An essay that sheds a new light on the crisis of contemporary democracy.

The ruling elite in the United States, and increasingly around the world, sees democracy as outdated, a relic of the past to be replaced by a “techno-enlightened” despotism, governing on behalf of a childlike populace. This vision is spreading rapidly across the globe. In this incisive essay Marco Revelli demonstrates how contemporary democracies have lost their original promises. The gap between ideals and reality has grown so wide that the foundational principles (representation, participation, transparency, and information) are nearly unrecognizable. With rigorous analysis, the book dissects the forms of democratic decline: from “executive democracy,” where parliamentary functions are replaced by the efficiency of a strong leader, to “democracy without a people,” where abstention becomes a form of negative participation; from the “democracy of the few,” increasingly oligarchic, to the “democracy of money,” where market forces dictate every relationship; from the “democracy of disinformation,” warped by media and algorithms, to “artificial democracy,” where artificial intelligence threatens to replace political representation. Yet Revelli does not stop at diagnosis. In his conclusions, he calls for a new beginning from the ground up: radical regeneration to revive a democracy that is deeply in need of renewal, but not dead.