Democracy in practice differs between countries, making it impossible to determine its survival on the global platform. The growing threats to national security (terrorism, political violence, economic depression) push democracies to question their institutions. In class, we discussed Zakaria\u2019s view of democratic development\u2014a country must have order and rule before it can have freedom (democracy). However, why should democracy be the end goal? Rwanda, a country currently in the \u201corder and rule\u201d state is flourishing. Drawing from my gap year working for a non-profit in Uganda, I refer to Rwanda as a model for Sub-Saharan development. The economy is growing exponentially, the school attendance is the highest in the region, and the parliament seats are occupied by more women than men. Will democracy destabilize the parliaments efforts in rebuilding Rwanda? If a regime in place works and people are happy, why change it? Zakaria himself agrees that authoritarianism might be an alternative to liberal democracy. Democracy itself also has it perils, one main example being its relationship with capitalism. Capitalism, in any existing form, is inconsistent with democracy. Capitalism is based on a hierarchy, a production for profit rather than need, an accumulation of capital, a deprivation and subordination of others\u2014elements that align with plutocracy rather than democracy. Noam Chomsky claims that Americans on the lower 70% of the income scale have no influence whatsoever on policy. Influence in politics slowly increases moving up the income scale. Globally, capitalism invites enormous disparity of influence over policy. This begs the ultimate question should every country strive for democracy even if it\u2019s the second-best alternative?<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fareed Zakaria separates the notions of democracy from liberalism, claiming that the United States and other counties worldwide have moved towards states of illiberal democracy. Zakaria defines illiberal democracies as \u201cdemocratically elected regimes often re-elected or reinforced by referendums that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1720,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fourth-blog-democracys-prospects","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1720"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":559,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions\/559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18f-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}