It appears to me madness to base all our political efforts upon the faint hope that we shall be successful in obtaining excellent, or even competent, rulers.
Politicians end up acting like party soldiers instead of representatives of the people. Their loyalty goes to party machines, lobby groups, and donors. Honest or independent politicians hardly stand a chance. The system rewards opportunism and “moral flexibility.”
The real benefit of democracy (or whatever approximates this idea) is not about the chosing of tyrants for 4-6 years but something much more important: freedom of speech and protest. That's feedback in almost real time and allows to curb excesses, corruption and thus keep a semblance of social cohesion and a system that mostly works.
Ditctatorships are blind and deaf and thus can't even be a Reich of a Thousand Years: it will always collapse within a generation or so, typically leaving a smoking ruin as legacy. That's bad.
And it's bad that our "democracies" (not democratic enough any of them) have been going down the authoritarian road of curbing free speech, the right of protest, etc. That makes them not just less democratic but also much weaker.
That's a valid point. Though, one can always have the case of a “benevolent tyrant” - a non-democratic ruler who'd allow free speech and criticism, at least for some while. The original problem remains, though: when this benevolent tyrant turns “less benevolent”, how do we remove him from power? You cannot remove government solely through free speech, especially when free speech becomes prohibited. So, in case of a tyrant it's always violentce and civil strife. Democracy, however, within the Popperian model, offers the least destructive method.
Overall, those two issues are intimately related: you cannot have peaceful removal of government without democracy, and then again you cannot have democracy without free speech.
As to the lack of feedback I fully agree. Indeed, Popper made that very point, discussing the fragility of tyranny: errors accumulate, yet addressing them freely is prohibited, and so they snowball and finally crash the system. Today, just as you rightly mentioned, criticism is seen as a danger “to our democracy.” This can only mean the system will eventually buckle and break.
Indeed but there's a limit to it. I guess that the best example would be contemporary China, right? But just ask DeepSeek about Xi Jinping and you get no answer, never mind if you ask about the taboo-est subject in the PRC: the Tiananmen uprising of 1989. If you can't criticize the leaders or major historical developments that shaped the country... the feedback you'll get will be insufficient.
As for power change, there are always ways. From soft coups to profound revolutions, and not even "democracies" are impervious to them, because they are states within a deeper socio-economical order (capitalist regimes typically, in which capitalism, property and such cannot ever be really challenged). Engels for example advocated for democratic buildup of the socialist or communist alternative as revolutionary opposition, yet he understood that when this movement achieved hegemony, reached a majority, it would trigger a brutal violent reaction by the powers-that-be, "democratic" rule would be unseated and replaced by dictatorships (what has actually happened over and over, fascism was not a weird accident: it was systematically implemented in most of Europe to fight socialism in the wake of 1917), he just expected (wrongly?) that the socialist movement would be strong enough to defeat such reaction in the streets (what also happened to some extent here and there but not often enough, and almost invariably not resolutely enough).
My greatest disagreement with Popper is that rather than democracy, what he advocates is for Capitalism, making both conceps equivalent in a discourse type that would be exploited by the likes of Reagan. In reality true democracy can only exist where all people have similar economic power, i.e. in true communism. That's of course something that Leninists don't want to understand.
Yes, the Tiananmen uprising case is quite symbolic of such lacklustre censorship, which only asseverates the problem... Then again, I personally don't know how that event is depicted in Chinese history books. So, maybe it is addressed somehow? In any case, Popper explicitly contrasted open societies (with error-correction via peaceful dismissal) against closed ones that rely on force or dogma to maintain power, with a stern warning about the 'shelf-life' of the latter.
Now, once again yes, non-democracies and even flawed democracies can be overthrown violently. Then again, Popper’s point was never that democracy is immune to upheaval. It is that democracy is the only system designed to make such violence unnecessary for removing bad or incompetent rulers. Peaceful transitions, as we can see by examining recent history, have been the norm in functioning democracies. Non-democracies routinely require bloodshed. The problem is that this is currently demolished, subverted through an installation of technocratic-autocratic rule.
