stuck on the introduction for my JLI essay competition essay

i was wondering if anybody could give me constructive critisicm and tell me what they think of my introduction since im stuck on it. also, do tell me if this sounds like AI because when i ran it through an AI checker it said 70 percent AI even though i wrote it myself

the question im doing is "is democracy in crisis" btw!!

In the Second Treatise of Government, John Locke conceptualizes political society as a "fiduciary trust" grounded in the ongoing consent of the governed. This trust is not a static agreement but a rather dynamic one; Locke argues that when institutions fail to protect natural rights or deviate from their mandate, power reverts to the community to be reconstituted in new forms. Built into the heart of Lockean theory, therefore, is a legitimate, if often turbulent, mechanism for systemic renewal.

Today, many observers fear this mechanism has stalled. In 2025, the United States suffered a 24% decline on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Liberal Democracy Index, mirroring a broader global trend of institutional erosion and collapsing public trust. To the contemporary critic, these fractures signal the terminal crisis of the democratic project. However, I believe that current instability is not a precursor to collapse, but a manifestation of democracy’s "antifragile" capacity for self-correction, whereby the very forces threatening to dismantle the system provide the friction necessary to reform it 

The present "crisis" stems from a structural mismatch between 18th-century "vertical" institutions, designed for slow deliberation, and a 21st-century "horizontal" information environment that demands instant contestation. Drawing on Locke’s theory of the dissolution of government and Schumpeterian "creative destruction," I contend that today’s friction is the necessary process by which democracy sheds fossilized forms to reclaim its legitimacy.Through an analysis of the epistemic challenges inherent in digital discourse and the enduring resilience of Lockean consent, it becomes evident that democracy is not in a state of failure, but is instead undergoing a fundamental recalibration for a networked age