Brilliantly put: "democracy is a child of plenty, privation and scarcity make it an orphan and it starves to death" Thank you. There was a brief period of plenty during the rapid rise of energy supply in the 1950's and 1960's but as energy got scarcer and ever more violently contested over, democracy gradually broke down. It didn't happen overnight, it took half a century to get where we are at the moment.