Name: Fareed's Take: People around the world are dissatisfied with democracy
Uploaded: 2025-12-26T16:58:36.000Z
Duration: 6 min 49 s
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If you watch the news these days and feel that beyond the daily chaos, something seems broken in our politics, you're not alone.

A recent Pew survey of 23 countries finds that a median of 58% of adults are dissatisfied with how their democracy works.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

In the US, more than 60% share that view.

In Italy and France, nearly 7 in 10 people still prefer democracy to autocracy.

But dissatisfaction and despair have become ubiquitous.

Now, when I bring this up with people of a certain age, they often recall the 1970s.

Then too, Western democracies looked exhausted.

In the US inflation, Vietnam and Watergate had eroded public confidence.

Samuel Huntington warned about the governability of democracy.

Daniel Bell saw capitalism corroding the virtues that sustained it.

Economic reform and technological dynamism restored faith.

Within a decade, communism collapsed and liberal democracy stood triumphant.

The crisis of the 1970s proved to be a prelude to renewal.

But today's malaise feels different and deeper.

Governments performed poorly, but people still believed in the system.

Today, America's central institutions, courts, media, universities, even elections are widely viewed as biased.

Rigged trust in government has fallen to about 20%.

Congressional approval often hovers in the teens.

The media is trusted by less than a third of Americans, down from nearly three quarters in the 1970s.

The issue is not competence, but cohesion.

Institutions once commanded respect because they seemed impersonal and rule bound.

In the first episode of Michael Lewis brilliant podcast against the Rules, he talked about how in sports, fans shout ref, you suck.

Even though officiating today is as accurate as ever.

The problem isn't performance, it's perception.

Once people decide the ref is biased, no amount of precision restores trust.

The same story plays out in law, journalism and politics.

When referees are opaque or distrusted, the entire contest feels illegitimate.

Lewis point explains why accountability alone doesn't fix democracy.

More transparency can make bias more visible, which feeds rather than cures cynicism.

This helps explain the peculiar appeal of Donald Trump.

He has abandoned the pretense of neutrality altogether.

As president, he acts personally, politically, even punitively.

If all institutions are biased, better an avowed partisan than a hypocrite claiming neutrality.

A 2023 study by Sung in Kim and Peter hall confirms this pattern.

When citizens perceive the system as unfair or biased, they shift reference from neutral process to direct personalized rule.

Leaders who present themselves as fighters rather than referees, who attack courts, media and bureaucracies gain credibility precisely because they reject the system's pretense of fairness.

Trump's rise also exposes a deeper divide between left and right populisms.

Kim and hall find that when people see unfairness as personal my job, my income, my future are unfair, they turn to right wing populace whose rhetoric frames their pain as betrayal by elites and outsiders.

When they see unfairness as social society treats others unfairly, they gravitate to left populace who promise things like redistribution.

In recent years, the shocks that most unsettled people deindustrialization, automation, migration, secularization generate a sense of personal rather than social unfairness.

Workers fear being replaced, not merely that others are poor.

That fear produces anger and fits naturally with the rights narrative against migrants about protection, borders and national revival.

In anxious societies, vengeance is the easier appeal.

Add to this a decades long campaign on the right to discredit America's basic institutions from bureaucracies to the press and trust has eroded just as intended.

The 1970s crisis ended when leaders set about making democracy deliver.

The people had doubted government competence but not its legitimacy.

Today's challenge is moral, not managerial.

Institutions still function, but they've lost their aura of fairness.

When citizens no longer trust the referees, they stop obeying the rules.

Every election becomes a civil war by other means.

We have entered democracy's post referee age, a world where institutions are disbelieved, impartiality mocked and citizens choose sides not by policy but identity.

Once people decided democracy was worth repairing, ours will end only when we decide it's worth believing again.

Fifty years ago, people doubted their governments.

The next democratic revival will not come from clever managers or technocratic reforms.

It'll come from a rediscovery of trust, the invisible rule that makes all others possible.

Unless we can believe again that the referee is trying to be fair, we will keep shouting ref, you suck at our own democracy.

And then wonder why the game no longer feels worth playing.

Go to CNN.com fareed for a link to my Washington Post column this week.