Fukuyama, f*** yeah

I wish I could be quite as optimistic, but while the argument may be sound enough it does rely on the basic premise that what we call democracy in the West is sustainable. In order for it to remain so it has to cleanse itself of the undue influence of the business and banking interests that have determined – without the informed consent of the electorate at large – not only the choice of candidates – but the outcomes of recent elections in US and UK. Who chose George W Bush or Tony Blair as candidates in the first place? That is the problem with our system. We only get a choice of the people that have already been selected – but by who?

“There is no reason to think that the rule of Putin, or of the Communist Party of China, will outlast the next economic downturn, or even slowdown, any more than Ben Ali or Mubarak.”

To what extent have the latter only fallen because they prevented people from practising capitalism with all it’s attendant benefits (to an extent due to massive corruption on the part of the ruling class) ?

As long as the CCP continues to provide an environment in which most people feel they can better themselves and don’t feel that they are affected by corruption – why shouldn’t they survive? (The parallel question could be posed about the US post crisis).

It may be a bit much to describe Pakistan as a democracy – it’s more a durable military-capitalist clique that adroitly switches between dictatorship and democratic facade according to conditions. If it ever stabilizes on the democratic setting public opinion would oblige the elites to pay much more attention to economic development than today, when military aggrandizement and terrorist subversion of neighbors are the primary concern of the state. So it may not be such an exception to Fukuyama’s second thesis.

‘Second [liberal representative] democracy ensures that everyone has a say. Not, of course, an equal say, but, for anyone outside of the ruling elite, more of a say than they would get under any alternative system.’

A bold claim!

Maybe you should titled this ‘Dr Pangloss, f*** yeah!’

Pr Q said:

The real threat, as Hidari observes in a footnote, is that democracy can be subverted from within, by charismatic/authoritarian leaders like Berlusconi and Putin. In Queensland, we experienced the same thing on a small scale under Joh Bjelke-Petersen (look him up).

The biggest dangers to popular democracy in established liberal democracies are well-mannered liberal elites. Its your economically rational Davos Men and politically correct SWPLs that hate the man in the street and never miss a chance to take him down a peg or two.

Actually Joh was not nearly as bad as most liberal commentators like to make out, with the dubious wisdom of hindsight. His unique brand of charisma, plus some sharp political practice, may have won him an extra election or two. But in general he stayed in power because he got good results for QLD, economically capitalising on the sea-change boom and politically arm-wrestling more funds from Canberra.

Joh’s worst crimes were accepting a bit of graft for sly brothels. Not exactly the crime of the century. But he stopped a few street marches, which gave a bunch of self-righteous Left-liberals some protest war stories to endlessly retail in op-ed columns from then to eternity.

By contrast the bland apparatchiks of the various state ALP’s have managed to sell off and rip-off their states to the tune of billions. Thereafter smoothly slipping into high-paying jobs in the finance sector. No doubt Eric Roozendaal will tread that well-worn trail.

As Kinsley said, the scandal is not what is criminal, its what is legal.

_Second, democracy ensures that everyone has a say. Not, of course, an equal say, but, for everyone outside the ruling elite, more of a say than they would get under any alternative system. Once that fact is generally recognised, mass mobilisation against the system becomes an impossibility._

Possible counter-example: France in May-June 1968 (one of the largest general strikes in history).

I like Matt White’s old analysis: there’s not really much evidence that democracies don’t fight each other, and part of the apparent effect is just that in the modern world, countries don’t fight each other very often. There are not many true international wars; instead there are mostly civil wars that other countries may get involved in. (The US invasion of Iraq did start as an international war but turned into the other kind.)

But it does seem to be the case that democratic countries are relatively stable, and that makes war on the country’s territory less likely simply because the majority of wars are civil wars.

The list of countries that do not even claim to be democracies is very short and has been for decades. The list of countries that do not have regular elections is longer, but as of 2011 it’s a lot shorter than it used to be. In both respects this represents a radical change from earlier eras: we live in an era where ‘the people’ are almost universally seen as the right source of political mandate (rather than tradition, or divine right, or what have you), even by ‘managed democracies’ that are anything but democratic. So really I think the main issue of the day is the great tranche of ‘sham democracies’ and ‘illiberal democracies’ which have elections (of varying degrees of ‘freeness’ and ‘fairness’), but where government is run and society is organised to favour adherents of the ruling party and to persecute opponents, to the point that people are compelled to abandon the ‘losing side’.

Great post.

John, I think your account has to be a little more complex, as there’s surely been a double movement since 1990 – on the one hand, the hollowing out of the liberal democracies, and, on the other hand, movements towards more representative government in former communist/military run states or autocracies

In the U.S., for instance, since 1990 we have seen a president who lost the popular vote seated by a Supreme Court controlled by his party; we have seen the further explosion of a prison population, second now to China; we’ve seen torture countenanced; we’ve seen just recently, in the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, the government cooperate with a large corporation to suppress news on a scale that is Chernobyl-like. Meanwhile, archaic anti-democratic structures – for instance, the Senate – have become ever more powerful, to the point where the white people of five states – the Dakotas, Idaho, Montana and Kansas – can in effect destroy the hope of such popular measures as the public option, or the withdrawal of troops from the wars that the U.S. is waging in spite of the popular indifference, contempt and opposition. Similarly, in spite of the opposite of almost seventy percent of the U.S. population, both parties put TARP through because they decided the population needed it.

