Democracies should keep their nerve against dictators

My fellow Briton, Sir Winston Churchill, was especially famous for his wartime leadership but today his name is often seen as the source of a pithy quotation about political systems. “Democracy is the worst form of government,” he said, “except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Faith in democracy certainly rises and falls, especially at times like now when dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping look strong, dangerous and worryingly effective. Yet it is vital that, like Churchill, we keep our nerve.

A main reason why people living in democracies often suffer a kind of inferiority complex regarding dictatorships is that when power is concentrated in one man’s hands, decision-making can look deceptively easy.

The essence of democracy is the dispersal of power and the use of checks and balances to limit the room for leaders to take decisions on their own, so it is obvious that it will be much harder, for example, for a democracy to reorganize industry to serve war aims, or even to build railways and airports.

This is also why would-be dictators such as America’s Donald Trump prefer to meet dictators like Putin or North Korea’s President Kim Jong-un rather than their fellow democratic leaders: they are sitting with what they see as the closest political equivalent to a business billionaire, someone who can make his own decisions and get things done. Yet that apparent decision-making ability can be both dangerous and illusory.

The danger is perhaps obvious: Putin’s ability to decide to invade his neighbor, Ukraine, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, is ample proof of that. Putin’s decision also shows how dictatorship can become more dangerous over time if the concentration of