Obituary Over A Decade (measurements!)

The second decade - not to be mingled with the 2020s, which saw a close still under the ever-potent and yet strangely normal aegis of Trumpdom - since the last centennial (the "zeroth" not being an option) now coming towards a close has indeed, and perhaps since before halftime, been commended, if not lauded, and epitomised as that which saw the break of seeming victories of the great undisputed twentieth century. And if that pessimism is to stand any merit, we must reflex over where we are now as opposed to late 1920, or the early 1920s, just as much as the early 2010s. In the early 2010s (that is, early 2010) I was myself under the tutelage of high school, or gymnasium as we call it (without the Germanic capital "G"), and for all its bondage it was a pleasant time; not so much for the presence of choices made, as the absence of the foolishness of my own, and the very compact presence of my time and my own thoughts on how to use it. But I am a foul man, and full of vice, and just as capable of sniffing out the Zeitgeist as the Geists in human skin doing most of the speaking, and in the worst of times the thinking, for us. 

I say this only to draw parallells, in the plural sense, to the seeming fate of the world, by which we would expect to mean the Western world, or what was previously the "free" world. For in a way not un-akin to I myself discovering myself not very free, compared to my eighteen- or nineteen-year self, I have noted not only the relative freedom and liberty of the non-Occident (if not exactly of the classical Orient) which anybody with eyes had minded, but moreover the bondage, restrictions, real perils and relative authoritarianism of the free world, both in reality and in potentia. Our democracy, and by now I am not exactly alone to say this, rests at a proverbial knife's edge, balanced only by some knives' edges held and reflected in a sense of virtue, and immediately and suddenly imperilled by those wielded by vice, or at least eager self-interest. 

The difference, and thus difference across this decade, is 

In late 1920, we were not so certain of this triumph of democracy, of course. We had, in Sweden, already passed - through an already democratic, at least in the sense of the revolutionaries of 1688, or 1832, assembly assembled mainly from the ideas of 1789 (the American 1789, not the French, mind you) through the most debate-laden and peaceful parliamentary procedure - the vote for women, and just before that for men, including in the electorate for the more, or until now more prestige-cloaked "first" chamber. In Germany, parliamentary liberalism had triumphed over the continent's supposedly premier authoritarian power. 

But in 2010, how sure were we not of all those things? Nobody would in 2010 have come to question the great German democracy, nor the great experiment in how one, far from the Anglo-Saxon waving fists and shouts of procedural trickery and hecklerism, whether parliamentary or congressional, could adjoint a government of red and black into a synthesis of permanent-democratism. This "democratism", or so I believe, hold the key to much of the frustration against it, for as much as representative democracy is not democratic, in the classical sense it would permit the electorate to actually rule themselves - and would never, not even in the very liberal powers which now embody it - 

How then are we to cheer or reckon this 2010s? Well first, through recognising the limitations of this democracy - or at least of this "democratism" and of liberal, representative systems - both in its appeal and security of persistence in the Arab world and elsewhere where it has not ever or seriously broken through, the Chinese-Confucian for instance,