Americans tend to treat democracy’s superiority as settled, and the long-run evidence backs them up. A major study by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and colleagues found that countries that democratize end up about 20 percent richer per person within a generation. But most of the world does not grade governments on long-run studies. For billions of people outside the wealthy West, the test is simpler: does the power stay on, are food prices steady, is there work, and do the roads get built? When the stomach is empty, a ballot can feel like a luxury.
China understands this and sells its model on exactly those terms. Its GDP per capita has climbed from about $300 in 1980 to nearly $15,000 today, by IMF figures, and the World Bank credits it with lifting some 800 million people out of extreme poverty. India, the world’s largest democracy, started from a similar place and sits near $2,800. Beijing’s centralized system, paired with Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms, built power plants, factories and rail lines at a pace India’s more deliberative politics has not matched. Anyone who values liberty will find little to admire in that model. It does explain why the model sells.
Prosperity Usually Comes First
Political science has a blunt finding here. Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi found that no democracy had ever collapsed in a country richer than Argentina was in 1975, about $6,000 per head in 1985 dollars, while poorer democracies fell again and again. South Korea and Taiwan industrialized under authoritarian rule and became durable democracies once they grew rich. Singapore took a hybrid road under Lee Kuan Yew, pairing disciplined execution with tight limits on political freedom; its GDP per capita now tops $100,000.
Silencing people is the wrong takeaway. Regimes that crush dissent blind themselves to their own mistakes. The lesson is about the order of needs. A factory worker in Shenzhen or a farmer in Uttar Pradesh wants a reliable bus and a working school first and a freer debate second. A democracy that cannot supply the first will struggle to sell the second.
America’s Vetocracy
That is where the United States should worry. In April, Gallup found just 10 percent of Americans approve of Congress, one point above the record low set in 2013, with 86 percent disapproving. Last fall the government shut down for 43 days, the longest full shutdown in American history, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates the economy permanently lost about $11 billion. This spring the Department of Homeland Security went unfunded for a record 76 days. Continuing resolutions stand in for budgets. A typical federal environmental impact statement takes about four and a half years before a shovel moves. California voters approved high-speed rail in 2008 at an estimated $33 billion; the state’s own estimate is now $126 billion, and the first passengers are not expected until the 2030s. Over the same years, China built more than 50,000 kilometers of high-speed track, more than the rest of the world combined.
The same pattern now reaches the top of the world. As Arctic ice retreats, Chinese container ships recently completed their first season of regular weekly service to Europe along Russia’s northern coast, cutting the Suez voyage nearly in half. America’s answer is a heavy icebreaker contracted in 2019 for delivery in 2024; the GAO now expects it in 2033. Until then, the Coast Guard’s only working heavy icebreaker is the Polar Star, commissioned in 1976. Congress paid for these ships. Washington simply could not get them built.
Francis Fukuyama calls this a “vetocracy,” a system so well defended against overreach that it is also defended against action. Gridlock is usually treated as a domestic annoyance. Abroad, every stalled American project is free advertising for Beijing.
When Pressure Worked
Democracies can still move fast when someone applies pressure on purpose. For years, polite diplomacy left most European allies short of even NATO’s 2 percent defense target. The Trump administration took a blunter, transactional approach, and much of the foreign-policy establishment called it reckless. Yet at The Hague in June 2025, every ally except Spain, which negotiated its way out, committed to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense and security by 2035, with 3.5 percent for core military needs. This March, NATO reported that European allies and Canada had raised real defense spending by 20 percent in 2025, and that for the first time every member cleared the 2 percent bar.
The method has costs. Alliances rest partly on predictability, and an adversary who cannot tell which commitments are firm may miscalculate. Still, deliberate pressure inside an existing structure broke an inertia that decades of consensus diplomacy could not.
Reforms Worth Debating
None of this argues for abandoning checks and balances. It argues for sorting the checks that produce accountability from those that merely produce paralysis. Several reforms would push the system toward delivery without touching the Constitution: a narrow filibuster exception for infrastructure and budget bills; sunset dates that force major programs to be reauthorized on a schedule rather than run on autopilot; and a public, plain-English scorecard for every large federal project. Congress already accepts the logic of the first idea, since budget reconciliation bills cannot be filibustered. In my years running R&D programs, a project with no milestones was one nobody could kill or save.
A bolder idea deserves debate, if only for what it forces us to confront: a president elected to a single, non-renewable term of five or six years, with narrow authority to break legislative deadlock on designated infrastructure and economic bills, subject to full judicial review. It would require a constitutional amendment and carries real risk of abuse, so it should be considered only with guardrails at least as strong as the power it grants. But removing the reelection motive would strip out much of the posturing that fuels gridlock today.
The postwar assumption that democracy wins by default, whether or not it delivers, is wearing thin across the developing world and, increasingly, at home. Ordinary people need full refrigerators more than fine speeches. The contest with China will not be settled by speeches about freedom. It will be settled in part by which system can pass a budget, build a bridge and keep a promise on time. If America keeps mistaking gridlock for principle, it will keep handing its rivals their best argument.
Meda Parameswara Reddy, Ph.D., is the Director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking.
