| Global democracy is in decline, and three recent essays cast the trend in different lights. In a Saturday Essay for The Wall Street Journal, Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution and Stanford University pins it largely on a US withdrawal; as America retreats into nationalism, stops speaking up for human rights, and ceases to pressure dictators, autocracy is advancing (and democracies are eroding) in that vacuum. But we've seen—and survived—an eerily similar democratic crisis before, writes Morris P. Fiorina (also of the Hoover Institution and Stanford), in the latest issue of Hoover's Governance in an Emerging New World. In the 1970s, similar forces were at play: Social divisions, a lack of trust in leaders, and a wave of activism generated dire predictions about democracy's future. But the world pulled out of it, Fiorina writes, as soon as leaders and parties won convincing elections, garnered enough public support to drive new policies, and proved that democratic systems still worked. Reagan and Thatcher, in other words, saved the day. For Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier, the problem is more technological. In a Boston Review essay, they write that "Democracy's Dilemma" is a problem of information: The "open forms of input and exchange that [democracy] relies on can be weaponized to inject falsehood and misinformation that erode democratic debate," they write. Disagreements are no longer solved in healthy ways, thanks to the noise injected by outside actors and domestic discontents. The answer, for Farrell and Schneier, is to find ways to guard institutions from such informational attacks. | 
