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We see litters of articles and papers from liberal media that democracy is globally dying. While I don't believe this is happening right away, could most democracies become less so in the future?
The German YouTuber Kraut some time ago had suggested that the political turmoil in liberal democracies is largely a result of the collapse of the USSR and with it, the Cold War consensus of combatting communism which unified various different groups.
I don't think American liberals are particularly holding up democratic principles in their own domain either, with how they deplatform and censor their opponents. Essentially, they're really just consolidating their electoral power while trying to protect the thin sheen of freedom in America. This bias extends across the US establishment. If you look at the highest-earning zipcodes they've all flipped massively to the democrats over the past few decades. Same is true if you look at the Ivy League. Seen in this light, the FBI was merely following the trend when they raided Ryan Kelley's home and other such harassment campaigns will not face scrutiny because a large portion of the US elite agree with the FBI targeting their political opponents. This is why they refuse to let Jan 6 die, it was certainly a riot, but nowhere close to a coup. We know what a real coup looks like from the recent Sri Lankan crisis. In South Korea, gender wars and the excessive divide over feminism has effectively become a major electoral talking point, although President Yoon Suk-yeol is married to a career woman himself who doesn't wish to be addressed as First Lady and has 0 kids with him. The state of the Koreas, one being a depressing totalitarian state and the other being a depressing, hyper consumerist protectorate of the US almost feels like an ill fated destiny. Even in India, the progressive pressure has generated a lot of culture wars of its own, where the ruling BJP's base perceive liberals as being sympathetic to Pakistan while levelling every epithet against India which would also be relevant to their archrival, and have reacted strongly. Couple with that the malthusian growth rates and the neoliberal decay preceding their rise to electoral power from being just another one of many parties in the country. But Russia and China, the "authoritarian competitors to the free world", are both strong societies, I can't imagine something like 1CP being done away so quickly if it was instituted in the US. They don't have to deal with electoral politics and do not have to deal with culture wars. And with an ascendant China, its proximity to China might tempt India to remodify its political institutions to have a shot at uplifting its hundreds of millions from poverty.
Now I'm not saying culture wars will end democracies, but its probably a symptom of decadence in democratic societies combined with the rise of social media highlighting our differences with millions of our own countrymen. Maybe I'm young and only speaking from my own limited experience? Curious to know what others think.
Logically, shouldn't we expect powerful absolutist/totalitarian states to dominate, ceteris paribus?
I think it was only favourable geography that shielded Britain from autocracy and let democracy get so strong. They were left alone to focus totally on naval power. Everyone else who tried this got pummelled (Netherlands, Carthage and Athens for example). They weren't islands. They had to divide their attention between sea and land. Maxxing out naval power, bringing in the trade money and having accessible coal turned out to be the dominant strategy, if you can avoid being invaded by a stronger land power while you build up.
If it weren't for British naval power, French royal or Napoleonic absolutism would've taken over Europe and the world. The British were the ones who paid for the Austrians and Prussians to impale themselves on French bayonets.
Because of that naval power and a great deal of luck the United States got the best parts of an entire continent to rule and a zero-threat hemisphere. There's no more fortunate nation on the planet - of course their inherited suboptimal quirks will survive. If it weren't for vast Anglo-American resources, Germany would've won both world wars and cemented authoritarianism as the reigning world ideology. The Germans got outspent 2:1 in both world wars. It's very hard to see how the Allies win if you take away half their resources for a 'fair' fight. We saw what happened when it was just France and Britain vs Germany, just two global empires vs a single oil-poor state no larger than Texas. Germany trounced them and the Benelux, Denmark, Norway and Poland.
Due to incredible geographical and historical luck, democracy and liberalism managed to snowball their way to global dominance despite being less competitive than authoritarian/totalitarian systems. If there was a land bridge between France and Britain, Britain would've just been another Eurasian land power like Spain or Sweden rather than an unstoppable liberal juggernaut. We would all be living in one party states today.
