Notes Toward a Unified Theory of Abundance, Part II

In Part One of this series, I offered up a couple definitions of modernity/modernism. One of modernity’s defining features, I argued, was staggering growth in humanity’s productive capacity: our ability to feed, clothe, transport, amuse, educate, torture, and murder each other.

As you can tell from the above list, modernity has been something of a mixed bag. Its productive and destructive capacity go hand in hand, leading to something of a dilemma for the whole human species. The main modernist ideologies all grapple with that dilemma in one way or another. There are three in particular that defined international ideological competition through the twentieth century: liberal democracy, Communism, and fascism.

First off, we need to talk a little bit about what makes them modernist ideologies. One reason is genealogical: Communism, fascism, and modern liberal democracy all share a common ancestor in the French Revolution.1 Even our modern conception of a political left and right are of French extraction: the Jacobins sat on the left wing of the National Convention and the Girondins sat on the right wing.

The other reason is that liberal democracy, Communism, and fascism all use the tools of modernity to answer its central political questions: Where are the radical transformations of the past few centuries taking us? What do we do with our expanded power over life and death? What is the appropriate relationship between society and the state, given the tools each now have at their disposal?

It would take too long for me to do even a cursory survey of how all three ideologies answer these questions, so I’ll limit the remainder of this post to a brief discussion of liberal democracy and what distinguishes it from its main ideological competitors.2

Do you know what that means? That’s right, motherfuckers. It’s Fukuyama Time.

In The End of History, Fukuyama described liberal democracy as the teleological end of human development.3 But it was only 30 years later that he provided a robust description of what development looks like in practice. In The Origins of Political Order, he identified three interdependent preconditions for “getting to Denmark,” as he called it: a strong state, the rule of law, and democratic accountability. These preconditions are all institutions, in the sense of the word that Fukuyama borrows from Samuel Huntington: they are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior.”

A healthy liberal democracy is a delicate equilibrium in which each of those institutions acts as a check on the others. The rule of law and democratic accountability limit the power of the state, but the state remains a muscular institution in its own right. Democratic accountability and state power can change the law as circumstances require, but the rule of law nonetheless sets the terms under which the state and democratic polities operate. And while democratic legitimacy underpins the entire system, democratic majorities operate under certain institutional constraints, such as the inability to infringe on minority rights.4

Achieving this balance is a difficult, highly contingent process. Different institutions can emerge at different times: at any moment, a given society might have strong norms around the rule of a law but a weak state, or a powerful state but no real system of democratic accountability. Despite what many of his critics believe, Fukuyama does not think there is anything inevitable or permanent about the development of a political order that appropriately balances these three institutions.

With a working definition of liberal democracy fixed in our minds, let’s go back to the central political questions of modernity and consider how liberal democracy answers them.

Where are the radical transformations of the past few centuries taking us?

Liberal democracy’s ambitions are not quite as lofty as those of Communism or fascism. Mussolini envisioned a total unity between the state and the people: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” Marx predicted a state dominated by the proletariat class, to be followed by a post-state, post-historical Communist society. In both scenarios, politics — at least as we understand it — eventually disappears.

Not so for liberal democracy, which posits the essential ineradicability of politics in human affairs. We may eventually drive ourselves to extinction or spread liberal democracy across the globe; or we might just continue to muddle through history indefinitely. But as long as there is more than one human being alive on this planet, there will be political conflicts. That means we will need political institutions — and productive tension between different political institutions — to peacefully resolve those conflicts.

What do we do with our expanded power over life and death? What is the appropriate relationship between society and the state, given the tools each now have at their disposal?

When we speak of a well-functioning or healthy liberal democracy, we’re usually referring to a political system that has democratic legitimacy, protects individual autonomy, and does a good job of making sure just about everyone has access to the resources they need to live a reasonably comfortable, healthy, dignified life. That’s why Fukuyama writes about “getting to Denmark”: Denmark is an affluent democracy that has low inequality, low poverty, high levels of self-reported personal fulfillment, and (in general) rules that safeguard personal and political liberty.5

Under this framework, modernity is both a motor for liberal democracy and a potential danger. Its manifestations can be harnessed to improve citizen wellbeing — for example, through broadly shared wealth creation or innovations in health care technology. But it can also cause tremendous harm (e.g. through anthropogenic climate change) and erode liberal democracy itself (e.g. through the development of communications monopolies that foster extremist political movements).

Of course, liberal democracies have themselves been the authors of some of modernity’s worst depredations: Mass killings, mass imprisonment, environmental despoliation, the destruction of entire communities, and the systematic oppression of entire peoples. As the late philosopher Charles Mills persuasively argued, many of these crimes were not sins against liberalism: they were compatible with a liberalism that recognized only some people as legitimate political subjects. But Mills also argued — equally persuasively, in my view — that people who accept his critique should try to improve liberalism from within, not discard it.

If Mills had a point when he wrote “Occupy Liberalism!” in 2012, he has even more of a point now that existing liberal democracy — flawed as it may be — risks getting replaced with something much worse. I’ll tackle the threats to liberal democracy in my next post in this series.