The UK’s hollowing out has been as spectacular. The right not to be surveilled in the UK has been utterly abandoned. The Party system – like that in the U.S. – has made a mockery of the elementary idea at the heart of representative democracy – that you know what your candidate or party represents. Obama’s stance with mandates and the public option, or the liberal democrats stance with regard to tuition fees (the pillar of their campaign) turned out to be not only empty, but was actively reversed.

Italy can be called a democracy only if we call, say, Marcos’ Phillipines a democracy. When the leader of the country has in his hands almost ninety percent of the domestic tv networks, as well as the most popular newspapers and magazines, the amount of power he exerts makes a mockery of liberal democracy.

I haven’t gone on about the other losses of civil liberties, for which see Glenn Greenwald.
I think that democracy as a tendency actually came to the developed nations in the 60s – that was when the U.S., for instance, started to change from an apartheid regime with some democratic features into a democracy. But by 1990, these tendencies had been exhausted. In particular, the idea that large private power – corporations – could be democratized by making them responsible not simply to their stockholders and upper management, but to their stakeholders and the society at large that absorbs the costs of their wastes, among other things, simply disappeared.

If democracy becomes universal, and if democracies don’t fight each other, then history, understood as “kings and battles” is indeed at an end.

The theory of democratic peace does not say that democracies don’t fight each other. The theory says that countries that have been democracies for a while (i.e. ‘mature’ democracies) don’t fight each other.

John Q: “Second, democracy ensures that everyone has a say. Not, of course, an equal say, but, for everyone outside the ruling elite, more of a say than they would get under any alternative system. ”

Having a say doesn’t mean that much if the power blocks pretend to listen, and then do what they wanted anyway. An example would be the USA in the last 30 years, where there has been a systematic immiseration of the working class, and a systematic degradation of much of the middle class. We’ve gone to a system where ‘normal’ is 3/4 or more of the workforce not sharing in productivity gains. We’ve gone to a system where ‘normal’ is the financial elites trashing the system, profiting from that, and using it as an excuse to cut government spending on others.

Jack: “The biggest dangers to popular democracy in established liberal democracies are well-mannered liberal elites. Its your economically rational Davos Men and politically correct SWPLs that hate the man in the street and never miss a chance to take him down a peg or two.”

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! is the most polite comment that that deserves.

Matt – for a more exhaustive analysis of the Democratic Peace hypothesis, see Spencer Weart’s Never at War.

You know, The South has only occasionally has had anything like a real democracy, even by white men only considerations.

I find the post silly, but hard to refute in a simple way. Technically speaking, I don’t believe in democracy, and my response to Winston Churchill is to shut his fuckin’ yap about the abusive language.

First, any discussions on democracies face huge no true scotsman issues, just like capitalists who pretend that this isn’t a mixed economy when it suits them, or latter day commies who think Stalin just did it wrong and Lenin/Trotsky would have done it better. We don’t have a direct democracy. We don’t even really have a republican system either. Yet, we talk as if we’re a democracy all the time, mostly to give out free good cop/feels to the public without actually empowering anyone.

Second, I wouldn’t want to live in a true democracy and neither would most people typing on this website. It’s pointless to give votes to everyone, even if they are not invested in the government, because do you know what? They spoil their votes. Not talking about Mickey Mouse. Talking about voting to send a message on whatever that bugs them in their interior world, like uppity wimmin. Well off elites use the votes of the commoners to garner the benefits of state tax collection. Mob violence would be used everywheres. Vote getters promise what they have to, like Clegg, and abuse the media.

In very short, widespread enfranchisement of simply the vote is only stable and non-nasty for countries with a great deal of wealth and plenty of safety valves, like a whole New World, or The West. Without those features, democratic systems just lend themselves to wars of conquests and looting a la Vikings. The only way I’d ever want to be in a democratic system is if *everyone* gets a real education (that is, people get taught real history, nobody can escape from learning real math and science, etc, etc) and that human rights are strictly understood, and looting of the weakest parties can’t happen. Oh yeah, the only minorities Senators protects are the patricians. I mean *real* defense of minorities.

We still have a ways to go in finding a truly working system of government.

Shah8 says: We still have a ways to go in finding a truly working system of government.
I personally like th idea of randomized direct democracy. Instead of a senate, there are (say) a 1000 randomly chosen citizens, who get to vote on each proposal as if on on referendum.

It adds direct input from ordinary citizens into the process, but the small size eliminates the need for intermediate mass media. Instead politicians have to pitch their plans directly to real people, who can ask questions back. And people can get the paid time and resources to make an opinion as good as they can manage.

It requires some faith in people. But I think/hope that if people know that their personal vote matters, and if they have time to learn about the issues, they will do on average a decent job.

Second, democracy ensures that everyone has a say. Not, of course, an equal say, but, for everyone outside the ruling elite, more of a say than they would get under any alternative system. Once that fact is generally recognised, mass mobilisation against the system becomes an impossibility.

Other counter examples to this might be the last few years in Thailand and, to a lesser extent, the Phillipines. Or are these places where the fact that people get more of a say in a democratic government has yet to be generally recognised?

Go back and reread burritoboy @26. He covers my concerns very well.

Venezuela?

“There is no reason to think that the rule of Putin, or of the Communist Party of China, will outlast the next economic downturn, or even slowdown, any more than Ben Ali or Mubarak.”

“This is a spurious argument by definition.”

These two go well together. Having decided that Fukuyama was right in his views regarding the triumph of democracy, you then find “there is no reason to think” an adequate answer to exceptions? Setting aside the impossibility of knowing that there “is no good reason to think” anything, your claim is no more than a dismissal of contrary evidence.

