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Notes -
What comes next?
Tl;dr - Assuming Fukuyama is wrong and it isn’t American-flavored liberal democracy until the heat death of the universe. What comes next, either probabilistically or from a perspective of the ‘next’ thing?
If you’ll let me indulge in some whig history and half-baked, poorly-researched ideas, I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts. Say that modern liberal democratic states represent some form of linear progress over the monarchies of the middle ages, the city states of antiquity and hunter-gatherer tribes that came before that. I will say that they at least represent progress along the axes of complexity and ability to project power; I’d rather sidestep the question of whether they represent true ‘progress’ at the risk of getting bogged down in discussions about what the purpose of human existence is. I’m also more interested in speculating on what the political system/civilization of the future looks like than AI doomerism or ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ style takes, but if you truly believe that’s what’s in the cards for us, I suppose I can’t begrudge you your pessimism.
I confess that my knowledge of history is severely deficient so I’d welcome any corrections here, but essentially: modern elections couldn’t be run without at least writing and widespread literacy, nor could the modern nation-state. It was much harder for London to project power to America in the 18th century when communication involved a round-trip on a sailing vessel than it is for Washington to project power over San Francisco with instantaneous telecom in the 21st. In this vein, I’d contend that western liberal democracies are software written for the hardware of the 18th century. Sea changes of the last two centuries include:
Huge increase in the amount of data available
Massive decrease in the amount of time required to transmit information, and the barriers to doing so given the universality of internet access and smartphones
Significant increases in education levels
AI
Insert your thoughts here, not trying to make an exhaustive list
All that preamble to ask, what is the next ‘step’ in the evolution of the political tradition and/or civilization? Sooner or later, some country will develop a system leveraging the above much more effectively than us and we’ll be outcompeted.
For example, if we wanted to, we could relatively easily hold a referendum for every major political decision for truly radical democracy - just have some kind of app on your smartphone connected to your SSN (fraud avoidance strategy TBD), vote on the questions of the day over breakfast. Maybe the mob becomes the fourth branch of congress and new legislation requires a majority vote. Perhaps (and I shudder to think of the logistics or reception this would receive in the current climate) issues are categorized by topic and people are sorted by expertise, but policy is still decided by a much broader group than congress.
The nation-state itself could become obsolete. Many have remarked how the cosmopolitan product manager/twitterati of New York, Toronto and Paris are much more similar to each other than they are to the Freedom Convoy, Gilets Jaunes or Dutch farmers dropping manure in highways and vice-versa. How can the nation-state survive man having more camaraderie for his tribal in-group over his fellow countrymen? The hive system outlined in Too like the Lightning seems interesting if the logistics could ever be worked out.
Contrary to what some think, I don’t have a self-referential fetish for democracy. Maybe the Culture mythos predicted the future and competitive nations in the future will turn all import decisions over to AIs, or else get wrecked by their neighbors. Maybe all the technological progress I’ve discussed is orthogonal to politics, and we could just as easily have a liberal democracy as a Yarvinesque monarcho-corporatism as an authoritarian regime exploit AI/big data and outcompete the rest of us independently of how enfranchised the populace is.
What do you all think?
I think honestly the form of government is irrelevant for the most part. That’s mostly a tool, a means to the end of the business of doing government and that ideally the end goal of government should be a prosperous state filled with reasonably healthy, happy people. Right now, our current democracy isn’t delivering and probably won’t for the foreseeable future. And if it continues to not deliver, especially while micromanaging relations between people, I think we’ll sooner or later replace them with something else. What that something else is I can’t really predict. I think a properly tunes AI with a goal of human flourishing could do well for itself, but so could a monarchy or an oligarchy.
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I've always been a little confused by this. I'm American and I would be pretty upset if the values that I think the American elite hold are replaced by those of the elite of other countries. To emphasize the differences, I'm going to exaggerate this a lot and focus entirely why they seem bad from an American perspective: European elites feel too far in the direction of stuffy old-money terrified of change, Chinese elites too far in the direction of stereotypical spoiled rich heirs, and Indian elites too far in the direction of clannish religious fundamentalists (for example).
I therefore think the more dynamic, meritocratic American elites would have more values in common with the average American. Maybe I'm not elite enough to know true elite values, but I think people that claim there is truly some global elite class should travel more. I also think people sometimes confuse either an anglophone elite class or a global subcultural community (e.g. a particular academic field or readers of a particular blog) with a global elite class. Even with the second example, while I definitely have more in common with a random European mathematician than a random American lay-person, I feel more of a culture-clash talking with the average (non-UK) European-born mathematician working in Europe than with the average conservative American mathematician.
Even if people are more talking about the particular values of the liberal, American elite being particularly good at spreading and taking over parts of the elite of other countries, I'm not sure the process has gone nearly as far as needed to reasonably claim that elites everywhere are homogenized (as much as I would like this to be true).
I think that's true for regular elites and all elites in the past, but things are becoming a bit different now with very extreme levels of wealth and ease of travel. The very richest billionaires are more easily able to meet up from around the world in exclusive venues, instead of American billionaires mingling with American millionaires because there aren't enough other American billionaires to make an entire social group with.
