Democratic Decline Quotes

The commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts.

Any country is either becoming more democratic or less democratic. I think the United States hasn't tended to its journey toward democracy in a long time.

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.

Venezuela has gone from being a democratic country 15 years ago to being totally not a democracy today. Usually that de-democratization doesn't take the form of a heavy handed police state.

The liberal [Democratic] state is destined to perish. All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal. [Fascist]

The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.

Under the leadership of this President, the state of the union is not strong. We are being pulled apart rather than pulling together. Our democracy is suffering from the choices being made, and yet we are offered the same tired excuses and unrealistic analyses.

That is, I think that what I do, that democracy in Venezuela hasn't really worked well since the [Ugo] Chávez era and that it has gotten even worse since the last elections, in which the Maduro government lost control of the House, of the country's legislature.

We are actually experiencing a dismantling of democracy. I didn’t think this was possible.

In Europe democracy is a falsehood. I do not know where it will end, but it cannot end in a quiet old age.

Tony Blair personified the shift away from democracy, towards control by bankers.

It's this mingling of the economic and political elite which is really destroying our democracy.

Democracy is dead in the Maldives.

You have to go back to the 1920s, almost a hundred years, to find the Democrat Party as weak and out of power as it is today. How did that happen with just one election? It didn't happen in one election. The fact is the Democrats have been losing elections, except for the White House, for the last eight years in numbers that have not been reported.

I began to think of war, even so-called "good wars" like World War II, as corrupting everybody. Violence begetting violence. The good guys beginning to act like the bad guys. And when I studied the history of wars, it seemed to me that that was the case. Athens vs. Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians presumably the democratic state. The Spartans the totalitarian state. But as the war went on, the Athenians began to act like the Spartans. They began committing atrocities and cruelties. So I saw this as a characteristic of war, even so-called "good wars."

The crisis of Western values has many aspects, many faces. There is a decline in faith in liberal democracy, a loss of confidence in universal human rights, a collapse in support for all kinds of transnational projects.

This is a historic disaster of Biblical proportions. The Democratic Party, as it is, is dead. This is a historic realignment. There were Reagan Democrats. Now there are Trump Democrats. The elites of this country alienated voters everywhere because they didn’t want to hear what working and middle class voters were screaming for four years—focus on us and our problems, not your agenda to destroy Trump.

The world was never more unsafe for democracy then it is today.

I go back to Robert Reich and his appearance on [George] Stephanopoulos' show. The Democrat Party has not been in this bad a shape since the 1920s.

Our polity has fallen down a dark hole into a place that is far from the vision and values of those who founded this democracy.

In Europe, it appears that in the name of democracy, elites are pursuing an autocratic, centralized power, seeking economic control and social regimentation.

The sense the great democracies of the world - Europe, the United States, Japan, others - are going to set the agenda for the world. [Russians] want to bring that down.

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.

With attention deficit democracy, I am trying to wake up people to how the combination of mass ignorance, fear mongering by the government, and lying politicians is putting our entire system of government to a death spiral.