Where has Democracy gone?

An interesting article discussing the decline of Democracy in the world today.
Here is an excerpt:

It first hit me with force that democracy may not be a universal goal when I was in Russia in 2005 to discuss my book on radical Islam. Almost everyone I met — from leading academics, to my driver, to radio talk show hosts, to all sorts of people I met in bars — loved Putin and were contemptuous of democracy and capitalism. Every Russian I met wanted a strong government, thought democracy is inherently corrupt and useless, and that capitalism is another word for theft.
Last week, I was in China and had an opportunity to talk with several Chinese businesspeople — some top executives, some shopkeepers and, once again, several middle-class people in bars (a small sample out of 1.3 billion Chinese). Each was perfectly content to let the unelected Communist Party run the government, as long as economic growth continued. A point made by several of them (admittedly, all the people I talked with are doing well economically) and also made by a local academic expert is that the rest of Asia is noticing that the Chinese Communist Party-managed economic method is working better than the American democratic capitalism method.

The thing I took away from this article is that it seems people are going to be happy with whatever government is around as long as they are making money. Which I think speaks more to Capitalism than to any form of government. It makes me wonder if in the future, Governments will evolve in to a business format and become a hybrid of corporate totalitarianism, where Governments resemble corporations more than the current forms we have now. Where leaders are still "elected" but by shareholders. It is already happening on smaller scales in that many services are being privatized by municipalities since it can be done cheaper (ie: garbage, street maintenance).