Full franchise democracy in the US is arguably younger than living memory. So are a lot of things we take for granted as civil rights (and some of powers that be seem determined to roll those back).
But even assuming the premise, it’s not hard to see how generations who’ve enjoyed a privilege might be more likely to take it for granted than societies that have more recently gained it, and are within living memory of fascism in power (or in neighboring states).
Civil rights is orthogonal to democracy. Creating a democratic country like the U.S. is the real achievement. Most countries never come close to accomplishing that.
Fun fact: The US isn't counted as a "Full Democracy" by that index, so seems it's not as a great of an achievement as you seem to think. I'm looking forward to see how the ranking of the US changes in 2025, seems to be slipping downwards rather than upwards sadly.
> However, the political and structural problems that caused the US to be downgraded to a “flawed democracy” in 2016 (a downgrade that pre-dated the inauguration of Donald Trump as president in January 2017) persist. These include low levels of trust in political institutions and the media; institutional gridlock; excessive influence of lobbyists, interest groups and the mega-rich; sharp economic and social inequalities; and an absence of social consensus on core national values.
Sorry, but why exactly should we care about what some random score that some people invented and named Democracy Index says? It’s not like there is some universal agreement that maximizing the score in these people’s quiz is good or proper.
At least they provide justification and reasoning behind the numbers they assign, they're not throwing darts to see what to score things. Read through the report yourself, then come back if there are specific things you disagree with. Or maybe even better, find some better research and link it here.
Just saying "USA is the most democratic country in the world" feels like worse than at least trying to look at things objectively.
I didn’t say the U.S. was the most democratic country in the world—I wasn’t comparing the U.S. to Norway or Denmark. But the U.S. achieved in the 18th century something that Germany, France, Spain, etc., didn’t achieve until the mid-20th century. That’s an achievement.
And the lack of universal suffrage back in the day doesn’t diminish America’s achievement. India and Bangladesh and Iraq and many places have universal suffrage but they’re not as democratic as the U.S. was in 1789. Getting to that point is the 0 to 1 of democracy. Expanding the franchise from there is incremental development.
This index unironically puts countries that practice government censorship in the category of full democracies. Sorry but this isn't a democracy index - it's just a progressive index.
The founding of the US is absolutely a remarkable achievement. A group of colonies successfully broke from global imperial power to successfully establish a society heavily influenced by the best enlightenment thinking and classical civil philosophy. It's really something. Looking at some populist reactionary movements that happened in the early 19th century, one wonders if the outcome could have been as good as the US constitution even 30 years later.
That said:
* it existed in a historic and cultural context of states that had already made significant movements in that direction -- it was a big leap, but it wasn't simple 0-1. More like a 0.4 with a lot of the relevant ideals and institutions (elections, representation, courts, legislative bodies, executive authority, rule of law , etc) fairly well developed and demonstrated in various ways pulled together into a coherent 0.75 and woven in with enlightenment ideals as expressed in documents like the declaration of independence.
* There is at least a partial linear dependence between civil rights and democracy. The franchise relationship is where it's strongest. Democracy is effective, principled, & honored ballot access. Without any effective franchise what you have instead is an opinion poll. And mere fractional access to the franchise walks elections & representation down from "1" -- it is literally the coefficient you have to multiple a "1" democracy by in order to arrive at its effective democratic nature.
That's just the start, though. It's a bit like that old Churchill/Shaw/Twain/whoever story where Clever Guy™ is having a conversation with a woman:
“Would you sleep with a stranger if he paid you £1,000,000?”
“Yes.”
“And if he paid you £5?”
“£5? What do you think I am?”
“We’ve already established that, now we're just haggling over the price.”
Ha-ha! A country without a universal franchise has already established that some people don't get a democratic say, it's just haggling over who those people are. And that means it can haggle over whether you get to be one of those people. And even eventually over whether anyone gets to be one of those people, over whether it is democratic at all.
This generalizes to other rights. In order to have them guaranteed to anyone, they must be guaranteed to everyone. It's why constitutional guarantees tend to be features of constitutional representative democracies since the enlightenment, imperfect leap though the US is.
