Democracy is nothing else but the will of the majority. Today, the dominant form of democracy is representative democracy, where citizens elect government officials to govern on their behalf, such as in parliamentary or presidential democracy. Countries have their own unique models of democracy that suit their respective national conditions. That democracy is in trouble, stagnant at best, and declining in many places. The deterioration of democratic elections, parliaments, and independent courts has led to problems in safeguarding the rule of law and holding politicians to account. Formal institutions like legislatures are weakening. Democracy faced its most serious crisis in decades, and the majority of the countries suffered net declines in political rights, civil liberties, and global freedom. Political rights and civil liberties around the world deteriorated to their lowest point. The reasons for democracies collapse are governmental instability and foreign involvement. The causes of the failure of democracy include economic inequality, culturally con-servative reactions to societal changes, populist or personal politics, and external influence from great power politics. Many states that seemed like promising success stories are sliding into au-thoritarian rule. And the world's most powerful democracies are struggling with problems at home, including social and economic disparities, partisan fragmentation, guarantees of free and fair elections, freedom of the press, the rights of minorities, the rule of law, influxes of refugees, terrorist attacks, and ethnic cleansing, all of which come under attack around the world.

The rise of right-wing populists who appeal to the narrowing of fundamental civil and political liberties and appeal to anti-immigrant sentiment. Right-wing populists gained votes and parlia-mentary seats in Argentina, Austria, Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. They succeed in weakening established parties on both the right and left. Populist leaders and groups reject plural-ism and demand power to advance the particular interests of their supporters at the expense of mi-norities. The very idea of democracy and its promotion among young people is contributing to a dangerous apathy for the future. The spread of antidemocratic practices around the world poses economic and security risks. When more countries are free (including the U.S.), they are safer and more prosperous. Democratic governments allow people to have a say in the direction of their lives and work and to help set the rules, to which all must adhere. While more countries become autocratic and repressive, nations and entire regions become unstable, giving more room to vio-lent extremists. Democracy scores declined in many countries, from Central Europe to Central Asia, in 2023, yet civic activists and democratic leaders continued to strive for better governance across the diverse region.

Democratic norms eroded within the U.S. and damaged its international credibility in terms of good governance and human rights. Over the past decade, the United States has experienced a se-ries of setbacks in the conduct of free and fair elections and criminal justice under the leadership of both major political parties. Many institutions of the U.S. government are dysfunctional and getting worse. In the state of democracy in the U.S., many expert opinions and media comments reveal that an American democracy is in chaos at home and that havoc and disasters have been left behind as the U.S. imposed democracy around the globe. Despite the rising problems at home, the U.S. continues to behave with a sense of superiority, point fingers at others, and usurp the role of the lecturer of democracy.

The U.S. serves the interests of none other than itself and is acting to split the world into (of what it defined) 'democracies and non-democracies. A silent civil war has taken root in the U.S., and repairing damaged democracy requires a sense of nation and public interest, both of which are currently lacking. Ian Bremmer, president of Euro-Asia Group, writes that America's dysfunction-al politics raises fears that the 2024 presidential election will again provoke deadly violence in the country. More than a third of Democrats and Republicans believe violence is justified to achieve their political ends. American politics has increasingly revealed its nature as the 'game of the rich'; the top rich families making political donations contributed millions of dollars, and billion-aires provided 16% of federal election funds. Politics is controlled by the rich and politicians to serve their own interests.

The public has a right to vote but does not have real sway over politics. Average citizens matter, but generally only when their public policy desires align with those of the elite or organized inter-ests. And when it comes to issues that don't have a direct impact on the elite's well-being, such as social security, medical care, or unemployment insurance, The general public has no independent impact on policymaking. In short, 'What the elite want, the elite get'. The main American media firms are privately owned and serve the powerful and the rich. The U.S. uses social media to ma-nipulate international public opinion. Capital and interest groups can basically get anything they want when it comes to public opinion. Agencies affiliated with the US Department of Defense had long interfered in public opinion in the Middle East through propaganda on social media (Twitter, X).

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article about the explosion of the North Stream natural gas pipeline, but American and European mainstream media, known for their sen-sitivity to such scoops, stayed eerily quiet on this piece of explosive news. The judicial system is also blind to public opinion. Americans are increasingly disillusioned with American democracy, and Americans' pride in their democracy has dropped sharply. The U.S. needs to show more global support for justice and peace as American politicians have a high tolerance for killing, which is now being seen vividly on screens every day. The Chinese government states that China is a'so-cialist democracy' and a 'people's democratic dictatorship. Under Xi Jingping, China is also termed a 'whole-process people's democracy'.

Pessimism dominates in Germany these days, not only because of the wars in Ukraine and Isra-el/Palestine but also because of certain parallels between the concerns of today's Germans and what happened in Germany 100 years ago. And this is due to inflation, high energy prices, eco-nomic stagnation (growth close to zero), the rise of the extreme right, political paralyses, falling exports to China, the lagging of the German automobile industry, high property inequality, imper-fect assimilation of the foreign population, and complete political dependence on America.

The world's largest Indian democracy—with nearly 2 billion people—is retreating, and its demo-cratic foundations are floundering. Indian democracy is under pressure like never before, where there is more injustice to cover up. Experts and critics say that trust in the judiciary as a check on executive power is eroding. With increasing assaults on the press and free speech, religious mi-norities are facing attacks by Hindu nationalities and the jailing of activists for peaceful protests. Modi's ministers say India's democratic principles are robust, even thriving, and External Affairs Minister Jaishankar said that 'there was a time when in this part of the world, we were the only democracy'. ' And if there is sense in the world today that democracy is in some form the future, then a large part of it is due to India. But experts accuse Modi's populist government of using un-bridled political power to undermine democratic freedoms.

