Democracy is the default mode

Two heritages: the autocratic and the egalitarian. We have them both, and we can switch between them, but the default mode is probably egalitarian (i.e. democratic), because that’s the way we spent most of our human past.

Leaving actual killers aside, the ‘alpha male’ model of leadership is still successful in many countries that are formally democratic: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and Viktor Orban in Hungary. Indeed even genuine democracies of long standing can be seduced by a ‘great’ leader, like De Gaulle in France. No, I don’t know where Donald Trump fits in this Pantheon, writes Gwynne Dyer. Photographs courtesy of Commons Wikimedia and Flickr

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

July 28, 2021

LONDON, U.K.—At first I was going to write about the ‘Arab Problem,' because there is not a single functioning democracy in the Arab world. The presidential coup in Tunisia has probably ended democracy in the one country that actually achieved it during the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2010-11. Egypt b...

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