What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorism has always struck me as a great life hack in favor of optimism and against despair. Can it also apply to democracy?

For lovers of freedom and democracy the news has been grim for at least 18 years, according to Freedom House. All these years the world has been in a democratic recession, with more countries every year trampling, rather than protecting, civil rights and civil liberties.

The downward trend seems to be accelerating, not only in places where coups are frequent like in Africa but also in the West. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán, in his 14 years into his second term as prime minister, has methodically engaged in exerting control over the media, courts, universities, parliament and business to turn the country into an autocracy. This has been a model of governance for Donald Trump, who seems determined to take similar actions in his second term as US president.

Powerful men have many imitators, to varying degrees. The president of South Korea, Yun Suk-yeol, has just succeeded in the fragmentation of power. An unpopular politician who (like Trump) has labeled the opposition as “internal enemies”, attempted a de facto coup this week by declaring martial law. Fortunately, parliament, the press and the country rose against him and the coup was over within hours.

Elsewhere, democracies long considered stable and mature continue to adopt a populist narrative, making them look like silly travesties. At the same time, governments in both France and Germany recently collapsed while trying to pass a bleak budget. The French government lost a parliamentary motion of no confidence this week, the German will follow in more than a week. Democracy, it may seem to cynics, not only does not solve problems, but is sometimes the problem itself.

Among the causes for this widespread disillusionment, one of the most obvious causes is the deliberate disinformation spread by the enemies of democracy, most notably Russian President Vladimir Putin. His trolls and bots have tried to steer Western voters as many citizens have surrendered to nihilism, along the lines of Putin’s “nothing is real and everything is possible” strategy.

Both Romania and the US believe, for example, that Russian interference helped an obscure pro-Russian and NATO critic, Kalin Gheorgescu, win the first round of Romania’s presidential election, and is now likely to win the second round this year. Weekend.

Others turn their backs on democracy because it rarely seems to cure life’s bigger problems, such as inequality and the consequent alienation and disenchantment of whole sections of societies. If democracies cannot right glaring injustices, why shouldn’t citizens turn to the local emperor?

And then, of course, there’s that subtle but powerful feeling the French call “ennui,” boredom. If you’ve always lived in a democracy and still don’t like your life, you may be drawn to charismatic and radical rulers out of sheer boredom and frustration. The Trump-Musk reality show, for example, is more entertaining than the current White House.

My point is that pessimism is tempting. Modern democracy often seems to be dying a slow death before our eyes, just as the first democracy ended ignominiously in the 5th century BC when the Athenians abandoned self-government and ceded power to the Thirty Tyrants, a group of pro-Spartan oligarchs whom I imagine as Putin fans.

But wait, there’s still Nietzsche: Our democracies are sure to be tested and battered. But if they survive, they may emerge even stronger.

Let’s take another look at South Korea. Senior citizens still bear the brunt of their past experiences with dictatorship and martial law (last imposed in 1980), and all South Koreans are proud of the democracy they have built since then. Yun didn’t understand. When he went on TV to announce his coup, something clicked and the whole of society rallied: not only the opposition but also most of Yun’s base in parliament, the press and the population. Common sentiment vetoed it. Yun will now likely be impeached. Either way, his name and career are ruined.

This episode resembles the Spiegel Affair of West Germany in 1962. At that time the Americans, the British and the French (ie the Western Allies from World War II who supported the young Federal Republic), and especially the Germans themselves , still doubted whether this German republic, largely run by men who had let the Weimar Republic fail and Adolf Hitler to ascend, she was reliable and robust.

Then a conservative defense minister didn’t like an article in Der Spiegel magazine. Acting on the paternalistic and authoritarian instincts of an earlier era, he ordered the detention of several journalists and the raid and occupation of editorial offices. But the citizens of West Germany had seen this work before and took to the streets decisively. The Minister of Defense was dismissed, the government suffered a blow, the curse of Weimar was lifted, and West German democracy became real.

Similar struggles are taking place in many democracies today. For nearly a decade, a populist and far-right party in Poland imitated Hungary’s Orban and appeared to be succeeding. But then the Poles ousted the autocrats and put the democrats back in charge. The tug of war isn’t over, but now it’s a fair fight. The same was true of Israel before its collective soul was engulfed by the terrorist massacre of October 7, 2023: For most of that year, Israeli democrats led an effort against their far-right government to undermine judicial independence.

The point of Nietzsche’s aphorism is that we should see life’s challenges as antigens that provoke an immune response. Remove all the antigens and the immune system can become activated and cause autoimmune diseases. in the context of democracy. I’ll call it “boredom”. If the system encounters a fatal challenge it may fail. Trials, however, will sustain it and eventually revive it.

But what about America? Intellectuals are trying to figure out whether or not the Insurrection Act, say, resembles South Korea’s martial law, and whether Trump will turn into Yun. The answer is: If Trump installs enough cronies, he could.

The most pressing question then is how the immune system of the oldest continuous republic will react. Will conservatives — in the media, in Congress, and in the electorate — join other Americans, even those they disagree with, to fight back? Will Senate and House Republicans veto the coup, will Fox News imitate the South Korean media?

Is the American republic Weimar or West Germany? It’s an open question. The positive is, because it remains the most likely, that over time freedom in the United States, and by extension the world, emerges stronger than ever.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. He was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.