Liberal democracy, as practiced in the USA and the UK, does not work. Why not? Because it leads to impoverishment, which in turn leads to fascistoid mobilization of anger and resentment, which are exploited by primitive groups who smell power. Why such trajectory? Because it was based upon wrong ideas about humanity. Like feudalism, fascism, and communism it was a grand experiment, and it is destroying itself and will probably leave something very dangerous in its wake, as did desperate impoverishment in the German Weimar Republic in the last century, which helped fascism to power. This is not just theory, but has meanwhile become factual evidence. This also means that the only form of society which appears to be workable, in spite of all kinds of problems, is social democracy.
The consequences for culture are clear: its funding is undermined, and limited resources mean that populism becomes a defining survival strategy.
Interesting and insightful essay, if we take the purple prose with a grain of salt:
https://eand.co/were-living-through-the-collapse-of-liberal-democracy-ea12a875b9a5
Francis Fukuyama seemed to think it was clear in the early 1990s that liberal democracies were the future. I'm not going to take seriously any proposal that social democracies are any more stable than other systems, especially in light of Cold War and post-Cold War contexts. Now if the author was writing a wry satire of Fukuyamaian triumphalism that's another story.
ReplyDeleteSocial democracies as to be found in W-Europe are less unstable and less vulnerable to fascistoid attempts than the USA, because they still have something of a welfare programme and general education that works and can prevent the worst: Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Switserland, and the garlic belt.
Deleteand they had those because functionally being vassals to the United States gave them enough stability to manage that, that and having in certain contexts more stringent immigration policies than the U.S. As I was noting earlier, that entire line of reasoning is predicated on the same core mistake Fukayama made about liberal democracies at the end of the Cold War.
Delete