Daniel sent us this one and it's a big one. He's basically asking: how old is democracy as an institution really, and is it actually what people want? He points out that across the political spectrum, when groups lose elections, they often revert to anti-democratic tactics or refuse to accept the results. Then when they win, suddenly they're champions of the democratic process. His question is whether democracy is just the thing everyone's supposed to endorse in our era, the socially acceptable position, but maybe it's ill-fitting clothes nobody actually wants to wear. And if that's true, could we backslide completely into a world where rule by force becomes the norm again?
That is a genuinely uncomfortable question. And I think the discomfort is the point. Daniel's not asking whether democracy is good in theory. He's asking whether the revealed preferences of actual populations, and actual political actors, suggest it's something they'll fight for, or just something they'll perform.
And there's a tension here. We sneer at autocracies, and I think for good reason. Dictatorship has a body count that speaks for itself. But sneering doesn't answer the question of whether what we're defending is a thousand-year-old institution or a relatively recent experiment that could turn out to be fragile.
By the way, DeepSeek V four Pro is writing our script today. So if anything sounds unusually coherent, that's why.
I was going to say, I sound sharper than usual. Now I know it's not me.
Let's start with the age question, because I think most people get this wrong. When people say democracy is ancient, they're usually pointing to Athens. Fifth century B.And sure, Athenian democracy was real, but it was also radically different from anything we'd recognize today. It was direct democracy for a narrow slice of the population. Maybe thirty to fifty thousand citizens out of a population of several hundred thousand. Women excluded, slaves excluded, resident foreigners excluded. And it lasted, in its classical form, about two hundred years. Then it collapsed.
Then basically nothing for two thousand years. And this is the part that I think gets glossed over. Between the fall of Athenian democracy and the late eighteenth century, democracy as a governing system essentially vanished from the Earth. You had republics, you had some representative bodies, you had the Roman Republic which wasn't democratic in any mass-participation sense. But the idea that the population at large should choose its leaders through regular elections? That was not the operating system anywhere for the vast majority of recorded history.
When we talk about democracy being this ancient, established thing, we're doing a bit of a historical sleight of hand. We're taking one city-state experiment that ended two and a half millennia ago, and then a modern revival that's really only about two and a half centuries old, and we're connecting them as if there's a continuous tradition. There isn't.
Modern representative democracy, the kind with universal suffrage, secret ballots, peaceful transfers of power, constitutional constraints, that really starts in the late seventeen hundreds. The American experiment, the French Revolution, and then a very slow, very bloody expansion over the next two centuries. And here's the key point: even that expansion is mostly a post-World War Two phenomenon. When my grandparents were born, most of the world's population lived under some form of monarchy or empire. Democracy was the exception, not the rule.
If we're being honest about the timeline, what we think of as democracy is maybe two hundred and fifty years old in its earliest forms, and only became the dominant global system in the last seventy or eighty years. That's a blink in terms of human civilization.
It's not even dominant now in the way we might assume. I was looking at the V-Dem Institute data. Their most recent report shows that the share of the world's population living in autocracies has been climbing. As of their latest figures, something like seventy percent of the world's population lives in countries that are not liberal democracies.
That's the number that should make people pause. We talk about democracy as the default setting for enlightened societies, but the actual lived experience of most humans on Earth right now is not democratic governance. And that's not just China and Russia. That includes countries that hold elections but where the outcomes are heavily managed, where the judiciary isn't independent, where the press isn't free.
There's a distinction between electoral democracy and liberal democracy. Electoral democracy means you hold elections. Liberal democracy means you also have rule of law, independent courts, civil liberties, a free press, constraints on executive power. And the number of countries that qualify as full liberal democracies is actually quite small. Freedom House puts it at around eighty or so out of a hundred and ninety something countries. And that number has been declining for, what, seventeen consecutive years now?
Seventeen years of democratic backsliding. So Daniel's question about whether democracy is stable, whether it's something people actually want, it's not a hypothetical. We're living through a period where the trend line is moving away from democracy, not toward it.
That trend line matters because it challenges what I think was the dominant assumption after the Cold War. You remember the end of history thesis?
Nineteen eighty-nine, nineteen ninety. The idea that liberal democracy had won the argument, that it was the final form of human government, and that the rest of the world would gradually converge toward it.
