Democracy’s Evanescence

When Ben Franklin emerged from our constitutional convention, an anonymous woman asked him what form of government our Founders had devised. “A Republic, Ma’am, if you can keep it,” Franklin famously replied.

It’s now increasingly clear that we cannot. If present trends continue, our Republic will not last through Trump’s second term. Nor will the Western Enlightenment, whose four pillars are Reason, Science, Democracy and Equality. Though subjects of frequent verbal genuflection, these pillars no longer serve as practical supports of US government. They lie cracked and broken in the sands of history.

All four are but abstract ideas. If the truth be told, they are tenuous. They require intelligence and often robust education to appreciate fully. They require diligence, self-discipline and self-restraint to remain standing.

Next to the hopes, fears, dreams, lusts, rages, loyalties, fealties, jealousies and desires of daily life, they are but shadows. Next to our evolution from small tribes of about thirty individuals, each ruled absolutely by an alpha-male ape, they are a minor polish on our species’ DNA.

The truth of our species lies in history. Our written records go back only five or six millennia. During all that time, there have been only a handful of democracies lasting even a century: Greece’s tiny city-states (Athens and Sparta), Rome, the British Empire, and the US.

For years I’ve been thinking how to quantify this point in terms of time elapsed and people affected. Suppose we could integrate (in the sense of calculus) the number of people, multiplied by the time each lived under any democracy, over the course of recorded history, and divide the result by the same integral over everyone’s lifetime (regardless of type of government). Wouldn’t we then have a rough measure, weighted by population and time, of how prominent in human history democracy has been?

Of course we can’t do that. We don’t have anything like the necessary data. But we can make a rough estimate simply but noting that the democracies we all study in history have been few, limited in their shares of global population, and short lived.

Take the Greek city-states, for example. The only reason we know of them at all was that their own historians and “philosophers” left copious and notable written records. But their populations were tiny (on a global scale), and their lifetimes—a few centuries at most—so short that we can safely neglect them.

For all of human history until 1776, Rome and the Brits were the biggies. In recent times, the US and the EU are worthy of note, if only because of their relatively large populations. Let’s do some arithmetic.

Rome’s recorded democracy lasted from some time in the middle of the millennium before Christ until Julius Caesar’s civil wars turned it into an empire. Let’s be generous and give it 700 years. As for population, Rome’s democracy at its height affected much of what is now Europe and part of Africa, but omitted all of Asia and the natives of the Americas. Probably one-quarter of the Earth’s people is a fair estimate. So Rome rates 1/4 x 700 = 175 human-population years.

As far as we know, Britain’s democracy was/is longer lived, 810 years to date, if you count from the first Magna Carta in 1215. But Britain’s relative population was and is much smaller than Rome’s. And I don’t think it’s fair to include its huge colonies, like India, which were mostly ruled by viceroys and had no vote in Parliament. So, as a very rough (and generous!) estimate, let’s take Britain’s 2024 population of 69 million, divided by the 2024 global population of 8.2 billion, or 0.008. Thus Britain’s contribution to history-weighted global democracy is 810 x .008 = 6.8 human-population years.

For the US, our short life reduces our numerical impact. If we take the 249 years since our 1776 Independence (NOT our 1791 Constitution), and multiply by our current share of the 2024 global population of 8.2 billion, we get 249 x 341 / 8,200 =10.4 human-population years.

As for the EU, let’s be generous to democracy and consider all of it, with a 2024 population of 449.2 million people, to have been democratic since the end of WWII, and let’s add in Japan’s 2024 population of 123.8 million people, for a total of 573 million people. That adds 80 x 573 / 8,200 = 5.6 human-population years.

Doing the calculation this way, based on fractions of total human population rather than absolute numbers, simplifies the analysis by eliminating the complicating factor of the explosion of the global human population over the last few centuries, since the discovery of Science and real medicine. What we get is the following tally in terms of human-population years:

(Ancient) Rome’s democracy	175.0
The Brits	6.8
US	10.4
The postwar EU	5.6
TOTAL	197.8

Rounding human recorded history up to six millennia is fair, because the Jewish calendar now stands at 5785 and the Chinese have even older records. If we accept that working estimate, the population-weighted incidence of democracy in human history is approximately so:

Incidence of Democracy = 197.8 / 6000 = 3.2%

Two conclusions follow from this rough but meaningful calculation. First, those of us who’ve lived most of our lives in the EU, Japan, US and other scattered modern democracies have been, on an historical basis, extremely lucky. Second, the chances of that luck continuing for the next two generations are—at least on an historical basis—slim.

The next essay in this series will explore what most of our youth and next generations can expect, and why. Will monarchy, Orwellian Chinese-style dictatorship, or a new kind of feudalism be their lot?


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