I was going to be a historian. Went to grad school even.
Reading historical accounts, I wondered what it was like to be in a village and one day out of the blue, a crowd of men takes everything they can steal including the honor and lives of women and children, and burns what they can't.
I wondered what it was like to live in Frankfurt or Osaka in 1937, knowing your country's government was run by idiots, but not quite expecting them to be so idiotic they'd arrange to have the city leveled and half its people killed.
Now I know what it was like for them: a feeling every day of lurking doom, and every day a prayer, "Please God, just get me through this life intact, and my wife and children too."
We're still today just as deeply vulnerable to the depredations of evil and cupidity, whether from without or within, as people were in past millennia. And we have not become more sophisticated. I'm confident at least one-half the people in this country, plopped into Frankfurt or Osaka in 1937, even given freedom to choose their leadership, would choose poorly.
In fairness, though, their other easy-button options at the ballot box would be little different, just as our choice at the general election today is often between someone with terrible ideas and delusional understandings of economics and technology, and in a hurry, and someone with equally poor judgement but thinking we should go to the same terrible places but slower. Effective popular control of governance seems as ephemeral and impossible now as we know that it was in the past.
If Western Civilization a century from now persists anywhere, in any enclave, I think that will be a matter of unusually good luck. Effective leaders, willing to take big risks for big changes, who want to extend life's good things not just to their crowd of palace insiders but primarily to the common people, are scarce. Only rarely appear Washingtons, Ataturks, Churchills, Thatchers, Bukeles, and Trumps. People with power resent the competition and exterminate or isolate them. And democracy? To rephrase Mencken, it enables people to select any plan and any goal, no matter how stupid or infeasible.