Democratic governments everywhere are in trouble. In Britain, the Labour government is tottering. In Japan, defeat looms for Prime Minister Taro Aso's Liberal Democratic Party. In Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is clinging on amid a sea of scandal. In France, hyperactive President Nicolas Sarkozy is attracting growing contempt and criticism.

Even U.S. President Barrack Obama is coming under a barrage of attacks as the American economy enters its predictable double dip and inflated expectations collapse like a punctured balloon.

Is the process of democratic government as we know it getting too difficult to sustain?

Certainly the big political parties, which have served as the pillars of the democratic system for the past two centuries or so, seem to be crumbling. Party memberships have withered and party politics has become the butt of jokes and contempt almost everywhere. People's deepening misgivings about politicians, parties and governments can simply no longer be denied.

In Britain, membership in the Labour Party, once over a million strong, has shrunk to less than 200,000. The Conservative Party, once at over 2.5 million in its heyday, now stands at barely 300,000. The figures in Poland, Hungary, France and the Netherlands show the same sort of dramatic drop.

This is not to say that people have lost interest in politics. The place of party politicians and party machines is being taken instead by a string of nonparty celebrities, or fringe party figures with the luxury of nonaccountability and the freedom to expound any view they wish as long as it is well-laced with criticism of "them" — the governments,elected politicians and their works.

Pop stars, TV personalities and media figures now sometimes command more attention than political leaders, regardless of the shallowness of their views, while party politicians feel increasingly under siege as they look out at an increasingly hostile world.

Attempts to cling to authority by news manipulation and trickery, the so-called art of spin, have merely compounded the degree of public distrust and derision. And as parties have grown weaker they have had to turn in desperation to more dubious fundraising activities, bringing them into association with business sources far removed from the democratic scene, and this attracting still more contempt.

The causes of this wholesale rejection of mainstream parties and politicians are not hard to see, and have long been predicted. Access to multiple digital media networks have given millions of people the chance to challenge established political postures and their articulators. And the global information revolution has enormously empowered an army of "parallel" nongovernmental bodies and lobbies who watch over the political process to pounce on abuses or attack those hapless politicians who dare to criticize their chosen cause.

Deference toward elected politicians has vanished as they are repeatedly upstaged by publicity seeking stars and their skilled PR agents, or by blatantly partisan journalists. Fewer and fewer places are left in an age of super-transparency for political fixers and party managers to hide. Their personal affairs and private lives become public property, often generating a storm of public abuse and outrage, as has been vividly demonstrated in Britain by the recent media revelations of elected parliamentarians' expenses.

A still deeper problem is that national governments can no longer pretend they are in control of national affairs. Global issues intrude at every point. Global interconnections through the markets, commerce, big business and the media system now mean that elected governments are like small, and often leaky, boats tossed on a violent global sea.

Where then should democrats turn, as they see familiar systems discredited? Are parliamentary government and representative democracy, after a few centuries of success, doomed to be crushed by a new sort of populist tyranny or dissolved into anarchy?

The answer is that democrats must never give up. The democratic method is the one defense against arrogance and the one force for exposing and dispersing over-concentrations of power and influence. At local, national or international level it is the device that in the end compels humility, reminds political leaders that they are human and temporary and ensures that no individual and no group remains in power too long, nor that any unhealthy personality cult persist for long.

Life is going to get tougher and tougher for those seeking to play a constructive role in public affairs and grapple with their increasing complexity. It will become ever harder to suppress awkward information and ever more difficult to "sell" unpopular but necessary policies.

But the compensating thought is that it will also become steadily harder to appeal to mass opinion, to call in aid and manipulate "the people," and to allow unscrupulous celebrities and demagogues to use and abuse power.

In short, the age of total transparency and information freedom will bring many headaches for good government, but it will also bring some welcome relief. Democrats everywhere should look on the positive side and struggle on.

David Howell is a former British Cabinet minister and former chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. He is now a member of the House of Lords.