Lately, on this blog, I have concentrated on what I consider to be our country’s biggest problem: enormous (($1.85 trillion in FY 2024) annual spending deficits and a rapidly growing national debt. This is unsustainable and will lead to a weaker U.S. if not brought under control soon.

But there is also much good news from around the world in 2024.  Democracy is thriving!  Consider:

• Voters in over 60 countries went to the polls last year. The elections were peaceful and the results were accepted by all parties without violence and civil division.  The largest democracy in the world, India, reelected Narendra Modi as president even though his party, BJP, underperformed expectations and denied Modi the supermajority he had anticipated.   The world’s oldest continuous democracy in the world, the United States, reelected Donald Trump in an orderly, peaceful, fashion.
• It was a bad year for autocracies.  Most dramatically, Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria was overthrown by rebels.  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is draining its economic and military resources.  Iran’s Middle Eastern proxies Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen are coming under increasing pressure from Israel.

  

• The world’s largest autocracy, China, has huge, self-inflicted, demographic and economic problems. Its recently ended one-child policy is leading not only to dramatic population decline, but also a major worker shortage.  It has an estimated 80 million empty apartment units, creating a huge financial drain.  It is unlikely to catch up with the U.S. in GDP anytime soon.

Conclusion.  The world is largely free and getting freer all the time.  Yes, there are autocracies (unfree countries) but they have major problems to deal with.  The U.S. and its democratic allies largely predominate both economically and militarily.  Free and open societies like ours will always have problems to deal with, but they are not the severe problems facing our autocratic adversaries.  We can never become complacent, of course, but we should be confident that democracy is ascendent and that our future is bright (if we can fix our debt problem).

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