Salon: Democracy has not been doing well. For this reason, now is an awkward time to argue that it must be the fulcrum of the Anthropocene. In the United States and Europe, democracies have rushed into foolish wars and stumbled in the face of economic crises--or created those crises. At the time of writing, the North Atlantic democracies are splitting into elite technocrats, who wish they could govern without consulting the masses, and angry populists, who would like to liquidate the technocrats. Nondemocratic...