This is an interesting take on the separation of the concepts of
democracy and liberal freedoms. It's based on observations of how
developing nations appear to adopt democracy and it notes the
emergence of so called "illiberal democracies". It observes that
western democratic nations emerged as a consequence of liberal
freedoms, and suggests this is just an accident of history and that
one is not necessary for the other.<p>I disagree.<p>The reason that the political mode of dynamic tyranny (see Aristotle)
we call democracy and liberalism are more or less welded/conflated is
that one tempers the other to create a stable system in the same way
that a hydrogen atom is stable pattern of proton and electron (other
political philosophers put it better, but that's my nerdy metaphor).<p>The article seems to posit that democracy can continue to exist in the
radical absence of liberal values, but then offers a number of
statements that contradict that.<p>> ruling parties, seeing their opponents more as enemies than
competitors, sought to restrict media freedoms and pack state
bureaucracies with loyalists. They used their control of the
democratic process to rig the system to their advantage.<p>These are not <i>stable</i> democracies. They may be seemingly legitimate
nation states that claim the epithet "democracy" but they are
ephemeral, without any future.<p>> Signer argues that “at its simplest level, democracy is a political
system that grants power based on what large groups of people want.”
And what these large groups want may not be good for constitutional
liberalism<p>That's a very pedestrian, flat-footed and reductionist definition of
"democracy". We have always known this. The Germans voted Hitler
in. But within a few years that country had been destroyed along with
half the world. That's a feature of <i>Raw Democracy</i>, why Aristotle
favoured Polity in its place, and why we have more sophisticated
interpretation today which insists on a liberal context.<p>I'd say the coinage of the term "illiberal democracy" is mischievous,
and we cannot humour it without corroding our own, _better_ notion of
democracy.<p>I do like the style of writing in The Atlantic, but this analysis
feels a bit off.