
The Crisis of Democracy [pdf] - 082349872349872
http://www.trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf
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082349872349872
The setting is 1975, but the ideas are familiar:

"There has been a substantial relative decline in American military and
economic power, and a major absolute decline in American willingness to assume
the burdens of leadership. And most recently, the temporary slowdown in
economic growth has threatened the expectations created by previous growth,
while still leaving existent the "postbourgeois" values which it engendered
among the youth and intellectuals."

"The system becomes one of anomic democracy, in which democratic politics
becomes more an arena for the assertion of conflicting interests than a
process for the building of common purposes."

I've just skimmed it so far, and found distasteful their general theme that
the "crisis" is that there was too much of it, and the kids would not "Respect
Mah Authoritah". However, they did include a dissent, which also brings up
many themes that are still timely in 2020:

Appendix I.B "Excerpts of remarks by Ralf Dahrendorf on the governability
study"

"Is growth presumably growth of a gross national product? Is this the only
kind of expansion of human life chances which we can think of in free
societies?"

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seagullz
This seems to be a thoughtfully critical take on it:

... This general "crisis of democracy," the commission held, resulted from the
efforts of previously marginalized sectors of the population to organize and
press their demands, thereby creating an overload that prevents the democratic
process from functioning properly. In earlier times, "Truman had been able to
govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall
Street lawyers and bankers," so the American rapporteur, Samuel Huntington of
Harvard University, reflected. In that period there was no crisis of
democracy, but in the 1960s, the crisis developed and reached serious
proportions. The study therefore urged more "moderation in democracy" to
mitigate the excess of democracy and overcome the crisis. ...

The Trilateral Commission study reflects the perceptions and values of liberal
elites from the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the leading
figures of the Carter administration. On the right, the perception is that
democracy is threatened by the organizing efforts of those called the "special
interests," a concept of contemporary political rhetoric that refers to
workers, farmers, women, youth, the elderly, the handicapped, ethnic
minorities, and so on-in short, the general population. In the U.S.
presidential campaigns of the 1980s, the Democrats were accused of being the
instrument of these special interests and thus undermining "the national
interest," tacitly assumed to be represented by the one sector notably omitted
from the list of special interests: corporations, financial institutions, and
other business elites.

[http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Necessary_Illusion...](http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Necessary_Illusions.html)

