1. How do democracies turn into dictatorships?
2. This is a fascinating and multifaceted question that has been at the back of my brain for quite some time. How do societies and governments, some of which have considerable sway on global affairs, fall from a democratic system of governance to an autocratic regime? We are living in the most democratically prosperous period in all of human history. While there are still kings, queens, and autocrats in certain countries, most of the world is run by democracies. Despite this, multiple of the world’s largest powers are dictatorships and as we have seen recently, it is still incredibly dangerous to have one person with sole decision-making power. The most glaring example of this is Russia, where we have seen a country with a tyrannical ruler bring a country that was slowly improving its economic prospects to one that is yet again being shunned by the majority of the world’s powers. Another great example of a well-known dictatorship is in mainland China, where the CCP and its leaders, under a false narrative of communism, have tightened their iron grip on their citizens, watching their every move and intervening if they step out of line. While these countries have been widely seen as authoritarian for a long time, there are also many countries that were seen on the world stage as allies of democracy for years that had fallen to a dictatorship rather quickly. These include Chile, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Egypt. Isn’t that strange? We see over and over again that dictatorships rarely ever lead to anything prosperous for the citizens, yet in many countries around the world, people support political leaders that explicitly or implicitly want to alter their country’s government to a one-party system. From the Nazi party in the 1930s to the storming of the United States Capitol by supporters of an election-denying president in 2021, there seems to be a never-ending supply of gullible people that fall to the lies and false promises that aspiring dictators whisper in their ear. But why is that and how does the rest of society end up falling in line? That is exactly what I am going to find out.
