Unlike in the last century, this time around it's not under the guise of nationalism or communism, but in representative democracies where the executive branches consumes greater and greater power, while weakening the well-vetted and centuries old safe-guards that were in place to prevent power-abuse.

Whenever the states sky-rocketing growth in power is questioned by the media or the citizenry the leaders can point to the fact that - hey it's still a democracy, you voted us in. So the populous is placated and ignorant to the fact the democratic process has been made impotent.

Many democracies around the world are admittedly flawed, but regardless, a larger portion of humanity today lives in democratic countries than anytime in history.

You can have a powerful democracy with a small number of constituents because then an individual has a realistic capacity to rally his neighbors and make change when something sour is going on.

You can have a large democracy when the government's power is strictly limited to a small well-defined area of influence, because then most constituents can realistically remain informed about that specific area of influence.

You cannot have a large, powerful democracy. A large democracy with many powers can't resemble a direct democracy because constituents can't realistically remain informed on so many issues. But it also can't resemble a republic because that forces voters to choose between e.g. the party that promotes censorship and the party that promotes police militarization, without sufficient influence to affect the position of either party.

The problem is that more and more of the things people describe as "democracies" are large and powerful.

That's not the case in Russia, Hungary, and China.