Liberal democracy might lose the 21st century | Hacker News Reader

Liberal democracy might lose the 21st century

noahpinion.blog

27 pointspaulpauper27 comments

Or maybe the explanation is a lot simpler.

Liberal democracies turned into oligarchies in much of the West in the 80s and 90s. While most of the benefits of growth used to go to people, now increasingly wealth is concentrated in a few hands.

Or in the words of Why Nations Fail, we remade the economy into an extractive system.

Lacking options and seeing that life for their children is getting increasingly more difficult and bleak people are slowly being more radicalized. They're losing faith in the traditional generators of growth like science and turning on one another.

Liberal democracy can win. But we need to undo the disastrous policies that got us here.

We elect people who are incentivized to continue these policies lest their own investment portfolios lose value.

I have very little hope that we can redirect our civilization in time to save it.

>> Or in the words of Why Nations Fail, we remade the economy into an extractive system.

Enshittification of the economy at the bottom and "enrichification" at the top.

We've seen this before many times before throughout history and it did not end well for those at the top.

That's why they're pouring massive amounts of investment money into making bipedal robots. If you can control the masses without needing the masses then it no longer matters anymore. Then you can live your cyberpunk dreams at the top of the pile while Elysium style robots suppress those at the bottom.

Liberal democracy will never win so long as we have an economic system that creates a power imbalance. Capitalism naturally captures markets and institutions. Corruption is inevitable.

There was communism 40 years in Eastern Block. Whole countries basically imploded in 1990s

Also because of corruption.

This is the part of the argument that baffles me. The argument goes: liberal democracies are partially captured by capitalism (corruption, actual, but frankly part of the argument is "corruption" in the sense of "we have the right to medicine, why don't doctors/nurses/... work for the government for free? No I won't feed them from my money. How dare you ask that!")

Fine. This is actually true. Money captures government. Of course, the fact that we discuss it so freely does mean something is done about it.

And yet, everyone I've ever spoken who came from an autocracy, from the USSR, from Palestine, from Saudi, from China, from DRC, from South Africa, from India (tbh India is worse than Europe, but far less bad than Russia was) ... They all confirm that every one of these non-liberal states are deeply, deeply corrupt and WILL prop up corrupt companies at the expense of everyone in the country, in some cases (or "if necessary") with violence. Some have islands of fair play (essentially a few sectors of the economy the rulers really don't care about but are still needed, and thus are an actual economic opportunity), but 95-100% of the economy is corrupt. And most of these people agree that this corruption in turn causes mass poverty, which in some cases is endemic.

One big theme is that all autocracies really have one purpose for all this corruption: to sabotage social mobility. Yes there is competition, usually between entire families, and one gains a bit one loses a bit, but NOBODY is allowed to switch places. That's what illiberal states are fundamentally about. Rulers remain rulers (especially in Saudi Arabia, that can go pretty damn FAR. Families whose children MUST take a job as a house servant for another family because their parents did that job. But also in China, it's about having the right families running the government. You can become the richest person among your cousins, with roughly the same amount of wealth as your richest uncle ... that's the limit. No going above it)

And yes, I obviously know of deeply unfair instances of corruption, in the US, and in Europe (oil companies are pretty much guaranteed to be corrupt, including in "the west", with telecom companies usually close behind). But it just doesn't compare to these illiberal states. And social mobility, definitely in the US, and even in Europe, is far higher.

So I'm baffled. Liberal capitalism is, as far as I can tell, by far the best solution to minimize corruption and maximize social mobility, both of which seem extremely desirable. It's also what these protests seem to be calling for. And yet ... every time there's demonstrations (which I understand, are part of liberal democracy and obviously part of the reason corruption remains under control) lots and lots of people call for entire countries to become illiberal. When asked they are under some sort of weird impression that socialism will make sure medicine is free, without training doctors. That housing for all will be the norm, while, of course, not building anything. That islam will mean wars end, without, of course, explaining why the conflict in, say, Sudan, isn't yet resolved.

