Excellent Atlantic article - long view on fascism v. democracy

[cilla4progress]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/francis-fukuyama-still-end-history/671761/

Despite the title, it's encouraging.

Shouldn't be paywalled.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

1. Keep fighting the fascists!

Supporters of liberal democracy must not give in to a fatalism that tacitly accepts the Russian-Chinese line that such democracies are in inevitable decline. The long-term progress of modern institutions is neither linear nor automatic. Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad. People across varied cultures do not like living under dictatorship, and they value their individual freedom. No authoritarian government presents a society that is, in the long term, more attractive than liberal democracy, and could therefore be considered the goal or endpoint of historical progress. The millions of people voting with their feet—leaving poor, corrupt, or violent countries for life not in Russia, China, or Iran but in the liberal, democratic West—amply demonstrate this.

[Fiendish Thingy]

2. If you have an Apple device, you should be able to read without a paywall.

Use the News App.

[The Unmitigated Gall]

3. Needed that!

[Hortensis]

4. Fukuyama's brilliant. He could also point to all the failed authoritarian

governments that tragically took over early in the last century, both LW socialist and RW fascist, while the democracies that successfully fought them off went on to unprecedented prosperity and wellbeing.