This is one of the reasons why Europe and the United States are facing debt crises and political dysfunction at the same time. People used to believe that human depravity was self-evident and democratic self-government was fragile. Now they think depravity is nonexistent and they take self-government for granted.
Neither the United States nor the European model will work again until we rediscover and acknowledge our own natural weaknesses and learn to police rather than lionize our impulses.
True. But the Great Relearning is gonna be a bitch.
JohnE_o 
Charles Cosimano 
Lord_Karth 
Noah172 
I think there’s something to the thesis that people have become so deeply ensconced in a relatively peaceful and prosperous civilization that they’ve forgotten that this is not the normal state of humanity.
But I don’t really think that you can say people think “depravity is nonexistent.” Everyone has their pet moral theory about why America is in decline–on the cultural right, it’s depraved secularization (or the rise of MTD); on the cultural left, it’s depraved materialistic greed. Pretty much everyone, even the relatively nonideological middle, believes that the ruling class is depraved in one way or another.
And because of that, I’m not sure it makes sense to say that they think “self-government is a given.” In fact, it seems as if it’s the rare American, at this point, who believes that self-government is working very well for us.
Perhaps the problem, instead, is our sense of helpless bafflement: self-government *should* be working, pretty much on autopilot, without constant tinkering and attention. However many times I’ve rolled my eyes at the almost comical cultures of protest in places like Argentina and Quebec, you can’t say that they don’t take democracy seriously.