Concerning your remark about Popper equating democracy with capitalism, here I have to strongly disagree. Popper did not equate democracy with capitalism. Nor did he advocate unrestrained markets as the essence of the open society. In fact, he explicitly acknowledged the “injustice and inhumanity” of laissez-faire capitalism, warned against concentrated economic power, and called for state “protectionism” and “economic interventionism” - the staples of social-democracy, as opposed to Reaganite nonsense. Popper supported piecemeal reforms to tame markets while preserving individual freedom and democratic accountability.
Then again, your claim that “true democracy can only exist where all people have similar economic power, i.e., in true communism” is the very historicist utopianism Popper spent his career warning people against. Historical communist regimes (USSR, China, Cuba, etc.) have uniformly failed Popper’s litmus test: one-party rule with no peaceful dismissal mechanism, often enforced by violence. Yes, certainly, Engels and Marx hoped democratic majorities could lead to socialism, but they hoped wrong. The actual outcome in Leninist states was dictatorship, and that is precisely what Popper predicted from closed, historicist systems that claim infallible knowledge of history’s endpoint.
“Equal economic power” has never translated into political equality or the ability to remove rulers without violence. Why? Because, in my view, this is an ontological impossibility: individuals are different, no two individual can possess perfectly equal economic power, just as two individuals cannot possess equal mental, or physical power. There's always some difference. What's needed is a careful system of checks and balances, so that those differences in power do not become sources of oppression. Yet "perfect equality", as in Marxian systems, is invariably dangerous utopianism.
P.S. Fascism did arise partly as an anti-communist force in the wake of 1917 as business elites in Italy and Germany feared Bolshevik-style revolution, funding Mussolini and early Nazis. But the picture is more complex: fascism was also anti-liberal, nationalist, and corporatist, rejecting both capitalism and socialism in favour of the totalitarian state. It was certainly not “systematically implemented in most of Europe” solely to crush socialism, that's simply left-wing mythology. Real-world authoritarians had multiple causes: economic collapse, Versailles humiliation, cultural backlash, etc.
You cannot democratically change a capitalist regime. Even in such a more real democracy such as Switzerland, where workers doubled their pay (minimum salary) through referendum just a few years ago, expropriating the rich is something unthinkable and would almost certainly need of violent conflict at least to some extent. In other less democratic "democracies", ruled de facto by oligarchic cliques and their carefully selected deep state managers, that's not "almost certain" it is certain beyond any doubt.
As Marx would put it: "democracy" (universal suffrage, freedoms, etc.) is necessary but not sufficient. For true democracy socio-economic equality is necessary and that's well beyond what Popper could ever consider in his sub-oligarchist mindset. And that's why there was a Cold War in his day, even if those were the days the greatest generosity of the capitalist regime (precisely because they had to compete with the USSR in terms of social development and not just "freedom").
Popper was never a communist or socialist, a Keynesian at best. And Keynes was all about to "save Capitalism from itself", not to overcome Capitalism and create a better system.
You state that “even in such a more real democracy such as Switzerland, where workers doubled their pay (minimum salary) through referendum just a few years ago…” Nice, of course, but in reality, this did not happen.
What happened in reality: In 2014, Swiss voters rejected (by 76% to 24%) a popular initiative that would have introduced the world’s highest statutory minimum wage (22 CHF/hour ≈ $25 at the time, or roughly 4,000 CHF/month). The proposal was defeated precisely because Swiss voters, using their direct-democratic system, decided it would harm employment and competitiveness. No federal minimum wage exists today. This is actually a vindication of Popper’s criterion: the people peacefully rejected a policy they disliked, the system works as intended: voters, not oligarchs, decided.
Now, your broader claim that “You cannot democratically change a capitalist regime” is falsified by history. Democracies have repeatedly implemented sweeping redistributive and regulatory changes through elections and referendums. To name just a few: The Labour government (elected 1945) nationalized coal, steel, railways, health care, etc., a massive shift toward social democracy without bloodshed. Then we have Nordic countries: high progressive taxation, universal welfare states, strong unions, and generous safety nets, all built and repeatedly adjusted via parliamentary majorities. Or even more recent examples: Germany’s minimum-wage introduction (2015), France’s wealth taxes and labour reforms, US state-level minimum-wage hikes and progressive taxation, all via democratic processes.
