Democracy: is the system going to survive?

For more than two and a half centuries, the United States set the standard democratic governance that was supposed to follow around the world. The basic principle on which this type of governance was built was to give voice to the citizenry. For more than a century 'citizenry' meant those who were of white colour and owned some property. Over time these constraints were overcome. It took a civil war to free blacks from slavery and still longer to extend the right to vote to women. However, the extended definition of citizenry did not imply that people would hold the same view of governance.

Two strands of thought were recognised: there were those who believed that the state should interfere in a very limited way in the lives of people and there were those who were prepared to be constrained by the rulers acting through their representatives. Elected representatives of the people who sat in parliaments and assemblies made laws that people were obliged to follow. In the United States, the Republican Party came to represent the first point of view whereas the Democratic Party was in favour of the second line of thinking.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 which also brought about an end of Communism in the eastern part of Europe, the American system of governance was generally accepted the world over as the preferred way to serve the citizenry. This move was celebrated by Francis Fukuyama in a best-selling book, The End of History. He was of the view that the main events in world history were the result of conflict between competing ideologies. In the period between the two World Wars in the twentieth century, there was conflict between autocracy and democracy. It took the form of Communism in the beginning of the twentieth century followed by Nazism in most of Europe before the Second World War. Those who won the wars gave voice to the citizenry and to the states that represented the people.

The British and American systems of governance differed in their content but the basic principles on which they were based were the same. Britain had evolved a parliamentary system in which laws were made by the people's representatives elected periodically. While the Americans also had bodies in which elected members served as people's representatives, the president - also directly elected by the people - was given a great deal of executive authority. In several areas of public policy, he could act by himself without getting approval from...