Liberal democracy is a fucking sham. Full of nice ideas that only work (in theory) if you completely ignore power.
Liberal democracy is the best system we have - unless you want to suggest an alternative. However all systems ultimately rely on their participants to play their role in good faith. Here, a group of people completely failing to give a fuck subverted the system - and those people need to face consequences.
It is the best system that has been allowed to develop given the pre-existing imbalances of power, sure. But liberals have no theory of power, let alone any intention of redistributing it.
What is the point of a free press if the press is owned by billionaires?
How can you have free speech when power controls the platforms from which you can be heard?
What use is the rule of law if it is impossible to adequately prosecute the wealthy and too expensive to adequately represent the poor?
Liberalism is full of sensible ideas which cannot work in this reality. A reality that liberal leaderships are happy to maintain because they hold, and are beholden to, a big chunk of the power that needs to be redistributed. Umberto Eco offers a nice aside on this, in Ur-Fascism:
It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.
Punch left, pander right, act all shocked when fascism takes over.
This is a useful critique of liberalism from a Rawlsian liberal, who admits that even Rawls might not have an adequate answer: The Rawlsian Diagnosis of Donald Trump. Worth reading in full but here’s a click-free taster:
There are many other questions we could ask—about the growing influence of money on the political process, say, or about the rising cost of a college education and the obstacle it presents to achieving fair equality of opportunity. But perhaps it is sufficient to take note of the skyrocketing economic inequality that characterized U.S. society during the years in question. Rawls’s claim that his principles embody an ideal of reciprocity rests heavily, though not exclusively, on the fact that his “difference principle,” which governs the distribution of income and wealth, requires economic inequalities to be arranged in such a way as to maximize the position of the worst-off group in society. Robert Nozick once asked, in objecting to the difference principle, how we would feel about a principle that required inequalities to be arranged in such a way as to maximize the position of the best-off group. Nozick’s mischievous question was a fanciful hypothetical that was intended to cast doubt on the strength of Rawls’s argument for the difference principle. But if one looks at patterns of inequality in the United States in recent decades, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the basic structure of U.S. society has come closer to satisfying Nozick’s hypothetical principle than it has to satisfying Rawls’s difference principle. That is, the inequalities fostered by U.S. institutions have come closer to maximizing the position of the best-off group than to maximizing the position of the worst-off group.
In short, the United States in recent decades has egregiously failed to live up to any reasonable standard of reciprocity, because its institutions and policies have blatantly failed to affirm the good of all citizens. If, as Rawls maintains, the stability of otherwise just institutions depends on their embodying an idea of reciprocity, then what we should have expected to see as a consequence of those failures is just what we have in fact seen: growing resentment and discord, and the degrading and destabilizing of liberal institutions. In one respect, the situation is even worse than this might suggest. Rawls’s point was about the stability of otherwise just institutions. Or, more accurately, it was about whether a candidate theory of justice could generate its own support if it did not meet the standard of reciprocity. The pre-Trump United States failed to meet that standard, but not because it was attempting to realize a utilitarian theory of justice that relied more heavily on sympathy than on reciprocity, and not because it was attempting to satisfy any serious theory of justice at all. Instead it was simply allowing, or even encouraging, the wealthy and the privileged to prosper at the expense of everyone else. And if even utilitarianism, which seeks to advance the general welfare, contains the seeds of instability because it fails to satisfy the conditions of reciprocity, then what are we to say about institutions that fail to satisfy those conditions because they neglect the worst-off and allow the wealthiest to amass almost unimaginable riches? What we can say is that they provide fertile conditions for the emergence of a candidate, and a president, like Donald Trump.
Let me put it this way, specifically for neoliberalism:
In a Society were “Greed is good” and the products of greed (namelly wealth) is the greatest indicator of “success” in the eyes of society, law-makers and law-enforcers are supposed to put notions such as “working for the greater good” or “upholding the Law” above personal upside maximization.
This is as much la-la-land fantasism completelly devoid of any relation to the real world behaviour of human beings in general as the notion that humans can create and maintain a society were everybody is equal (aka Communism).
The jury is still out, IMHO, on whether Capitalism as just a way to structure trading within the Economy in Markets with genuine competition under something else defining broadly how to rule for the good of Society is a good solution, but the current variant we have were Capitalism with low-regulation is treated as the one and only “ideology” to guide every aspect of Society (not just trading) is complete total bollocks and I suspect the ones pushing for this from the very beginning were well aware of it (things like “home economicus” which is the model of a human upon which the whole edifice of Free Market Theories was built, have long been proven to be unrepresentative of real human behaviour).
There’s no grand conspiracy and there is no set of rules that will tame the beast.
It’s not about individual greed. It is structurally inevitable. Any system which relies on power being in the hands of saintly individuals is doomed to fail.
I don’t know what a genuine Marxist revolution would look like because there has never been one. And I’m not optimistic that there ever will be. The crises of capitalism which create the conditions for a (theoretical) Marxist revolution occur when (and because) labour is at its weakest.
It’s fascism that wins out when liberals fuck up. Not least because liberals prefer it that way.
I don’t have any answers. But I’m not going to stop looking for them.
