Notes Toward a Unified Theory of Abundance, Part III

In Part I one of this series, we tried to define modernity. Part II considered three modernist political systems — Communism, fascism, and liberal democracy — and drew on the work of Francis Fukuyama to provide a working definition of liberal democracy. With those definitions of modernity and liberal democracy fixed in our mind, we’re finally ready to get into the meat of our theory.

Back in Part I, I suggested that the Soviet Union’s collapse heralded the start of a new phase in modernity. With Communism and fascism defeated, liberal democracy emerged as the last modernity standing: “the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe,” as Fukuyama wrote in The End of History. But “history” as political struggle did not end, even in advanced liberal democracies. This is consistent with Fukuyama’s theory, just as it is consistent with the basic premises of liberal democracy itself: As I wrote in Part II of this series, part of what distinguishes liberal democracy from Communism and fascism is its assumption that politics are a permanent feature of human affairs.

By “politics” and “political struggle” I mean something more than genteel horse trading and technocratic tinkering. The major political struggles of the past 30 years — and especially the past 10 or 20 years — have threatened the very survival of liberal democracy in what once seemed to be the most stable liberal democratic regimes. Victory over Communism and fascism has been followed by dysfunction and sclerosis. Probably that dysfunction and sclerosis were always there in some form, but the combination of post-war economic growth and anti-Communist fervor helped to mask them. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been little to stop liberal democracies from eating themselves.

In the absence of serious ideological competitors, liberal democracy faces two major internal threats. The first is what Fukuyama, in his political order series, calls political decay. From Political Order and Political Decay:

So political decay is most often the result of either institutional stagnation or what Fukuyama elsewhere calls repatrimonialization. Somewhat presciently — The Origins of Political Order was published in 2014 — Fukuyama warned that the United States faces a potentially severe crisis of political decay. There were plenty of signs of such decay at the time of the book’s publication1, but most pundits and officials treated the danger to liberal democracy as if it was still fairly remote. The 2016 election dramatized the crisis of political decay: a broken electoral system facilitated Donald Trump’s rise to power and he immediately began raiding the public treasury to benefit his own family — a flagrant exercise in repatrimonialization.

If political decay is the main institutional threat to liberal democracy, the main ideological threat is what I’ll call anti-modern modernism.2 This is an umbrella category that describes something as old as modernity itself and includes movements of both the left and right: left-Malthusians and Trumpists, techno-optimists and techno-pessimists, effective accelerationists and post-rationalists, and so on. What all of these movements is a qualified embrace of modernity: they’ve adapted themselves to modern communications tools and forms of political organization, even as they’ve rejected some or all of the modernist liberal democratic project.

Why does illiberalism mean anti-modernism? Because, as previously noted, liberal democracy is the last modernism standing. Many of these movements offer, as their alternative to liberalism, straightforward attempts to reanimate bankrupted 19th or 20th century ideologies. Others promise something new that turns out to be the aforementioned bankrupt ideologies with a new coat of paint on them. While they many of them may be threats to liberalism, none of them are successors to liberalism.

And yet they are all, in their way, modernist movements. It may sound like a cheap gotcha to observe that both tankies and neoreactionaries are very active on social media — that they use the very tools of the liberal modernist world they claim to reject. But their use of these tools is not anything so trivial as an act of hypocrisy; the tools use them as well. In fact, anti-modernist modernism is best seen as an organic creation of modern social and political organization. MAGA obsessives may pledge allegiance to an idealized version of 1950s America, but their movement was born out of cable television and shitposting.

There is no escape from modernity. As John Ganz recently wrote of René Girard, “he sees that the people who try to reverse the course of modernity are just the ones most captured by it.” Still, the rise of various anti-modernist modernist political tendencies needs to be taken seriously, both as a threat to liberal democracy and as a symptom of some deeper sickness.

Political decay and the spread of illiberal ideologies feed off one another. Because of political decay, illiberal movements can more plausibly claim that liberal democracy is not really capable of addressing the problems of modernity. But illiberal movements have also made political decay worse by seizing control of liberal institutions and preventing them from adapting to new circumstances. In many cases, they have deliberately broken institutions that might otherwise have functioned reasonably well.

There is a way out, though. In the fourth and final post in this series, I’ll finally bring things back to abundance liberalism.