For about fifteen years, that looked plausible. The third wave of democratization brought democratic transitions in Latin America, Eastern Europe, parts of Asia and Africa. But then something shifted. Probably around two thousand five, two thousand six, the trend lines started flattening and then reversing. You got democratic backsliding in Hungary, in Poland, in Turkey, in Venezuela. You got the Arab Spring which raised hopes and then mostly crushed them. You got democratic erosion happening not through coups, but through elected leaders gradually dismantling checks and balances.
That's the new playbook, right? The old model of authoritarianism was the military coup, the junta, the strongman in a uniform seizing the television station. The new model is much more subtle. You win an election, and then you use your democratic mandate to hollow out the institutions that might constrain you. You attack the press, you pack the courts, you rewrite the electoral rules to favor incumbents, you delegitimize civil society. And you do all of it while insisting you're the true voice of the people.
There's a term for this now. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way developed this concept. These are regimes where elections happen, they're contested, the opposition can participate, but the playing field is so tilted that incumbents almost never lose. And if they do lose, they often don't accept the result.
That gets us to the heart of Daniel's question. When people lose elections, do they actually accept the democratic process? Or do they just accept outcomes they like and reject outcomes they don't?
There's good survey data on this. Pew Research Center has been tracking public attitudes toward democracy globally. And the numbers are troubling. In a lot of countries, support for representative democracy is declining, especially among younger people. There was a widely cited study a few years back that found that only about thirty percent of American millennials said it was essential to live in a democracy. For people born in the nineteen thirties and forties, that number was over seventy percent.
That generational divide is alarming. It suggests that the people who remember the alternative, who lived through fascism or communism or the threat of them, they value democracy because they know what the absence of it looks like. But for people born after the Cold War, democracy is just the water they swim in, and they're more likely to notice its frustrations than its protections.
There's another layer to this. The data also shows that people's support for democracy is highly conditional on whether their side is winning. There's a concept called winner's consent and loser's consent. The idea is that for democracy to function, the losers of an election have to accept the result and wait for the next election. But what we're seeing increasingly is that losers don't consent. They claim fraud, they claim the system is rigged, they claim the election was stolen. And that's true across the political spectrum.
January sixth was the most dramatic example in recent American history. But it's not unique. You saw similar dynamics in Brazil after Bolsonaro lost. The pattern is: when I win, the system worked. When I lose, the system was corrupted.
That's exactly Daniel's point. If people across the board pay lip service to democracy but resent it when it goes against them, is democracy actually what they want, or is it just the performative position you have to take in polite society?
Let me push on that a bit. Because I think there's a distinction between what people say in surveys and what they'd actually do if democracy were threatened. It's one thing to tell a pollster you're frustrated with democracy. It's another thing to actively support a coup. The question is: when push comes to shove, do people mobilize to defend democratic institutions, or do they shrug?
The evidence is mixed, and I think it depends heavily on context. In South Korea recently, when the president attempted to declare martial law, you saw massive public mobilization against it. The National Assembly voted it down within hours, and the public was out in the streets. That's an example of democratic resilience. But in Hungary, Viktor Orban has been systematically dismantling democratic institutions for over a decade, and while there's opposition, there hasn't been the kind of mass mobilization that reverses the trend. They get used to the new normal.
That's the chilling part. The boiling frog problem. Democratic erosion happens gradually enough that each individual step doesn't feel like the moment to take to the streets. And by the time the cumulative damage is obvious, the capacity to resist has been hollowed out.
This connects to another dimension of Daniel's question. The historical depth of democracy. Because if democracy is only a couple of centuries old in its modern form, and if it's already showing signs of fragility, maybe the real question is whether it's a stable equilibrium at all, or just a transitional phase between older forms of authoritarianism and whatever comes next.
That's the post-democratic future question. And I think to answer it, we need to ask what democracy is actually doing for people. What's the value proposition? Because if democracy is just a procedure for selecting leaders, then it's competing with other procedures that might be more efficient or more decisive. The case for democracy has to be that it delivers something autocracies don't.
Historically, the case has been twofold. One, democracies don't go to war with each other. The democratic peace theory, which has held up reasonably well empirically. Two, democracies tend to be more prosperous over the long run. They protect property rights, they allow innovation, they correct policy mistakes through electoral feedback. But both of those claims have been challenged recently.
