Democracy is not simply in crisis. In 2025, it is losing all three structural dimensions simultaneously; the mechanisms that should have served as buffers are collapsing along with it.
KIKOLAUS Path Ethics evaluates systems along three dimensions: Autonomy (capacity for self-organization), Connectivity (enabling other systems), and Persistence (stability over time). Liberal democracy shows simultaneous erosion on all three in 2025.
Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics describes the loss of Autonomy: platform systems structurally determine political opinion formation without touching formal freedoms. The distinction between nominal freedom (no one compels me) and structural autonomy (I genuinely self-organize) is the central diagnostic instrument.
Hartmut Rosa's acceleration thesis reveals the Persistence loss: deliberation requires time. Acceleration systematically destroys this temporal prerequisite, leaving institutions that formally stand but are normatively hollowed out. Hungary is the paradigmatic case: high formal, collapsed normative Persistence.
Julian Nida-Rümelin's deliberation theory shows the loss of Connectivity. The Path-Ethics thesis of this article is that democracy is the political system type with maximal Connectivity because it allows the greatest number of other societal processes to coexist and mediate among one another. Affective polarization destroys the shared basis on which difference can become productive. Difference itself remains.
The decisive point: all three erode simultaneously. Earlier crises had compensatory mechanisms. The diagnosis for 2025 is that none of these buffers remains untouched: the mechanisms that should compensate are themselves under pressure. This is the Buffer Collapse.
Geopolitically, an external amplification layer compounds the picture: the Illiberal International, a structured transnational network with its own A-A-P profile, deliberately erodes democratic Connectivity.
→ The full paper „Democracy as an Eroding Path: A Path Ethics Case Study“ is available for download (DE + EN), including the A-A-P crisis diagram, typology of democratic structural patterns, and engagement with current resilience research (Linz/Stepan, Levitsky/Ziblatt, Croissant/Lott).