My Take | Crisis of democracy is inevitable in ‘post-consensus’ world
Even little Hong Kong has been condemned to endless ‘partisan political combat that will pervade every aspect of life’ – at least until the tanks roll in
You live long enough, you see history repeating itself.
In the mid-1970s, Samuel Huntington, late author of the famous if controversial The Clash of Civilisations, co-wrote an influential report on the crisis of democracy in the United States, Europe and Japan. Its diagnosis of the political ills plaguing American society was “an excess of democracy”.
The 1960s youthful rebellion and counter-culture, the authors concluded, had led to a profound and widespread distrust and discrediting of “central government institutions”, and that for political stability and governance to be re-established, the “prestige and authority” of such institutions had to be restored.