Maybe I have become unhinged and have lost my mind, but when I read this by Barry "whistling past the graveyard" comes to mind. Democracies vote incumbents out of office when things go wrong not when incumbents mismanage. A system that could produce a more informed effective electorate than the uniformed democratic electorate would seem likely to have an edge. The counter has always been that a restricted franchise may produce more competence, but it definitely produces plutocracy. These days, however, democracies seem increasingly to be likely to produce plutocracy without the competence. And the recent rise of transnational neo-fascism makes things even worse: politicians reconcile a broad democratic electorate with their desires to pursue plutocracy via performative cruelty against those they label as "others".
From China's perspective, what "democracy" generates is the same amount of plutocracy, much less competence, and mob rule in the sense that giddy minds will be dizzied by demagogues with foreign (and domestic) quarrels.
Yes, China does face the five-good-emperors-in-a-row-is-the-limit problem. But modern democracies face problems too.
I have less confidence in "built-in course-correction" than Barry does.
Time to go read The Federalist Papers, written when it was not a slam-dunk belief anywhere that a republic could be sustained, again: Barry Eichengreen: China and the Future of Democracy: "Growing geostrategic influence, rising soft power, and, above all, continued economic success suggest that other countries will see China as a model to emulate...
...They will be attracted to its political model, which eschews the chaos of Western democracy in favor of centralized administrative control. The attractions are even more alluring against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s incoherent approach to governing, the British Tories’ shambolic efforts to manage Brexit, and Italy’s inability to form a government.... Decisions are costly to reach and difficult to sustain in democratic systems.... China’s approach, which has delivered the goods for two generations now, has more going for it, especially from the perspective of poor countries where sustained growth is the priority....
But this confident forecast misses a key point. Democracy may be messy, but it contains a built-in course-correction mechanism. When policy goes awry, the incumbents responsible for the mistake can be, and often are, voted out of office, to be replaced, in principle at least, by more competent rivals. An authoritarian regime has no such automatic adjustment mechanism.... The idea that China’s leaders will continue to avoid serious policy errors indefinitely, and that their capacity as crisis managers will never be tested is, quite simply, fanciful....
China, clearly, is emerging as a world power, even more quickly than it otherwise would, to the extent that the US is coming to be seen as an unreliable partner concerned only with advancing its own interests–at the expense, if necessary, of other countries. But the belief that China will continue growing at mid-single-digit rates for an extended period violates the first rule of forecasting: don’t extrapolate...
#shouldread
