The National Diet building in Tokyo. Democratic capitalism faces challenges, but institutions can adapt and survive if societies resist inequality, concentrated power and political complacency. | Bloomberg
Aug 3, 2026
A thoughtful essay by a Japanese author, circulated anonymously within a private discussion group to which I belong, captured a sentiment many people today quietly share. It described the peculiar experience of living through what feels like the end of a civilization: the unsettling awareness that everyday life continues much as before even while the institutions, values and assumptions that have long sustained it appear to be quietly disintegrating.
It is an arresting image. We still go to work, raise our families, pay our bills and make plans for the future. Streets remain busy, elections are held, financial markets function and governments continue to operate. Yet beneath this appearance of continuity, many people sense that something fundamental has changed. Confidence in democratic institutions is weakening. Economic inequality continues to widen. Political discourse grows increasingly polarized. The world feels less stable than it once did.
The anonymous author argues that democracy and capitalism are undergoing profound transformations. Democracy, once intended to disperse power and restrain rulers, risks becoming little more than a mechanism for selecting strong leaders to whom citizens willingly surrender authority. Capitalism, originally justified as a means of creating prosperity through open competition, increasingly appears to legitimize extreme concentrations of wealth and influence, giving rise to what the essay calls an “ideology of the elect.”
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