Although Europe remained the world's highest-performing region, there have been significant de-clines in democratic performance in many established democracies, including Austria, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and the U.K. France declares itself an indivisible secular, democratic, and social republic. The British political system is a multiple-party system. Democracy Index 2023 ranks 2023 as the 22nd most electorally democratic country in the world. Norway is a parliamentary, democratic, and constitutional monarchy. Switzerland is a direct de-mocracy. Alongside the usual voting rights accorded in democracies, the Swiss people also have the right to vote on specific issues.

While countries like Azerbaijan, Belarus, Russia, and Turkey are performing well below the Euro-pean average across most indicators of democracy, And most countries in the Americas continued to have a mid-range performance across categories of democracy and managed to hold credible elections, like El Salvador and Guatemala. And surprisingly high rates of political participation and deceasing levels of corruption in Africa.

In non-democratic countries like Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Ara-bia, and Vietnam, there are no freely elected national leaders, political opposition is suppressed, all religious activity is controlled, dissent is not permitted, civil rights are curtailed, and elections occur under a single-party authoritarian political system.

The global democracy index score showed the percentage of the global population in a state of democracy around the world. Only 8% live in full democracy, 37% live in some type of flawed democracy, 37% live in authoritarian regimes, and 18% live in hybrid regimes, while 55% of the world does not live in democracy at all, based on the Economist Intelligence Unit's (EIU) latest Democracy Index Report.

The EIU measures democracy by assessing many indicators across five key categories: electoral process and pluralism, political culture, political participation, functioning of government, and civil liberties. Only 12% of countries in Africa are operating as some type of democracy (aside from Mauritius, the only full democracy). In the Americas, only a few countries are considered full democracies: Costa Rica, Canada, Uruguay, and one of the best performers year-over-year, Chile. And some of the world's worst performers year-over-year are El Salvador and Haiti, which are associated with high crime rates and corrupt governance.

In Asia the highest democratic index score have South Korea 8.3%, Taiwan 8.99%, India 7.04%, then Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand 6-7%, and the lowest in Myanmar 0.74%. In China, it is 1.94%, and Hong Kong's state of democracy continues to decline as China increasingly restricts civil liberties. The democracy index score in Australia is 8.71%, and in New Zealand, it is 8.71%. In Central Asia and the Middle East, the democracy index is among the lowest; there are no full democracies at all. In Iran, it is 1.96%, Saudi Arabia is 2.08%, the UAE is 2.9, Lebanon is 3.66, Jordan is 3.17%, Pakistan is 4.13%, Armenia is 5.63, and Georgia is 5.2%. Afghanistan rapidly became the lowest-scoring country following the exit of US forces and the subsequent takeover by the Taliban. Elite-constraining activities peaked at the end of the Soviet period and declined af-terwards. The lack of constraints on elites has led to a failure of democracy in Russia.

Are we witnessing the death of capitalism and facing the tyranny of big tech today? Surveillance is a reality; we already live in the era of surveillance capitalism.

Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics that denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. And surveillance is an attempt at a radical and ominous automated manipulation of behavior that is undermining sustainability, democracy, and human dignity. Surveillance capitalism is a 'new economic order' and 'an expropriation of critical human rights'. Defending privacy Shoshana Zubof analyzes the digital economy era in her book, The Age of Surveillance. Capitalism says that personal data from millions of social net-work users has been harvested without their consent, used for political purposes, and monetized. The danger of surveillance capitalism is that platforms and tech companies claim ownership of private information because it is free for them to access, but there is very little supervision or ac-tual laws by governments and users themselves.

Surveillance is an assault on human autonomy and a threat to freedom and democracy. Surveil-lance capitalism hinges on the appropriation and commercialization of personal data for profit-making. Google is the foundation of general surveillance. People are generating huge amounts of personal data every second; your whole life will be searchable. Automated machine processes not only inform but also massively shape our behavior in a state where production is focused on con-trolling brains and automatically directing people's movements. How can a system of democracy function in that state—in which man kept his word?

Yanis Varoufakis, former Minister of Finance of Greece, wrote in his book 'Techno-feudalism, Who Killed the Capitalism' that people are entangled in networks of digital capital that train us how to train it to control us. Life in the clouds Social democracy is unthinkable in a world that re-duces the proletarians in the world of cloud capital to automation. Yanis Varoufakis believes that in order for each of us to regain individual ownership of our own minds, we must collectively take ownership of the capital in the cloud and not leave it to a few feudal lords. It won't be easy, but it's the only way that the artifacts stored in the cloud now used to modify offensive behavior will be-come a means of emancipation. Private capital has made unprecedented progress in the sale of the world's material wealth, and today's cloud capital is selling off parts of our brains. Sometimes they used to address you as a reasonable being with the status of a citizen for fear that a citizen after all decides on something. Today there is no longer that fear, because any 'good-for-nothing' can come to power and use that power that comes from banking, corporate, and screen agendas. Those who rule rely on AI (artificial intelligence) and work as they were already connected to the 'Davos computer'. The desert of anti-humanity is large, but the world is also large, and perhaps all that vastness of difference and human elusiveness cannot be instrumentalized by one group of powerful people, (as they hope.)