The argument against Fukuyama for some time has been the success of parternalistic societies like China and Singapore. Now, Egypt’s regime runs into trouble and it means an end for China’s? Hey, presto? Declaring victory for democracy from inside a democracy on the supposition democracy will sweep the Middle East because it’s probably going to be the model in Tunisia and Egypt if all goes well, while dismissing counter examples as sure not to last – there is a successful career in marketing investment advice just around the corner for you.

#37: Maybe he is thinking about executions?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment

Though the info on Wikipedia has the US at 5th for that metric so maybe not.
/The company surrounding the US on this issue is hardly complementary.

I think the post is a bit off in the bolded part of this section:

I’ll turn now to the last part of Fukuyama’s thesis that the “end of history” entails the triumph of liberal capitalism. Here, I think, Fukuyama is engaged in a bait and switch that is almost universal among American commentators. On the one hand, the triumph of capitalism is proved by the fact that capitalism, in forms ranging from Hong Kong-style free markets to Scandinavian social democracy is universal). On the other hand, since the US is assumed to be the archetype of capitalism, this proof is taken to show that US-style liberal capitalism must prevail. This is a spurious argument by definition.

While the first part is no doubt true, that “capitalism”, broadly defined as market economies with anywhere from little to significant amounts of redistribution, has triumphed, Fukuyama’s views on this are, best I can tell, that the “end of history” is actually going to be more in the European-style welfare state, as opposed to “US-style liberal capitalism.” A quick search for a quote from FF on this topic wasn’t fruitful, but I’m quite confident that, whatever his original views on what the “End of History” would look like, he now looks more favorably on the larger welfare states. As to the point about: “a bait and switch that is almost universal among American commentators.”, undoubtedly and unfortunately true in many instances, but I think this may be one of the few times amongst capitalist proponents that this *isn’t* true.

@42 Democracy is not stable, but kingship is not stable either, due to the lack of a reliable enough feedback loop. Nothing is stable. As Thomas Jefferson famously said: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

To the people who are saying that the Roman Republic is an “important counterexample,” are you actually saying that it is, in any meaningful form, a democracy? Because I don’t think that’s defensible. The Senate was restricted to a narrow oligarchy, the Popular Assembly never had any real power and well over 1/3 of the population were slaves.

Because the US borrowed a lot of Roman look-and-feel in its institutions and monuments, it seems like people here often overestimate the similarities. But there’s very little real social, political, or economic continuity.

I’d also point out that nearly 500 years passed between the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud and the ascension of Octavian/Augustus. We should all ‘fail’ so quickly…

Henri,

No, kingship isn’t stable. But you’ve just accepted Aristotle’s cyclic model of regimes which is opposed to the modern representative democratic republic, which is supposed to last eternally, or as near eternally as to make no difference.

the modern representative democratic republic, which is supposed to last eternally, or as near eternally as to make no difference

Who supposes that, and on what basis? Fukuyama, and pulling it out of his ass? No political institution in the history of our species has ever lasted eternally (not that we’d know if it had, I guess, but none of them have even lasted more than a few centuries) and the existing representative democracies are all younger than some *individual dynasties* of monarchy. It’s absurdly early to be declaring the end of history — get back to me after a millennium or so of democratic peace.

Two of the most frequent problems that seem to afflict even modern democracies:

* Some of the country’s population are second-class citizens, de jure or de facto (often on ethnic, cultural, or religious lines); note for example how, in one of the oldest and most established of the representative democracies, it was a very big deal for a mixed-race man to be elected President, and how much bigger a deal it would be for a non-Christian.

* A particular region of the country defines itself as different from the rest of the country and believes that rule by a government consisting mostly of outsiders is not legitimate with respect to them. Quebecois, Catalans, Tamils, Kurds, etc. Occasionally these groups actually do win independence — most of Ireland, for example — which just encourages the others.

Either or both can lead to internal violence, in which other states (democratic or otherwise) may or may not become involved.

The “the theory of democratic peace” is just plain silly. It rests on wishful thinking and historic ignorance. Probably the only reason why it has any credibility at all is World War II. Once we look past that singular event and examine all the wars of the past two hundred years or so, we find that democracies (at least those regimes that were most democratically advanced for their time, e. g. Britain and the Netherlands in the 18th century) acted as aggressors more often than not. Most of these wars were motivated by imperialism, and democracies have historically tended to be the most successful imperialist powers. Ok, strictly speaking, the argument is not that democracies tend to be less aggressive, only that they are less likely to fight other democracies. And of course there have simply been very few democracies until recently (and even fewer if you count only so-called mature democracies) so counter-examples are rare although they do exist (fn1). But if the evidence suggests that democracies are at least as aggressive as non-democracies, why should we believe that war would disappear if only everybody were a democracy? It’s a little bit counter-intuitive.

(fn1) Proponents of the theory mostly respond by defining counter-examples away using the no true scotsman defense.

chris 49: “A particular region of the country defines itself as different from the rest of the country”

Most obvious example is the American civil war. Why don’t we test the theory by just looking at the wars the US fought during the 19th century? The US fought against Britain (parliamentary regime), Canada (British colony), Mexico (republic), the Confederation (democratic), Spain (complicated), Indian tribes (many of which were democratically organized), popular guerillas in the Philippines (possibly democratic), did I forget something? Sure we can make all these examples fit the theory by using a convenient definition of “democracy” in which the only qualifying country would be the USA itself. How silly would that be.

