ABSTRACT
The acceptance of the legal and constitutional order as a source of legitimacy can be measured through polls about popular satisfaction with democracy. The rise of youthful rebellion and a counterculture in the 1960s, however ephemeral, was more of a fundamental challenge to the values on which legitimacy was founded in the advanced democracies even though there was never a serious attempt to overthrow, nor the likelihood of such an outcome. Actual measurements of protest, turmoil, and alienation are more relevant to legitimacy even though they may add together separate, unrelated incidents as easily as recording one unified rebellion. The willingness to fight, in any case, represents a much higher potential cost to the citizen—injury, illness, imprisonment by the enemy, death, and at least prolonged absence from home—than a mere statement of national pride. Democratic legitimacy seems a fragile vessel amid the praetorian waves of the participational revolution.
