Matt Yglesias continues the argument that There Is No Alternative
. . . pay attention to what’s not being disputed. Nobody, as best I can tell, disagrees that in principle Libya ought to be a republican nation state with a government accountable to its people and beholden to some notion of human rights. Nobody is suggesting a dictatorship of the proletariat or the obsolescence of bourgeois democracy in an era of national struggle for blood and soil. The last big thing in Iran was a violent government crackdown on protestors who were brought out in the streets by election fraud. That’s bad. Yet it’s noteworthy that neither Franco nor Stalin would steal an election. Once you’re conceding the point that were it the case that you lost the election you would be obligated to step down, you’ve abandoned the quest for a viable alternative.
My gut instinct is that liberalism is not the end. And, in fact in the grand sweep of history it will be an curious oddity. My sense is that the future of sentient life is likely authoritarian, traditionalist and devoid of our values of individualism.
However, articulating this is a project for many years from now.
8 comments
Comments feed for this article
Tuesday ~ August 23rd, 2011 at 12:59 pm
Curt Doolittle
The Civic Republican ethic, and the commercial propertarian society that consists of enfranchised ‘shareholders’ is an oddity whose origin lies in the balance of power system that evolved due to small size of western tribes, their equipment costs and their battle tactics that required cooperation. The later aristocratic property-society we call Christian Monarchy, and it’s anglo variant in particular, and the American Constitution perpetuated that rarity. But it is a rarity.
“The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.”
Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, 1867.
Liberty (to avoid the appropriated term Freedom) is the desire of the creative minority. It always was, and it always will be. Everyone else just wants the fruits of commercial society. They don’t want to participate in the market place, they only want to be consumers in it. They have demonstrated that want with their preferences for employment, government employment, unionization, and subsidy. In an agrarian society almost every man participates in the market. In contemporary society only small and medium sized business people do. So demographically, it just appears that it will not be possible to continue to perpetuate a society that requires the values of market participants when only a minority of citizens participate in the market by taking risks with their capital in anticipation of reward.
The battle is won among theorists. It has been for a decade or more. I think Zacharia was the first to publish the sea change. Authoritarian capitalism is the future for most of the world. Why? Because the minority of us who desire liberty, are not willing to pay the costs of maintaining our liberty. We are too few.
Tuesday ~ August 23rd, 2011 at 4:52 pm
freddiedeboer
Seriously, Karl– bless you. I often feel really alone out here in arguing that the consensus is just never really the consensus. Thanks.
Tuesday ~ August 23rd, 2011 at 7:37 pm
Rory Leahy
You may not be allowed to articulate it many years from now as future governments may no longer permit that kind of analysis
Tuesday ~ August 23rd, 2011 at 11:40 pm
Dane
Why? Because the minority of us who desire liberty, are not willing to pay the costs of maintaining our liberty. We are too few.
The whole point of Austrian School political economy is passing on the cost of property rights onto the blood and treasure of others.
It’s the ultimate parasitism masquerading as libertarianism.
Wednesday ~ August 24th, 2011 at 12:00 pm
Gepap
What gives you the notion that an agrarian society is one in which every person “participates” in the market? In most agrarian societies few if anyone had a sufficient surplus of any kind to participate in anything more than the basic interchange of goods that happens naturally within any human group, given that we are highly socialized apes. This is to say nothing of systems where the farm labor is provided by individuals who didn’t own the land, slavery being the most obvious such example.
This may be a well designed ideological screed, but it is well short on accurate historical analysis.
Wednesday ~ August 24th, 2011 at 2:18 am
Roy
The thing is that societies exist in a state of competition with each other, if a society is more innovative, resourceful, and more aggressive, all hallmarks of liberal market based societies, it will outcompete other models.
Authoritarian Capitalism is just not efficient or creatice enough to triumph, it is the road to technical and most of all economic stagnation. I am not saying liberal market capitalism is the ultimate society, I just think it is by far the most successful competitor we have yet seen.
Wednesday ~ August 24th, 2011 at 5:49 am
Marcin
Putting on my Marxist hat for a moment, we would expect societies to adapt to their economic reality, and adopt forms of organisation that maximise wealth.
If, as we see, manufacturing is becoming possible using generic manufacturing devices (such as 3D printers), and presumably generic chinese factories, then we would expect a society with a greater number of entrepreneurs.
Unless there is a power reason which prevents those entrepreneurs from profiting fully, I would expect them to be a powerful constituency, who would, essentially support bourgeois norms. I think technological progress is going to militate against concentrations of power.
Of course, I don’t neglect the role of ideology and class interest – a global class that can create a global crypto-feudal society which subjects everyone involved in design and the operation new manufacturing technologies, would potentially have a relatively stable social order, because there would be nowhere to run to, and hence attack from. Whether or not that would be possible depends on such a variety of factors that I hesitate to speculate as to whether or not it could be done.
Tuesday ~ May 7th, 2013 at 7:40 am
fiftyone fifty hats
usually people are not enough to speak on such topics. To the next. Cheers