It is time to face a difficult question. Is democracy all that good? How do we relate to democracy when it produces evil? Can we give up on democracy?

We needn’t have waited for Donald Trump’s return to power to ask this question. We could have asked this after his first victory in 2016. Or, after Narendra Modi’s triumph in 2019, or perhaps after his popular endorsement following the violence in Gujarat in 2002. Or, if we cared to look at the rest of the world, after Viktor Orban’s rise to power in Hungary in 2010, Benjamin Netanyahu’s vice-like grip in post-2009 Israel, the Rajapaksa family’s control in Sri Lanka after 2004, the beginning of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s reign in Turkey in 2003, or Thaksin Shinawatra’s victory in Thailand in 2001 — the list is endless.

The simple point is that the record of actually existing “democracies” in delivering good outcomes is not so good. The phenomenon of democratically elected and re-elected leaders unleashing bad politics — chaos, corruption, criminality, ethnicide, ecological destruction — while retaining their popularity is not something new. If we care to look without blinkers and beyond affluent European societies, it is hard to resist the conclusion that what we assumed to be the benefits of a normal, functional democracy are largely fictional. Success stories of democracies are usually happy coincidences that last for a limited period. These episodes are bright stars in a dark sky of shades of disappointments, failures and disasters. “Democratic” governments do not improve our chances of good governance, the rule of law or well-being of its citizens.

When it comes to assessing outcomes, there are only three serious arguments in........

© Indian Express