Democracy is Dying: What to Do?

Democracy is dying all over the world and autocratic governments are coming to power. We see that in Germany, in the United States, Serbia, Israel, not to mention those that have been nondemocratic all along that show no signs of changing.
 
People are demonstrating in the streets opposing the trend, but it continues. If it is a global phenomenon than there must be a global cause to why this is happening. I believe it is the rate of change the world is going through which has no precedence in the history of mankind.  
 
Change causes problems because the world, or in our case, a country, is a system composed of sub systems: the technological, economic, legal, political, social sub systems. The subsystems do not change at the same speed. Technologies change at a very high speed, economic, legal sub system struggle to catch up with the changes and the social sub system is the most left behind. This disparity in speed of change by each subsystem, causes DISintegration, cracks in the system, manifested in what we call “problems”. And the faster the rate of change, the faster problems appear, and the more subsystems are impacted simultaneously, the more complex the problem becomes.

The democratic system is not capable of having these problems resolved in a timely manner. Democracy takes time to arrive to a consensus. To implement decisions democratically is even more time consuming. Democracy produces effective, better decisions, than a dictatorship whose decisions are one sided and biased but it is a very inefficient system of managing change, of solving problems. Dictatorship is the opposite. Its decisions are worse than a democratic decision-making body will arrive at but they are efficiently arrived at and executed.
 
People expect prompt actions  solutions. The pressure is on the government to act and deal with problems but since the democratic system is slow the executive branch takes over with executive orders and gets accused of being autocratic.
 
The problem with democracy is going to increase with a new variable: change in peoples education, and exposure to information with the new technologies. People will be demanding more than ever before to impact the decisions government makes but as the institutional democratic process ineffective, they will be  looking for informal ways to impact decision making. Expect an increase in social unrest, burning tires and smashing windows.

The solution is to stop or slow change and some political parties are voting for it. It can not work in the long run. Global change continues and the social media impacts everyone and eventually reaches everyone. No one can stop change, and we cannot change the aspirations of educated people to be part of the political process.

‍What to do?

‍Over 50 years ago Elizabeth Mann Borgese and myself edited a book, Self-management: New Dimensions to Democracy, published by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (available from Adizes Institute Publications). In that book we presented that what is needed is a new form of democracy, grass root democracy not a representative one. The role of government in this system is not to run the country but to see to it that it is run by the people well. The executive branch role is more of an (I) role. The grass root institutions that are impacted and or impact the problem are required to get together and solve it. The role of government is to see to it that it happens and that the decision arrived at does not violate some bigger issue.

It is called the third system and was tried already in Yugoslavia(See Ichak Adizes: Industrial Democracy: Yugoslav Style, Adizes Institute Publications).

In Yugoslavia it bit the dust because the system was based on political ideology that negated capital as a factor of creation and rejected the role of entrepreneurship, it violated communist theoretical foundations. Also the country fell apart but the system with corrections to the deficiency mentioned above was a solid one.