Liberalism and democracy has obvious issues with incentives: loot the country while you're in charge to deny it to the other side. Or loot the country to bribe your voters. It divides the country between parties and opens up avenues for foreign interference. Poland-Lithuania dabbled with liberalism on the Continent and got partitioned. Switzerland only survived due to favourable defensive geography. Illiberal states can more easily mobilize the population for offensive wars, grow stronger and repeat the process. For competitiveness between equals, you need militarism and a centralized state. You need to devote a larger fraction of the pie to military power than the enemy, you can't just be the US and have an economy so big you win conflicts just by entering them. This isn't to say that authoritarian systems are perfect or even desirable, just that they're more competitive when they're not faced with innately stronger opponents.
This bodes ill for the looming conflict with China, the first time the democracies face a power their own size. Naturally, it started with a disastrous defeat in that delusional liberals decided to transfer our manufacturing base to China on the basis that this would somehow make them liberalise. There's an echo of Munich in that. No matter that China guns down liberal protestors in Tiananmen or starts the Third Taiwan Straits crisis in 1996-7, they just ignore evidence and invest China into becoming the world's greatest manufacturing power (which had been the US's crowning achievement for over a century). I personally blame multinationals bribing foolish policymakers for this mega-disaster but it's still a failure of liberalism to allow this to happen.
Maybe we get ridiculously lucky again. Maybe we can coast on previous victories. But I'm doubtful.
Autocracies are good at mobiliziation: launching ambitious campaigns, overthrowing previous government, suppressing dissent, quick small annexations (bites). They are not good at sustained growth over controlled territories (in fact even sustained resource extraction).
Historically, most expansionist endeavors of past autocracies had failed either immediately or via slow degradation. Aside from counterfactuals, what real cases do you have in mind of successful autocracies? And of course, it depends on how we measure performance: if we consider absolute values, than autocracies might boast their mobilization spikes; but if we integrate area under the curve, they loose.
Notation: By democracy here I mean simply operation of a representative assembly, by autocracy – strong hierarchy, branching out from a single ruler. Not speaking about welfare state, universal suffrage, etc.
From theoretical perspective, every enterprise, involving collective action, will suffer from free riding and principal agent problems. In both regimes this is solved via negotiation -- first you have to arrive at agreement, then you need a commitment device to secure it. Autocrats do this in the background: build satiate (coup-proof) elites around them by reward and punishment -- but it is always a precarious personal-trust-based balance. Democracies make negotiation and commitment more sable via institutionalization. Part of the process which is open to public, is just a spectacle; the point is that by making process more formal, it's easier to track maneuvers of all actors, and quickly react by forging coalitions. Even modern autocracies nowadays use nominal, publicly visible parties as a commitment device.
Edit: China has been growing fast for only ~30 years and still haven't achieved US GDP per capita. Initial growth is a sign-up bonus for capitalistic approach, the game starts when growth saturates.
The Russian and Chinese empires were doing pretty well, growing for centuries. The latter collapsed because of the British, the former collapsed because of the Prussians/Germans (who themselves did very well up until they started facing the British). And when the British and other Europeans arrived to pull the rug out from underneath everyone else, they ruled their colonies autocratically.
I don't understand what you're talking about commitment devices. There are internal factions in all parties and states, from the US democratic party to the CCP. The methods the CCP uses to coordinate are more centralized and straight forward than what the US Democrats do because they enjoy the advantages of deciding on a central strategy. A strong paramount leader can say "Hide our strength and bide our time" and they'll actually execute the strategy. If you don't obey the party, you get imprisoned or sent off to Inner Mongolia. There's no Chinese Manchin holding up Xi's legislative agenda. There are bottom-up elements too, they let local areas try out various economic ideas to see if they work before imposing them nationwide. It's a little like Auftragstaktik, 'get semiconductors produced, we'll give you some money, make it happen and we'll promote you'.
The Democrats or Republicans have all these people pushing on them because they're less centralized. You have cliques like the Project for a New American Century plotting to start random wars in the Middle East. You have the Tea Party plotting to wreck the government. You have various wings of both parties blatantly bribing voters by printing out money and giving it away. Of course there are factional interests in China too - some people allege that One Belt One Road is about pandering to China's construction-industrial complex. But it clearly serves their national strategy as well as factional interests. Factions in America are much stronger and the country is much more divided.