The democratic peace theory is interesting. It's true that established democracies rarely fight each other. But the mechanism might not be democracy itself. It might be that democracies tend to be wealthy, and wealthy countries don't fight each other. Or it might be that democracies tend to be allied with each other through institutions like NATO. The causal arrow isn't clear.
On the prosperity point, China's economic rise complicates the narrative. Here's a country that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty under an authoritarian system. It's not a liberal democracy, it doesn't hold competitive elections, and yet it's delivered enormous material gains for its population. If the argument for democracy is that it produces better economic outcomes, China is a massive counterexample.
Although the counter-counterargument is that China's growth happened during a period of economic liberalization, and that its political system may eventually hit a ceiling because it can't process feedback and correct course the way democracies can. We don't know yet. The experiment is still running.
But for a lot of people around the world, the Chinese model looks attractive because it delivers stability and rising living standards without the messiness of democratic politics. And that's the competition. It's not democracy versus Soviet-style communism anymore. It's democracy versus state-led authoritarian capitalism. And that's a much more appealing competitor.
Let me try to synthesize what we're saying. Democracy as a modern institution is roughly two hundred and fifty years old, and in its current global form, maybe seventy or eighty years old. It's not the ancient, deeply rooted system we sometimes imagine. Support for it is declining, especially among younger generations. When people's preferred parties lose, they often reject the legitimacy of the process. And there are credible alternative models out there that are delivering results for their populations. That sounds like a recipe for backsliding.
But I want to push back on the idea that this means democracy is doomed or that it's just a fiction nobody wants. Because I think that oversimplifies what's happening.
Okay, make the case for democracy.
First, I think there's a difference between dissatisfaction with democratic performance and rejection of democratic principles. When people say they're frustrated with democracy, what they often mean is they're frustrated with the specific outcomes their democracy is producing. They're frustrated with polarization, with gridlock, with unresponsive elites, with economic inequality. Those are real problems, but they're problems of implementation, not problems with the fundamental idea that people should have a say in how they're governed.
That's a distinction without a difference if the implementation problems get bad enough. If democracy consistently fails to deliver, people will look for alternatives regardless of how they feel about the abstract principle.
That's the risk, absolutely. But here's the second point. When we look at the places where democracy has backslid, it's rarely because the population actively chose authoritarianism. It's usually because a particular leader or party exploited polarization and institutional weaknesses to accumulate power, and the opposition wasn't strong enough to stop them. It's not a popular demand for dictatorship. It's a failure of democratic defenses.
That's a more hopeful framing, actually. It suggests the problem isn't that people don't want democracy. It's that democracies have weak immune systems, and they're vulnerable to pathogens that know how to exploit those weaknesses.
And the immune system metaphor is useful because it suggests that the solution is strengthening institutions, not abandoning the patient. Things like independent election administration, robust judicial review, strong press freedoms, civic education. These are the antibodies. And in countries that have them, democratic backsliding is much harder.
This is where we get into the circular problem. To strengthen democratic institutions, you need political will. But if the political system is already captured by actors who benefit from weak institutions, where does the will come from?
That's the trap. And Hungary is the canonical example. Once Orban had a supermajority, he could rewrite the constitution, redraw electoral districts, capture the media, and make it nearly impossible for the opposition to compete. At that point, the democratic immune system had already failed. The question is whether there are earlier intervention points where backsliding can be stopped before it becomes irreversible.
That's where public opinion actually matters. Because if the public is willing to mobilize at those early stages, you can stop the slide. The problem is that early-stage democratic erosion doesn't look like a crisis. It looks like a series of technical legal changes, each of which can be justified on its own terms. By the time it looks like a crisis, it's often too late.
There's a political scientist named Juan Linz who wrote about this decades ago. He identified what he called the loyal opposition, the semi-loyal opposition, and the disloyal opposition. A loyal opposition opposes the government but accepts the legitimacy of the democratic system. A disloyal opposition wants to overthrow the system entirely. But the dangerous category is the semi-loyal opposition, which pays lip service to democracy while being willing to undermine it when it serves their interests. And Linz argued that democracies break down when semi-loyal actors become dominant and loyal actors don't recognize the threat until it's too late.
That's exactly the dynamic Daniel is describing, right? People who trumpet being democratically elected when they win, but who revert to anti-democratic tactics when they lose. That's semi-loyalty in a nutshell. And the question is whether semi-loyalty is the norm, and genuine loyalty to democratic principles is the exception.
