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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?
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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