A very interesting debate all round. However, in regards to the rule of Putin, or of the Communist Party of China, will outlast the next economic downturn, I fear that both Putin and the CCP are quite willing to shoot their way out of any protests. And the lesson of China in 1989 is surely that no protests can overthrow a regime that is willing enough to shoot to kill to hold onto power.

Burma/Myanmar would also seem to suggest that people power won’t work if the men with the guns will actually use them.

@ 20:

“we have seen the further explosion of a prison population, second now to China”

Nope, Roger, the U.S. incarceration rate is higher than China’s, both a % of population AND in absolute numbers!

http://www.naturalnews.com/021290.html

It’s called Google.

I think it’s a bit premature to calling the end to history when we don’t know if human civilization itself can survive AGW or about a dozen other similar threats that are going to make a mess of things in the next 100-1000 years. And it is our so-called democracies that have been most responsible for these threats.

The basic argument seems to be based on defining the right people as the Democracies, and then not actually looking very closely at how they work or what they do. In the USA, we actually have a kleptocratic imperial plutocracy with no one except Lucre itself in charge. The result looks like a cross between a feeding frenzy (as legislators struggle to make as many earmarks as needed to get re-election funds) and a race-to-the-bottom in standards for most people.

Meanwhile, actual dictators can be sensitive to what their subjects think, and may actually be able to deal with fundamental concerns in sustainable ways. The Japanese monarchy, for example, was very sensibly able to deal with deforestation.

If the period we live in is the triumph of Democracy, then it looks like this kind of “Democracy” is spectacularly unsustainable. It only remains to be seen how and with what it will be replaced.

But I would say, rather, that it is Capitalism that has triumphed so unsustainably. Democracy is more notable for its absense in our ways of actually doing things. What we have mastered is the doublespeak required to think of our institutions as Democratic.

Excellent discussion. The main threat to liberal democracy, however, appears today to be what Martin van Creveld has identified as the loss of legitimacy of the nation-state. In fact, nation-states everywhere in the world are fracturing, and various commentators have pointed to cities instead of nation-states as the major players in the 21st century.

The breakup of the world’s nation-states suggests that the national monopoly on violecne which accompanied the Treaty of Westphalia is drawing to a close. We now see fanatical groups and superempowered individuals increasingly capable of inflicting mass violence. This bodes ill for the liberal democracies insofar as it provokes nation-states to extreme overreactions such as America’s bizarre overreaction to 9/11.

The kind of ever-incraesingly intrusive quasitotalitarian measures taken in the name of “security” in America and Britain and elsewhere are rapidly eroding the legitimacy of the nation-state. At some point, citizens will have so little allegiance to TSA thugs who have them arrested for reciting the 4th amendment, and DHS goons who break down the doors of their house to confiscate their computers because they’re downloading mp3s, that the entire political credibility and institutional legitimacy of liberal democracies will come into question. At that point, it’s not clear what results.

Corporate capture of the nation-state’s government increasingly produces policies that benefit the corporate bottom line while throwing individual citizens out of work. This can’t continue indefinitely without destroying the legitimacy of the democracy that undergoes corporate capture.

Jack, looks like no one took your bet at #2, but I will do it happily and on the terms you offered: $100, at 1-to-2 odds, that the CCP will be in charge of the PRC on Feb 1 of 2021.*

This is not to say that I think the Chinese will rise up to demand political freedom. I think the Party will lose in the next 10 years because of their failure to manage economic issues, resulting in the people demanding a new system. Though the American revolution has often been portrayed as a demand for political freedom, that was a lucky side-effect — the uprising was predicated on economic issues, (Stamp Tax, Boston Tea Party, ‘no taxation without representation’ and whatnot), and after we revolted, we happened to have some brilliant political theorists and one skeptical leader to declined to be King.

I think that corruption, driving things like confiscation of land, or school-building collapses, and misallocated resources, as seen in China’s ‘ghost cities’** will be the twin drivers of the uprising. What these things have in common is that a) they affect middle-class Han, and b) they lie at the fault line of local political corruption and economic growth, so they are not as easy to hush up as purely political demands from outside the mainstream of Han society by, e.g., the Tibetans, Uighurs, or Falun Gong.

And while I’m taking the bet, I’ll make a provisional claim, in hopes that the CT audience will amend or refute it: no autocratic and industrialized state has lasted more than 70 years. There are long-lived autocracies, and long-lived industrialized states, but not both.

-clay

* The two obvious edge-cases are “What does it mean to be the CCP?” and “What does it mean to be in charge of China?” East Germany still has Communists, but now that is the name of a democratic party, and England still has a Queen, but she isn’t in charge, so we’ll need some method of making that judgment at the time, which I’ll let you define or propose.

** http://www.businessinsider.com/pictures-chinese-ghost-cities-2010-12?slop=1

it’s self-evident but we recoil from it as from filth: history doesn’t end. in a million years it will be 1002011.

piglet @53: I respectfully suggest you look at some of the lit. on the democratic peace. It’s certainly debatable on several grounds, yes, but neither silly nor especially counterintuitive. The restriction to ‘mature’ democracies is also debatable, but derives from work showing that states in periods of transition to democracy don’t tend to be esp. peaceful (as opposed to when the transition is finished and democracy somewhat consolidated). The Indonesia example mentioned by JQ above may tell against this. (I assume he left out the “not” as in the restriction “does not seem to be required”.)

