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Americans have long been growing dissatisfied with the state of their political system. As survey researchers have chronicled over recent decades, an overwhelming majority of citizens now believes that the United States is "headed in the wrong direction." Trust in such major institutions as Congress and the presidency has fallen markedly. Engagement in formal political institutions has ebbed. The media are more mistrusted than ever. Even so, most scholars have given these findings a stubbornly optimistic spin: U.S. citizens, they claim, have simply come to have higher expectations of their government.
As we showed in an essay in the July 2016 Journal of Democracy, that interpretation is untenable.1 American citizens are not just dissatisfied with the performance of particular governments; they are increasingly critical of liberal democracy itself. Among young Americans polled in 2011, for example, a record high of 24 percent stated that democracy is a "bad" or "very bad" way of running the country-a sharp increase both from prior polls and compared to older respondents. Meanwhile, the proportion of Americans expressing approval for "army rule" has risen from 1 in 16 in 1995 to 1 in 6 in the most recent survey.2
Americans' dissatisfaction with the democratic system is part of a much larger global pattern. It is not just that the proportion of Americans who state that it is "essential" to live in a democracy, which stands at 72 percent among those born before World War II, has fallen to 30 percent among millennials. It is also that, contrary to Ronald Inglehart's response to our earlier essay in these pages,3 a similar cohort pattern is found across all longstanding democracies, including Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand (see Figure 1). In virtually all cases, the generation gap is striking, with the proportion of younger citizens who believe it is essential to live in a democracy falling to a minority.
What is more, this disaffection with the democratic form of government is accompanied by a wider skepticism toward liberal institutions. Citizens are growing more disaffected with established political parties, representative institutions, and minority rights. Tellingly, they are also increasingly open to authoritarian interpretations of democracy. The share of citizens who approve of "having a strong leader who does not have...