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Among dystopias, this one is remarkably well-argued... It is rather frustrating to see how illiberality and strive have come back. In the nineties, the "End of

Among dystopias, this one is remarkably well-argued... It is rather frustrating to see how illiberality and strive have come back. In the nineties, the "End of History" made for a convincing hypothesis: Market economies in functioning democracies had proven that they were capable of providing decent quality of life for everyone. Competition had moved on from natural resources to human ingenuity, rendering the supposed motivation for all the wars of history irrelevant. Contrary to orthodox left-wing opinion, poorer countries were not exploited; instead, they had a standing invite to this future of plenty, and Asia took them up on it. But China's economic rise didn't effect any democratic change. It seemed that democracy did not, after all, win the cold war. Communism merely lost it. Dictatorships can be as productive as open societies, as long as you don't saddle them with too much incompetence or self-defeating ideology. So we are now in this new battle of the systems, and too often, we're loosing: China and Russia are obvious. But Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines, and Poland are more recent converts to the prosperity gospel of strongman leadership. With Trump, Brexit, and several recent election results in Europe, the hits keep coming closer. Maybe humans never actually liked democracy. They just enjoyed its spoils. Now that there's an option to both eat and hate, they're overjoyed.

pjc50 8y ago
> Contrary to orthodox left-wing opinion, poorer countries were not exploited Apart from the literal carve-up of colonialism, and businesses like the United Fruit Company? Asia very much did not have a "standing invite". Japan was explicitly rebuilt. China had a number of false starts with mass death before settling on export-led state capitalism. Vietnam tried to escape colonialism and was bombed flat. Cambodia was bombed for being next to Vietnam. South Korea and Singapore are probably closest to this ideal, which both relied on the state "picking winners" for support. Philippines exports people, and was once a byword for corruption under Marcos. Indonesia .. is never in the news? > Now that there's an option to both eat and hate, they're overjoyed. There's a minority for whom this is very much true, unfortunately. (WRT Russia, there's a strong case for what happened being "democracy" and "capitalism" but without rule of law, resulting in a gangster takeover)
- lubonay 8y ago
  Very good point about Russia - and I would expand it to most of the former Soviet block and Eastern Europe. Democracy only works if voters are competent and the vote counting process is fair. Without rule of law, you get coerced/bribed voters filling ballot boxes and criminals tallying the results.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Not just around voting - it's the whole infrastructure of public accountability. There needs to be some way to prevent the elected from simply giving themselves the state oil company, etc.
village-idiot 8y ago
While it’s obvious that their Psyops worked in 2016, it’s hard to argue that Russia’s system is superior to our right now. Russia is deeply corrupt, incompetent, and basically a 3rd tier economy or lesser. Italy tosses out more GDP than Russia. China is a far better case for your thesis. They’re doing much better economically and the government is both totalitarian and largely accepted by the populace. This situation is also very new, since they accepted open markets at least, and it will be interesting to see how stable it really is.
- pjc50 8y ago
  China's situation is like someone trying to dilute acid with water: put in a few drops of freedom, wait for the fizzing to subside, put in a few more, all while hoping to avoid an explosion. China is accepted by the Han populace. The extremely non-Han parts (Tibet, Xinjiang) are having it imposed on them at gunpoint.
- empath75 8y ago
  Their psyops only worked because one political party committed treason to assist them.
  - acdha 8y ago
    “Only” doesn’t seem like the right word to describe extremely effective use of a limited hand. If they hadn’t realized how far the hitherto anti-Russian GOP would go to gain control they’d have had to spend orders of magnitude more money to damage the U.S. as badly as electing Trump did.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      Everything on the Russian side screams of a desperation play. What’s more confusing is why the GOP decided to play ball with them instead of telling them to pound sand. It’s not like the GOP was struggling to hold onto power, they’ve got control of 2 branches and most state governments.
fallingfrog 8y ago
One theory I've heard is that democracy, or the age of mass politics, was coincident with the age of mass warfare. To see how, look at the English longbow. In it's own age it was a superweapon. It was both cheaper, could fire faster, and had better range than the crossbow. But yet, only the English ever used it. The reason why was because it was so cheap to make. But, for a person to develop the muscle mass and skill use it effectively took years of training, and once that training was in place, it could not be taken away. So that made any country that used the longbow vulnerable to peasant rebellions. So to use the longbow, England had to make the tradeoff that they had to make concessions to limited forms of democracy, or risk revolt. If your army uses crossbows, on the other hand, you can just take them away once the fighting is done. Fast forward to Napoleonic France. Napoleon realized that liberte, egalite, and fraternite could be used as weapons. If your people are convinced that the state belongs to them, then you can arm them all. And that's exactly what France did- they created a people's army and ran roughshod over all the other countries of Europe until they eventually followed suit and also allowed forms of democracy in their own countries. They had to, or be conquered. The age of mass democracy therefore coincides with the era of total warfare, for better or worse. We are allowed to participate in governance to the extent that our consent is required for the waging of war. But, that age is coming to an end. The development of nuclear weapons meant that there will never again be another war involving masses of infantry- so our consent is no longer required to run the country. The weapons can now be taken away, and so can democracy. Well, that's one take anyway.