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Also, American elites don't have the sort of sweeping power compared to elites elsewhere, save for maybe 2003 and the Iraq war or maybe the FBI (although law enforcement are not really elites and cannot create policy). US govt. elites have been losing power over the past century. .
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The only future I see any longer is 1984. We may shift to a multipolar world, but every pole will utilize the same, no exaggeration, Orwellian systems of social control. Extreme control of information. Elections that are more or less completely rigged. If not the actual vote, then having the intelligence community shaping the information environment to such a degree that nobody of a previous era would have ever considered it a fair election. The shift to a defacto one party state, where participation with the infrastructure of civilization is dependent on being a party member in good standing. It may not look exactly like China's social credit score, but it won't be far off, and will be identical in intent.
Weird Malthusian degrowth policies will rule the day. Every year our quality of life will be worse than the last for some nebulous greater good. Despite this, I see no end to the forever wars either. Forever wars pair too well with degrowth anyways.
Governments will cull their electorate more openly, encouraging suicide and sterilization as "ethical" choices to meet degrowth goals. This messaging will begin as early as Kindergarten.
People who advocate for actual human flourishing will be considered terrorist.
And I'm just gonna stop there because I'm already depressing myself too much to go on. Should probably go touch grass or something...
The Middle East wars ended though. This narrative sounds appealing and then I look at someone like Ron DeSantis going on about woke, and Biden who is too feeble to do much. I think too many people are forming their opinions based on fiction, like TV or history. Real-life leaders , especially in modern America, are way more impotent, ineffective, and unenthusiastic than their fictional depictions.
Those aren't our real leaders. Our real leaders are the spooks in the intelligence community who essentially took a mulligan on an election, and prevented the lawfully elected president from exercising his constitutional authority for 4 years.
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I'm here to agree with this. The amount of technological progress means the only likely future is a tyrannical panopticon state. China is ahead of the times in that regard, and the boot is coming for your grandchild's face regardless of what happens in the next ten years.
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I agree at a sentimental level, it feels like carcinization towards totalitarianism in some form or another in an inevitable outcome of techno-capital development.
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Is this actually true? Or is its appearance just a consequence of contentious proximity? It might be easier for a New Yorker to get along with a Parisian than an Alabaman, but in some respects that's because they have less in common. French politics are inconsequential to the NYer, French culture a curiosity. People from Alabama and New York share a government and have to fight over how the pie gets divvied up, what the drug store can actually sell, and whether being gay is going to be illegal or mandatory.
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Bit late but I was wondering what you're referring to here; it seems an odd comment in light of massive agricultural and fishing subsidies being the single largest item of EU spending. Relative to the whole budget they have been falling but iirc not in absolute terms, either way the idea that the EU is somehow unfriendly to agriculture is surely absurd. Of course there are regulations, but there is no question that the EU is a huge net benefit for farmers, half the reason it exists is to keep French farms afloat.
That's a reasonable sentiment, but then you have to accept that suggesting the EU is hurting the 'hands that feed them' is just a complete nonsense, whatever the Netherlands does on fertilisers. If we want to preserve agriculture for the sake of heritage or whatever, one cannot then turn around and act like such farmers are an oppressed class, if their existence depended/s on everyone else subsidising them.
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This seems to not belong in a post about Fukuyama. If anything Fukuyama predicts the end, or at least the diminishment of the nation-state:
Moreover, much of the criticism of Fukuyama is based on the claim that he understates the importance to humans of ethnic (ie, national -- that is essentially what the "nation" in "nation-state" refers to) affinity.
Also, cross-state affinity of elites is not new, and of course elites often conversed with one another in a language that the local hoi polloi did not understand.
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I don’t have perfect answers, but I like the odds of a network state where people use technology to set up large tribes without geographic proximity or ties to a nation state. Basically the nation state order will break down into smaller and smaller units, as we get enclaves of groups that have niche interests joining together online.
To be clear I still think the nation state will exist for a long time on inertia, but it will slowly become rendered obsolete as people start associating with smaller circles.
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There are only two paths available to the US.
1: We continue as sole superpower, power continues to coalesce in Washington, the empire grows (fast or slow), and this collection of power moves further and further from the people who provide its basis. As the captured wealth of the global economy flows into our coffers, politics becomes something not left to the proles. Big stuff at stake. The disenfranchised working classes will eventually be joined by the lower and middle middle classes, and conspire together to get around the vast bureaucracy and get their guy in at the top. This will be resisted, violently. But sooner or later, we will get our Caesar. So long as we are an empire, an emperor is inevitable.
2: We do not continue as sole superpower, whether through division, incompetence, or poor war choice. Then, anything can happen, but it will all be worse for us personally than a gradual shift to greater empire. A modern Caesar eventually ending American Democracy is the good scenario.
Seems to me the rise of an opponent might stave off the transition to decadence and decline.
