The political crises across the world this week may appear as disparate events, shaped by national histories and local politics. Yet there are striking commonalities. Consider three current crises. Nepal, France and the United States could not be more different. Nepal’s weakly institutionalised democracy, born of the people’s movement of 2006, has ended in deep disappointment: Corruption, economic stagnation and a pervasive sense among the young that their future has been stolen. French democracy has long been anomalous — governed largely by presidential decree, punctuated by violent street protests, and sustained by an economic model that is unsustainable. In the US, the assassination of Charlie Kirk is a grim reminder of rising political violence. The country seems closer to civil war than at any time in recent memory, and it is uncertain whether its chosen economic path can address its crisis of governability. Even more stable democracies, like India and the United Kingdom, face storms gathering on the horizon.
Normatively, there is no alternative to democracy; it must be reinvigorated. Authoritarian regimes have their own governance crises, and the sheer momentum of institutions may still carry democracies through. Yet the fear that John Adams once expressed — that “democracy never lasts long; it soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself” — seems apt once again. Democracies appear to follow a cycle: After 40 to 50 years of expansion, a phase of exhaustion inevitably sets in.
The last global crises of confidence in democracy came in the 1920s and 1930s, when many believed parliamentary government was doomed, and again in the late 1960s and 1970s. That era culminated in the Trilateral Commission’s 1975 report on The Crisis of Democracy, authored by Samuel Huntington, Michel Crozier, and Joji Watanuki. The report’s diagnosis was conservative and geographically narrow, but its omissions and insights remain instructive.
The malaise of democracy, it argued, was internal: A product of democratic excess. Democracy nurtured an adversarial intellectualism so suspicious of authority that it undermined democracy itself. The decline of elite cohesion weakened mediation and compromise. The clash of incompatible values, politicised in the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s, made polarisation inevitable. Democracies, the report claimed, suffered from both excessive preoccupation with private satisfaction and excessive demands on the state. The former eroded the discipline and sacrifice required for public goods; the latter overloaded institutions with demands they could not meet, making economic policymaking almost impossible. The striking claim was that it was not inequality but excessive political mobilisation that endangered democracy. Democracies did not merely waste or exhaust themselves; they collapsed under the weight of their own expectations.
Today, the consensus is different: Growing inequality fuels democratic disenchantment. Democracies are finding it increasingly difficult to build social coalitions that enable effective economic policies. Mass protests can register dissatisfaction, but forging a consensus around intelligent reform is far harder. Gabriel Boric’s swift fall from optimism to plummeting approval in Chile illustrates this fragility. Globally, we may be entering a new era of dual polarisation: Not only a clash of values but also diametrically opposed economic visions. The Left fears lack of public investment; the Right fears socialist excess. This polarisation extends beyond policy into perceptions of the economy itself. In the 1970s, the concerns were familiar — oil shocks, the scale of government spending, the reach of social programmes. But today’s radical uncertainty is deeper: The falling employment elasticity of capital raises the possibility that even well-designed policies cannot generate enough jobs.
Across Nepal, France, and the US, there is one recurring theme: Young people feel robbed of their future. Yet, although democracies like India and the US are often rightly described as gerontocracies, it is unclear whether politics can be organised along generational lines. Youth anger does not produce youth consensus. It reflects shared anxiety about the future, not a shared programme for it.
Participation presents a further puzzle. It is difficult to argue that the current crisis of democracy stems from excessive participation in any conventional sense. It is not the Seventies’ style social mobilisation that is overloading institutions. There is one exception — unless one counts social media. The radical democratisation of the information order has become a form of political participation in itself, dissolving authority and making the old concern about adversarial intellectuals casting suspicion on power seem almost quaint.
Corruption is another persistent theme in democratic politics. It appears as both structural corruption — entrenched elites monopolising power — and transactional corruption, visible in the lavish lifestyles of politicians. Strikingly, anti-corruption, more than economic reform, has been the engine of political change across much of the world.
Yet two sobering facts stand out: Anti-corruption movements rarely eliminate corruption, and more often than not, they license authoritarian turns. It is staggering how much the rhetoric of anti-corruption serves authoritarian ends. Corruption matters deeply, as Nepal’s stunning levels of rent extraction show. But the old adage still applies: The structure of corruption matters more than its incidence. Anti-corruption can devour democracy as much as corruption itself.
The Trilateral Commission downplayed another source of disenchantment: War. In the US, the Vietnam war corroded authority; in the 2000s, the Iraq war undermined liberal legitimacy. Nothing corrodes democracy more than lies about war. Today, Gaza may quietly play a similar role in deepening cynicism, particularly in the West.
Our present moment, then, is marked by paradox. There is an explosion of youthful energy and even pockets of idealism. Yet every cause that inspires them — from jobs to anti-corruption — seems to turn into its opposite, breeding disillusion. No wonder the shadow of nihilism haunts democracy more deeply now than in earlier crises.
And is nihilism destiny? Democracies have adapted in the past. If the 1920s and 1970s teach anything, it is that moments of exhaustion can give way to reinvention. The same Samuel Huntington was writing about a Third Wave of Democratisation shortly after his pessimistic diagnosis. But the crisis of the 1930s was ultimately overcome by World War II more than anything else.
The challenge is to turn shared anxiety into durable institutional solutions rather than just fleeting protest, and to imagine economic futures not defined by scarcity of work or zero-sum polarisation. This is about the only question different democracies of the world are not discussing with the degree of seriousness and consensus-building required to carry any programme through. The exhilaration of protest is so easily foreshadowed, not just by violence, but a sense of drift. Democracy seems like an exercise of agency to nowhere.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
