Democracies Win the Marathon: The Illusion of Authoritarian Efficiency
There is a question I keep hearing from thoughtful, frightened people, and it always arrives in roughly the same shape. Liberal democracy, the argument goes, is constitutionally too soft. It grants a platform to every voice, including the voices openly committed to its destruction. It plays by rules its enemies cheerfully ignore. We now live in a post-truth world where authoritarian regimes flood the public square with so much falsehood that the truth cannot keep pace. So how can such a permissive, slow-moving system possibly survive the onslaught? Surely, the despairing conclusion runs, the West is writing its own death sentence, and the only honest thing left to say is farewell to it. I want to answer that question directly, because I think the despair behind it, however understandable, rests on a misreading of how history actually moves. ...