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On what time scale? For all the talk of the disenfranchised working classes, materially they have never had it so good. Liberal democracy brings home the bacon at the moment, why wouldn't it 100 years from now?
Also, if this is meant as a general statement then I don't think there's much evidence for it. Where was Britain's emperor? Of course the British empire did wither away but even as the empire grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries that was, if anything, accompanied by greater democratic participation, more process and bureaucracy and no consistent or continuous increase in public unrest and instability.
Long term. Took the Roman republic a thousand years to bring about its own destruction, but I don't think we'll have to wait that long. But quite possibly beyond our lifetimes, for sure. You are correct that we have great material wealth at the moment, and that this defrays the impulse of the populace to demand greater power. Great wealth, like great power, tends to congregate in one place. Over time, peace and prosperity bring about inequality and disenfranchisement. Which brings about the great leveller of societies, war. The Romans fought several civil wars before becoming an empire, it is at least possible we will do the same.
Uh, on the throne? Unlike Rome, which kept the Senate as a vestigial cover for the power of the Princeps, Britain kept the monarch as a vestigial cover for their oligarchy.
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Only the gods can answer that, now enough of this, lets go to the forum. I've heard that Tiberius Gracchus has some new land reform he's wanting to talk about.
Not sure what the point of this is. 'The Roman Republic collapsed, therefore the collapse of American liberal democracy must be near at hand!' What?
The collapse of the American Republic happened in 1861 when our own Caesar killed it. He died for his sins, but his enemies couldn't undo what he did.
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I feel much less clever and witty when I need to directly explain my points rather than obliquely make them with historical references, but very well.
The point of that post was to draw a parallel between the final stages of the Roman Republic and the modern era, specifically the moment before Tiberius Gracchus made the first moves in a long chain of events that ultimately lead to the collapse of the Republic. Mostly this was done to somewhat cheekily point out the folly of the quote I amended, demonstrating that it could readily be applied to a system that was about to undergo several bloody civil wars and "reigns of terror".
The Republic collapsed into civil wars and eventually gave way to the rule of one man at the height of its power and security. The catalyst for its disintegration was elites leveraging the disgruntled masses to further their careers battling against elites that sought to supress said disgruntled masses for their own benefit. I could go on, but the parallels are obvious, the USA is consciously modeled after the Roman Republic and has in many ways followed a similar trajectory thus far, it is not unreasonable to suppose that it might continue along that same trajectory.
Also I should say that the poster who you were replying to had a point, although I disagree with the idea that America is an empire (or that the Republic was truly an empire either). Power is a force and follows its own laws in the same way that natural forces do, there is too much power converging in Washington for it not to change the system that channels it. Much like the Republic, the US has gone from backwater to Hegemon practically overnight, in the case of Rome it turned out that a system designed to govern a leading city state could not survive the sudden pressure imposed on it by the near absolute power, time will tell how the US fairs.
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Eh... it all depends on what criteria you pick. You can barely pay rent on a working class salary, let alone support a family.
Irrespective of how true this is in absolute terms, in relative terms it's nonsense. Since the early 50s nominal median income has risen over 3,500%, while average home prices have risen under 2,000%. So even in what is one of the fastest rising costs of all wages have outdone prices on average. This isn't to say the increase in housing costs isn't awful, but we hardly need an American Caesar to solve that problem, just to relax building restrictions and build more homes.
And there's that deadly word: just. It conceals too much. For certain parts of America--the parts that really need this, in fact--accomplishing this goal looks a little too coup-complete as it is.
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As JTarrou put it, man has only two choices in government, autocracy or oligarchy, so even though in my opinion Fukuyama is wrong to the point I don't understand how he was ever taken seriously, the outcome is not hard to predict.
In a less true-but-boring sense:
How about a corporatist oligarchy using liberal democracy ceremonially the same way Brits use monarchy, exploiting AI/big data to ensure "Everything Within the State, Nothing Against the State, Nothing Outside the State"? It's more or less the official plan of western liberal democracies, and we're halfway there anyway.
I have never met anyone who read the book who thinks that; it is nothing if not carefully argued. Of course, most people who criticize are actually criticizing media misrepresentations of the argument.
In addition to what @arjin_ferman, @anti_dan and others have said, I can recommend the review of Kirill Yeskov (biologist and paleontologist, and yes, The Last Ringbearer guy): pencil notes on the margins of Jared Diamond's book. He does think basically that. It should be mostly deepl-translatable.
My comment was re The End of History, not re Guns, Germs and Steel.
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Can you recommend some kind of a summarized version of his argument, that does not misrepresent him? "Carefully argued" doesn't do much for me. It's not hard to argue for something carefully, and the result being something that should never have been taken seriously to begin with. Guns, Germs, and Steel would be a good example.
I read it many years ago, but this seems to be pretty good: https://www.coursehero.com/lit/The-End-of-History-and-the-Last-Man/plot-summary/
I am curious why you see Guns, Germs and Steel as something not to be taken seriously.
