted my attention toward the end of the article was its reference to the Millennials' less-than-steadfast commitment to liberal democracy, as I have seen that tendency corroborated by another academic study recently:
...Yet even given these factors, Republicans have their work cut out for them as the generational wheel turns. Certainly, to be remotely competitive, they must abandon socially conservative ideas that offend most Millennials. The GOP’s best chance lies with making capitalism work for this group, sustaining upward mobility and expanding property ownership. If we see the creation of a vast generation of property serfs with little opportunity for advancement, America’s future is almost certain to be redder, a lot less market-oriented, and perhaps a lot more authoritarian than previous generations have ever contemplated.
For those who gave The Fourth Turning a close reading, Strauss & Howe vaguely alluded to just such a prospect. And, of course, the writer here means "redder" not as in red state, but as in cue the music and strike up "The Internationale."
Read further at this link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...alist.html
"How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’"
Here are a few excerpts from the New York Times article published shortly after the election:
Yascha Mounk is used to being the most pessimistic person in the room. Mr. Mounk, a lecturer in government at Harvard, has spent the past few years challenging one of the bedrock assumptions of Western politics: that once a country becomes a liberal democracy, it will stay that way.
His research suggests something quite different: that liberal democracies around the world may be at serious risk of decline...
...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 [Hooah!] 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.
In the United States, Donald J. Trump won the presidential election by running as an antisystem outsider. And support for antisystem populist parties in Europe, such as the National Front in France, Syriza in Greece and the Five-Star Movement in Italy, is rising.
Of course, this is just one paper. And the researchers’ approach, like all data-driven social science, has limitations. It is only as good as the survey data that underlies it, for instance, and it does not take into account other factors that could be important to overall stability, such as economic growth...
Read further at this link: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world...cracy.html
Since the United States of America is not culturally sophisticated, nor intelligent, by developed-world standards, I still expect Europe to rise above the far-right xenophobia that has taken over the USA. The populist party in Italy, for example, is much smarter than the Trumpist GOP, and LePen seems unlikely to win in France. Brexit and Trump both won narrowly. Now that the refugee crisis is subsiding somewhat, perhaps Europeans will focus on REAL concerns again. We can hope.
But democracy has indeed gone into decline since the brief uprise in the Arab Spring. Most of those revolutions were suppressed, and so democracy did not advance much in Egypt, and chaos replaced tyranny in Libya (not much of an advance). Iraq gained a better leader, but still battles the Islamic State which gobbled up a lot of territory in Iraq and Syria and a small slice of the Libyan coast. Similar movements to the IS established reigns of terror in northern and central Africa that are now receding. Putin, who now actually owns half of his country, has destroyed earlier democratic advances and become the latest in a long line of Czars. Many Eastern European regimes seem to be moving to the right too.
Meanwhile Turkey has become an autocracy by democratic decision, and suppressed its Arab Spring and Kurdish revolts. Ukraine threw out a corrupt Putin agent as its ruler in the Arab Spring era, but still battles against Putin in the East, and Crimea reverted to the new Czar's rulership. North Korea is even worse than before, and China remains authoritarian. Burma made some progress, but still represses minority groups. Brazil has fallen into a corrupt oligarchic malaise and is losing ground on human rights and democracy. Venezuela is on the verge of collapse under its successor to cult-ruler Hugo Chavez. Elsewhere in SA, Colombia seems on the right track, and a turn to the moderate right is happening. Cuba is still under tight control. Africa has made unsteady progress, but is still largely authoritarian, if not in chaos. The Philippines elected a tyrant who kills thousands of his people and is turning to China. India has a nationalist leader whose dedication to democracy and human rights is somewhat doubtful, and Pakistan is under constant terrorist attack. Afghanistan is a permanent clusterfuck.