@63:The breakup of the world’s nation-states suggests that the national monopoly on violence which accompanied the Treaty of Westphalia is drawing to a close.
Most nation-states are not breaking up, though some are. And it’s treaties (plural) of Westphalia and they didn’t do what most people think. (For starters go to Duck of Minerva and read D.Nexon’s post on this.)

Or how ’bout *you* getcherself a niiiiiice book on the Spring and Autumn period. Not about democracies, but about changes of civil relationship to leaders and legal framework. It’s a pretty good way (if quite sparse for a history) to see how the history of the area cycles as leaders need more public support to leaders needing less.

Look, there was a thread last year @Yglesias where much of this was hashed out. Mature Democracies? Bullshit. States in transition to democracies being not especially peaceful? Duh. Do you know why states engage in democratic bargaining with its citizens? Because they live in a time and place where the leadership *has* to engage in bargaining in order for said state to survive. I.e. not exactly peaceful times. States, furthermore, do not keep their promises when the pressure is off, and repression is ramped up again. This doesn’t happen in “mature” democracies because they had colonial possessions or a post-colonial framework with which to mooch off of.

Barry @ #24 said:

Jack: “The biggest dangers to popular democracy in established liberal democracies are well-mannered liberal elites. Its your economically rational Davos Men and politically correct SWPLs that hate the man in the street and never miss a chance to take him down a peg or two.”

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! is the most polite comment that that deserves.

You can dispense with any politesse. If you have got anything – facts, logic or a confirmed prediction – then put it up. Or shut up.
Point and snigger doesn’t cut it any more.

bb @ #71 said:

If you post something as idiotic as that quote, you get what you deserve. I’m not quite sure what you think you’re doing here, but as far as I’m concerned—and I doubt I’m alone—you’re basically an unusually pompous troll.

Dear bb,

Thankyou for that perfect example of flawless logic and impeccable command of the facts. It certainly represents an improvement on “BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

I remain your “pompously idiotic troll”,

Jack Strocchi

PS The “well-mannered liberal elites” who have been in the driving seat this past generation or so have given us the GFC, open contempt for working class men (“crackers, “red-necks”, “bogans”) and a spectacular collapse in popular political participation, with mass-based political parties replaced by apparatchiks for hire. If you think that this state of affairs is indicative of a healthy liberal democracy then I have a bridge you might be interested in buying.

Clay Shirky @ #65 said:

Jack, looks like no one took your bet at #2, but I will do it happily and on the terms you offered: $100, at 1-to-2 odds, that the CCP will be in charge of the PRC on Feb 1 of 2021…* This is not to say that I think the Chinese will rise up to demand political freedom. I think the Party will lose in the next 10 years because of their failure to manage economic issues, resulting in the people demanding a new system…The two obvious edge-cases are “What does it mean to be the CCP?” and “What does it mean to be in charge of China?” … so we’ll need some method of making that judgment at the time, which I’ll let you define or propose.

I am happy to take you up on this bet on what most people would acknowledge are generous odds.

My definition of CCP rule: it retains a monopoly of political power – a one-party polity. Of course the character of that rule is subject to change – the post-Deng communists are nothing if not pragmatic opportunists in policy.

FWIW I am confident of the outcome because I believe, on the basis of gut instinct and folklore, that in 1980 the post-Mao CCP put in place a fifty year plan for socio-political development. Which means that there is still another 20 years to run on the deliverables.

Basically the CCP’s plan seems to be a gigantic socio-political triage: get 2/3 of the ~ 1200 million (> 100 IQ) Han Chinese to a middle-class or better standard of living by 2030. After that all bets are off.

They have already gotten the top 1/3 up to that standard, the coastal Chinese more or less pulled themselves up by their boot-straps once Deng took the Maoist hobbles off.

The middle 1/3 will probably take only half as long, given ample government assistance – stuff like the recent hinterland stimulus. For an example of the PRC’s long-term thinking you can check out their Central region development plan.

The bottom 1/3 (< 100 IQ) may find it a bit hard to compete on the international stage. By 2030 the PRC will be ready for a bit of decadent welfare democracy.

Lets not forget that the CCP has pulled off some pretty impressive plans over the past 30 years. One-child policy, Enterprise zones, hydro-electric schemes.

No doubt there will be problems along the way. But the CCP took Tianamen Square and the GFC in its stride. They have shown remarkable ability to co-opt dissident forces – businessmen, religious people and off-shore Chinese. And of course the PLA remains a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CCP.

So yeah, I give the CCP at least until 2030.

Clay Shirky said:

And while I’m taking the bet, I’ll make a provisional claim, in hopes that the CT audience will amend or refute it: no autocratic and industrialized state has lasted more than 70 years. There are long-lived autocracies, and long-lived industrialized states, but not both.

We have only had large-scale industrialization for 200 years and large-scale democratization for the past 100 years. So there has not been enough time for a series of long-term politico-economic cycles to work themselves out to test that hypothesis. The PRC is the only major (industrialized dictatorship) exception to your rule, apart from the oil-rich Arab shiekdoms. Its been going for 60 years. So if it is still in the saddle in 2021 you shall have an answer to your question.

Democracy will come to the PRC, all in good time.

Thanks for setting me straight on incarceration rates, U.S. vs. China. But this merely strengthens my point.
As interesting is the somewhat ambiguous notion of “liberal democracy”, which I take to mean something more than majoritarianism – I take it that there are checks in place that prevent the autocratic use of majority power. The question is whether those checks in place actually benefit an economic and political elite – as per the Senate example – or an economic and political outcast. In other words, all minorities and all majorities aren’t alike – composition of same counts!