Note, that to me, "not to be taken seriously" implies that it can be summarily disregarded, whereas something that is carefully (and thoroughly, I should have included that as well) might be wrong, but cannot be dismissed, even if it wrong; it must be engaged with. Of course, there are some exceptions, such as works based on clearly erroneous factual premises, but that does not seem to me to describe either Guns, Germs and Steel or The End of History.
It seems to me this world can be divided into people who "really really hate GGS" and everyone else.
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Thanks!
I disagree, this sort of approach is easily hackable by mining scholarly works for whatever data suits your idea and shaping it into a narrative that is trendy with the current zeitgeist, thus ensuring few people will be interested in challenging you to begin with, and the remainder is too intimidated by the sheer magnitude and obscurity of the material you've dug out.
Massive Theories of Nearly Everything belong in the same category as musing of your local pub philosopher until they withstand the test of time, and many challenges from opponents.
You might ask how are you supposed to challenge something without taking it seriously, but at least half of what I meant by "taking seriously" would be something more like "putting on a pedestal". When 4channers were freaking out about what's going on in Wuhan circa 2019, while all the experts were asleep, no one was taking them seriously. You could still engage with their arguments though.
Didn't it spend pages upon pages talking about how lucky Europeans were because they started off with caloric and easy to cultivate crops, and easily tamable animals, only for it to turn out that ancient European plants/animals were about as useful to humans as those anywhere else, and what the authors were comparing were products of generations of artificial selection to wild plants/animals?
Yes, but isn't that a claim that the argument might be wrong, rather than a claim that they must be wrong? It seems to me to be an argument for skepticism, rather than an argument for dismissal out of hand.
As a possibly non-relevant aside, the book is about why Eurasia developed more quickly than elsewhere, rather than Europe.
Glancing at my copy of the book, he says: "Experimental studies in which botanists have collected seeds from such natural stands of wild [fertile crescent] cereals, much as as hunter-gatherers must have been doing over 10,000 years ago, show that annual harvests of up to nearly a ton of seeds per hectare can be obtained[.] ... [In contrast,] [c]orn's probable ancestor, a wild plant known as teosinte, ... was less productive in the wild than wild wheat . . ." So he certainly at least tried to compare like with like. In addition, that is only one of three advantages he claims that Eurasian cereal plants had over wild plants elsewhere; the others, he argues, are that they are annuals, and that most are plants that "usually pollinate themselves but are occasionally self-pollinated." I don't know whether either of those attributes can be changed via artificial selection. Re animals, he notes that only 14 of the world's large (100lbs+) herbivorous animals were ever domesticated (including only 13 of 72 in Eurasia) and notes that even modern efforts to domesticate large wild animals other than the "ancient fourteen" that were domesticated failed, and makes arguments why so few have been domesticated.
Most importantly, that is an argument that Diamond is wrong, or that that he overstates his case. But it is not an argument that "no one ever should have taken him seriously," and I note that on the Wikipedia page on the book, Joel Mokyr is cited as saying that "Diamond's view that Eurasia succeeded largely because of a uniquely large stock of domesticable plants is flawed because of the possibility of crop manipulation and selection in the plants of other regions, the drawbacks of an indigenous plant such as sumpweed could have been bred out, Mokyr wrote, since 'all domesticated plants had originally undesirable characteristics' eliminated via 'deliberate and lucky selection mechanisms'", which sounds like the criticism you are citing.* But he is also quoted as saying that the book is "one of the more important contributions to long-term economic history and is simply mandatory to anyone who purports to engage Big Questions in the area of long-term global history". And I will say that one of the strengths of the book is that is explicitly states the assumptions behind its arguments, repeatedly refers to possible weaknesses in supporting evidence, and also repeatedly suggests avenues for future research which might undermine some of its claims.
I understand your objection, but I think Diamond's book is one of those that taken as how he states it fits into the not even wrong category. You read the book, and it all sounds very science-y and convincing. But then you think about it again and it occurs to you that, hmm wait a minute, how can you even suppose to think about what a "wild" pig, chicken, horse etc actually is? The fact is the ostensibly wild populations of these things are hopelessly interbred with escaped chickens and horses from the early and current selectively bred populations, and its not easily done determinable when breeding really started.
Then you did down into things like his zebra arguments, and they are just obviously rubbish because there are multiple instances of Europeans going to Africa in the 1800s and early 1900s and remarking on how easy to break zebras are, and it seems his zebra-horse comparison is actually like 180 degrees from what actually was the difficulty level. And then you have to think to yourself, "huh, if he got this super easy thing so wrong, how much else is just him spinning nonsense?" And then even small inquiries indicate yes. And your logical conclusion is delving into the rest is simply a massive waste of time and energy.
I didn't even get to that point - I saw GGS from the outset as an attempt to provide an alternative hypothesis to the HBD explanation, but the only reason you need an alternative hypothesis to the HBD explanation is social pressure. The metaphor that comes to mind is of a child trying to explain why the cookie went missing when you left the room, entirely unaware that you had them on video surveillance the whole time. When you already know the answer, there's very little to be gained from listening to an excuse you know is going to be false beyond laughter (and there were a few great memes shitting on GGS).
