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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?
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.
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.
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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