Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the breakdown of authority rather than the exercise of authority. In comparison to a handful of dictators such as Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein who exercised their absolute power to kill hundreds of thousands, I found more and deadlier upheavals like the Time of Troubles [in 17th-century Russia], the Chinese Civil War [1926–37, 1945–49], and the Mexican Revolution [1910–20] where no one exercised enough control to stop the death of millions.3
One can think of democracy as a form of government that threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself. A good democratic government allows people to pursue their lives in safety, protected from the violence of anarchy, and in freedom, protected from the violence of tyranny. For that reason alone, democracy is a major contributor to human flourishing. But it’s not the only reason: democracies also have higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and genocides, healthier and better-educated citizens, and virtually no famines.4 If the world has become more democratic over time, that is progress.
In fact the world has become more democratic, though not in a steadily rising tide. The political scientist Samuel Huntington organized the history of democratization into three waves.5 The first swelled in the 19th century, when that great Enlightenment experiment, American constitutional democracy with its checks on government power, seemed to be working. The experiment, with local variations, was emulated by a number of countries, mainly in Western Europe, cresting at twenty-nine in 1922. The first wave was pushed back by the rise of fascism, and by 1942 had ebbed to just twelve countries. With the defeat of fascism in World War II, a second wave gathered force as colonies gained independence from their European overlords, pushing the number of recognized democracies up to thirty-six by 1962. Still, European democracies were sandwiched between Soviet-dominated dictatorships to the east and fascist dictatorships in Portugal and Spain to the southwest. And the second wave was soon pushed back by military juntas in Greece and Latin America, authoritarian regimes in Asia, and Communist takeovers in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.6 By the mid-1970s the prospects for democracy looked bleak. The West German chancellor Willy Brandt lamented that “Western Europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship.” The American senator and social scientist Daniel Patrick Moynihan agreed, writing that “liberal democracy on the American model increasingly tends to the condition of monarchy in the 19th century: a holdover form of government, one which persists in isolated or peculiar places here and there, and may even serve well enough for special circumstances, but which has simply no relevance to the future. It is where the world was, not where it is going.”7
Before the ink was dry on these lamentations, democratization’s third wave—more like a tsunami—erupted. Military and fascist governments fell in southern Europe (Greece in 1974, Spain in 1975, Portugal in 1976), Latin America (including Argentina in 1983, Brazil in 1985, and Chile in 1990), and Asia (including Taiwan and the Philippines around 1986, South Korea around 1987, and Indonesia in 1998). The Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, freeing the nations of Eastern Europe to establish democratic governments, and communism imploded in the Soviet Union in 1991, clearing space for Russia and most of the other republics to make the transition. Some African countries threw off their strongmen, and the last European colonies to gain independence, mostly in the Caribbean and Oceania, opted for democracy as their first form of government. In 1989 the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a famous essay in which he proposed that liberal democracy represented “the end of history,” not because nothing would ever happen again but because the world was coming to a consensus over the humanly best form of governance and no longer had to fight over it.8
