Democracy viewed as archaic and obsolete

xsampa

Banned
With a POD of 1900 or later, make democracy be percieved as obsolete and archaic, much like many people view monarchy nowadays.
 
When even the most totalitarian regimes find it advantageous to put "democratic" in their official titles, I think your OP is gonna be a pretty tall order. You'd probably need something on the scale of Nazis(not Stalinists, because even they paid lip service to democracy) winning World War II, grabbing up almost all the land in the world, and raising entire generations to believe that elite rule, identified as such, is a good thing. And even then, they'd eventually probably come around to calling themselves "democratic", if for no other reason than to have a leg to stand on when saying that the few remaining democracies really aren't.
 
Maybe have technocracies rise to power in an explicit way. And have them be successful. I would be tempted to say to have AI's or some form of that rise and take power, in a way that the people allow it to, but that would leak into Future History.
 
Was OP perhaps inspired by my thread (which has the opposite requirement) to post this? Or pure coincidence?

Also, POST-1900? The USA and various republics in the Americas are already firmly rooted in republicanism by then. I'd say it's very difficult to almost impossble.
 
With a POD of 1900 or later, make democracy be percieved as obsolete and archaic, much like many people view monarchy nowadays.

With a 1900 POD? Hard to kill off the ideology at that point, or at least in a way that it's seen as "obsolete" rather than just "anarchic and dangeriously radical". I suppose one way you might be able to pull it off would be a strong surge in popularity of and reasearch into the Eugenics movement, if its in a positive Eugenics (IE Breeding a race of "natural aristocrats") rather than negative Eugenics (IE Purging the negative aspects of the gene pool). If you can do that, producing a gene-perfected class (I have no idea if this is even possible or how it would be done) who's objectively so much smarter than everybody else that you get the population to admit their decisions are bound to produce better results, than maybe you could get a neo-Oligarchic idea to take hold if states run by the Humans 2.0 thrive while old democracies struggle economically.
 

manav95

Banned
In a more positive POD, Stalin dies in April 1945 and Beria takes over. He has his NKVD purge his opponents and claim that they were seeking to undermine the country and the recolrevol. He also had the dirt on his sexual escapades erased and produces a fake will of Stalin endorsing him for leadership. He also gives free rein of the army to Zhukov, ensuring the Red Army and the great war hero remain loyal to him. He makes peace with the West and liberalizes the economy somewhat. After his death in the late 1960s, a group of young Communists rages against the tyranny of the regime and brings it down with the help of Party moderates and reformers who want profit.

In the West, there is a general shift to the left and by the 1970s, there is a growth in spiritual, socialist democracies. From here, the world moves towards one global state, and the old liberal, fractious democracies fade away.
 
This was basically the case in the interwar period, Mussolini compared fascism and democracy to electricity and gas lamps.

There was a pervasive sentiment that liberalism, in both a political and an economic sense, were 19th century anachronisms that were proven obsolete in the era of total war and command economies, or at least heavy-handed state intervention that maintained private property rights on paper.

It's largely forgotten nowadays but Nazi Germany was a model for authoritarians in eastern Europe before 1939. France appeared to be economically stagnant and in geopolitical decline, while Germany seemed to have recovered from the depression and begun surging ahead.
 
This was basically the case in the interwar period, Mussolini compared fascism and democracy to electricity and gas lamps.

There was a pervasive sentiment that liberalism, in both a political and an economic sense, were 19th century anachronisms that were proven obsolete in the era of total war and command economies, or at least heavy-handed state intervention that maintained private property rights on paper.

It's largely forgotten nowadays but Nazi Germany was a model for authoritarians in eastern Europe before 1939. France appeared to be economically stagnant and in geopolitical decline, while Germany seemed to have recovered from the depression and begun surging ahead.
If we see Fascist Italy remain neutral in World War 2 and lead a Fascist Bloc during the Cold War, you might see a surge in Fascism throughout the world which sees it gradually succeed the Western Democracies and becomes a model for quite a few countries to implement.
 
Perhaps somehow get Demarchy to be a major reformist movement. I.e. transitioning certain democratic institutions to demarchy ran institutions.

If succesful, by the 21st century there could be significant sentiment towards full demarchy.
 
All Social Democratic parties and anarchist scenes in Europe become colonised by class struggle workers who fight at the point of production and social reproduction. This produces a virtuous cycle feedback which reinforces institutional and organised class consciousness and which transforms the socdem parties and anarchist circles from bourgeois liberal talk shops into institutions populated by the class and run on class principles. Compare the rank and file in Spain or Petrograd to the failures of the “leaders” in the CNT-FAI or RSDLP(b).

As a couple of national revolutions topple the bourgeoisie the standard triple power situations develop: parliament, geographic radical liberal councils staffed by the “leaders” and workplace councils staffed by the class. The more developed institutional class consciousness pushes these revolutions to a situation ala Hungary 1956 or Czechoslovakia 1968 but by the 1917-1923 upsurge.

