The Future of Democracy?

After the ideological conflicts of the 20th century, democracy was widely hailed as an ideal, or at least inherently superior, form of government. And compared to the most prominent competing system of the last century, communism, it’s been a great success. But anyone would concede that our democracy isn’t perfect, and as the elections approach many are calling attention to the limitations of our system. For much of human history, people didn’t even conceive of a functioning democracy, thinking only in terms of anarchy or dictatorships. It could be that we just don’t yet see a further, better incarnation of participatory government. Perhaps, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, democracy is simply “the worst form of government except for all the others.”[1] One of the fatal flaws of communism, as practiced in the Soviet Union, was a reliance on centralization. Soviet economic planning failed to achieve the success of free market economies — something Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek predicted in the 1940s, [2] although decades passed before the system’s collapse. Ultimately, the concentrated decision-making of the Soviet system, with a handful of people calling all the shots, proved unequal to the task of adapting to increasingly complex problems. [3