That said, I think the seamless policy transition from Bush to Obama that saved the financial community – the wealthiest – first, with a combination of TARP and the Fed’s outrageous lending policies between 2008 -2010, revealed by the audit of the Fed – indicate that democracy is in pretty poor shape in the U.S. Partly this is due to a problem that the political policymakers in the 1789 didn’t foresee – the problem of a two party state. The problem is that, given enough of an economic headstart, those with powerful economic positions can use their resources to, in effect, buy off both parties. Actually, this isn’t only a U.S. problem. In Mexico, the funders of the PRI moved pretty easily to funding the PAN. The expense of maintaining a political party is really not that great – and thus, what I call buying one – not only funding it, but making room for political operatives, as was recently the case when Orszag went from the White House to Citi, an event only noticeable for the fact that it was briefly noted – and setting up institutes of policy making – from Cato to Brookings to the George Mason U. economics department – to dominate the political discourse. What one might call position-defending is incredibly cheap, when all is said and done. Partly it is cheap because of the cost of political power is cheaper under a two party monopoly. In the U.S., there were really more than two parties disguised under the two parties up until the sixties – there were, for instance, conservative Southern democrats and liberal northern Republicans. But both parties have become more or less national structures, squeezing out the sub-parties within them (something the Republicans have been more successful at than the Dems).

This is, as I say, one factor – and the role of parties is different in different Western countries. But across the spectrum, the left parties have withered, or been taken over internally – viz UK’s Labour – to represent a much different constituency than used to be the case. In extreme cases, such as Ireland, the dominant party merged so entirely with the oligarchs that the nation exists, at the moment, primarily to pump money into the bondholders of various corrupt and defunct banks. This is a first, I think – I don’t think there is a name for this.

Where the strike marks came from, I don’t know.

The papacy is an example of a succesfull way to manage autocratic succession – but the Chinese system is essentially the same : the CCP is quite similar to the Catholic church as a semy corrupt, somehow meritocratic body, the leadership of which is elected by the top 100 guys every few years. Why should the CCP be that much more unstable that the papacy ? Currently it is delivering much more to its constituents !

Clay sharkey: “I think the rising tide of middle-class expectations (driven, ironically, by the CCP’s very success) will create a set of demands around well-run government that the CCP is unable to respond to, both because they will be unable to root out corruption fast enough or fully enough, and because the system they are asked to manage is becoming increasingly complex.”
This, of course, may be the key to the double aspect of history right now, as the de-democratization in the Western countries is associated with the falling assets and incomes of the middle class, and the progressive destruction of their expectations. This is generating a set of demands that the Western governments are responding to by facilitating the more rapid decline of the working and middle class – through such ventures as raising the age of retirement in an era in whcih young unemployment is the prevailing problem, etc. The defense of vested interests within the democratic framework has created the conditions for eroding the democratic framework, and will continue to do so.

“This, of course, may be the key to the double aspect of history right now, as the de-democratization in the Western countries is associated with the falling assets and incomes of the middle class, and the progressive destruction of their expectations. This is generating a set of demands that the Western governments are responding to by facilitating the more rapid decline of the working and middle class – through such ventures as raising the age of retirement in an era in whcih young unemployment is the prevailing problem, etc. The defense of vested interests within the democratic framework has created the conditions for eroding the democratic framework, and will continue to do so.”

I strongly agree with this. As an italian critical of Berlusconi, I would add that B. is not a “charismatic leader” who reached power thanks to his charisma (although he and most italians believe in this image); instead, he is the result of the changes in the italian political system that happened during the so called “tangentopoli” crisis.
In the tangentopoli crisis, most traditional italian parties were destroyed, the italian communist party survived but became a progressive party and new parties, such as B.’s “Forza Italia” gained power.
The old parties were mostly mass-parties: communists and to a lesser degree socialists based their power structure on unions, whereas cristian democrats were based on the church and the opposition of “middle class” to communism.
When Italy became a “postindustrial” country (roughly in the ’80es)the power of the unions crumbled. At that point the traditional parties lost their “rason d’etre” and thus legitimation.
New parties in Italy are no more mass-parties, they are more a sort of “fundraising structures”. As a consequence, a sort of root-less party like B.’s “Forza Italia” became possible thank to B.’s mediatic and economic power.
Thus, Quiggin’s opinion that “differently democratic” characters like Putin or Berlusconi are on the way out sounds wrong to me, in facts I believe this kind of figures are going to became the rule instead of the exception.

It’s also dubious how continuous the papacy has been. If a pope is as result of poliical or even military forces succeeded by an enemy, is that continuity? If the pope loses political power, does that count as a continuity? After all, most hopeful scenarios for Egypt imagine democratic elections for the role of president, making his succession nominally a continuity.

Discussions like this one remind me of those in the summer of 2003, or the summer of 1940 (for which, see Mazower’s work). Each time, what looked like the total triumph of a particular way of doing things rather quickly turned into a high-water mark, and those who made predictions, or took political positions, based on extending a line on a graph, ended up looking foolish later. Sometimes, in the 1940 case, they ended up imprisoned, banished, or dead.

And Mubarak appears to have got his Nashii on…

“This, of course, may be the key to the double aspect of history right now, as the de-democratization in the Western countries is associated with the falling assets and incomes of the middle class, and the progressive destruction of their expectations. This is generating a set of demands that the Western governments are responding to by facilitating the more rapid decline of the working and middle class – through such ventures as raising the age of retirement in an era in whcih young unemployment is the prevailing problem, etc. The defense of vested interests within the democratic framework has created the conditions for eroding the democratic framework, and will continue to do so.”

