One, maybe two cheers for liberal democracy
An extremely condensed look at The End of History
Here is my best effort to condense the theory proposed by Fukayama’s ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, one that I broadly agree with.
Political organization must facilitate a) the reason-guided satisfaction of needs and desires, and b) the recognition of common human dignity.
Free markets are the best way to facilitate the reason-guided satisfaction of needs and desires thanks to *prices*. Prices capture information about supply and demand that has been processed in a decentralized way by every free individual in an economy. Central planning will never be able to reproduce this - planners will always have to guess how much of something there is and how much need for it there is and they’ll always be at least a little wrong, and people will suffer. High prices will be replaced by shortages and long lines.
Democracies are the best way to facilitate the recognition of common human dignity. Our leaders are selected from our citizens, and during their terms they do not wear fancy robes and crowns to establish that they are a different and better type of person than everyone else. We yearn for moral autonomy, to make our own determinations about right and wrong and to have those determinations be respected by others and by the government. Even well-kept citizens of a market-dictatorship will rebel against being told that they are property of the state.
The superiority of liberal democracy for meeting human needs has been challenged quite a bit, from the left by thinkers like Marx and from the right by thinkers like Nietzsche. For Marx and his descendants, social reality is not determined by individuals but by social categories, and as such liberal ‘freedom’ actually disguises the real oppression brought about by the conflict of these categories. For Nietzsche, people aren’t driven for recognition of *common dignity* but instead seek *superiority*. We want don’t just want to feel good, we want to feel *better* than someone else. We want to feel better than the people who are different than us, better than the person we were yesterday.
I think these are valid criticisms, and I also think that liberal democracy remains the best way to handle these issues. Preserving a private domain of life free of state interference is the best way for individuals to be able to identify and speak to these social issues - if the personal is political and must be brought under state control, then nobody will ever have the opportunity to criticize or challenge the assholes in power, and social problems will become permanent. On the other pole, free markets and democratic government provide great outlets for those who are driven to be recognized as superior people, since businesses need customers and politicians need voters. The only way to become extremely honored and powerful is to make something that a bunch of people want to buy or make policies that a bunch of people want to vote for. This isn’t perfect, but I’d rather have asshole businessmen and awful demagogues than rampaging warlords sitting on thrones of skulls.
The main challenge to liberal democracy, I think, is actually information technology. Information is becoming much cheaper to produce than to evaluate. Our best and brightest go to the high-paying fields of marketing and finance - marketing is all about producing the information that people use to make decisions and finance is all about sifting through the mountain of information to make financial decisions. Our best and brightest could be doing literally anything else with their talents, but instead they devote their lives to generating and dealing with an awful lot of noise.
Relatedly, being subject to elections means that our politicians need to spend a ton of time and effort fundraising and campaigning. Victory goes to whomever raises the most money and government benefits go to their donors. An entire ecosystem of political consultants exists to help turn money into votes. These consultants could be doing literally anything else and our politicians could be spending much more time doing the work of actually governing.
What’s the solution? I don’t support subjecting all aspects of human life to state control, including under the flag of ‘democratic accountability’. I do support legislation to reign in American hyper-financialization, and legislation to enact campaign finance reform. More immediately, it also comes down to individual citizens like us doing our best to consciously be good citizens, taking our role as citizens seriously, doing the hard work of resisting the firehose of slop sprayed at us everyday by the algorithms. Human life isn’t easy, and even the best version of society will always take some work to maintain.