Sometimes there is profundity in despair. In a war-torn African country, a resident was once greeted with that most ordinary of human questions: “How are you?” His reply was extraordinary: “Today is better than tomorrow.” Few words could more completely express the despondency of a human being who has ceased to expect that life will improve. Civilisation has largely been constructed upon the opposite hope: that accumulated knowledge, experience and social organisation will enable succeeding generations to live better than those preceding them. Parents educate their children because they hope their lives will improve upon their own; societies build institutions because they expect future generations to strengthen them. “Today is better than tomorrow” reverses that fundamental human expectation. It is more than pessimism; it is the surrender of hope.
There are disturbing reasons why those words resonate today. Freedom House reports that global freedom declined in 2025 for the twentieth consecutive year. Political rights and civil liberties deteriorated in 54 countries while improving in only 35, and only 21 per cent of the world’s population now lives in countries it classifies as Free, compared with 46 per cent two decades ago. V-Dem, using a different methodology, estimates that around 74 per cent of humanity lives under autocratic regimes, with only 7 per cent living in liberal democracies, and concludes that for the statistically average global citizen democracy has fallen back to approximately its 1978 level. Democracy indices inevitably involve methodological judgements, but when different institutions using different measures identify sustained deterioration over decades, the direction of travel deserves serious reflection.
The issue is larger than the fortunes of particular governments or political parties. Democracy should not be regarded as the predetermined destination of history, but it remains one of humanity’s greatest accumulated achievements in limiting arbitrary power and enlarging human agency. Its evolution represented a long and uneven intellectual and social journey over the fundamental questions of who should govern and where legitimate authority should reside. Ancient experiments with citizenship were followed centuries later by restraints upon absolute monarchy; the Enlightenment challenged inherited authority and the divine right of kings; the American and French revolutions transformed the political vocabulary of rights and popular sovereignty; and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries progressively enlarged citizenship through abolition, universal suffrage, labour movements, women’s political emancipation, decolonisation and civil-rights struggles. Across this uneven historical journey, the broad movement was from subject to citizen, from inherited authority towards popular sovereignty, and from arbitrary power towards accountable government.
Abraham Lincoln distilled this aspiration into his description of democracy as government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Its significance extends beyond elections. The revolutionary principle embedded within those words is that sovereignty resides ultimately in the citizen. Government does not confer political dignity upon the people; citizens temporarily confer authority upon government. Elections, constitutions, parliaments, independent courts and a free press are instruments through which a deeper principle is expressed: the sovereignty of human agency and the right of citizens to participate in determining the conditions under which they live.
The contemporary retreat is particularly troubling because democracy is rarely being abolished outright. It is instead being denuded tissue by tissue. Elections continue, legislatures meet, courts sit and constitutions remain formally operative while the living tissue that makes these institutions democratic is progressively weakened. Truth in public discourse, tolerance of disagreement, pluralism, institutional independence, minority rights, freedom of expression and meaningful political competition can all be diminished without formally dismantling the democratic state. The skeleton remains recognisable while the democratic organism within it gradually weakens.
Fear and the Manufacture of the “Other”
Among the most effective instruments for this denudation is fear. Frightened populations can be persuaded to surrender freedoms that confident citizens would instinctively defend. Genuine anxieties about economic insecurity, migration, terrorism, cultural change or geopolitical competition can be mixed with exaggeration, disinformation and ideological narratives until societies begin perceiving existential threats everywhere. Sometimes the alleged enemy lies beyond the border; increasingly, political advantage is also derived from manufacturing one within.
The paradox is that those portrayed as existential threats are frequently weaker than the majorities supposedly endangered by them. Migrants become invaders, refugees security threats, religious or ethnic minorities demographic dangers, political opponents enemies of the nation, and dissenting journalists or intellectuals agents of hostile interests. The politically constructed “other” becomes indispensable because fear requires an object. Once citizens are persuaded that their nation, religion, culture or identity faces existential danger, restrictions upon liberty can be repackaged as necessary acts of national preservation.
This helps explain the resurgence of exclusionary nationalism. Patriotism-attachment to one’s country and community-is compatible with democracy. Nationalism becomes dangerous when belonging is defined so narrowly that some citizens acquire greater claims to national authenticity than others. The democratic question, How shall equal citizens govern themselves?, is displaced by a more dangerous one: Who among us constitutes the real nation? Once political leaders claim the authority to define the “real people,” opponents become easier to delegitimise, minorities easier to marginalise and constitutional restraints easier to portray as obstacles to the popular will.
Donald Trump in the United States, Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Javier Milei in Argentina operate in very different societies and constitutional systems and cannot responsibly be placed within a single ideological category. Yet their political environments illustrate different manifestations of a wider phenomenon: populism, majoritarianism, hyper-nationalism, ideological polarisation and the personalisation of political authority. The contemporary demagogue has discovered something potentially more effective than the classical overthrow of democracy: democracy can be hollowed out from within while continuing to claim democratic legitimacy.