Conciliar consensus governs and parliamentary democracy is viewed as outdated and archaic by the 1970s.

Your economic opinion on complex post value market systems dictates the standard of living but the question was political not social.
 
When even the most totalitarian regimes find it advantageous to put "democratic" in their official titles, I think your OP is gonna be a pretty tall order. You'd probably need something on the scale of Nazis(not Stalinists, because even they paid lip service to democracy) winning World War II, grabbing up almost all the land in the world, and raising entire generations to believe that elite rule, identified as such, is a good thing. And even then, they'd eventually probably come around to calling themselves "democratic", if for no other reason than to have a leg to stand on when saying that the few remaining democracies really aren't.
There's more than a grain of truth behind this. Fascist groups that were opposed to liberal democracy relied on implicitly democratic ideas to attack their opponents, they criticized the existing oligarchic parliamentary systems as corrupt and unresponsive to the people's concerns.
 
Monarchies have to rely upon force, consent, or claims that they are their for some divine reason. democracies rely upon some level of representation so that people are seen as being invested in the endeavor of having a state and taking turns. One of th eimportwnt things baiut democracies, when well down and not actively sabotaged at ever level like in Germany after WWI, is how people can lose power and keep their lives, or get a chance to go again. I feel even if democracy (we will need to find a specific definition for it, as even the Vatican is a democracy) is seen as passé countries will have a junta of some sort.
 
There was a pervasive sentiment that liberalism, in both a political and an economic sense, were 19th century anachronisms that were proven obsolete in the era of total war and command economies, or at least heavy-handed state intervention that maintained private property rights on paper.

In some cases it didn't actually need out-and-out fascism to replace liberalism. Salazar's Catholic Corporate State, for example.
 
Maybe replace it - or at least the terminology - with meritocracy. The idea is “we tried it where any shithead can run things - you want it, you earn it.” Kind of like China’s system of tests and hoopsmto jump through so the intelligent and ambitious earn their way to the top (whether it actually works that way is another story.)
 
If you want to use the analogy/logic brought up in Starship Troopers and expand upon it: The basis of the state is violence, and all laws are ultimately upheld by the barrel of a gun. Voting is in effect a channeling of violence of the state by the voter. Would we give a child a gun? No! We already don't let children vote. We already (in lots of non-US countries) make it quite difficult to get a gun. Why should we not limit the ability to choose the direction of state-violence to only those who are worthy?


Granted, what do we mean by democracy? Democracy as in people voting at all, or Democracy as in liberal democracy?
 
With a 1900 POD? Hard to kill off the ideology at that point, or at least in a way that it's seen as "obsolete" rather than just "anarchic and dangeriously radical". I suppose one way you might be able to pull it off would be a strong surge in popularity of and reasearch into the Eugenics movement, if its in a positive Eugenics (IE Breeding a race of "natural aristocrats") rather than negative Eugenics (IE Purging the negative aspects of the gene pool). If you can do that, producing a gene-perfected class (I have no idea if this is even possible or how it would be done) who's objectively so much smarter than everybody else that you get the population to admit their decisions are bound to produce better results, than maybe you could get a neo-Oligarchic idea to take hold if states run by the Humans 2.0 thrive while old democracies struggle economically.

Thing is, once the eugenic technology was developed, you would have demands that it be made available to the general public(either via the free-market or central distribution, depending on who was making the demand), so that everyone's kids could have the same alleged genetic advantages toward becoming part of the elite. And you'd have companies and maybe even NGOs competing to convince everyone that THEIR master-caste forumula is the one to get. In other words, eugenics itself becomes democratized.

And it wouldn't take long before some wanker who was bred via, say, Acme Eugenics, gets elected to some high-ranked position and proceeds to make a complete clusterfruck of everything, and then you've got the eugenics equivalent of the Ford Pinto, except it managed to screw up the whole nation, so there's a backlash against Acme, and Widgenics Inc. takes their place as the popular choice, until one of their boys screws up, and then someone gets the idea to run as a "nature-made" candidate, and the whole idea of genetic inevitability among the elites comes crashing down like a house of cards.
 
Everyone gets the vote earlier, and demands so much for themselves that it crashes the economy, meaning democracy get seen as disastrous.
 
The issue, and I appreciate this can come across as slightly Whiggish, is that most other forms of social organisation tend to be very bad at dealing with popular discontent, lasting only as long as the good times do. This means that whatever replaces democracy must somehow keep the populace happy during the bad times.

So you'd need either loads of dictatorships to take over and denounce democracy as archaic or, if by democracy you mean just liberal democracy, maybe get loads of anarchist and libertarian socialist communities around that actually work and last long enough.

The PoD is honestly way too late, if you have one going back centuries then maybe, just maybe, something could be worked up. Whether or not this system would endure forever is another question (I seriously doubt it, once you hit industrialisation then it's really hard) but you could theoretically end up in a scenario where, in 2019, democracy has been tried at some point and failed.
 
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