pjc50 8y ago

> Contrary to orthodox left-wing opinion, poorer countries were not exploited Apart from the literal carve-up of colonialism, and businesses like the United Fruit Company? Asia very much did not have a "standing invite". Japan was explicitly rebuilt. China had a number of false starts with mass death before settling on export-led state capitalism. Vietnam tried to escape colonialism and was bombed flat. Cambodia was bombed for being next to Vietnam. South Korea and Singapore are probably closest to this ideal, which both relied on the state "picking winners" for support. Philippines exports people, and was once a byword for corruption under Marcos. Indonesia .. is never in the news? > Now that there's an option to both eat and hate, they're overjoyed. There's a minority for whom this is very much true, unfortunately. (WRT Russia, there's a strong case for what happened being "democracy" and "capitalism" but without rule of law, resulting in a gangster takeover)

lubonay 8y ago
Very good point about Russia - and I would expand it to most of the former Soviet block and Eastern Europe. Democracy only works if voters are competent and the vote counting process is fair. Without rule of law, you get coerced/bribed voters filling ballot boxes and criminals tallying the results.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Not just around voting - it's the whole infrastructure of public accountability. There needs to be some way to prevent the elected from simply giving themselves the state oil company, etc.

village-idiot 8y ago

While it’s obvious that their Psyops worked in 2016, it’s hard to argue that Russia’s system is superior to our right now. Russia is deeply corrupt, incompetent, and basically a 3rd tier economy or lesser. Italy tosses out more GDP than Russia. China is a far better case for your thesis. They’re doing much better economically and the government is both totalitarian and largely accepted by the populace. This situation is also very new, since they accepted open markets at least, and it will be interesting to see how stable it really is.

pjc50 8y ago
China's situation is like someone trying to dilute acid with water: put in a few drops of freedom, wait for the fizzing to subside, put in a few more, all while hoping to avoid an explosion. China is accepted by the Han populace. The extremely non-Han parts (Tibet, Xinjiang) are having it imposed on them at gunpoint.
empath75 8y ago
Their psyops only worked because one political party committed treason to assist them.
- acdha 8y ago
  “Only” doesn’t seem like the right word to describe extremely effective use of a limited hand. If they hadn’t realized how far the hitherto anti-Russian GOP would go to gain control they’d have had to spend orders of magnitude more money to damage the U.S. as badly as electing Trump did.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    Everything on the Russian side screams of a desperation play. What’s more confusing is why the GOP decided to play ball with them instead of telling them to pound sand. It’s not like the GOP was struggling to hold onto power, they’ve got control of 2 branches and most state governments.

fallingfrog 8y ago

One theory I've heard is that democracy, or the age of mass politics, was coincident with the age of mass warfare. To see how, look at the English longbow. In it's own age it was a superweapon. It was both cheaper, could fire faster, and had better range than the crossbow. But yet, only the English ever used it. The reason why was because it was so cheap to make. But, for a person to develop the muscle mass and skill use it effectively took years of training, and once that training was in place, it could not be taken away. So that made any country that used the longbow vulnerable to peasant rebellions. So to use the longbow, England had to make the tradeoff that they had to make concessions to limited forms of democracy, or risk revolt. If your army uses crossbows, on the other hand, you can just take them away once the fighting is done. Fast forward to Napoleonic France. Napoleon realized that liberte, egalite, and fraternite could be used as weapons. If your people are convinced that the state belongs to them, then you can arm them all. And that's exactly what France did- they created a people's army and ran roughshod over all the other countries of Europe until they eventually followed suit and also allowed forms of democracy in their own countries. They had to, or be conquered. The age of mass democracy therefore coincides with the era of total warfare, for better or worse. We are allowed to participate in governance to the extent that our consent is required for the waging of war. But, that age is coming to an end. The development of nuclear weapons meant that there will never again be another war involving masses of infantry- so our consent is no longer required to run the country. The weapons can now be taken away, and so can democracy. Well, that's one take anyway.