Disinformation and Digitally Amplified Division
Disinformation is particularly corrosive because democracy depends upon citizens exercising reasonably informed judgement. Political sovereignty becomes attenuated when the informational environment within which choices are made is systematically distorted. Disinformation need not persuade everyone that a particular falsehood is true; it can achieve something equally damaging by destroying confidence that objective truth is discoverable at all. Citizens confronted continuously with incompatible versions of reality can retreat into informational communities that simply reinforce what they already believe.
When societies lose a shared factual foundation, democratic disagreement changes character. Citizens can legitimately disagree about poverty, immigration, inequality, national security or foreign policy, but meaningful argument requires some possibility of agreeing about what has actually happened. Once facts themselves acquire ideological identities, persuasion becomes increasingly difficult. Political opponents no longer merely reach different conclusions; they appear to inhabit different realities.
Technology has magnified this problem in ways humanity is only beginning to comprehend. Never have human beings been more connected. Information crosses continents in seconds and people separated by thousands of miles communicate instantaneously. Yet this extraordinary connectivity has not necessarily created a more cohesive human community. Algorithms can reward engagement; outrage generates engagement; and anger consequently acquires both commercial and political value. Digital platforms can segregate citizens into self-reinforcing communities where grievance intensifies and political identity acquires the characteristics of tribal belonging.
We therefore confront one of the great paradoxes of technological civilisation: technology has connected the human family digitally while providing unprecedented instruments for dividing it psychologically. Democracy requires citizens capable of profound disagreement while continuing to recognise one another as legitimate members of the same political community. When every opponent becomes a traitor, every minority a threat and every disagreement an existential struggle, the common civic space upon which democracy depends begins to disappear.
The Seductive Bargain: Prosperity for Freedom
Democratic pessimism is reinforced by another contemporary narrative: that political systems should principally be judged through measurable performance-GDP growth, per-capita income, exports, infrastructure, technological achievement and administrative efficiency. These measures matter enormously. Poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and inequality themselves constrain human freedom, and democratic governments that consistently fail to improve material conditions inevitably weaken confidence in democracy.
The danger begins when economic performance is presented as a substitute for political liberty rather than an instrument for enlarging it. The authoritarian bargain appears seductively practical: surrender some liberty, tolerate concentrated power and reduce political contestation, and in exchange the state will provide stability, security and prosperity. When democracies appear corrupt, disorderly or incapable of delivery, even sections of the intelligentsia can become receptive to this proposition.
Amartya Sen’s conception of Development as Freedom offers an important corrective. Development must expand substantive human capabilities rather than merely aggregate national wealth. A society may construct magnificent infrastructure and achieve impressive growth while citizens remain unable to question authority or determine who governs them. GDP can measure production; it cannot measure the value of an uncensored thought, the dignity of dissent or the freedom of a citizen to say no to power.
When Rights Exist but Fear Prevents Their Exercise
I encountered a small but disturbing illustration of this contradiction recently at a petrol station in Karachi. The attendant was communicative, and during our conversation I asked what he earned. “Rs17,500 a month,” he replied. The officially notified minimum wage for an unskilled worker in Sindh is substantially higher. I asked why workers did not demand the wages legally due to them. His response was immediate: “If I protest, they will throw me out of the job. How will I survive?”
There was no political theory in his answer, only the elemental calculation of survival. Yet it captured the distinction between possessing a right and possessing the practical freedom to exercise it. Constitutionally, he could speak, associate with fellow workers and seek legal protection; economically, he believed exercising those freedoms could cost him his livelihood. No policeman needed to silence him. Vulnerability had already established the boundaries within which he believed himself free to act.
This should caution us against defining freedom merely through the absence of visible coercion. A body without physical chains is not necessarily a free human being if fear constrains thought and necessity extinguishes agency. Political freedom without minimum economic dignity can become theoretical, just as economic prosperity without political liberty can produce affluent subjects rather than sovereign citizens. A democratic society must therefore pursue both: material conditions enabling citizens to exercise freedom and political institutions protecting their right to do so.
Pakistan: From Democratic Attenuation to Resignation
Pakistan embodies many of these contradictions. It possesses the visible architecture of parliamentary democracy: a written Constitution, elections, parliament, political parties, provincial assemblies, courts, media and civilian government. Yet beneath this architecture persists an uncomfortable question that has followed much of Pakistan’s political history: where does effective political sovereignty ultimately reside?
The answer cannot conveniently be attributed to one institution. Pakistan’s democratic deficit has evolved through an ecosystem of power in which dynastic political families, landed elites, influential business interests, patronage networks, bureaucratic structures and unelected institutions have interacted for decades. Political parties demand democracy nationally while frequently practising highly centralised or dynastic politics internally; economic and landed dependence can transform social power into electoral influence; and patronage can reduce citizenship from an entitlement into a favour distributed by those possessing access to the state.
Overarching this civilian structure remains the institutional weight of the armed forces. Pakistan’s military has indispensable constitutional responsibilities for national defence and has made enormous sacrifices in performing them. Yet precisely because it possesses the state’s most concentrated organisational and kinetic power, democratic constitutionalism requires a clear distinction between defending the state and determining who governs it. Civilian institutions cannot develop the authority, competence and accountability expected of them if political sovereignty remains, or is widely perceived to remain, divided between elected and unelected centres of power.
