Of course, by that time, it will be far too late.
For those who refute this assertion, one need only look at the buffoonery of the American Presidential race where both parties persist in telling us how much money they will borrow to win votes and otherwise avoid fiscal responsibility. Fiscal responsibility itself has now been rebranded into the "fiscal cliff" which would entail an "irresponsible" reduction in borrowing to spend. Or better yet, look at Europe, where leaders there do only the barest minimum required at each juncture to kick the can down the road and thereby postpone hard decisions until some totally undefined and non-existent later date.
These fools need to learn a hard lesson. They have turned the political system into a popularity contest and made the public at large believe that politics is a zero sum game - either "they" win or "we" win. There is plenty of scope in this fiasco for everyone to lose from this ongoing bipolar rent-seeking and pie splitting exercise.
I am not endorsing authoritarian governance, I am only pointing out that the current "representative democratic systems", concentrated too much power in the hands of too few people aka. politicians who have become exalted power brokers. And I realize that all political systems have special interest groups, but the current systems handed too much political access and influence to the SIGs to influence politicians. And in the process, these SIGs have subverted the interests of the general public into oblivion. Not only did they turn politics into a zero sum game, they turned the economy itself into a zero sum game. The fundamental premise of modern economic theory is that the economy does not have to be a zero sum game full of binary winners and losers. Yet, that is clearly what it has become at the hands of this clusterfucked political system.
It goes without saying (but I will say it anyway), that on the other side of this next 'event', democracy will be shoved aside by anarchy and various forms of totalitarian regimes (fascism, communism, monarchism etc.). Anarchy likely won't prevail for too long given all of the tools of coercion at the disposal of the state, but as we are witnessing in Syria, anarchy can hang around long enough to do some serious damage.
