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Notes -
Let's discuss democracy, and the decay and potential recovery of two anglo-origin democracies.
South Africa is clearly having a rough time at the moment. Anemic growth, mass joblessness, the spread of slums, ultraviolence on the streets.
The party largely responsible for this the ANC has a declining vote share but still commands the loyalty of a plurality of the electorate. In addition, most of the parties opposing the ANC are not exactly free marketer reformers of the type that might rapidly turn some of these issues around. Since Apartheid ended more than 20 years ago and these trends are deepening, it seems that the decay has not swayed most voters away from the policies that caused the issues.
A friend of mine said that he has full faith in the UK (Great Britain) to recover fully from its current woes, because one day voters will wake up and see that governance is terrible and getting worse, and they will vote for the opposition who will fix things.
Certainly, some of the parties in the Yookay are trying to fix things through structural economic and social reforms (Reform, Restore), but the plurality of voters including young voters favor parties that would either deepen or continue the issues (Greens, Labour, Muslim Indie Bloc)
Note: from the perspective of this poaster the main issues facing the UK are: Low Skill Immigration, Economic Stagnation, Integration of Non-European Migrants, Crime
So I ask the Motte: Do you believe that in anglo origin democracies that enough decay will have voters seek out parties with effective fixes for the issues, or merely cause voters to slowly rebel against the incumbents?
No. Things can always get worse without resistance. Look at Cuba, the situation is much, much worse now than many people - even those hostile to communism - imagine. The country has, since 1991, slowly gone from a moderately poor but functioning socialist country like the former Eastern Bloc or China at the time, to the poorest country in the region after Haiti. The people are starving, there’s no electricity, no medicine, no fuel. The economy has been collapsing for 35 years. There is extensive reporting that even the Chinese have strongly recommended pursuing China or Vietnam style capitalist reforms, but the regime leadership are, moreso than the Chinese or Vietnamese, die hard communists loyal to central planning as an economic theory.
This is true historically, too. There were empires that took centuries to collapse. In my opinion, the institutional inertia around immigration for the Anglo countries is too high to solve. The public don’t have the stomach for what is required. Look at Minneapolis; ICE would probably have to kill hundreds of thousands of American citizens to outweigh even a small part of the damage caused by massive third world immigration. The only thing that could save it would be some kind of sudden, deeply unexpected overthrow of democracy in a Western country, but there’s a 90% chance that only makes it worse. You only get one LKY in a century, if that.
I've been to Cuba, and it really is shocking just how horrific it is. In Latin America, there are tons of mostly indigenous villages where there essentially is no modernity since anyone with the skills to maintain it, people like doctors and engineers for instance, decamp for the cities which are often first world/close to first world. The Mexico City gdp per capita is Spain tier, for instance. Many of these villages don't even have running water. I've used a bucket with a rat larger than my cat on the wall giving me moral support, for instance. Cuba is essentially one of those villages, just on the scale of a country and with a few exceptions in the hotel zones.
I'm not sure how Communist Cuba's government remains, though. At the low level, cops literally treat you better and reduce any requested bribe if you stay in a casa particular (small house owned by an individual cuban) vs. a state affiliated hotel. They view the first as you supporting the people, and the second as you supporting the state. The party/military essentially functions as a kleptocracy; they make deals with foreign companies to run the hotels, the hotels are incredibly capitalist where poor Cubans serve rich foreigners (and a few locals) where you call each other compañero/comrade as a costume. Even when I was there, most propaganda was more of the anti-imperialist/nationalist/third worldist variety than class based variety.
At this point, I think the party/military understands, even if subconsciously, they are just kleptocrats engaged in capitalism who ideologically justify themselves on anti-Americanism. They literally show MTV in the same hotel Castro used when he first became dictator. Additionally, the revealed preference of the government is to not invest in the rest of the country, which absolutely requires infrastructure improvement, and to solely partner with foreign companies to build up tourism. The hotels are set up so that as much as possible, they import all their necessities, such as food or toiletries, rather than buy it from Cuba itself. The government relaxed the emigration laws so more people can leave. Their actions to me suggest rather than viewing themselves as communists building up a country to a bright future, they view themselves as hotel magnates who unfortunately have an entire island of poor people attached to their properties. It also helps fuel their cope that if Cuba ever liberalized, they would be in penniless exile in Venezuela or Russia at best and languishing in a Cuban jail cell/lynched at worst.
Unless something radically changes, I don't think that the Anglosphere has the stomach for mass deportations, defined as millions deported, any time soon. At the same time, you can have meaningful differences in the rate of immigration: Biden vs. Trump, Trudeau vs Carney for instance. While I don't see any plausible path where, for instance, you get a Britain with absolute minimal immigration/restrictive guest worker programs like in Japan, I still think it's up in the air the degree and type of mass immigration Britain gets. A Britain with a diverse immigrant pool and most problematic groups, like poor Kashmiris, limited is a far different place than one where you get true open borders with, for instance, the entire third world. Britain in first scenario likely is still a pretty decent place to live, while in the second scenario I'm not sure Britain the state survives it.
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