The deeper contemporary danger is therefore not democratic weakness alone but democratic resignation. Citizens risk becoming accustomed to governments whose electoral mandates are contested, political arrangements perceived to depend partly upon forces outside parliament, parties dominated by families or narrow elites, and economic structures in which wealth and social status purchase disproportionate political influence. What begins as an exceptional compromise can, through repetition, acquire the appearance of political normality.
There is consequently a distinction worth making between democratic erosion, democratic attenuation and democratic resignation. Erosion weakens institutions; attenuation preserves their external architecture while progressively thinning their democratic substance; resignation begins when citizens cease expecting anything substantially better. That final stage may be the most dangerous. Visible authoritarianism frequently generates resistance because domination is recognisable; normalised democratic insufficiency can instead produce apathy. The ballot remains in the citizen’s hand while confidence in its capacity to redistribute political power gradually diminishes.
When the Intelligentsia Concedes Intellectual Space
At precisely such moments, intellectuals, academics, journalists, universities and civil society acquire responsibilities extending beyond criticism of governments. Democracy requires criticism, and intellectual independence demands exposing corruption, incompetence and hypocrisy irrespective of whether governments possess electoral legitimacy. But there is an important distinction between criticising democracy to improve it and rationalising democratic retreat because authoritarian alternatives appear temporarily efficient.
The intelligentsia can unwittingly concede intellectual territory when it begins accepting that certain societies are “not ready” for democracy, that political liberties can safely be postponed until economic development reaches some undefined threshold, that hybrid arrangements constitute a satisfactory equilibrium, or that powerful rulers are preferable to disorderly democratic institutions. Such propositions may appear pragmatic, but they contain a profound presumption: that ordinary citizens can temporarily-or perhaps indefinitely-be deprived of full political agency for their supposed benefit.
History provides little justification for confidence in such bargains. Powers surrendered temporarily are rarely returned automatically; institutions acquire interests in preserving authority, exceptional circumstances become normalised, and restrictions generate arguments for their own continuation. The task of the intellectual is not to reconcile society with power merely because power appears permanent; it is to preserve society’s capacity to imagine an alternative to it.
This does not require romanticising democracy. Democratic governments can be corrupt, inefficient and unjust; elections can empower demagogues, majorities can mistreat minorities and political parties can become oligarchies. Democracy’s defence must never become an excuse for bad governance. The answer to failed democracy is not less democracy but deeper democracy combined with better governance-stronger institutions, rule of law, credible elections, meaningful local government, economic opportunity and political parties themselves accountable to their members.
Keeping Tomorrow Open
We return to the haunting words with which we began: “Today is better than tomorrow.” Democracy has never guaranteed that tomorrow will automatically be better. Human societies make mistakes, voters make poor choices, institutions fail and historical progress sometimes reverses. Its promise is more modest but ultimately more profound: tomorrow remains open because those exercising power today do not own it.
Humanity’s journey from subject to sovereign citizen was neither easy nor inevitable, and its achievements are not irreversible. The present wave of populism, exclusionary nationalism, manufactured fear and democratic attenuation may continue for some time. Political tides, however, eventually run their course, while human agency has repeatedly demonstrated its resistance to permanent subjugation. Human beings can submit to coercion, fear or economic necessity for long periods, but the desire to think freely, speak freely and exercise control over one’s own destiny has repeatedly reasserted itself. The impulse that challenged absolute monarchy, colonial domination, racial discrimination and authoritarian rule can also challenge the contemporary diminution of democratic freedom.
The responsibility of the present generation is therefore not to succumb to democratic pessimism but to keep alive democracy’s most important emotional resource: hope. Hope is not political naïveté; it is the conviction that tomorrow remains open to human agency-that injustice can be corrected, governments changed, institutions reformed and societies capable of learning from failure. Once citizens cease believing that tomorrow can be better than today, resignation becomes the silent ally of domination. Civil society, universities, journalists, intellectuals and democratic political leaders must therefore protect not merely elections and constitutions but society’s continuing belief in the possibility of a better future.
The present populist and nationalist tide will eventually run its course, as political tides before it have done, but what follows will depend upon what humanity preserves while it lasts. If the idea of the sovereign citizen survives-if truth, tolerance, pluralism, freedom of thought, political choice and the right to dissent remain alive in our institutions and collective consciousness-democracy can renew itself. Only free human beings can freely imagine and build a better world. Peace imposed through fear remains fragile, prosperity purchased through subjugation remains incomplete, and human dignity without freedom becomes an empty promise.
That is why “Today is better than tomorrow” must never become humanity’s political creed. Democracy cannot guarantee that tomorrow will be better, but it preserves something indispensable: our freedom to make it better. The enduring promise of democracy is therefore the promise of tomorrow-the hope that free and sovereign citizens, exercising their collective human agency, can still build a world more peaceful, more prosperous and more respectful of human dignity than the one they inherited.
Tomorrow must remain better than today-not because history guarantees it, but because free human beings must remain free to make it so.