But there’s an even more important conclusion from that statement to be made. We tend to view this discussion in the light of “what is the best type of government”? But that’s not the only, and perhaps not the most important, question. We also have to ask about the durability of types of government.

Most people in our times will argue that the representative democracy is the best precisely for the reason of durability, as Quiggin did above. That is, the representative democracy is the best government because it is both the best simply but also the most durable. A problem results if the representative democracy is no more durable than other types of government, however.

The mechanism you describe above is precisely what Aristotle argues is the downfall of republics – the wealthy, over time, tend to undermine the republic because they dominate the offices too much, manipulate the policy in their direction, and treat the other economic classes poorly. That we see this as our current empirical reality means that (in general), Aristotle was the better political scientist than those of modernity who proposed an eternal representative democracy.

Roger @ 82: “This, of course, may be the key to the double aspect of history right now, as the de-democratization in the Western countries is associated with the falling assets and incomes of the middle class, and the progressive destruction of their expectations. This is generating a set of demands that the Western governments are responding to by facilitating the more rapid decline of the working and middle class –”

That’s my big point – the USA’s political system is remarkably unresponsive to anything against the elite’s short-term interests. Even after they were pulled out of their fall into the Abyss by by their collars, they’re quite happily continuing on.
In the short term, their goals are to neutralize Obama as much as possible, have him do the minimal clean-up, and take the blame, and then finally to put the GOP back into power. And they’ve done a phenominal job, considering how badly they just did.

LFC 67:

“The restriction to ‘mature’ democracies is also debatable, but derives from work showing that states in periods of transition to democracy don’t tend to be esp. peaceful (as opposed to when the transition is finished and democracy somewhat consolidated).”

So states in transition to democracy are not especially peaceful, as opposed to mature democracies? Would you consider the USA in its mature phase, or Britain in its mature phase, as especially peaceful?

ajay: Britain was transitional while at war and happened to be mature while relatively peaceful? That’s a nice example of the no true scotsman defense. Now when can we expect the US to reach maturity?

Does it say anything about democracies funding coups in other democracies in order to have authoritarian, but more market-friendly, regimes installed?

With regard to the updated post, it’s unfair to read Fukuyama’s book as a defense of “U.S.-style” industrial capitalism over the Swedish or Hong Kong (or other) variants. He really didn’t focus on those issues, and he endorsed a good bit of government regulation (e.g., he commented favorably on laws to prohibit dry cleaners from charging more for women’s shirts than men’s).

I’m not sure what Fukuyama’s theory of thymotic equality would say about the Hong Kong rule, that you can advertise different prices for girls of different ethnicities so long as the advertisements are in Chinese and not English.

@100:US hostility towards democratic leaders such as Mossadegh, Lumumba, Arbenz, Allende may have prevented or slowed their countries’ democratic maturation. Those conflicts were not open wars but ignoring them in a theory about international relations and democracy seems hard to justify.

I agree with this. I would add only that U.S. hostility in these cases was probably partly explainable by the Cold War mindset in which any left-leaning Mideast or Third World government was considered a potential ally of Moscow and hence a geopolitical threat or liability. The Nixon admin was eager to get rid of Allende, IIRC, not only because his gov’t was seen as unfriendly to U.S.-based multinational corporations but also for geopolitical/Cold War reasons. And since the coup against Allende was followed by the years of Pinochet’s dictatorship, it certainly set back democracy in Chile.

Democracy didn’t “self-destruct” in Palestine in 2006. The US and Israel destroyed it, because they didn’t like the outcome.

Freddy, Iranian democracy didn’t self-destruct. It developed in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and then it got the strange idea to demand a larger share in the profits of the the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, even though it clearly said “Anglo” in the name. Then there was a bit of democratic peace, and Iran was no longer a democracy.

But of course, that doesn’t count against the democratic peace theory, since Iran wasn’t a mature democracy at the time. A mature democracy would never engage in such aggression against other democracies.

In the aftermath, AIOC got renamed “British Petroleum”, so people wouldn’t make that mistake again.

novakant: I happen to remember Britain taking part in a bloody war of aggression quite recently.

Yes, but (read your nineteenth century history) during the transitional phase Britain was taking part in bloody wars of aggression pretty much all the time. The current level of violence and troop commitment in Afghanistan would barely have been regarded as rising to the level of a war by the Raj; it would have been regarded as “business as usual on the North-West Frontier”.

Britain was transitional while at war and happened to be mature while relatively peaceful? That’s a nice example of the no true scotsman defense.

No it isn’t. Look up the no true Scotsman defence to find out why.
I’m responding to your point “So states in transition to democracy are not especially peaceful, as opposed to mature democracies? Would you consider the USA in its mature phase, or Britain in its mature phase, as especially peaceful?” by saying “Well, yes, Britain in its mature phase is a lot more peaceful than it was during its transition phase”.

Now when can we expect the US to reach maturity?

Well, since the US is a much younger democracy than Britain (fully democratic elections only since 1965, rather than since 1928) it may take some time. But, again, if you compare US military activity since 1980 with most other 30-year periods in its history, it might be informative. Do you think the US has been more violent in 1980-2010 than in, say, 1950-1980? Or 1850-1880?

Barry: no, not really. I’m responding to the point “So states in transition to democracy are not especially peaceful, as opposed to mature democracies? Would you consider the USA in its mature phase, or Britain in its mature phase, as especially peaceful?” by saying “Well, yes, Britain in its mature phase is a lot more peaceful than it was during its transition phase”.