It’s not a conspiracy, its just a change of motivations for individuals and the whole changes completelly because different motivations at the individuals can result in very different emergent properties of the whole (there’s an area of Mathematics for this kind of thing).
Apparently there was investment of money by some very rich people early in the 70s in things like Think Tanks which pushed out the theoretical underpinnings of neoliberalism (and have been shilling fot it ever since) but most of what happenned quite overtly (the fishyest part was them hidding their aources of funding) and most of whate ended up happenning was really just the natural product of human behaviour and how in a “greed is good” system many will naturally seek power as a shortcut for quick personal upside maximization.
There are tons of effects like that: for example people who see power as responsability towards other and thus feel the weight of holding power, are much less likely to seek it than those who feel no weight of responsability whatsoever and just want it to benefit themselves. Interestingly enough there was a study published in the Harvard Business Review some years ago showing something related to that: specifically they discovered that companies led by people who had not got the CEO position by seeking it (for example, the second in line getting the position because the CEO died in an accident) performed better than those with CEOs who had activelly sought that position.
The point being that if structurally you put personal upside maximization at the core of decision making, given human nature you’re going to naturally get emerging properties of the whole such as widespread corruption or legal outcomes depending on a person’s wealth more than guilt.
Liberal democracy is the best system we have - unless you want to suggest an alternative. However all systems ultimately rely on their participants to play their role in good faith. Here, a group of people completely failing to give a fuck subverted the system - and those people need to face consequences.
It is the best system that has been allowed to develop given the pre-existing imbalances of power, sure. But liberals have no theory of power, let alone any intention of redistributing it.
What is the point of a free press if the press is owned by billionaires?
How can you have free speech when power controls the platforms from which you can be heard?
What use is the rule of law if it is impossible to adequately prosecute the wealthy and too expensive to adequately represent the poor?
Liberalism is full of sensible ideas which cannot work in this reality. A reality that liberal leaderships are happy to maintain because they hold, and are beholden to, a big chunk of the power that needs to be redistributed. Umberto Eco offers a nice aside on this, in Ur-Fascism:
Punch left, pander right, act all shocked when fascism takes over.
This is a useful critique of liberalism from a Rawlsian liberal, who admits that even Rawls might not have an adequate answer: The Rawlsian Diagnosis of Donald Trump. Worth reading in full but here’s a click-free taster:
So your suggested alternative, is…?
Already covered.
I don’t believe so.
Then you’ll have to ask a coherent question.
Let me put it this way, specifically for neoliberalism:
This is as much la-la-land fantasism completelly devoid of any relation to the real world behaviour of human beings in general as the notion that humans can create and maintain a society were everybody is equal (aka Communism).
The jury is still out, IMHO, on whether Capitalism as just a way to structure trading within the Economy in Markets with genuine competition under something else defining broadly how to rule for the good of Society is a good solution, but the current variant we have were Capitalism with low-regulation is treated as the one and only “ideology” to guide every aspect of Society (not just trading) is complete total bollocks and I suspect the ones pushing for this from the very beginning were well aware of it (things like “home economicus” which is the model of a human upon which the whole edifice of Free Market Theories was built, have long been proven to be unrepresentative of real human behaviour).
There’s no grand conspiracy and there is no set of rules that will tame the beast.
It’s not about individual greed. It is structurally inevitable. Any system which relies on power being in the hands of saintly individuals is doomed to fail.
Power protects itself because it can. Any system with unchecked imbalances of power will devolve into a corrupt oligarchy. Monopoly (the board game) was originally developed to make exactly that point.
I don’t know what a genuine Marxist revolution would look like because there has never been one. And I’m not optimistic that there ever will be. The crises of capitalism which create the conditions for a (theoretical) Marxist revolution occur when (and because) labour is at its weakest.
It’s fascism that wins out when liberals fuck up. Not least because liberals prefer it that way.
I don’t have any answers. But I’m not going to stop looking for them.
It’s not a conspiracy, its just a change of motivations for individuals and the whole changes completelly because different motivations at the individuals can result in very different emergent properties of the whole (there’s an area of Mathematics for this kind of thing).
Apparently there was investment of money by some very rich people early in the 70s in things like Think Tanks which pushed out the theoretical underpinnings of neoliberalism (and have been shilling fot it ever since) but most of what happenned quite overtly (the fishyest part was them hidding their aources of funding) and most of whate ended up happenning was really just the natural product of human behaviour and how in a “greed is good” system many will naturally seek power as a shortcut for quick personal upside maximization.
There are tons of effects like that: for example people who see power as responsability towards other and thus feel the weight of holding power, are much less likely to seek it than those who feel no weight of responsability whatsoever and just want it to benefit themselves. Interestingly enough there was a study published in the Harvard Business Review some years ago showing something related to that: specifically they discovered that companies led by people who had not got the CEO position by seeking it (for example, the second in line getting the position because the CEO died in an accident) performed better than those with CEOs who had activelly sought that position.
The point being that if structurally you put personal upside maximization at the core of decision making, given human nature you’re going to naturally get emerging properties of the whole such as widespread corruption or legal outcomes depending on a person’s wealth more than guilt.