Expropriation of the rich (in the Marxist sense of abolishing private property) is indeed rare, but that is not a failure of democracy, it is a reflection of voter preferences. Most citizens prefer regulated capitalism with safety nets over the abolition of private property, especially if the alternative is a Marxian revolution with blood on streets and arbitrary party dictatorship. So, when voters do want more redistribution, they vote for it. When they don’t, they don’t. That is exactly the “dismissal button” at work.
Finally, “true democracy requires socio-economic equality” is, once again, just so much dangerous left-wing mythology. In reality, every actual attempt to impose “socio-economic equality” by abolishing private property (USSR, Maoist China, Cambodia, etc.) produced exactly the opposite: one-party dictatorships where rulers could not be dismissed without violence or purges.
Likewise, the Cold War’s welfare-state expansion in the West had many causes: domestic politics, Keynesian ideas, post-war reconstruction, not merely fear of the USSR. And those capitalist democracies delivered far higher living standards and personal freedoms than the command economies they competed against.
Overall, Popper’s realism is minimalist: democracy is the system in which bad or incompetent rulers can be replaced peacefully. It does not promise (and cannot guarantee) any particular economic outcome, because that would require treating the “general will” or “historical necessity” as infallible. That path leads to tyranny, as history repeatedly showed.
Your vision of “true democracy” as one that must first achieve perfect economic equality is precisely the closed-society logic Popper warned against: it subordinates the procedural safeguard to a utopian end-state. In practice, that has always meant the rogues (now wearing red stars instead of tiaras or crowns) become unfireable. Thank you, but no, thank you! :)
Maybe it was in Geneva only? I remember that they voted on it and was approved, largely because the cost of life in Switzerland is extremely high. It happened more recenly: this decade.
Reforms are not expropriation (social re-appropiation of what was robbed) and it should be clear to anyone with two neurons that the owner of a newspaper has much more political influence than the janitor of that same newspaper. Thus "democracy" in Capitalism is an illusion: the rich almost invariably control every single decision.
In the UK the Brexit referendum was a rare example of direct democracy in that the entire country was given a chance to say Yes or No to a specific policy. You only had to look at the reaction of many of the libs to their side losing, to see how much they really value the concept of democracy
Politicians end up acting like party soldiers instead of representatives of the people. Their loyalty goes to party machines, lobby groups, and donors. Honest or independent politicians hardly stand a chance. The system rewards opportunism and “moral flexibility.”
The real benefit of democracy (or whatever approximates this idea) is not about the chosing of tyrants for 4-6 years but something much more important: freedom of speech and protest. That's feedback in almost real time and allows to curb excesses, corruption and thus keep a semblance of social cohesion and a system that mostly works.
Ditctatorships are blind and deaf and thus can't even be a Reich of a Thousand Years: it will always collapse within a generation or so, typically leaving a smoking ruin as legacy. That's bad.
And it's bad that our "democracies" (not democratic enough any of them) have been going down the authoritarian road of curbing free speech, the right of protest, etc. That makes them not just less democratic but also much weaker.
Lack of feedback is weakness.
That's a valid point. Though, one can always have the case of a “benevolent tyrant” - a non-democratic ruler who'd allow free speech and criticism, at least for some while. The original problem remains, though: when this benevolent tyrant turns “less benevolent”, how do we remove him from power? You cannot remove government solely through free speech, especially when free speech becomes prohibited. So, in case of a tyrant it's always violentce and civil strife. Democracy, however, within the Popperian model, offers the least destructive method.
Overall, those two issues are intimately related: you cannot have peaceful removal of government without democracy, and then again you cannot have democracy without free speech.
As to the lack of feedback I fully agree. Indeed, Popper made that very point, discussing the fragility of tyranny: errors accumulate, yet addressing them freely is prohibited, and so they snowball and finally crash the system. Today, just as you rightly mentioned, criticism is seen as a danger “to our democracy.” This can only mean the system will eventually buckle and break.
Indeed but there's a limit to it. I guess that the best example would be contemporary China, right? But just ask DeepSeek about Xi Jinping and you get no answer, never mind if you ask about the taboo-est subject in the PRC: the Tiananmen uprising of 1989. If you can't criticize the leaders or major historical developments that shaped the country... the feedback you'll get will be insufficient.
