We don't need examples of what's going on in the United States; nor "the poorer nations with far fewer resources who will always be much more vulnerable to the appeal and dominance of elites and authoritarianism".

We have it all here in good old Oz.

With large slabs of society still petrified by Covid scaremongering, many people have swallowed the propaganda and are afraid to leave their homes, to work, spend and travel. The fear-mongering Left and Right have much to answer for what they have done to our country.

We are living in a time where intolerance masquerades as tolerance and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group. Right here.

Australia is over-governed and plagued by micro-managing politicians who simply cannot face losing the trappings of power acquired during the pandemic.

Many Australians are hopelessly ignorant of important lessons from the totalitarian past. They remain entirely unaware that totalitarianism often emerges as a gradual process towards the consolidation of absolute power and control over society, which can easily spread without much of the population first noticing it and taking hold before it is too late.

Evil is often perpetrated by governments under the guise of ‘safety’ and ‘public health’. Furthermore, that totalitarian past has left for its posterity the now apparently forgotten warning that, in the name of ‘safety’ and ‘public health’ governments can implement the most atrocious perversities. Sound familiar?

On ignorant totalitarianism in Australia, former CCMO, Dr. Nick Coatsworth, has questioned the value of the muzzles/masks we are still struggling to breathe through in hot, humid Summer weather.

When we the poeple choose the candidates, as opposed to backroom power brokers and then vote for whom we please with optional preferences the order of the day? we might be able to claim we are a liberal democracy, even more so if it is one supported by a bill of rights And an incorruptable Federal ICAC!

Well I suppose that sums it up as wishful thinking and self delusion about what we claim to have as a bona fide liberal democracy with its stage managed (dirty deals done in the dead of night) compulsory voting?

Less than 15% belong to a political party from which all candidates are drawn. And that my friends is taxation without real representation, which in reality, here in this country and the land of the "free" is all smoke and mirrors!
Alan B.

It is not just that democracy has (inevitably) failed but that Western culture(such as it was) has inevitably failed too.

Humankind is like rubble in its present dark state, and it is effectively destroying the Divine Gift or creation (that is both the natural world and the biological integrity of their bodies too.

The modern everyman of consumer society is a propagandized individual, participating in a "culture" of illusions and, effectively, self-destructing.
At present, a "culture" of total war, a "culture" of death, is ruling, while the people are engrossed in self-destructing consumerism.

The human world has become a kind of insane sporting event in which people threaten one another and carry on in an insane manner.It is collective madness. Much/most of that madness is created and inflamed by both TV, and now even more so by social media. Everybody has become madly possessed by the most recent happenings in the verbal sound-of-fury-and-signifying-nothing cancel culture wars as demonstrated by the recent storm-in-a-teacup brouhaha re Joe Rogan.

The human world of nowtime is a lunatic asylum, a dark soap opera. That absurd soap opera controls the destiny and experience of the total world of human beings. - and that dark soap opera is, in its root-disposition, totally indifferent to human life, and to the world altogether.

The Real handling of business is not being done at the present time, or even suggested except in rare circles. And certainly not in the pages of Spectator Magazine.

Now, everybody is on the brink with everybody else. It is everywhere like that. The daily news IS that. Everyone's daily life has become something like an insane sporting event - that is played to the death. The human world of nowtime is like a colossal Reality-TV - a dreadful mini-series, a few weeks until death. The common world is a world of media created Reality-madness. Everyone is mad with Everyman now - mad with ego - everybody at war with everybody, to the death.

The proponents for Democracy will never accept a democratic system because it'd mean for them to toe the line as well !
As I have stated many times, Democracy is the worst kind of Dictatorship. A benevolent Dictator will always out-perform the hangers-on in a so-called democracy.
A true Democracy would be ideal but because people aren't ideal a true Democracy will never work.