I think about this in terms of what you might call democratic depth. A country doesn't just have democratic institutions. It has a democratic culture, a set of norms and expectations that make those institutions work. Things like conceding elections, respecting judicial rulings, not using state power to punish political opponents. Those aren't laws, mostly. They're norms. And norms are fragile.
Norms are fragile because they depend on people believing that everyone else will follow them. Once you get a few high-profile norm violations that go unpunished, the whole equilibrium can unravel. It's a classic collective action problem. I'll respect the norms as long as I think you will. But if I think you're going to defect, I'd be a sucker not to defect first.
This is where I think the historical perspective is actually somewhat encouraging. Because democratic norms have collapsed before, and they've been rebuilt. The nineteen thirties were a disaster for democracy. Germany, Italy, Spain, much of Eastern Europe, all fell to authoritarianism. But after World War Two, democracy came back stronger in much of Europe, with better institutional safeguards. The lesson isn't that democracy is doomed. It's that democracy requires active maintenance and periodic renewal.
The nineteen thirties also show how quickly it can all fall apart. The Weimar Republic was a functioning democracy with a sophisticated constitution. It collapsed in less than three years once the Nazis gained power. The institutions weren't enough. The norms weren't enough. The public didn't rise up to defend democracy because a large enough share of the public had stopped believing in it.
That's the nightmare scenario. And it's why I think Daniel's question is so important. If democracy is just a veneer, if most people are semi-loyal at best, then we're always one severe crisis away from collapse. A deep enough recession, a big enough security threat, a charismatic enough demagogue, and the whole thing could come apart.
Let me ask you directly. Is democracy the ill-fitting clothes nobody wants to wear? Is it a fiction we collectively maintain because it's socially unacceptable to say otherwise?
I don't think so. But I think it's more fragile than we'd like to believe, and I think the commitment to it is shallower than we'd hope. Here's how I'd put it. I think most people want the benefits of democracy. They want freedom of speech, they want to be able to choose their leaders, they want protection from arbitrary state power. What they don't necessarily want is the discipline that democracy requires. They don't want to lose elections. They don't want to compromise. They don't want to accept outcomes they disagree with. They want democracy for their side, not democracy as a neutral procedure.
That's a very honest formulation. People want the rights without the responsibilities. They want the freedom without the frustration. And that's not unique to democracy. It's a general human tendency. But in most areas of life, we accept that you can't have the benefits without the costs. The question is whether we can build enough support for the costs of democracy to sustain it through difficult periods.
That's where I think leadership matters enormously. Democratic leaders have a responsibility to model democratic norms, to concede elections gracefully, to respect institutional constraints even when they're inconvenient. When leaders treat democracy as a weapon to wield against their opponents rather than a framework to govern within, they're teaching their supporters that democracy is just a tool. And tools get discarded when they stop being useful.
This connects to something I've been thinking about. We tend to talk about democratic backsliding as a top-down phenomenon. Elites dismantle institutions, and the public goes along. But there's also a bottom-up dimension. If the public is deeply polarized, if people see their political opponents as existential threats rather than legitimate rivals, then they'll support anti-democratic measures because they think the alternative is worse. They'll accept a strongman who promises to crush their enemies because they've convinced themselves that losing an election means the end of the country.
That's affective polarization. It's not just that people disagree on policy. It's that they actively dislike and distrust the other side. And when that gets intense enough, democratic norms start to feel like luxuries you can't afford. If you believe the other party is going to destroy the country, why would you accept an election result that puts them in power? You'd see it as your duty to resist by any means necessary.
Social media accelerates this. It creates information ecosystems where people never encounter the other side's perspective except in its most caricatured form. It rewards outrage and contempt. It makes compromise feel like betrayal. I'm not saying social media caused democratic backsliding, but it's definitely an accelerant.
There's good research on this. The polarization dynamic has been intensifying in pretty much every advanced democracy over the last two decades, and it correlates strongly with the rise of algorithmically driven social media. Causation is hard to prove, but the correlation is striking.
Where does this leave us? Daniel asked whether we could backslide completely toward a post-democratic world where rule by force becomes the norm again. Is that plausible?
I think it's plausible in specific countries or regions. We're already seeing it in some places. But globally, I think the picture is more complicated. Democracy is still the aspirational default for a lot of the world. When people protest, they're usually protesting for more democracy, not less. The Arab Spring, the Hong Kong protests, the Belarus protests, the Iranian protests, these are people demanding democratic rights, not rejecting them.