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But, breaking an animal is not the same as domesticating an animal. As noted on page 159: "Elephants have been tamed, but never domesticated. Hannibal's elephants were, and Asian work elephants are, just wild elephants that were captured and tamed; they were not bred in captivity. In contrast, a domesticated animal is defined as an animal selectively bred in captivity and thereby modified from its wild ancestors, for use by humans who control the animal's breeding and food supply."
And of course to this day zebras have not been domesticated.
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It has been ages since I read the book, so I might be conflating a bunch of things, and it's also been quite long time since I heard the counter arguments. Does he name any of these studies? Wheat outcompeting corn is unintuitive right off the bat.
I edited some things in so maybe you missed it when you wrote your response, but I disagree with your definition of "taken seriously". Like I said Channers schizzoing out about COVID weren't taken seriously, even though they were right, and were making arguments that should have been addressed.
I don't see the study; as is unfortunately common in popular works, the book does not have standard endnotes or footnotes. But, the comparison is not between wheat and corn, but between teosinte and wild wheat, and teosinte ears were apparently very small, as he discusses. Note also that even today, wheat has much more protein, and more of most other nutrients, than does corn.
Well, it sounds to me that we are agreeing about the dangers of dismissing arguments out of hand.
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Wild wheat outcompeting teosinte seems plausible. Wheat's ancestors look like slightly stunted wheat; maize's ancestors look like they're barely even the same plant.
But that makes sense when looking 10,000 years ago. Native Americans managed to domesticate teosinte anyway, and by 6,000 years ago (when Eurasia hadn't yet quite figured out that whole "writing" thing, so they hardly had an insuperable head start on civilization) you'd think it would have become an advantage.
There's an interesting hypothesis (postdating Diamond? I think I loaned out my GGS copy a decade ago and never ended up getting it back...) that potatoes (even better nutritionally than corn) might not have been an advantage for civilization in particular because "leave it in the ground until you need it" doesn't reward the sorts of planning and storage and trading and so forth that lead to large scale social organization ... but maize is the same sort of "harvest it in season and dry it and store it" crop as the Old World grains. Potatoes are also a problem because in between all the good New World regions for growing potatoes are thousand-mile stretches of lousy regions for growing potatoes (Diamond does talk about the ease of spreading crops East-West along climate isoclines, rather than North-South), but maize at least can be grown over a contiguous area stretching a continent and a half, and it was.
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I think we'll end up with a single truly unitary state. AI naturally centralizes power. In principle, you could have a robotic mine, robotic power plant, robotic industrial economy, robotic soldiers, all centrally coordinated by a superintelligence. That is surely more efficient than having hundreds of millions of people running around, doing all those things, scheming against eachother, failing to communicate or coordinate.
Whether the superintelligence is autonomous or under someone's control doesn't really matter, it'll effectively be a single-actor, unitary state with many appendages. Now maybe you have a small oligarchy of human controllers - I think this is unstable. Where there are people, there are disagreements and internal conflicts. None of them gain from having the cooperation of the others like old-timey oligarchs, they don't have their own independent power base or wealth sources. They're all using the same source of power. Eventually it would decay down to rule by one person, or one AI.
I think a large, democratic system is better in moral terms but harder to achieve and less competitive. Ideally, I'd like to see a world where we all have our own sovereign resource base as some kind of posthuman. I might have the bulk of my assets in an iron mine on an asteroid, Steve might have a manufacturing facility orbiting Mercury, we trade and retain our own sovereign military strength. Citizen-soldiers but in space and with more guns. Power is decentralized such that the majority can gang up on the wealthy elite if they behave egregiously. Decisions are made democratically, such that the status quo can't be overthrown. But how could we get to this state? We'd need a benign, altruistic, non-powerseeking libertarian to provide the technology to everyone and disperse it, such that each has power over their own destiny.
Some people have said 'Xi Jinping or Altman don't seem like they're going to exterminate humanity'. I believe that power corrupts. Those who come up with superintelligence first will try to hoard its fruits. They don't want enemies to threaten them and power is seductive. I think there will be a decisive strategic advantage coming up, that someone will get self-improving AGI at some point that can then spit out a bunch of really powerful inventions too quickly for states to handle. Or maybe there's some architecture change that puts the machine up to superhuman intellect immediately. The first to get to self-improvement wins the game, then nobody can resist them.
What does immortality and absolute power do to people? What sort of pettiness or humiliation rituals are we going to experience? Consider what our current elites do with their immense wealth and power. Then consider that there would be some kind of sifting mechanism where the most aggressive and conniving are more likely to get ultimate control (by betraying their brethren and seizing control). In the long run, I think we all die, if we are merely subjects of some AI-controller.
Only a slow take-off could keep us away from a unitary state and progress seems to be anything but slow.
All of this stuff is in its infancy though. I would expect that within 20 years, making food would be within the robotic skill set. Twenty years ago LLMs were the stuff of fantasy. Here they are, able to write well enough to be writing copy.
