If Thailand's own history is a reliable guide, abandoning democracy can be expected to lead straight to economic stagnation and exacerbated inequality.(Picture credit: AFP Corrections to this article: * This clause was changed to refer specifically to the 2006 coup.
Meanwhile, activists like Reed have learned to stress secular reasons (Israel is a democracy, a reliable ally) for their position.
One recent former editor of a Scottish title says: "Scotland is in danger of becoming the first modern democracy without reliable organs of free speech".
His career reached from Louis-Philippe's July Monarchy to the beginning of the Third Republic in 1870, which made democracy a reliable fact of French life nearly 100 years after the storming of the Bastille.
In the Los Angeles speech, he rejected the unilateralism that has been the hallmark of the Bush administration's foreign policy in favor of what he called "being a good and reliable ally to our fellow democracies".
If democracy is predicated on reliable information, it's in serious trouble right now.
Poroshenko said he had met the US ambassador on Wednesday and been assured that "the new US administration would remain a reliable partner in the struggle for democracy".
In the aftermath of Mr. Montesinos's fall, Mr. Fujimori was rescued from disgrace by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright's recognition of him as a reliable conductor of a return to democracy in Peru.
A somewhat nervous statement was issued by the Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, congratulating Trump and noting he had been assured by the US ambassador that the incoming Trump administration "would remain a reliable partner in the struggle for democracy".
In the past few decades, development economists have come to understand that the key driver of growth is honest government, and that the most reliable guarantor of honest government is democracy.
What is relevant to us right now, however, is not the vagaries of a representative democracy, but creating a reliable, official, and secure means for citizens to make their opinions felt by those in office.
