Democracy is not guaranteed — it is a rare and fragile thing
We cannot take democracy for granted; those of us living in democracies are enjoying a rare moment of freedom in human history.
We take democracy for granted. Very few of us living in democracies are old enough to have fought for it. We are the inheritors of our grandparents’ victories and we often don’t realise how hard they worked to build the democracies we enjoy. We were born into them, and as with any inheritance that we didn’t work for, we risk taking it for granted and frittering it away.
I’ve written before that the simplest measure of success for a form of government is life expectancy. At the very basic level, we ask of those who rule us that their rule affords us health and longevity. This has, in many ways, been the basic measure of social systems since early humans first formed societies; those that worked out how to live longer thrived, those that didn’t declined and vanished.
Democracies are good for health and longevity. By contrast, dictatorships and autocracies tend to have lower life expectancies, worse health, and less prosperity. In Russia, life expectancy is 71, in Germany it is 81.
There is a simple reason for this. In a democracy, where people can vote out their leaders, a form of political natural selection takes place. Those leaders who…