Expecting China to reach US GDP per capita in under 30 years is ridiculous. In 1989, Chinese GDP per capita was $407, the US was at $22814. That they've narrowed a 50x difference to <4x is extremely impressive, especially considering that America has a host of geographic and historical advantages. It is not easy to create hundreds of millions of jobs.
In theory, I agree that hierarchical top-down control propagates signals better. As for practice, I can provide examples from the Soviet history, which illustrate the following problems:
Signal from the top might be initially poor (unrealistic), and all subordinate levels would have to cope with it
Interest groups and factions, which you acknowledged, erode control and create corruption. Democracy has those too, but I’d argue it has less overall corruption due to formal influence channels, like lobbying, donation campaigns, etc. Hidden corruption in autocracy might remain unaccountable for a long time.
Struggle between US parties is more transparent, with a lot of stuff exposed by journalists. Publicity reduces space for maneuver (you can’t make things up randomly or keep denying everything). In autocracy outcomes of conflicts often depend on personal connections and ability to maneuver; there is no way for outsiders (even within same circle) to get the signal, as the eventual purge would be advertised as generic treason or whatever
American failures are more exposed, but whether they are more numerous/deleterious is a purely empirical question. I’d be glad to know evidence on China.
Agreed. My point is that China and US are facing different slopes of the same S-curve at the moment (economically, and historically, as you noted), so direct comparison of growth rates is not meaningful.
Well there are natural problems in measuring inherently obscured phenomena in corruption.
If we compare public infrastructure, China crushes the US. They actually finished their HSR program and it is creating an 8% return according to the World Bank. Meanwhile, California's HSR has yet to begin operation, while costs balloon.
If we compare military research, US officials worry that Chinese procurement is much more efficient: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/china-acquiring-new-weapons-five-times-faster-than-u-s-warns-top-official
If we compare quantitative military procurement, China builds a mid-sized European navy every 18 months. The US Navy is actually shrinking as they decommission recently purchased warships like the Littoral Combat Ships along with relics from the 90s or earlier.
As far as I can see, all the US's strengths seem to be concentrated in the private sector. SpaceX rocketry and Starlink open up novel capabilities for the US. Microsoft, Facebook and so on are leading the world in AI. Intel and AMD are very good at designing chips. But these advantages are what you'd expect from a very large, advanced economy. They don't indicate that the government is excellent, only that it isn't Soviet-tier in worsening development. If the government was capable, they'd be building huge numbers of nuclear plants (like China is), developing infrastructure, creating an effective healthcare system (China's life expectancy just surpassed the US), fighting drugs and reducing violent crime. The US is well behind China in these fields despite being richer. Thus I conclude that China has a more capable government.
I also don't see why publicity and journalists mean you can't make things up. Certain elements of the US political-media-intelligence establishment made up a Trump-Russia collusion story that spread around the world: https://nypost.com/2022/05/23/fbi-told-agents-trump-russia-data-source-was-from-doj-not-clinton-tied-lawyer/
A different bunch of the same sort made up Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq and used it to start a pointless war. While China does disappear people from public attention or conceal various incidents like Tiananmen, that seems to be a much more natural thing to do than accusing the President of working for a foreign power or invading random countries. That doesn't enhance national strength.
Thanks for evidence, that's interesting. I know very little about China to comment. Soviet Union was 3rd fastest growing economy in 1928-1970 (however, as this article shows, choosing time window changes picture a lot), and its military complex was relatively efficient too. W/t Gorbachev I believe it could have grown further, albeit slowly. Drawing parallels in how US was taking stock of SU, it seems they usually overestimated the threat and were misled by gross numbers and lack of official data. Some of this obsession with net output seems to hold for China, judging by retracted papers (1) (2). I need better stats, but most Chinese patents were filed in Chinese patent office, which might imply the same issues with quality, despite clearly superior number of applications.
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