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The context of this conversation is:
That there is no currently extant physical machine shouldn't matter when talking about 'what comes next'. It's not impossible in principle to replicate the human hand mechanically.
Sufficient intelligence can get you physical automation.
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Looking at the pace of progress in both rigid and soft body robotics suggests that the overhang of software above hardware isn't going to last very long.
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Democracy will never be replaced. It's trendy to proclaim Fukuyama is wrong or the world is regressing, so you ask "what will replace it , or why is it wrong" and cannot answer, or they bring up something hypothetical or small. No, Russia vs. Ukraine doe not threaten Fukuyama's thesis. The End of History was published in 1992 yet there have been many conflicts since then, like in Africa and the Balkans. He never promised a world free from conflict. Large, liberal democracies are still fully intact. I cannot think of any post-Cold War example of a large democracy sliding into authoritarianism. Maybe Turkey, but it still has elections, and it's not really a 'Western democracy'.
What country could that be, save for China (and even then, it's pretty weak and defensive). The rest of the Western world follows the US lead and subservient to it. Russia is nowhere close to being competitive at anything but natural resources.
If by "democracy" you mean the pro-forma elections held with ever increasing participation from the organs of government and the commanding heights of the economy, I agree.
If by "democracy" you mean real mass participatory politics with the people consulted at least about major decisions, I disagree. If that ever existed, it will not for some time now that power is coalescing. None of us alive today will ever see a more participatory government.
good point . I think this distinction matters. I don't see the democratic process going away but I can also see people losing faith in the fairness of it.
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What does this even mean? Elections are that consultation, and the electorate gets to decide what the 'major decisions' are by the salience of any particular issue come election time. Any more specific consultation than that is hardly necessary for a meaningful democracy, hence why every successful democracy ever has been a representative one.
Yeah, China has elections too. So does North Korea. Any more specific consultation than that is hardly necessary!
Oh come on that's hardly analogous. Those elections, as you well know, only allow government-approved candidates; there is no choice or consultation. It's ironic you should say that given that, as Skibboleth notes, it is often nominally Marxist regimes and their defenders that deploy the argument that liberal democracy is a farce that thwarts the real Will of the People, which can only truly be fulfilled by an authoritarian leadership.
Right, in America, you can have non-government-approved candidates... but if you try to run one, we'll investigate him and his associates to the ends of the earth and charge whatever ticky tack crimes we can concoct while claiming that he's "mentally incapable" of discharging the duties of the office, so we can also remove him that way, too.
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I find it reminiscent of many pro-Chavismo arguments from Western leftists I read some 15 years ago: authoritarian populism is more authentically democratic than liberal democracy because the former (supposedly) draws upon mass popular support while the latter uses sterile proceduralism to deprive The People of their voice while pretending otherwise.
This was mostly due to the fact that they liked Chavez' economic policies and needed a way to rationalize supporting an increasingly dictatorial government while claiming to still believe in freedom, human rights, etc...
For the contemporary American populist, it is much the same dilemma, except from the right. Your electoral fortunes have been tenuous at best and you're clearly losing the popularity contest with the younger generation. You can try to retool your message to be more appealing, or you can argue that corrupt institutions are creating a false consciousness and need to be swept away.
It's not a question of authoritarianism or false consciousness, it's a question of whether a different election result will actually mean a different policy. With strategies like "you get to vote in a referendum until you give the right answer", unelected bureaucracies pushing through policies that were never voted on, and half-assing the policies that people did vote for, you make elections more or less irrelevant. Add to that the demonization and censorship of dissent, and I'd say it's on you to prove these "public consultations" are in any way meaningful.
Different election results do yield different policies. The structure of the US government, however, means that there is heavy status quo bias - 50% + 1 is not adequate to radically alter policy.
Further, "winning" doesn't guarantee you get what you want because it's easy to talk a big game until you actually have to wield power and worry about fucking up (either by making a bad decision or alienating voters with incoherent demands - witness the GOP stumbling at the 1 yard line on ACA repeal or past prevaricating over the debt ceiling).
I'm going to need you to elaborate, because this looks like a complaint about being unpopular and a wheeled goalpost.
Weird... the word on the street in Europe is that the Anglo "first past the post" system makes things a lot more amenable to change, in contrast to coalition in-fighting of continental parliaments.
The "demonization" complaint might look that way, but censorship? If something was unpopular you wouldn't need to shadowban it, or ban it outright.
This may or may not be true, but the US doesn't have an Anglo political system. It has its own thing, which has a lot more veto points, asymmetric representation, and parliamentary rules which allow a minority to veto new legislation. Plus an electorate that seems to like divided government (in contrast to many parliamentary systems where divided government isn't even possible). In order to enact major legislative changes in the US you either need to convince diametrically opposed factions to cooperate or win an absolutely overwhelming victory (or bite the bullet and abolish the filibuster).
Absent that, you're pretty much stuck with executive discretion or lobbying the Supreme Court to declare that not doing what you want is unconstitutional.
