Welcome to the End of Democracy

Joel Kotkin, Executive Director of the Urban Reform Institute, recently published an essay on democracy’s demise. Donald Trump is not the villain of the piece. Rather, he argues that the withering of democratic process and institutions reflects the deeper transformation of our societies: the emergence of a ruling technocracy; the use of the pandemic and the environmental crisis to constrain individual rights; the growing distance between the governing and the governed. All of it made worse by the mind-boggling concentration of economic wealth.