This.

It looks like it goes in cycles: after major catastrophic event subsequent generations that don't remember the catastrophe are willing to engage in another one (I think of WWI and WWII as one event). If the memory was stronger there would be more pressure to find other means of resolving issues.

Eg. as a "half boomer" European I remember well why EU was created. It looks like the reasons have been largely forgotten now.

The macroeconomic problem is that export-led growth is zero sum. Other kinds of growth aren't, but for most countries export-led growth is the most accessible kind of growth. Then, if other countries are rationally defecting, trying to reach out to them gets viewed as treason.

I think more broadly, we're (re?)discovering various weak spots in democratic governments, and all at once globally.

Ones that strike me include:

- Most crucially, democracy relies on an educated electorate, but access to really excellent education is minimal globally. This exposes democracies to disinformation and populism

- Democracies are not great at long-term investment and planning, due to the rapid election cycle and politicians needing to manage polls in ~real time

- We long relied on media as gatekeepers and curators of sound political analysis and facts, but a revenue race to the bottom means media now chase ragebait and owner politics instead

- The uncomfortable truth is that a lot of successes of Western Democracies happened when they weren't all that democratic. Anything prior to 20th century was really plutocratic at best, then there was a slow expansion of the vote, but even then, there simply weren't that many terrible options to vote for. Even an uneducated electorate can make a good choice when all you can do is choose between two decent options

- Not entirely related, but I think shift from values-based societies to consumption/hedonistic societies broke the unwritten contract of democratic systems, where you vote not for your immediate benefit, but for some kind of societal one.

As Churchill supposedly quipped, democracy still seems like the least bad option, but that shouldn't mean we don't discuss improvements. I don't really know where we go from here - pumping lots of money into education would possibly do it eventually - but awareness is a good first step to fixing.

  The benefits of globalization did not reach all citizens, leading to a maldistribution of wealth.

Those are merely received ideas, not necessarily the root cause of a decline in democracy.

Acid House music arose around the end of the Cold War.

If, for some reason, a handful of influential figures had blamed Acid House for all society's problems instead of globalization, then presumably the author would have written:

  The benefits of Acid House did not reach all citizens, leading to a maldistribution of wealth.

This century, we have landed on a whole framework for explaining what we don't like about the world - involving 'elites', globalism, immigrants, etc etc - and it is a pretty useless as a framework.

Democracy requires that people view themselves as part of a singular group; we might all have different interests and priorities, so each citizen might want different policy, but the compromise to the majority should be something that's positive overall.

We are not so far into the multicultural experiment (in the literal sense where distinct self contained cultural groups can exist in one nation), and it's becoming clear that it doesn't really work. You get endless cases of representatives chosen based on cultural groups, policies where one group wins at the cost of the whole, and lower trust in the system generally.

This is complicated by the messaging that multiculturalism is the same as anti-racism. This has been such a successful campaign that nationalism even being an acceptable idea is one of the major dividing points between parties.

I don't really believe that it's resolvable without some kind of major external factor.

I actually think globalism has nothing to do with the decline. Or maybe the gains it brought us has indirectly contributed. In general US quality of life has risen. Japanese quality of life isn't bad either. I think the keys are just simple apathy, ignorance and fear of loosing what you have when you have it easy. It is like the silly anti-vax stuff now. People don't see the huge infant mortality rate that used to be there so their value signal for vaccines is completely un-tuned. They didn't have to go through the hardship so they don't know the value. Similarly, by most measures, life is actually pretty good compared to the time we are trying to make great again, but because people now weren't alive then and didn't see the impacts of unregulated stocks, weak health institutions, etc etc, they don't understand the value of the institutions and can't adequately judge the importance of people that are trying to keep those institutions strong. Instead they see a report that has dramatic music and footage from a different time/country with no context and a headline saying 'inconsequential thing X will destroy you and take your home and I will protect you' so they vote out of fear and ignorance or don't vote at all because they can't be bothered to learn as a way to inform instead of experience. Until it happens to them it isn't real. I think fear, ignorance and apathy are the real keys here.

Not even in its founding. Federalist #10 spells out exactly the fears that Madison had about democracy. You give people full political power and they'll use it to redistribute wealth/land. So you need to give people somewhere to funnel their energies without rocking the boat too hard. Originally we weren't supposed to vote for Senators and the presidency was mostly conceived as a ceremonial role and the Electoral College was there just in case the establishment was ever too threatened by "democracy"

A true democracy would be people voting on laws directly and having the _option_ to appoint an assistant to vote for them.

That's right - politicians would not be "leaders" but assistants who could be removed or replaced at any time.

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A political party and a person's political opinion are both points in a high-dimensional vector space. The greatest issue with representative democracy is that voting is the act of describing one point (your political opinion) by picking another point from a small predefined set (political parties) which is acceptably close to yours.

That's nuts and it should be obviously nuts to anyone who understands a tiny bit of vector math. Thank god they don't teach it until university or we'd have riots every day until it was fixed.

Yes, nowhere has a 'democracy', this is a sales or branding term.

What we have is 'representative democracy' where people choose someone to represent them.

So, hundreds, thousands or even millions choose one person to represent them for 4-5 years. That person decides those people's best interests on what to do for the thousands of decisions that come up.