Here I think we're going to hit an impasse, because I don't think right-wing populists in the US are being censored. I think they are (especially their more extremist representatives) attempting to frame losing soft power conflicts (or even just getting hit with the banhammer for TOS violations) as censorship.
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This is bullshit propaganda for the ruling class of liberal democracy.
The people are never intentionally consulted about important issues, and when they are and vote against the wishes of the elite, their will is ignored in practice or slow walked to oblivion.
When were the European people's consulted on immigration? And those few times they were consulted about higher EU integration they said no and were summarily ignored.
Americans keep desperately voting to end their foreign wars and the elite will literally have generals disobey the people they elect to conserve foreign entanglements.
The idea of popular sovereignty is a fiction as self evidently self serving by now as the divine right of kings.
Perhaps not intentionally, but elections are a de facto consultation on the biggest issues anyway. The latter part of the statement just isn't so universally, or even generally, true as you suggest. Take immigration. Every election in a European nation was a consultation around the time of the refugee crisis; Germans could have voted for AfD if they felt that strongly, but they mostly didn't so more Merkel it was.
Concerning EU integration I assume you are referring to the Denmark Maastricht referendum, but I don't think it proves your point. As a result of the referendum they negotiated several crucial opt-outs including on defence and currency, then they put that changed agreement to another referendum and won fairly comfortably. So score one for liberal democracy, if anything.
Also; Obama did end the Iraq war? So not sure what the 'foreign entanglements' bit is about. If it's referring to Trump, them that isn't evidence of deep state interference, just of the fact that Trump is a moron who had no idea how to work the levers of power.
I guess it's one of these irregular verbs.
I am powerless, you are being railroaded, he is a moron who has no idea how to work the levers of power.
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This is not a fair representation of what happened. While the vast majority Syrians who made it to Europe were accepted (under their current international obligations European nations didn't have a great deal of choice, they could hardly start refouling them to Syria), most applicants from nations like Nigeria and Pakistan were rejected, as well as about half from Sudan and others. Overall I think about half of all asylum applications were rejected in the peak of the crisis, which considering that somewhere in the region of half of all asylum seekers were Syrians, Afghans or Iraqis is hardly a scandalous figure.
I also think public opinion was not so decidedly anti-migrant as some imply. Over the 2015-2017 period ESS, Ipsos Mori and BES all have opposition to migration decreasing, (all slightly different wording) the former two with figures of under 50% for every year since 2014.
In the technical sense that nearly 100,000 soldiers left 2009-11, with remaining forces mostly there for embassy/consulate protection?
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What do you call it when generals lie about the number of troops stationed in Syria to their president?
Anyway, this makes the whole idea unfalsifiable. Anyone that the deep state successfully hinders is automatically a moron who doesn't know how to work the levels of power by this logic.
Having read about that now it seems fairly small fry. Leaving under 8-900 troops where they led Trump to believe it was below 4-500. They still probably shouldn't have done it but hardly a grave subversion of democracy.
I don't think so. Successful apparent 'deep state hindrance' of an otherwise competent politician would be genuine cause for concern, whereas there is plenty of other evidence to indicate that Trump was just an idiot.
The dude that posted a bunch of classified documents on Discord doesn't seem like big deal to me either, in the grand scheme of things, but somehow the whole system came down on him like a tonne of bricks.
If someone's hindered at every step, won't he look like an idiot no matter what? How do you tell whether or not he's actually competent?
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Depending on your definition of "democracy" and "large", Hong Kong might be an example. It's gone from mostly free elections to a situation where the opposition has basically given up. Venezuela is another contestable example.
However, in both cases, these are special cases which don't serve as widespread models. Not even many Latin American socialists see Venezuela's "Socialism of the 21st Century" as a model any more, while Hong Kong is basically a case of salami tactics in which an economically advanced semi-free democracy is being absorbed into a less advanced but much larger superpower. I don't know of anyone who wants to their country to become like Hong Kong, especially as it loses economic ground to Singapore as the financial hub of Asia.
Possibly, but if we limit to 'Western' then they don't count. It's hard to come up with examples even outside the US.
Venezuela isn't "Western"?
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Every now and then you see people arguing that Taiwan should follow Hong Kong's example. I will admit that I find it difficult to come up with a charitable explanation beyond uninformed, dangerously optimistic, or shill. Maybe that "It'll happen eventually anyway, might as well take the best terms possible even if the agreement likely to be broken"?
I am sure that people outside of Taiwan might think that (not least the CCP) and that some people in Taiwan want to join the PRC or be like Taiwan today, but in some sort of arrangement with the PRC. However, those are all different from people in Taiwan regarding Hong Kong as a model to follow.
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OP says: "Assuming Fukuyama is wrong and it isn’t American-flavored liberal democracy until the heat death of the universe. What comes next, either probabilistically or from a perspective of the ‘next’ thing?"
And you say "Russia vs Ukraine"? Isn't this like saying "The mighty Roman Empire withstood Cannae, so it will never fall, not until the end of time!"
