Idk if you’re a nerd, but Brian Klass is a contemporary political scientist who actually challenges this, and yet still affirms a determinist lense. His latest book is on his chaos theory that I think can be helpful navigating our current world.

Here’s his big think interview if you’re interested!

One way to think of this is that we can’t predict the future with what we know of the past because the “rules” are constantly changing. One example is an academic paper that was written that said middle eastern dictatorships were especially stable in comparison to others, but then a year later the Arab Spring occurs. His take is that the author wasn’t wrong- based on all the information of the past it made sense that these dictatorships were not going away anytime soon, but what happened was the world changed making those assumptions moot.

So the idea that European democracies are inherently stable isn’t necessarily a given, and as our world is drastically changing, our tools to gauge the health of a democracy are becoming less and less relevant.