As for power change, there are always ways. From soft coups to profound revolutions, and not even "democracies" are impervious to them, because they are states within a deeper socio-economical order (capitalist regimes typically, in which capitalism, property and such cannot ever be really challenged). Engels for example advocated for democratic buildup of the socialist or communist alternative as revolutionary opposition, yet he understood that when this movement achieved hegemony, reached a majority, it would trigger a brutal violent reaction by the powers-that-be, "democratic" rule would be unseated and replaced by dictatorships (what has actually happened over and over, fascism was not a weird accident: it was systematically implemented in most of Europe to fight socialism in the wake of 1917), he just expected (wrongly?) that the socialist movement would be strong enough to defeat such reaction in the streets (what also happened to some extent here and there but not often enough, and almost invariably not resolutely enough).
My greatest disagreement with Popper is that rather than democracy, what he advocates is for Capitalism, making both conceps equivalent in a discourse type that would be exploited by the likes of Reagan. In reality true democracy can only exist where all people have similar economic power, i.e. in true communism. That's of course something that Leninists don't want to understand.
Yes, the Tiananmen uprising case is quite symbolic of such lacklustre censorship, which only asseverates the problem... Then again, I personally don't know how that event is depicted in Chinese history books. So, maybe it is addressed somehow? In any case, Popper explicitly contrasted open societies (with error-correction via peaceful dismissal) against closed ones that rely on force or dogma to maintain power, with a stern warning about the 'shelf-life' of the latter.
Now, once again yes, non-democracies and even flawed democracies can be overthrown violently. Then again, Popper’s point was never that democracy is immune to upheaval. It is that democracy is the only system designed to make such violence unnecessary for removing bad or incompetent rulers. Peaceful transitions, as we can see by examining recent history, have been the norm in functioning democracies. Non-democracies routinely require bloodshed. The problem is that this is currently demolished, subverted through an installation of technocratic-autocratic rule.
Concerning your remark about Popper equating democracy with capitalism, here I have to strongly disagree. Popper did not equate democracy with capitalism. Nor did he advocate unrestrained markets as the essence of the open society. In fact, he explicitly acknowledged the “injustice and inhumanity” of laissez-faire capitalism, warned against concentrated economic power, and called for state “protectionism” and “economic interventionism” - the staples of social-democracy, as opposed to Reaganite nonsense. Popper supported piecemeal reforms to tame markets while preserving individual freedom and democratic accountability.
Then again, your claim that “true democracy can only exist where all people have similar economic power, i.e., in true communism” is the very historicist utopianism Popper spent his career warning people against. Historical communist regimes (USSR, China, Cuba, etc.) have uniformly failed Popper’s litmus test: one-party rule with no peaceful dismissal mechanism, often enforced by violence. Yes, certainly, Engels and Marx hoped democratic majorities could lead to socialism, but they hoped wrong. The actual outcome in Leninist states was dictatorship, and that is precisely what Popper predicted from closed, historicist systems that claim infallible knowledge of history’s endpoint.
“Equal economic power” has never translated into political equality or the ability to remove rulers without violence. Why? Because, in my view, this is an ontological impossibility: individuals are different, no two individual can possess perfectly equal economic power, just as two individuals cannot possess equal mental, or physical power. There's always some difference. What's needed is a careful system of checks and balances, so that those differences in power do not become sources of oppression. Yet "perfect equality", as in Marxian systems, is invariably dangerous utopianism.
P.S. Fascism did arise partly as an anti-communist force in the wake of 1917 as business elites in Italy and Germany feared Bolshevik-style revolution, funding Mussolini and early Nazis. But the picture is more complex: fascism was also anti-liberal, nationalist, and corporatist, rejecting both capitalism and socialism in favour of the totalitarian state. It was certainly not “systematically implemented in most of Europe” solely to crush socialism, that's simply left-wing mythology. Real-world authoritarians had multiple causes: economic collapse, Versailles humiliation, cultural backlash, etc.
You cannot democratically change a capitalist regime. Even in such a more real democracy such as Switzerland, where workers doubled their pay (minimum salary) through referendum just a few years ago, expropriating the rich is something unthinkable and would almost certainly need of violent conflict at least to some extent. In other less democratic "democracies", ruled de facto by oligarchic cliques and their carefully selected deep state managers, that's not "almost certain" it is certain beyond any doubt.