> The argument goes: liberal democracies are partially captured by capitalism

My argument was that corruption can collapse any society, no matter the economic or political system.

In reply to your post: In an autocracy, the corruption is obvious to everyone and concentrated in a branched tree starting at the top leader. It is (was * ) very easy to remove it all in a revolution (though, that doesn't usually lead to a corruption-free society after). In a democratic capitalistic system, corruption is hidden, dispersed, systemic, very difficult even to demonstrate it's existence, much less remove it.

So, in a democratic liberal society, protests against corruption can't target the corrupt structure of government, because it's mostly invisible. When times are hard people want an autocratic leader to solve their problem in an autocratic manner ("iron fist", Hitler was actually voted!). The protesters only demand the removal of current corruption, not it's replacement with a top-down autocratic corruption, which is inevitable in an autocratic system, but even so, when the new corruption gets bad enough, it will be removed in a revolution and the process starts over again in a democratic system.

* This cycle is probably not functional anymore. With surveillance tech, protesters can't organize to bring down an autocratic governemnt anymore. The same surveillance can transform a democratic government in a fascist corporate-led one (think society in Robocop movies). No real examples yet, but I'm sure we'll get there.

Communism is a power imbalance of a different type. There is a middle way.

I think quite a bit of this is that if you’re not in the out group, being in an autocracy would feel like it has a lot of benefits with few drawbacks. About a decade ago I was speaking to a man in Haiti who lamented the fall of the Duvalier and Aristide regimes. From his perspective (since he nor his family members were targets) it was stable versus what had come since via democracy such as the UN “peacekeeping” forces (and it’s obviously gotten much worse since then). At one point he said “Yes people died but at least they picked up the trash.”

None of this is an endorsement on my part. It seems clear to me that democracies are better than autocracies, but there are appealing parts of autocracies if you are willing to turn a blind eye to the atrocities.

I would look deeper into the coup's in Haiti and if there were any liberal democracies who were involved in those.

Haiti's history is full of foreign interference since Christopher Columbus first landed there some 500 years ago.

Oh I completely agree with that. The fact that they were still paying off their “debt” to France after 150 years for having the nerve to revolt against slavery is itself a crime.

It's not just France. For about 100 years the debt was paid to France and for about 25 years it was paid to the US after the US invaded. What's today Citibank demanded the invasion. The US literally had marines take Haiti's entire gold reserve and cart it to Citibank's basement at 55 Wall Street.

The US took advantage of Haiti's revolt against slavery even after France had given up. By the time the US left, the UN said that it had stolen everything and forced Haitians into such horrific conditions they were close to starvation.

Free markets, liberal democracies, and so forth are just ways of distributing decision-making and control — that may be not optimal (e.g., they could be sometimes painfully slow compared to autocracies), but are good enough.

It all can be seen as a resilient distributed computer made of humans.

The USSR/communism failed not because it is inherently evil and soul-crushing, but mainly because it lacked the all-permeating, high-bandwidth information system that could survey and control all aspects of society in a centralized way (i.e., cyber-totalitarianism). But with all the new 21st-century technology and AI, it possibly could have succeeded...

We're living in interesting times.

> The USSR/communism failed not because it is inherently evil and soul-crushing, but mainly because it lacked the all-permeating

This seems to be the hope of Marxists today. But if you talk to people who actually lived in the USSR, no, it wasn't lack of information. It was like in the show "Chernobyl". It was protecting decision makers, right up to the point of sending firefighters LITERALLY INTO a fissioning nuclear reactor in hopes of putting it out and blaming it on an electrical malfunction to protect the careers of the plant director and chief scientist.

I've got 2 anecdotes to counter yours.

