It generally feels that the modern Western nations are ready to drop democracy for more or less trivial reasons, like moderately higher inflation (I'd go out on a limb and posit that it's inflation and its downstream effects that sour the mood specifically since 2021). At the same time the Western democracies went through way more serious economic upheavals in the past and yet democracy itself was not questioned. What is different today? For example, why didn't the US go Nazi after the Great Depression?
> For example, why didn't the US go Nazi after the Great Depression?
It flirted with it, as did most of Europe. Some nations shook out as fascist, some saw communist revolution, and some (barely) maintained the liberal capitalist democracies and republics while applying extensive socialist reforms like the New Deal. Whether the differing outcomes of that period were incidental or preordained is debatable.
After WWII, fascism and explicit expansionism largely fell out of favor as viable ideology, and we saw the bipolar heel-digging and soft/proxy power competition of the Cold War.
Then, after the collapse of the USSR, we had one surviving ideological framework dominating world-scale politics and it (inevitably) did not deliver enough equity and prosperity for people to accept that it was good enough.
So, like 100 years earlier, people are again looking around at other options.
There's no precedent to suggest that any one form of governance or economy can indefinitely keep all people settled and secure. Every one promises some kind of utopia, but all do so only speculatively.
In frank answer to your question:
> What is different today?
Nothing.
So if you like the whole liberal democracy thing over alternatives, you might want to
make sure you're fighting for it, so that your community (whichever that is) ends up as one of those that hangs onto it through this next round.
People being dissatisfied with "the way democracy is working in their country" are not necessarily ready to drop democracy, just as people dissatisfied with their lives typically don't commit suicide.
Someone who's simply disappointed that other people don't vote more like them could also answer the survey question this way.
