Defeating the Dictators review: prescriptions for democratic health

By spending more on things that actually matter, countries that oppress their citizens in other ways can engender remarkable levels of confidence in government.

Practically the only good news for democracies in this story is the fact that almost every major economy faces similar declining birth rates. Most dramatically, China has gone from 2.25 children per woman in 1990 to just 1.3 today. No major economy is producing enough children to maintain its current population.

Dunst argues that one of the biggest challenges for democracies is to convince their populations of the benefits of immigration, instead of listening to politicians like Donald Trump in the US and Marine Le Pen in France, who have been so successful in reviving ancient xenophobia.

Dunst is almost entirely silent about the explosion of fake facts on the internet, which makes it so much more difficult to sell the commonsense ideas he pushes for. Another problem is his failure to acknowledge that America now has only one major political party that is genuinely interested in solving any of these fundamental problems, while the other prefers to cater to its base with attacks on wokeness or any prosecutor who thinks it makes sense to prosecute a former president for any of his dozens of alleged crimes.