Apolitical politicians?
We definitely have to change the system, but how and with whom?

I was born in 1991, when the USSR went down and with it, the Cold War had ended. My generation did not know the world during a bipolar system, a system based on the continuous fight to defend the liberal, democratic and capitalist world against the protectionist, non-democratic and communist one. We did not know the guardians of liberalism and communism, all these politicians and social leaders that defended their belief fiercely. During those years, democracy and liberalism were proudly protected by the most remembered leaders of last century: Churchill, Mandela, Martin Luther King, among others.
Now it is different, it seems we are lacking of guardians of democracy and liberalism. I don’t know if we are apart from liberalism because of the lack of a common enemy as the one I described before or not, but we certainly have disconnected. It may seem that with the rise of globalization and massive communication, democracy is strongly triggered and it has been quite difficult to find leaders willing to defend this ideology.
Why don’t we have defenders of democracy? Where are they?
The biggest democracies of the world (USA, UK, France, Germany to name some) are struggling with either illiberal democrats (like Trump or Johnson) or have a big shadow of protectionism and a growing far-right opposition (like France or Germany). Actually, the Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU) Democratic Index of 2018, shows the constant decline of four out of five aspects they consider as the main cores to form a democracy, being “political participation” the only one that has been on the rise.
What has happened to democracy?
These are the main reasons I believe might be causing its fall:
1. The crisis of 2008 and its consequences in inequality and separation of classes:
This crisis helped to see the political power that the upper political and private class has and the impunity that their lives go through and we all saw it. We all saw the lack of consequences that this crisis had against the corrupt and the powerful that were actually one of the main causes of the clash. We also saw the impact it had in the bottom of society, poor people and the low middle class were the ones who suffered the most.
This crisis reminded us that despite our huge improvement against poverty (with a decrease from 36% of the world’s population living in extreme poverty in 1990, to 10% in 2015), there has been a strong concentration of wealth (with 45% of the world’s wealth in just 1% of the population). These people being the ones living with high impunity and outside the rule of law. Why don’t we have leaders that are willing to leave their political interests and turn to people instead of big firms? Maybe since there is no trust that political leaders will figure out how to deal with inequality and they seem to work only with the high class of political and private institutions then, people mistrust democracy as a whole, because leaders have not figured out how to decrease inequality.
2. Increase of massive communication and social media:
With these type of connection between people we have managed to stay in touch all the time and having access to important information, but as we have seen it, we also have stronger access to miss-information, to fake news that without fact-checking, are able to mislead skeptical people and separate them from democracy.
Also social media has made people closer to each other, but since it depends on every one of us who to follow and who not to follow, who to read or not to read, this can shorten our sight and we tend to only read and inform ourselves through the same type of opinions that we agree with. It might go against democracy since we isolate ourselves from the rest of society, we are getting unable to listen and read different opinions because it is far easier to just close an app or unfollow certain user that does not agree with our views.
3. Globalization and migration:
Since the world has gotten shorter and hyper-connected, people tend to guard their traditions and are afraid of the different. Since there has been a wave of migration since 2015 and we have had leaders that take advantage of the fear of people, this phenomenon has also triggered our democracy. People are afraid to deal with different cultures, religions, languages; so they are constantly looking for leaders who promise to defend their traditions and to separate the different from them. These leaders have a perfect common enemy in migrants, and unite against them.
4. Lack of democracy guardians:
Even though we have been dealing with tyrants and illiberals, we are lacking of democracy defenders. True believers of the importance of freedom, rights and liberal economy. People with true and applicable strategies to implement a sustainable economy, that fight for human rights and are transparent. These illiberal leaders have had the last years too easy for them, we need to find our guardians.
The separation that troubles me the most is the one that we decided to took against democracy. We did not grew apart from the ferocious capitalism and consumerism. For some reason we decided to divorce from democracy. Maybe it is our own fear to handle too much freedom for ourselves. Maybe it is because the growing “fake news” world that has manipulated people through new forms of communications. It could be that maybe our latest political leaders have not defended democracies as they should have. I come to wonder again.
I do understand something. I understand peoples anger against inequality, bad leadership, corruption. I understand the anger against people that have taken advantage of their power and favored their friends, family and the powerful. But I am not sure if the revolution to fight against that behavior should have been against democracy and liberalism.
We have gave power to tyrants, to illiberal leaders that are now looking for a new common enemy, like immigrants or journalists who basically represent freedom of movement and freedom of expression.
We must move, we must stand in favor of democratic values, freedom of speech, freedom of movement and equality of rights between everyone. We cannot lose this battle, there is much to loose, everything to loose.
We have to change the system and it is important to do it as soon as possible in order to change the wheel that is messing with the world, but we have to be very smart to choose the right leaders. The ones who have strong and strategical policies, that actually know how to conduct politics in order to agree on those policies and act with society as an ally. We start seeing new leaders in the upcoming election of the US with people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who want change and who have an actual plan on how to do it. These are people who are willing to take the risk and act against inequality and corruption, to act in favor of equal rights to everyone and to regulate a hyper-capitalist world.
We need those leaders in the rest of the world. We have to counterattack the illiberals and we cannot stand still any longer.
Sources:
The World Bank