That's an important counterpoint. The demand for democracy hasn't gone away. In fact, in the most authoritarian countries, people risk their lives for it. That suggests there is something deep in human nature that wants a say in how they're governed. The problem isn't that people don't want democracy. It's that sustaining it requires more than wanting it.
Wanting democracy is easy. Doing democracy is hard. It requires institutional design, norm maintenance, civic education, and a certain level of trust and social cohesion. And those things can erode even while the desire for democracy remains.
Let me try a different angle. One of the things Daniel's question implies is that democracy might be a historical anomaly, a brief experiment that's already running out of steam. But what if we've got the timeline wrong in the other direction? What if democracy isn't old or new, but actually the natural default that keeps reemerging whenever conditions allow?
That's an interesting framing. You're suggesting that the two-thousand-year gap between Athens and the modern era wasn't because people didn't want democracy, but because the material and technological conditions didn't support it?
I'm not making a strong claim here, but think about it. For most of human history, most people lived in subsistence agriculture. They were illiterate, they had no access to information beyond their village, and they were dependent on local elites for protection and resources. Mass democracy requires a certain level of development. It requires literacy, it requires communication infrastructure, it requires a middle class, it requires some sense of national identity beyond local or tribal loyalties. Those conditions didn't exist for most of human history. When they started to emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, democracy started to emerge too.
That's essentially the modernization theory of democracy. Economic development creates a middle class, the middle class demands political rights, and democracy follows. It was the dominant theory in political science for decades. It fell out of favor because it's too deterministic and because there are plenty of wealthy countries that aren't democratic. But as a broad historical pattern, there's something to it.
If that's right, then the question isn't whether democracy is a fiction nobody wants. It's whether the conditions that support democracy are stable or eroding. If democracy depends on a broad middle class, what happens when inequality hollows out the middle class? If democracy depends on shared information, what happens when the information environment fragments into non-overlapping realities?
Those are exactly the right questions. And I think the answers are worrying. The economic trends in most advanced democracies over the last forty years have been toward greater inequality, declining social mobility, and the hollowing out of middle-class jobs. The information trends have been toward fragmentation, polarization, and declining trust in institutions. If democracy depends on those foundations, and the foundations are cracking, then we should expect democratic performance to deteriorate.
That deterioration then feeds on itself. As democracy performs worse, trust declines further, polarization intensifies, and the system becomes even more dysfunctional. It's a doom loop.
Doom loops can be broken. That's the thing. The nineteen thirties looked like the end of democracy, and then democracy came roaring back. The nineteen seventies looked like a period of democratic decline, with military coups in Latin America and authoritarianism spreading, and then the third wave of democratization happened. These things aren't linear.
What broke the cycle in those cases?
In the nineteen forties, it was the defeat of fascism in World War Two and the subsequent construction of a new international order with democracy at its core. In the nineteen eighties and nineties, it was a combination of economic crisis in authoritarian regimes, the end of the Cold War, and active democracy promotion by the United States and Europe. Different mechanisms, but in both cases, democracy rebounded because the alternative systems failed catastrophically.
That might be the strongest argument for democratic resilience. Autocracy has its own failure modes, and they tend to be spectacular. Democracies fail slowly and messily. Autocracies fail suddenly and violently. When they fail, people remember why democracy was worth having in the first place.
China is the interesting test case here. If China can sustain its economic growth and political stability for another generation without democratizing, it fundamentally challenges that narrative. It suggests that a competent authoritarian system can avoid the catastrophic failures that discredited earlier autocracies. And that would be a new thing in world history.
I'm skeptical, but I'll admit my skepticism might be wishful thinking. The historical track record of authoritarian systems is that they eventually make catastrophic mistakes because there's no feedback mechanism to correct course. A single bad leader can drive the country off a cliff. Democracies have guardrails. They're frustrating and slow, but they usually avoid the worst outcomes. The question is whether China has found a way to institutionalize good governance without democracy. If they have, that's a game changer.
The Chinese system isn't one-man rule in the traditional sense. It's a massive party bureaucracy with internal selection mechanisms and performance metrics. It's not democratic, but it's not arbitrary personal rule either. The question is whether that system can survive a leadership transition, an economic crisis, or a major policy failure. We don't know because it hasn't been tested in that way yet.