I knew a guy who served in the Iraqi military after the fall of Saddam. He did not serve under Saddam, he was not pro Saddam. He told me that under Saddam, you could walk down the street at 1AM with ten thousand dollars cash in your hand waving it in the air and nobody would try to take it from you. Religiously motivated attacks simply did not happen. The flip side of that, if you got involved in politics or messed with his business, you disappeared.

Another friend of mine, a Zulu man from south Africa, told me he missed apartheid. I was awestruck when he told me this. He said he couldn't go into certain parts of cities without a work permit and couldn't own certain land in certain regions, he had limited freedom, but that the streets were clean and there was much less corruption and crime.

(Note: This isn't a one off either, there's actually currently an anti corruption ovement that is mostly black in ZA with elements of pro apartheid sentiment, it's truly bizarre.)

These were both very much outgroup people, probably happy with the change in the status quo, only to with hindsight feel like they lost something. I'm with you, I'm opposed to autocracy, authoritarianism, and I'd rather live in a messy society where everyone is free, but often there are tangible benefits in systems like this. Dictators and authoritarians know this, they know that when times are tough people want security, and they use it to great effect, and it works.

Liberal democracy never won in China, not sure how it can be lost. The central piece of the blog seems to be this:

"China hasn’t yet proven the superiority of its system, but its successes raise the uncomfortable question: Can this be what wins? Can universal surveillance, speech control, suppression of religion and minorities, and economic command and control really be the keys to national power and stability in the 21st century? How could that be true, when those same things failed so comprehensively in the 20th?. . . it’s useful and to think about how and why totalitarianism might be well-adapted to the world of the 21st century. In fact, I have a theory of how this might be true. This theory is only a conjecture — *it’s something I don’t believe in*, but also something I can’t yet convince myself is wrong."

By the end of it I don't really get what this article is trying say. The first 2/3rds is about all the shiny things China has and people like it because they don't see the dumpster fire in the alley that made it all happen.

If one was concerned about the direction of liberal democracies outside of the West, India would be a more interesting place to look.

I posit that it comes down to what people value. Up-thread there is a discussion about how a Zulu man lamented the fall of Apartheid because, to paraphrase, “at least the streets were clean.”

Of course the issue is that we could have clean streets without genocides, and that is true of human society everywhere, but while one might value clean streets enough to be OK with (what I believe to be) unreasonable and unnecessary costs, others care more for being right and grandstanding to score political points, gain power, or simply make themselves feel better by attacking others.

As long as society continues to pay deference to people who value those things more, the cleanliness of our metaphorical and literal streets will always be secondary.

It might and world should worry what will replace it. Lot of those liberal democracies used to be empires or has reformed into large blocks which could be considered an empire. They might want to reestablish themselves.

Why does it need to be a competition? LIO can always mind it's own business and coexist with autocracies.

I would say though that people would probably be less interested in autocracy, if democracy didn’t have housing shortages and homeless people everywhere, countless people in debt, painful job losses and economic turmoil, etc.

Incompetent democratic governance invites and begs for competent autocratic governance. This will always happen - and it’s already happened in El Salvador, Singapore, and other countries.

Democracy worked, for a while. And at least when it fails, there are mechanisms in place for restitution. Not so much for autocracies, which aren't competent just by being. The current ones somewhat work, but who knows down the line?

Of course.

But the greatest threat to a democracy is not some controversial leader who makes bold or questionable decisions.

It’s when the majority of people get the feeling, the sense, that their desires and needs are not being met.

The greatest threat to democracy is forgetting history. After all Mussolini made the trains run on time before he destroyed Italy.

Dismissing these problems as "incompetent democratic governance" is missing that in many cases these are manifestations of voters getting what they want. Housing shortages and the existence of an underemployed class are popular with voters because they keep asset prices up and wages down.

I think that’s an overly Marxist and myopic point of view, considering the amount of social problems coming out of taxation and other policies that aren’t so popular with the wealthy. This isn’t Victorian England.

My point is, it’s a two-way street.

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