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John Adams, the second American president, famouslywarned that without constitutional constraints on the power of popularly elected governments, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

That these words of wisdom, which for so long remained dormant counsel in history books, now spring to relevance marks the crisis of modern democracy today. Drawing on his reading of the failures of Greek democracy and the Roman Republic in antiquity, Adamsunderstood that predatory appetites are whetted when too much power is concentrated in any one place.To that end, along with the other Founding Fathers, he designed a Constitution with circuit breakers an independent judiciary and a deliberative upper house selected to check the popularly elected lower house that would cut off power when too much of it flows to one set of interests, including, and especially, the electoral majority.As John C. Calhoun would later put it, a positive majority makes a government; anegative, or check on that power, makes constitutional rule.

Barely a day goes by in the United States when President Donald Trump doesnt assault one or another of the institutional constraints on his power, above all an independent judiciary and the free media, not to mention the special prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department to look into whether the Trump team colluded with Russia during the campaign. Fortunately, the weakness and incompetence of inexperienced leadership combined with factional polarization within the ruling Republican majority has only yielded paralysis. Democracy in the U.S.today may be wasting and exhausting itself, but so far it has not succeeded in taking its own life.

That is not the case elsewhere. As Nilfer Glewrote recently in The WorldPost, a pluralist Turkey that once aspired to join Europe has now given way to an authoritarian, Islamic populist regime ratified by a majority through the ballot box.

In Venezuela, the ruling regime has used the populist canard of a popular referendum to elect a stacked list for a constituent assembly to write new rules that nullify the power of the opposition-dominated National Assembly. The 545 largely pro-regime constituents elected over the weekend are now directed by Venezuelan President Nicols Maduros government not merely to rewrite the constitution, writesMoises Rendon, but also to establish a new communal political system with absolute power, not unlike those in Cuba or North Korea. The prospect of such a systemrisks total economic collapse, a worsened humanitarian crisis and permanent civil conflict in Venezuela.Since last weekends vote, Maduros government has moved speedily to arrest opposition leaders. With domestic avenues of resistance now blocked, hope turns to international pressure. The world needs to move now before the situation spirals into a failed state, says Rendon.

Ueslei Marcelino / Reuters

Poland, once the poster child of post-Cold War democratization, is sliding back to authoritarian rule. Taking heart from the solidarity with its illiberal sentiments expressed by Trump during hisrecent visit to Warsaw, the parliamentary majority of the ruling Law and Justice party and its allies passed legislation in July that would politicize the rule of law and end the independence of the judiciary. The aim, as Jacek Kucharczykwrites from Warsaw, is to completely overhaul the judiciary system, including the forced retirement of Supreme Court justices, [as] an essential part of the ruling partys long-term strategy of dismantling democratic checks and balances and introducing de facto one-party rule.

To everyones surprise, Polish President Andrzej Duda vetoed the law that would have ousted the Supreme Court justices after massive demonstrations against it across all of Polands major cities. These young people sent a strong signal to Duda, who largely owes his unexpected victory in 2015 to anti-establishment young voters, Kucharczyk reports. The ruling party has nonetheless pledged to press on with its proposed reforms. Stay tuned as uncertainty and turmoil grips yet another nation.

In Italy, representative democracy is being challenged from another angle by the populist Five Star Movement, which polls show is a leading contenderfor power in upcoming elections in 2018.The Eurosceptic movement believes that delegation of power to a corrupt political class ought to be replaced in the internet age by direct citizen participation in governance. In a video, a Five Star leader, Davide Casaleggio, explains a set of innovative online tools the movement has created not only to raise funds and recruit candidates for office from outside the mainstream parties, but to engage citizens directly in the proposition and drafting of legislation as well.

Writing in The WorldPost last year about Brazils own democratic meltdown,one of the countrys former presidents, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, identified the core of the crisis of representative democracy as the widening gap between peoples aspirations and the capacity of political institutions to respond to the demands of society. He continued: It is one of the ironies of our age that this deficit of trust in political institutions coexists with the rise of citizens capable of making the choices that shape their lives and influence the future of their societies.

