Filthy Redcoats
Historians estimate that the proportion of adult white male loyalists to Great Britain somewhere between 15% and 33% during the American Revolution for democracy. There were about 400,000 Loyalists or 16% of the white population of 2.25 million in 1780.
The Apathetic
Approximately half the colonists of European ancestry tried to avoid involvement in the revolution. The uninterested included deliberate pacifists, recent immigrants, and simple apolitical folk.
Crazy Revolutionaries
The patriots received active support from perhaps 33 to 45 percent of the white populace. John Adams has sometimes been cited as having claimed, in an 1813 letter, that one-third of Americans supported the revolution and one-third were against.
Why Democracy?
Life sucked for millions of years, then democracy happened.
For thousands of years, the average person made about $1000 per year. Today, the average GDP per capita is $52,000 per year in the US.
What led to this sudden 52X explosion in wealth? This happened over a period of 200 years. For perspective, biologically modern humans have existed around 200,000 years. 200 years is 0.1% of 200,000. So after being generally for literally 99.9% of human existence, global wealth suddenly multiplies itself by 52 during 0.1% of our existence.
Dis-Incentivizing Innovation
Prior to representative democracies, the divine right of kings stated that everything was owned by the king or whatever. So there was no point in spending your life developing some new technology or building a business that could be confiscated at any time. Thus there was little reward for innovation. Thus there was little innovation.
Meritocratic Resource Deployment
Then some representative democracies and free markets were born. Democratic governments produce more of a meritocracy than an aristocracy. In an ideal free market, the most productive people acquire and then get to control and deploy most of society’s resources. Hence, resources are deployed much more efficiently than they are by a bunch of randomly selected inbred aristocrats.
The benefits of this compound and snowball to produce exponential growth as seen in the GDP curve.
Everyone Seems to Hate Direct Democracy
Everyone seems to care tremendously about the various global problems but are undyingly loyal to the system that allows them to thrive. It’s as if everyone sees constant hand-wringing as the perfect all-purpose solution for everything.