This is a blog post I didn’t know I was going to write until I ran across some information today. The research completely baffled me. It boggled my mind so I thought I would share it with you, my readers. This won’t be a long post. It is more a journalistic post than anything else.
In politics, there is a phenomenon called “democratic deconsolidation.” Sounds like some term out of a political science textbook. It happens when a significant portion of the population thinks that democracy is a fairly poor way of running a country. It happened in Venezuela. Researchers named Yascha Mounk and Roberta Foa decided to study this phenomenon using a three-factor model. The first factor was public support for the democratic form of government. Something odd happened or it was odd to many of us who live under a democratic form of government. Public support for democracy in currrent democracies like the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and others was low and falling, especially among the younger people.
In the United States, 75% of those born in the 1930s believe that a democratic form of government is preferable. However, among those born in the 1980s, only about 27% believed the democratic form of government was preferable. To make all this even scarier to people like me, many of the younger people believe that army rule (autocratic rule) is preferable to democratic rule. I will have to admit that I don’t understand that at all. But, then again, I’m only reporting facts in this blog post. The same phenomenon was found in Europe.
This is all I have to say currently except one thing. If you are one who feels this way, please take a class in political science.
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