Why Republicans, Russians, and autocratic losers are going crazy—in one chart
"Conservatives" are losing and they know it
“Conservatives” are going maddeningly crazy. If you’re reading this, I’m sure that you are as irate as I am over the non-stop Republican attacks on everything decent.
They are passing laws that will let them change the results of elections
They are trying to outlaw abortion—a constitutionally protected right—everywhere they can, even before their hand-picked Supreme Court turns back a half-century of settled law.
They are attacking LGBTQ+ people by passing outrageously discriminatory laws.
They are trying to deny the Federal government the power to issue mandates to combat pandemics.
They are gerrymandering everything in sight far beyond their outrageous gerrymanders in the past.
And the madness doesn’t stop in America. The whole world is going insane with versions of “conservatism.”
Russia’s attack on Ukraine—the most blatant European land grab since World War II—is a “conservative” project, Putin’s personal “Make Russia Great Again” campaign.
“Conservative” fascism in Hungary is wildly admired by American Trumpists.
Europe always seems one slip away from toxic right-wing nationalism.
“Conservatives” have always been a curmudgeonly bunch, prone to complaining, whining, victimhood, and mouthing off at anything that touches one of their hot buttons.
But it seems like they are going crazy right now all over the world. Why? What has triggered this “conservative” madness?
The answer is provided by this one chart. It’s not difficult to get the point.
(See a bigger version of this chart HERE.)
As the steady rise in the blue portion of the graph shows, democracy is taking over the world. This is not the ancient kind of simple democracy, which Aristotle called “the worst of the better forms of government” because it could easily tip over into mob rule. Such a form of democracy could never be stable for long, because it only takes one demagogue to lead the people to destroy all the institutions of society and then set up the demagogue as a strongman to impose order on the chaos.
No, the kind of the democracy that is taking over the world is enlightenment democracy—a form of government pioneered in United States with the Constitution of 1787, which combined representative democracy and republicanism into a stable and progressive form of government.
“Conservatives” were all for enlightenment democracy as long as they could manipulate it to favor their selfish ends. But the more that people in the world experience the benefits of modern democracy—especially the benefit of taking power out of the hands of the powerful and putting it into the hands of the people—the less “conservatives” like it. Fearful and greedy, the world’s “conservatives” feel backed into a corner by the expansion of human rights and decency that arises from empowering the many.
This crisis has been brewing for a long time. Now it is here. If those of us who value enlightenment democracy cannot muster the fortitude to enter the fight at the level of ferocity that “conservatives” are more than prepared to use, the blue area in chart above will start to take a nosedive very quickly.
We will know sooner rather than later. If the easily distracted American people turn Congress over the Republicans this fall, the flagship modern democracy will fall into authoritarianism. And just as America led the way into widespread enlightenment democracy, it will lead the way out.