The representative however does not need to do any of the things they said they would. They can not be held accountable for saying one thing but doing the other (ie lying), except at the end of their term, when they can be voted out. (Giving another the chance to do the same.) They only have to catch the people's aspirations, not deliver on them.

And even on those 'decisions' that the representative does get a chance to opine and vote on, the representative is hamstrung - bills contain so much that no one would agree with. Even if there were well-meaning representatives, they are unable to do anything with bills written by lobbyists in the pay of the companies that the bill is meant to 'restrain' - representatives cannot agree only with the good and leave the bad.

My jarring awakening to the importance of genetic and cultural Japanese-ness in Japan was when that girl won the Miss Japan pageant. She was seen as not-Japanese as she was white. Which I hadn't thought would be a problem. (Maybe it was foolish of me, but to be fair they had actually already had a black Miss Japan. So why wouldn't they accept a white one?) Anyway, it culminated in that girl giving up the crown but it taught me an important lesson after several conversations with friends.

Japanese-ness is not some backward notion from a time that the world has advanced beyond. They take Japanese-ness extremely seriously. One ignores it to their own detriment. As that particular Miss Japan contestant found out.

And as, I suspect, many foreign residents of Japan will find out in the coming years. It's unfortunate.

But culture above everything I guess?

I hope you will obey the government and hand in your papers if it votes to deport you.

You summarized the "democracy the god that failed" book.

The issue is we look upon the government for solutions. In reality, the answer always lies in us.

What people don't get about 'Anglo-American' democracy is that the various political governmental bodies ARE NOT the governing mechanism of society

If you're not president of some local board or organization, then YOU are the problem. America is a nation of presidents. Until we each do that, the country will always be missing something. Outside observers clearly noted this early on in this country's history. People completely misplace their trust today depending on the government.

This is why transplanting American legal systems to foreign cultures doesn't work. The work to be done is not governmental but rather interior to each individual in society

> there's no central King whose greed for wealth can be satisfied once.

King and court and lords are the same amount of greedy bastards. The issue with kings is on another plain, what to do with power transfer to a new king. Democracy try to solve exactly this problem. What to do with individuals bending laws to be new kings is another issue to solve.

With all the saber rattling from China what else were they supposed to be doing?

I doubt that. Takaichi has (IMHO needlessly) angered China and China is lashing out - because China is much bigger, the economic pain will be much greater for Japan.

It's theoretically possible that Takaichi had a plan and decided the economic pain was worth it, but generally you don't win elections by hurting economy.

As a foreign resident I'm pretty happy. People like to make dollar comparisons (especially to US salaries) but it's a crude oversimplification.

Yet japan's parmesan score is rather uninspiring

They're talking about how recent trends are a departure from the existing trends that got Japan to where it is now (where you seem to like it).

Suicide rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

Japan: 17.4

USA: 15.6

Japan has more suicides

I’m an American and I love Japan, in fact, I’m typing this in my hotel room in Tokyo. This is my 14th trip here in 16 years; my seventh trip since Japan lifted COVID-19 travel restrictions in late 2022.

Japan does many things well; I love the efficient and clean public transportation, the excellent customer service, the lack of price gouging at hotels and airports, and the general kindness of the people. I love the social harmony here. I also used to work for a Japanese company before switching careers to academia, and in many ways I seem to fit in better with corporate Japan than modern corporate America.

However, not everything in Japan is better than the United States. I stayed in Japan for nearly two months last summer and I found myself craving a nice deli sandwich when I returned to America. Deli sandwiches aren’t really a thing in Japan other than Subway.

For more serious matters, I know many Japanese people who moved to Silicon Valley because there were more opportunities there compared to Japan. I know a few Japanese women who felt stifled in Japan due to gender expectations and ended up thriving in America in careers such as art and biotechnology. While Japanese K-12 schools are better on average than their American counterparts, American higher education is still the best in the world, though it’s very expensive. While I had great experiences at the Japanese company I worked for (both in Japan and the US), not all companies in Japan are good. The work culture here can involve very long hours. Additionally, salaries in tech are much lower than in America, and the yen has been weak since 2022.

Additionally, the United States is a multicultural nation. While it still has a long way to go when it comes to rooting out racism and xenophobia, and while things are challenging with the current political situation, there’s still the idea that anyone can become an American no matter their birthplace. In contrast, Japan is a Japanese nation. I could naturalize, but I’ll never be treated as truly Japanese, and if I have children, even if they are half-Japanese, they would not be treated as truly Japanese.

I love Japan; I want to continue traveling here twice per year and I can see myself spending a sabbatical year here one day. However, Japan is not paradise, and while things in the United States are rather tumultuous now, there are still aspects of American life that are nicer than in Japan, and not just cheese and deli sandwiches.

> but how are they to argue that it makes a country less democratic? [..] words mean something!

You misunderstand the purpose of editorials such as these. It is not to communicate, but to push an agenda [1], here by putting PR pressure on the Japanese government. Words are just a tool in pursuit of that goal. So 'democracy' is used because of its positive affect in the minds of the public, and because it can be successfully misused without most people noticing - the line between "a set of policies I like" (how they are using the word) and "rule of the people" (what the word actually means) has been blurred through years of media effort for this very reason.

[1] I use the term neutrally, as in agendas can be either good or bad. E.g. fighting for the right for repair, and tobacco companies deceiving the public about the harm of their product, are both agendas.