The big question is if the US (among others) can finish climbing the ladder when the political headwinds seem to be against "guaranteed to everyone."
> A country without a universal franchise has already established that some people don't get a democratic say, it's just haggling over who those people are. And that means it can haggle over whether you get to be one of those people. And even eventually over whether anyone gets to be one of those people, over whether it is democratic at all.
I don't think that inductive reasoning works. Every country excludes lots of people from the franchise. The U.S. has almost 100 million people who aren't eligible to vote, mostly young people and non-citizens. No country has a truly universal franchise. Under your reasoning, that's unstable--if we can take away the franchise from 17 year olds, we can take away the franchise from 18 year olds, etc.
Historically, the big democratic jumps were probably extending the franchise to prominent family heads voting, followed by landowning males.
"Young people" or other age limits are a dramatically distinctive case because the considerations involved are universal, cross-cutting and temporary. Age-based standards can't be used to create systematic outgroups. They bind and protect everyone equally in the ultimate and most practical sense because (a) everyone grows into enfranchisement (b) no one has it until they do. Which gives everyone an equal stake in what the specific age limit is too.
Contrast that with sex, religion, ethnicity, origin, asset ownership etc and the real question is why anyone would accept that they're truly comparable.
Citizenship may be the only truly stickier corner case. Largely because international relations will sometimes produce reasons to limit it more tightly or extend it more freely by broad categories such as national origin. But even here (a) most countries recognize that is often only one of several important judgements in a wise process (b) it's possible to review the equitability of citizenship qualifications: can they be met by anyone by way of objective assessment of investment in society and respect for acceptable participation?
I guess I'd ask you to define "democracy" first, as for me it would at least include that all citizens are allowed and realistically can vote. It took until 1920 for women to be able to vote, and it wasn't until 1965 every citizen realistically could vote. I don't think in that case it would come close to being the "oldest country with a continuously running democracy".
The world has many old countries. Most of the world’s most democratic states are constitutional monarchies, with centuries of history of not being a settler colony like the US.
How do you reconcile your comment with the fact that the US in the democracy index (from The Economist) is a flawed democracy, and considerably less democratic than a whole bunch of monarchies.
I don't think these ideas need to be reconciled, because there's no conflict between something having existed for a long time and it not continuing to exist. The Roman Republic had existed for over 450 years when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon.
Well we've only been a true "liberal democracy" for the past sixty years or so. Before that we were a de-facto apartheid state. Maybe at a stretch you could say 105 years if you go by the 19th amendment. And frankly i'm still skittish to call America pre-Trump a democracy with my full chest given the electoral college, completely bonkers division of the country into states, the senate, complete lack of a right to vote, our continual human rights abuses in terms of poverty and imprisonment/executions, etc etc.
I'm just saying there's literally dozens and dozens of countries with far more obvious realization of democratic ideals than we've ever managed to figure out, and at this point our age and blind devotion to dead assholes ("founding fathers") are major barriers to any sort of movement forward.
It's history: if a person doesn't grade on a curve, every page of the textbook looks the same (ie: people being jerks).
In order to deny that England, America, and France spearheaded the modern democratic system (albeit inspired by Ancient Greece), a person needs to explain who did?
> In order to deny that England, America, and France spearheaded the modern democratic system
That doesn't mean these governments make any political sense as a democracy today relative to the status quo. Hell, Britain is probably the only government on earth more dysfunctional than America's. At least France refreshed relatively recently; what the hell is Britain's excuse? Even North Korea and Eritrea seem to maintain more dignity internationally than any of the three of us and they barely even attempt to come across as "democratic".
I don't believe any of the founders believed they were creating a "true democracy," or even that it would be desirable. Read Federalist Number 10. The modern fetishism of democracy will lead bad places.
Yes, pretty much all claims of democracy come from the 20th century. I hardly think we were a more functional country at the time, though—it's only through the miracle of rampant exploitation we didn't all just immediately start killing each other. Thank god for the civil war to kick us to continue booting up a democracy.
One day we'll finish the job, I swear. Pinky-promise.
You'd have to do some contortions on the current definition of "democracy" for that to be true. For most of it's history, not everyone could vote, and if that's your bar then democracy in the US is... returning to it's roots.