As Marx would put it: "democracy" (universal suffrage, freedoms, etc.) is necessary but not sufficient. For true democracy socio-economic equality is necessary and that's well beyond what Popper could ever consider in his sub-oligarchist mindset. And that's why there was a Cold War in his day, even if those were the days the greatest generosity of the capitalist regime (precisely because they had to compete with the USSR in terms of social development and not just "freedom").
Popper was never a communist or socialist, a Keynesian at best. And Keynes was all about to "save Capitalism from itself", not to overcome Capitalism and create a better system.
You state that “even in such a more real democracy such as Switzerland, where workers doubled their pay (minimum salary) through referendum just a few years ago…” Nice, of course, but in reality, this did not happen.
What happened in reality: In 2014, Swiss voters rejected (by 76% to 24%) a popular initiative that would have introduced the world’s highest statutory minimum wage (22 CHF/hour ≈ $25 at the time, or roughly 4,000 CHF/month). The proposal was defeated precisely because Swiss voters, using their direct-democratic system, decided it would harm employment and competitiveness. No federal minimum wage exists today. This is actually a vindication of Popper’s criterion: the people peacefully rejected a policy they disliked, the system works as intended: voters, not oligarchs, decided.
Now, your broader claim that “You cannot democratically change a capitalist regime” is falsified by history. Democracies have repeatedly implemented sweeping redistributive and regulatory changes through elections and referendums. To name just a few: The Labour government (elected 1945) nationalized coal, steel, railways, health care, etc., a massive shift toward social democracy without bloodshed. Then we have Nordic countries: high progressive taxation, universal welfare states, strong unions, and generous safety nets, all built and repeatedly adjusted via parliamentary majorities. Or even more recent examples: Germany’s minimum-wage introduction (2015), France’s wealth taxes and labour reforms, US state-level minimum-wage hikes and progressive taxation, all via democratic processes.
Expropriation of the rich (in the Marxist sense of abolishing private property) is indeed rare, but that is not a failure of democracy, it is a reflection of voter preferences. Most citizens prefer regulated capitalism with safety nets over the abolition of private property, especially if the alternative is a Marxian revolution with blood on streets and arbitrary party dictatorship. So, when voters do want more redistribution, they vote for it. When they don’t, they don’t. That is exactly the “dismissal button” at work.
Finally, “true democracy requires socio-economic equality” is, once again, just so much dangerous left-wing mythology. In reality, every actual attempt to impose “socio-economic equality” by abolishing private property (USSR, Maoist China, Cambodia, etc.) produced exactly the opposite: one-party dictatorships where rulers could not be dismissed without violence or purges.
Likewise, the Cold War’s welfare-state expansion in the West had many causes: domestic politics, Keynesian ideas, post-war reconstruction, not merely fear of the USSR. And those capitalist democracies delivered far higher living standards and personal freedoms than the command economies they competed against.
Overall, Popper’s realism is minimalist: democracy is the system in which bad or incompetent rulers can be replaced peacefully. It does not promise (and cannot guarantee) any particular economic outcome, because that would require treating the “general will” or “historical necessity” as infallible. That path leads to tyranny, as history repeatedly showed.
Your vision of “true democracy” as one that must first achieve perfect economic equality is precisely the closed-society logic Popper warned against: it subordinates the procedural safeguard to a utopian end-state. In practice, that has always meant the rogues (now wearing red stars instead of tiaras or crowns) become unfireable. Thank you, but no, thank you! :)
Maybe it was in Geneva only? I remember that they voted on it and was approved, largely because the cost of life in Switzerland is extremely high. It happened more recenly: this decade.
Reforms are not expropriation (social re-appropiation of what was robbed) and it should be clear to anyone with two neurons that the owner of a newspaper has much more political influence than the janitor of that same newspaper. Thus "democracy" in Capitalism is an illusion: the rich almost invariably control every single decision.
End of the conversation.
In the UK the Brexit referendum was a rare example of direct democracy in that the entire country was given a chance to say Yes or No to a specific policy. You only had to look at the reaction of many of the libs to their side losing, to see how much they really value the concept of democracy