Can Our or Any Democracy Survive With 8 Plus Billion of Us?
The USA stands as the world’s most powerful and prosperous democracy, but despite many smaller and quite functional democracies, the anti-freedom, dictatorships of China, Russia, Iran and the many lesser dictatorships are not likely to be supplanted by citizen uprisings or any changes from the Xi and Putin types which happily suppress their citizens while gleaning special powers for themselves and their cronies.
As world population has quadrupled in my 91-year lifetime from 2 billion to 8 billion, demographers project another 3 billion by 2100. Even with today’s 8 billion population, many billions can’t be sustained on a habitable basis, depending of course on one’s view of habitability, such as many sad examples of what to most are inhuman conditions we see every day on our media!...
As that volume grows and pressures on free (and all) societies increase, can any democracy, a fragile coalition of potentially divisive individuals, somehow keep their governments providing an equilibrium of equality without slipping into chaos and then to an imposed authoritarian nation? That is the historical way freedom is lost.
The urgent actions a democratic government should take have been long delineated.
- Understanding that worldwide growth in population, many living under dictatorships drives unmanageable migration to democracies.
- Offering more government and private services such jobs (we need more workers), more healthcare including full reproductive care and abortion choice ironically makes migration more attractive.
- Offering carefully monitored grants to developing nations from which huge migration comes. These grants would include education about the importance of voluntary family planning options options.
- Strict rules insuring fair elections would be featured.
- Seeking from experts’ more ideas to improve living in emerging nations!
Sans such safeguards collapse of functioning democracies seems certain and a long dark age of marginal living will overwhelm our capacity to manage the human condition without unsatisfactory oppression!