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Notes -
Free market capitalism and identity
Today I spent some time reading about Georgia Meloni and watching some of her speeches, such as this one. She’s charismatic, but being a rootless global laissez-faire capitalist I am of course not thrilled; anyway, I’d like to offer my perspective on some of the issues raised in her speeches.
It is a natural state of affairs that the governments, by leveraging their capacity for violence, have an enormous power over their citizens and by extension on their businesses; all private organizations are by default subservient to the State.
"Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State" — Benito Mussolini
Diverting from such an arrangement is not trivial. Indeed, how do you stop the people who have, pretty much by definition, overwhelming firepower from using it to take your stuff? One way are the democratic institutions — things like the separation of powers, checks and balances, key positions being elected and therefore held at least somewhat accountable, and so on. All of that works to an extent, but these things are fragile and often not really sufficient.
The other pillar of limiting the power of the govts to control and loot private enterprise, is the competition between different countries. The states themselves can be seen as providers of a certain service — you pay the taxes, and in return get useful things like personal asset protection, arbitrage, infrastructure and so on. As such they are also subject to the market forces. If there are multiple independent offers, and you are free to choose any of them, then in fact you are likely to find a fair deal.
Therefore, in order for the free world to exist it must be possible to change your country at will. It’s easy to see that nationalism runs contrary to this goal. If you only ever can be accepted in one country, if you can only be permitted to run important businesses or organisations in the country of your birth; and doomed to be an irrelevant outsider in all others — well, then your government has you by the balls — you have no real negotiating position with the state.
This reasoning can be extrapolated to other kinds of identity Meloni mentions, to an extent, although of course the most important one of them by far is the national identity. But I disagree that the capitalist’s goal is to destroy identities. It is only necessary for them to be made interchangeable.
If anything capitalism served to amplify and increase the adoption of certain cultural elements, think the Italian cuisine or the Japanese animation. I know what you’re going to say — that it’s not real, it’s superficial, it’s commoditized and the real national identity is something else entirely. Well, it is. The real national idea, the one you’re left with when the music stops, is always to force you to surrender everything you have to the state and to go die in the trenches for no good reason, ostensibly as a sacrifice to your country. Perhaps it’s for the best if we abandon that.
There's a third pillar of Sovereign accountability, and that's intra-national political competition. The nationalist conception of the high and the low versus the middle paints a more historical picture of balance of power than Enlightenment morality and constitutionalism:
In other words, the rhetoric of Free Market Capitalism, anti-nationalism, and anti-racism, are not some morla enlightenment brought about by Progress. They are the managerial tact of American empire. The move to strike nationalist sentiment is not moral enlightenment reached by individuals freely entering a social contract. It's a political strategy being employed by power actors.
Accountability via internecine conflict strikes me as historically accurate but inherently unstable. If defecting is the corrective mechanism, such a society is going to find itself in a defect-defect equilibrium. Presumably, at that point, the other two pillars of accountability come in and clean up. That’s cold comfort.
The second issue is removal of this pillar. There’s no guarantee that a cohesive opposition forms to a “final” power center. Modern China is perhaps a good example. Xi certainly gets things done; one wonders how accountable or constrained he actually is.
Democracy has enjoyed a competitive advantage over the last few centuries because it makes an attempt to address both of these concerns. Voting out the government is a coop-coop resolution to a given dilemma and imposes fewer costs than the defect-defect option. And substituting “consent of the governed” for “consent of the nobles” changes the dynamics of the alternate power centers.
That's the key insight. That liberalism has had a competitive advantage in the centralization of power is the reason it is dominant. Not because of flimsy moral premises, like the notion that the individual precedes the web of social obligations, or that there are inalienable "human rights." Those notions and self-justifications are themselves byproducts of these power struggles; such as the colonial subsidiary struggle against the former centers of Power.
We can move from a Whig view of history, from the view of Liberalism as an emergent moral enlightenment in which primordial truths were discovered, to a post-liberal model which recognizes that liberalism was an innovation in the centralization and organization of power.
Understanding liberal ideology as a set of competitive advantages is fundamentally different than understanding it as a moral Enlightenment. It's true that those are not mutually exclusive, but with this model the former is all that matters. Liberal moral presuppositions, like individual will preceding social order, are flimsy and ahistorical.
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