Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

The graph shows that the third wave of democratization is far from over, let alone ebbing, even if it has not continued to surge at the rate of the years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At that time, the world had 52 democracies (defined by the Polity Project as countries with a score of 6 or higher on their scale), up from 31 in 1971. After swelling in the 1990s, this third wave spilled into the 21st century in a rainbow of “color revolutions” including Croatia (2000), Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), bringing the total at the start of the Obama presidency in 2009 to 87.¹⁴ Belying the image of a rollback or meltdown under his watch, the number continued to grow. As of 2015, the most recent year in the dataset, the total stood at 103. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded that year to a coalition of organizations in Tunisia that solidified a transition to democracy, a success story from the Arab Spring of 2011. It also saw transitions to democracy in Myanmar and Burkina Faso, and positive movements in five other countries, including Nigeria and Sri Lanka. The world’s 103 democracies in 2015 embraced 56 percent of the world’s population, and if we add the 17 countries that were more democratic than autocratic, we get a total of two-thirds of the world’s population living in free or relatively free societies, compared with less than two-fifths in 1950, a fifth in 1900, seven percent in 1850, and one percent in 1816. Of the people living in the 60 nondemocratic countries today (20 full autocracies, 40 more autocratic than democratic), four-fifths reside in a single country, China.¹⁵

Though history has not ended, Fukuyama had a point: democracy has proved to be more attractive than its eulogizers acknowledge.¹⁶ After the first wave of democratization broke, there were theories “explaining” how democracy could never take root in Catholic, non-Western, Asian, Muslim, poor, or ethnically diverse countries, each refuted in turn. It is true that stable, top-shelf democracy is likelier to be found in countries that are richer and more highly educated.¹⁷ But governments that are more democratic than not are a motley collection: they are entrenched in most of Latin America, in floridly multiethnic India, in Muslim Malaysia, Indonesia, Niger, and Kosovo, in fourteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa (including Namibia, Senegal, and Benin), and in poor countries elsewhere such as Nepal, Timor-Leste, and most of the Caribbean.¹⁸

Even the autocracies of Russia and China, which show few signs of liberalizing, are incomparably less repressive than the regimes of Stalin, Brezhnev, and Mao.¹⁹ Johan Norberg summarizes life in China: “The Chinese people today can move almost however they like, buy a home, choose an education, pick a job, start a business, belong to a church (as long as they are Buddhists, Taoist, Muslims, Catholics or Protestants), dress as they like, marry whom they like, be openly gay without ending up in a labor camp, travel abroad freely, and even criticize aspects of the Party’s policy (though not its right to rule unopposed). Even ‘not free’ is not what it used to be.”²⁰

Why has the tide of democratization repeatedly exceeded expectations? The various backslidings, reversals, and black holes for democracy have led to theories which posit onerous prerequisites and an agonizing ordeal of democratization. (This serves as a convenient pretext for dictators to insist that their countries are not ready for it, like the revolutionary leader in Woody Allen’s Bananas who upon taking power announces, “These people are peasants. They are too ignorant to vote.”) The awe is reinforced by a civics-class idealization of democracy in which an informed populace deliberates about the common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preference.

By that standard, the number of democracies in the world is zero in the past, zero in the present, and almost certainly zero in the future. Political scientists are repeatedly astonished by the shallowness and incoherence of people’s political beliefs, and by the tenuous connection of their preferences to their votes and to the behavior of their representatives.²¹ Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options but of basic facts, such as what the major branches of government are, who the United States fought in World War II, and which countries have used nuclear weapons. Their opinions flip depending on how a question is worded: they say that the government spends too much on “welfare” but too little on “assistance to the poor,” and that it should “use military force” but not “go to war.” When they do formulate a preference, they commonly vote for a candidate with the opposite one. But it hardly matters, because once in office politicians vote the positions of their party regardless of the opinions of their constituents.