Let me bring this back to Daniel's core question. Is democracy the ill-fitting clothes nobody wants to wear? I think the answer is no, but with a significant caveat. People want democracy in the abstract. They want the rights and freedoms it provides. They want to be able to throw the bums out when they're unhappy. But they don't necessarily want the discipline of accepting outcomes they dislike, and they may not be willing to defend democratic institutions when those institutions are under threat from their own side.
I'd put it slightly differently. I think democracy is a hard-won achievement that requires constant maintenance, and we're in a period where the maintenance has been neglected. The buildings are still standing, but the foundation is cracking, and we're arguing about the paint color while the structural engineers are sounding alarms.
That's a very Herman Poppleberry metaphor. Buildings and structural engineers.
You know me. I like a good infrastructure analogy.
The point is that the crisis of democracy isn't that people have rejected it. It's that they've taken it for granted. They assume the institutions will hold no matter what, so they feel free to treat politics as a zero-sum war where the only thing that matters is winning. And if enough people behave that way for long enough, the institutions won't hold.
There's a concept in political science called democratic recession versus democratic breakdown. A recession is a period of decline where democracies become less liberal, less competitive, less rights-protecting, but they don't necessarily collapse entirely. A breakdown is when the system fails completely and is replaced by authoritarianism. I think we're in a democratic recession globally, but I don't think breakdown is inevitable. It's a risk, not a certainty.
The distinction matters because it affects how we respond. If breakdown is inevitable, you might as well just try to protect yourself and your family. If it's a risk but not a certainty, then there are things to be done. Strengthen institutions, defend norms, build cross-partisan coalitions for democratic reform, invest in civic education, regulate the information environment in ways that reduce polarization without censoring dissent.
That last one is the hardest. How do you reduce polarization without restricting speech? I don't think anyone has a good answer to that. The platforms have tried various things and mostly made it worse. Government regulation raises obvious First Amendment concerns, at least in the American context. It's a hard problem.
Maybe the answer isn't top-down at all. Maybe it's bottom-up. People choosing to engage differently. Choosing to consume different media. Choosing to talk to people they disagree with. Choosing to value democratic norms over partisan victory. That sounds naive, I know. But democratic culture is ultimately made up of millions of individual choices. Institutions can shape those choices, but they can't replace them.
I don't think that's naive. I think it's incomplete, but not naive. And they can change. The question is whether they can change fast enough to outrun the institutional erosion that's already underway.
To summarize for Daniel, because I think we've covered a lot of ground. Democracy as a modern institution is about two hundred and fifty years old, and in its current global form, maybe seventy to eighty years. It's not ancient, and it's not the default human condition. Support for it is declining, and many people's commitment to it is conditional on their side winning. Democratic backsliding is real and accelerating. But people haven't stopped wanting democracy. The desire for self-governance keeps surfacing even under the most repressive regimes. The crisis isn't that democracy is unwanted. It's that it's hard to sustain, and we've been coasting on inherited institutional capital without replenishing it.
That's about right. And I'd add one more thing. The historical pattern suggests that democracy tends to rebound after crises, not because it's inevitable, but because the alternatives eventually discredit themselves. The question is whether that pattern holds, or whether we're entering new territory where competent authoritarianism can deliver enough of what people want to keep them satisfied without the messiness of democratic politics. We don't know the answer to that yet.
We don't. And that uncertainty is itself part of the democratic condition. Democracy means living with the fact that the future is open, that there are no guarantees, that things could go badly wrong. That's scary. But it's also what makes it worth defending.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The average cumulus cloud weighs approximately one point one million pounds, roughly the same as one hundred elephants floating above your head at any given moment.
I'm going to think about that every time I look up now.
One hundred elephants. That's not going to keep me up at night or anything.
Where does this leave us? I think the open question is whether the current democratic recession is a cyclical downturn or the beginning of a structural shift. And the answer probably depends on choices that haven't been made yet. By leaders, by citizens, by the people listening to this podcast. Democracy isn't a machine that runs itself. It's a practice that has to be renewed. And we're in a moment where that renewal is both urgently needed and uncertain.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping this show running, and thanks to Daniel for sending in a prompt that forced us to think hard about uncomfortable questions. This has been My Weird Prompts. You can find every episode, all two thousand five hundred and thirty something of them, at myweirdprompts.If you enjoyed this, leave us a review wherever you listen. It helps other people find the show.
I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. We'll be back with another one soon.
