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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.
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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