Is democracy in its death throes?

"The other is the proliferation of mass atrocities facilitated by the leadership void that's created by the first."

Roth explains: "Autocratic populists gain power by demonising unpopular minorities, and once they've gained power they claim to have special insight into the desires of the majority sufficient to undermine the checks and balances on their power. They attack independent judges, critical journalists and civil society."

He lists Turkey's Recep Erdogan, Egypt's Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte, India's Narendra Modi, Myanmar's generals, America's Donald Trump, Poland's Jarosław Kaczyński and Hungary's Viktor Orban in this category.

"This political process is founded in an anti-rights agenda and, with that foundation, they're much less likely to support human rights abroad," says Roth.

"You have a lack of leadership to stand against the atrocities of Assad and Putin in Syria, or the war in Yemen or Myanmar's ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya."

In other words, it's not just a matter of individual countries falling under the spell of populist "stong man" types. It's not an arithmetic process where two plus two equals a trend.

It's a self-perpetuating cycle – each time another country submits to an autocratic leader, it removes some political energy from the force field that supports peoples' rights worldwide, leading to further weakening. It's more like a geometric process or a viral one, more like two times two equals an accelerating collapse.

The big question, of course, is why? I'd suggest that it's more than just coincidence that the democratic recession took hold at roughly the same time as the the economic Great Recession of 2008.

Much as the Great Depression of the 1930s set the conditions for the rise of intolerance and fascism leading into World War Two, the devastating loss of jobs, income and middle-class wealth in the global financial crisis shocked the happy expectations of people in some of the world's most comfortable democracies. The US, Britain and Europe, most conspicuously.

Inequalities that had been tolerated during years of overall growth suddenly became intolerable. Young people in most of the democratic world increasingly have questioned the entire system.

And it's true that democratic countries have overhyped the advantages of democracy. It does not guarantee to supply the best government. It's true advantage is that it allows the bloodless removal of a bad one, as the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper put it.

Scapegoats, as usual, were sought and offered up – immigrants in general, Muslims in particular.

At the same time, China continued to improve the living standards for a fifth of humanity without interruption. This poses an existential challenge to democracies. "How can you keep saying your system is better than ours if your results are worse?" demanded a Chinese acquaintance.

It's a powerful point and the Chinese Communist Party has been actively promoting its model of authoritarian capitalism as the better way. The power of its example combines intoxicatingly with the bulge of its wallet. And Beijing, of course, asks its client states no uncomfortable questions about the rights of their people.

On the one hand, the world has seen that "the US retreated from its traditional role as both a champion and an exemplar of democracy amid an accelerating decline in American political rights and civil liberties", as Freedom House puts it. On the other, China has been modelling and coaching authoritarian approaches to government.

Can democratic rights and freedoms prevail against these powerful twin forces? "There's a strong sense that dark times are upon us again, that democracy is in crisis, that the West is imploding," says Sydney University political scientist John Keane.

But is that just a sense, or is it objectively true? "Crises are always lived, and that means they are always a matter of perception and interpretation. If, in time, millions of people come to think it's a crisis, it's a crisis," counsels Keane.

The outcome is not predetermined, in other words. The leaders in the democratic world and, indeed, their followers, need to improve the objective living conditions of their people.

And our responses to our times will matter. Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch describes it as "a battle and it's one worth engaging in – we shouldn't submit to despair and say the rise of authoritarian populism is inevitable. There's a counter-trend too."

The spirit of ANZAC struggle and sacrifice in defence of freedom shouldn't be just a memory. If lived, it can be a force for the future. God knows, it seems we're going to need it.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.