Despite what one thinks of the Five Star Movements simplistic populism, the tools it is inventing are a significant remedy to closing the trust gap Cardoso identifies. If citizen empowerment can be combined with the ballast of deliberative bodies that check popular passions and formulate responsible policies, as John Adams and the other American Founding Fathers rightly thought so necessary, the renovation of democracy instead of its suicide may well be possible.

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This week, scientists reported that, for the first time, they succeeded in editing the genes of a human embryo to eliminate a genetic mutation. Responding to the breakthrough, Craig Calhoun, the president of the Berggruen Institute, argues in a short essay that science and technological capacity are racing ahead of ethics, safety regulations and our understanding of risks and societal implications. Some, he writes, even worry that such gene editing practices are a backdoor to eugenics that will reinforce racial divisions. At a fundamental level, Calhoun posits, Genetic modification challenges our very idea of human nature. It suggests that we can make human beings into what we want them to be. Though conceding that gene editing is one of the most promising medical technologies in years, Calhoun concludes that unless there is much more attention to the ethical and social choices before us, we risk seeing that promise mired in controversy or turned into a disaster.

Though Mexico entered the democratic pantheon in 2000 when elections ended more than 70 years of one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, it has not yet been able to establish an effective rule of law. In an article and video that profile personal cases, Amnesty Internationals Josefina Salomn reports on what appears to be widespread arbitrary detentions by corrupt police chalking it all up to the war on drugs. View the WorldPost video based on Amnestys reporting below:

EDITORS:Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost.Kathleen Milesis the Executive Editor of The WorldPost.Farah Mohamedis the Managing Editor of The WorldPost.Peter Mellgardis the Features Editor of The WorldPost.Alex Gardelsis the Video Editor of The WorldPost.Suzanne Gaberis the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost.Rosa OHarais the Social Editor of The WorldPost.Katie Nelsonis News Director at HuffPost, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPosts news coverage.Nick Robins-EarlyandJesselyn Cookare World Reporters.

EDITORIAL BOARD:Nicolas Berggruen,Nathan Gardels,Arianna Huffington,Eric Schmidt(Google Inc.),Pierre Omidyar(First Look Media),Juan Luis Cebrian(El Pais/PRISA),Walter Isaacson(Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN),John Elkann(Corriere della Sera, La Stampa),Wadah Khanfar(Al Jazeera)andYoichi Funabashi(Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS:Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS:Moises Naim(former editor ofForeign Policy),Nayan Chanda(Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) andKatherine Keating(One-On-One).Sergio Munoz BataandParag Khannaare Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Societyand itsChinaFile, edited byOrville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage.Eric X. Liand the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai andGuancha.cnalso provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content ofChina Digital Times.Seung-yoon Leeis The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohenof Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe.Bruce Mauprovides regular columns fromMassiveChangeNetwork.comon the whole mind way of thinking.Patrick Soon-Shiongis Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institutes 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as theAdvisory Council as well as regular contributors to the site. These include,Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz,Gordon Brown,Fernando Henrique Cardoso,Juan Luis Cebrian,Jack Dorsey,Mohamed El-Erian,Francis Fukuyama,Felipe Gonzalez,John Gray,Reid Hoffman,Fred Hu,Mo Ibrahim,Alexei Kudrin,Pascal Lamy,Kishore Mahbubani,Alain Minc,Dambisa Moyo,Laura Tyson,Elon Musk,Pierre Omidyar,Raghuram Rajan,Nouriel Roubini,Nicolas Sarkozy,Eric Schmidt,Gerhard Schroeder,Peter Schwartz,Amartya Sen,Jeff Skoll,Michael Spence,Joe Stiglitz,Larry Summers,Wu Jianmin,GeorgeYeo,Fareed Zakaria,Ernesto Zedillo,Ahmed ZewailandZheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include:Marek Belka,Tony Blair,Jacques Delors,Niall Ferguson,Anthony Giddens,Otmar Issing,Mario Monti,Robert Mundell,Peter SutherlandandGuy Verhofstadt.

The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.

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Weekend Roundup: Modern Democracy At The Crossroads - HuffPost