I didn’t invoke the mature/immature distinction. That was done by LFC at 69.

Quick summary:
piglet: democratic peace theory is silly, democracies are very aggressive.
LFC: well, the actual theory is that mature democracies aren’t aggressive; transitional ones tend to be aggressive.
piglet: whoa there! The US and Britain are surely mature democracies if anyone is, and they’re both pretty aggressive.
me: well, yes, but they’re both less aggressive than they used to be when they were transitional.

I don’t think you’re reading this thread very carefully.

mebbe it’s just that all the “mature” societies, democratic or not, got nukes and direct wars of aggression has now become too expensive.

Let’s say that the Bush doctrine really was a radical innovation–that is, it allowed war on preventative rather than just preemptive grounds. That would suggest that a ‘democracy’ which actually spit in the face of unprecedented democratic opposition (referring here to the protests against a war on Iraq) has become more aggressive in an important way.

Wealth is relative. Death is universal.

The end of the Cold war was pretty exciting, and you could see how someone like FF might have gotten a little carried away. Surely, though, no one takes ‘end of history’ seriously at all, right? I mean, what ended was the idea of the Leninist state as a model for anyone. It’s over.

The conversation has moved on quite a bit, but let me just toss in a cent or two about the Senate. We can all wish that US history had played out differently: that Roger Williams’ view of Native land title had prevailed, that slavery had never been introduced, that Americans of Japanese descent had not been jailed, etc. Fact is, there was no chance of a constitutional compact without something like the Senate. Not then, and not now.

And in defense of Montana, I’m willing to put Walsh, Wheeler, Mansfield, Metcalf, and even Baucus and Tester up against any set of long servers (a set I hope to see Tester join) from any other state — whether more racially diverse or not — anyone would care to choose. Sure we had Clark in our transitional period, and Burns in our decadent post-maturity, but on the whole, we’ve done well enough. There’s certainly no reason to think that having more voters, or more voters of color, would have improved our representation any.

ajay, what I and Barry are saying is that you arbitrarily defined Britain at its imperialist/aggressive height as “immature”, thus to be discarded from consideration. That’s a bit dishonest.

By your definition, it took Britain about 272 years to become a “mature democracy” (counting from the Glorious Revolution to 1960). At that pace, we’ll have to wait for a few more centuries to test the democratic peace theory. How can you claim with a straight face (?) that “There aren’t many examples of wars between two mature democracies *and there have probably been enough of them around for long enough now for this to be significant*”, when Britain only qualifies as mature post 1960? Do you know of any currently existing democratic/parliamentary regimes that go back further than Britain? The only one I know of is Iceland.

Now in 111 you seem to suggest that a mature democracy is one with “fully democratic elections” and then perhaps 30 years of maturity. That definition of course discards all but the last 50 or so years of history from consideration. Maybe that restriction is justifiable but it would be too short a time span to validate a grand theory. The post war period was unusual in that the established powers refrained from fighting each other and many of the established democracies were allied with each other. Whether this is a trend towards peaceful maturity or just a historic anomaly due to the dynamics of decolonization and the cold war, we cannot know.

@Charley: If you think the US Senate isn’t actually harmful, you either haven’t been paying attention, or are very conservative.

Of course, if you *are* very conservative, then the Senate has been quite *helpful* — at obstructing the wishes of a majority of your fellow Americans who happen to disagree with you about a number of issues. I hope that, in that case, you can see why that same majority regards that as a problem, not a solution.

And what do you know, they have it. In the other chamber. Which is designed to serve that exact purpose.

Actually, thanks to the Reapportionment Act of 1929, they don’t necessarily have it in the other chamber. Wyoming, Montana, etc, are guaranteed at least one representative, no matter how large the population of a congressional district grows elsewhere to conform to the arbitrary cap of 435 House members. New York State, for example, is not losing a seat because it lost population, but because its population didn’t grow sufficiently quickly.

what I and Barry are saying is that you arbitrarily defined Britain at its imperialist/aggressive height as “immature”, thus to be discarded from consideration. That’s a bit dishonest.

I don’t think of it as arbitrary or dishonest. Was Britain in 1850 a mature democracy? No, obviously not. Was it on the way to becoming one? Yes, again obviously. Therefore, “transitional democracy”.
Britain took an unusually long time in transition; other countries have made the transition a lot faster. (Spain, for example; Franco to full democratic elections in a handful of years.)

Now in 111 you seem to suggest that a mature democracy is one with “fully democratic elections” and then perhaps 30 years of maturity. That definition of course discards all but the last 50 or so years of history from consideration. Maybe that restriction is justifiable but it would be too short a time span to validate a grand theory.

Why?

The post war period was unusual in that the established powers refrained from fighting each other and many of the established democracies were allied with each other.

Yes. Yes, it was unusual, wasn’t it? All these established democracies, not fighting each other? (meaningful look)

chris, Fukuyama’s book was from 1990 or so.

Maybe that restriction is justifiable but it would be too short a time span to validate a grand theory.

ajay: Why?

Perhaps because 50 years are just a tiny fraction of thousands of years of human civilization? On Britain, you are missing the point again. You can put the bar high and say that no 19th century democracy counts as fully mature but that removes some of the most interesting data points. 19th century Britain was clearly more democratic than its rivals. Proponents of democratic peace theory need to explain why democracies in so many instances just happened to be the most aggressive players around. To dismiss those examples as not mature enough is what I call dishonest.