Only it's not even that big of a conflict, the US isn't even directly involved. It's like one of the umpteen times the Persians invade pro-Roman Armenia and saying 'oh well we're enduring this fine, we will never fail!' We haven't even seen how Ukraine-Russia ends, we're still in the middle of it.
All it takes is one big lost war and a seemingly invincible empire can fall like Icarus. Russia alone could end the US tomorrow, plunging the Northern Hemisphere into a sea of fire. I'm not bullish on India or South America in the general case but if the US, China and Europe lose their cities and get irradiated...
That is my point though. Some critics of Fukuyama point that out as an example of Western democracy failing even though it's really small and does not even involve Western democracies.
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Well, with the exceptions of widespread, normalized political violence, direct and sustained political interventions by the security services, abrupt and unprecedented expansions of government power into every sphere of public and private life, collapsing social trust and cohesion, metastasizing distrust and disfunction in bedrock elements of the political process, and dangerous political and legal escalations arriving with monotonous regularity, the play was quite lovely dear, thanks for asking.
I think your thesis is just wrong, and that we can easily see the death of Western democracy from where we currently stand, and even pick out some of the vectors more likely to start the tower toppling.
The draft existed and was employed until the 70s. It's not unprecedented.
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Unrest can be imagined as a product of two factors: intertribal hate, and intertribal proximity. The more unrest there is, the more people sort themselves, reducing proximity. But the more proximity is reduced, the more interpersonal connections are severed, the larger our capacity for hate grows. Expressing hate requires methods for doing so, which work on specific configurations of proximity and hatred; new methods of expressing hatred must be constantly developed and disseminated, which takes time. All of this means that there will be peaks and troughs, but there will also be baseline fundamentals, and a trend.
We are, right now, as far from a federal election as it's possible to get, and Blue Tribe currently holds the reins of power. For these basic structural reasons, we have most favorable conditions possible for a lull, and they will not last. We are going to have another election, and no matter the result the basic tribal split will get worse. Reds are not going away. Blues are not going away. No progress has been made on their axiomatic disagreements. Grudges continue to accumulate. Conflict-resolution mechanisms continue to erode. Both tribes continue, daily, to search for ways to express and instantiate their hatred for each other. Such methods will be found and implemented, and the process of division will continue, in fits and starts, until its logical conclusion.
Or maybe I'm wrong. The elections next year seem like a reasonable milestone. What are you expecting?
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I think the concept of government is, like, melting. It used to be oriented around war, but wars are getting rarer and governments are getting disoriented now that they've lost their original reason to exist. Now they're just power for power's sake, unmoored from anything, floundering for a purpose and settling on something between welfare state and propaganda state.
They're not going to evolve into anything concrete because evolution relies on evolutionary pressure, of which there is none. Modern governments don't die they just change hands to whoever is crazy enough to accept unlimited responsibility in exchange for very little power. They'll just flail around forever, accomplishing nothing, sustained by the free energy in the political environment.
And safetyist state. As humanity ages and becomes more neurotic and/or risk averse, I expect governments to have a greater role, as agencies for (a) extracting resources from working-age people and distributing them towards larger, older cohorts, and (b) protecting people against ever smaller risks and discomforts.
Since neurotic risk-assessment is often incoherent and irrational, role (b) could end up looking very weird. A random example: a state interior minister in Germany said, in reaction to the 2015-2016 mass rapes of German women by immigrants:
This man, who had power regarding the security of a large German state, literally said that unwholesome speech is as awful as sexual assault (maybe worse). And from a policing perspective, cracking down on people saying unwholesome things Twitter and Discord is a lot easier than solving rape, theft, or murder cases. The future could look very weird, because neuroticism is very weird, and rising neuroticism is the best explanation I have of safetyism. The safetyist state, like the welfare state, is rising out of democratic tendencies, but will change democracy into something unrecognisable to those who lived before it, and due to public choice reasons it may be as hard (for the forseeable future, impossible) to remove as the welfare state.
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I think the form of government depends on who holds the power. If all the power in the nation is concentrated in a tiny military elite, you'll have a dictatorship ruling over peasants. If there are lots of independent wealthy land owners, they can demand stuff like voting rights and constitutions and get it unless the dictator destroys the source of their own wealth.
I think we're headed towards large welfare states, as we're soon going to reach a point where technological productivity is so high, millions of people can be fed and housed even if they themselves do 0 or near 0 labour, just off of the charity of others. I think parliamentary democracies will stay mostly stable, presidential democracies probably fall to a coup of some sort eventually.
This already exists to a large extent. A lot of people not contributing, either retired, disabled, homeless , mentally ill, negative effective tax rate, etc.
It was years ago that Romney correctly pointed out that around half of Americans are net receivers of federal spending. They pay no federal income tax or so little that direct benefits make them net receivers of cash from the feds.
And of course the revulsion and horror showed by major media outlets in response to his statement.
yup I remember that. first time politician told the truth during that election
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If he phrased it the way you said it, "Americans" fails to exclude children, making the whole thing pointless.
Reading a bit on it, around half of households don't pay federal income tax. So we're not unfairly including babies who don't file taxes.
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