Beyond Democracy

Prophets like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood that the 20th century was the substance of which prophecy is made.  Its history is a poetic saga, the poetry written in God’s own fierce verse.  The first decade of the 21st century was inclined to look back at its immediate centennial predecessor with a degree of self-satisfaction amounting to smugness.  Beginning with the Great War almost 100 years ago and continuing through the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalinism, the Third Reich, and World War II, the human race confronted the terrible inhumanity of man against man, faced it down, and from the experience learned the ultimate lesson mankind needed to learn: Never again!  We have suffered too much, and through suffering grown too aware, to repeat the past.  The 20th century was the century of mass murder, of criminality run rampant.  The 21st century will witness the ideal of global democracy fulfilled and the Rights of Man institutionalized.  How can the past be repeated since, heeding Santayana’s warning, we have learned from it and mended our ways?  In this context, the suggestion that Stalinism and Nazism represent the first crude attempts at the realization of a living tyrannical ideal that has haunted the minds and the imaginations of men since the Middle Ages and that continues to seek embodiment through softer and subtler means might seem gratuitously shocking, the ultimate Schadenfreude.

Accepted wisdom in the American Century was that the “end of ideology,” in Daniel Bell’s formulation, had been reached, ideology being understood as the ultimate source of irrationality, intolerance, inhumanity, and violence (second only to religion, of course).  A decade or so later, ideology experienced a violent revival in the rise of the New Left, which denounced the old tyrannies of right and left while seeking to impose a new, enlightened tyranny of its own.  New Leftism had its day, which had not yet quite departed when it was superseded by yet another ism—multiculturalism, an ideology (as Kenneth Minogue correctly characterized it) expressly developed, in part, from the theories of the Frankfurt School in the 1930’s to destroy the civilization of the West by ostensibly peaceful means where violent revolutionary ones had unfortunately failed and to replace it with a totalitarian society that precludes so much as the possibility of its citizens thinking politically incorrect thoughts.

James Kalb’s The Tyranny of Liberalism and Minogue’s The Servile Mind examine the workings of what Minogue calls “politico-moral” thinking and consider its implications for the supposedly democratic societies of the West that already have been dangerously—perhaps fatally—compromised by it.  Minogue argues that “democracy,” a word that has been applied to innumerable types of societies and forms of government, must be understood as “a transforming ideal of social life,” a telos whose end is the subversion and destruction of democracy itself by the politico-moral movement that is at once a social class, an intellectual sect, and a pseudoreligious awakening characterized by intellectual dishonesty, sentimentalist abstraction, and power-seeking.  Minogue rightly describes the onslaught of politico-moralism in the West as the equivalent of civil war, and indeed one can argue plausibly that the American Civil War of 1861-65 was produced by a primitive form of the politico-moral mind, which has continued to develop and assert itself ever since.  Politico-moralism has had many effects, not the least of which is the relentless proletarianization of Western publics by its insistence on radical equality, uniformity, moral equivalence, and the lowest common denominator in every aspect of life, including dress, but especially by its determination that citizens should not think for themselves but rather in imitation of the “role models” created for them by their governments, and according to the servile manner appropriate to slaves rather than the independent and deliberative one necessary to morally responsible citizens.  As a result, the countries of the West have devolved into a proletarian paradise, which goes far to explain why the proletariat the world over dream of coming here—and do, by the multimillions.

Of course, in order to transform society, the politico-moralist class needs to manage it, which it does by means of increasingly “democratic” government and the bureaucracy.  Its determination to assume full control has two causes.  The first is the modern inclination, or temptation, to locate power at higher and higher levels, on the faulty assumption that higher equals more efficient and more disinterested.  The second is the fact that modern societies, characterized by progressive industrialization, technological advance, and apparently limitless population increase, do, indeed, create for themselves a greater and greater social complexity that inevitably spawns more and larger problems, such as human congestion, environmental pollution, and social dysfunction, which seem to cry out for governmental and bureaucratic solutions.  That most of these “problems,” having no possible or practical solution, are not problems at all but simply unpleasant conditions does not deter the managerial search for real but impossible solutions, and the application of false ones that are all too possible.  In either case, the certainty that solutions must exist, and need to be imposed, both expands the scope of government and strengthens its authority.  Ultimately, there are no solutions to the contradictions of liberal-capitalist industrialism and the modern megastate that administers it, but that fact is unacceptable to modern societies; and so governments, in their search to solve and control everything, metastasize to the point where, having assumed direction for so much of society, they become indistinguishable from it, the boundaries between civilian and government enterprise having ceased to exist.

Taken together, the combination of the ideological democratic telos as it is understood by politico-moralist governments in the West quite obviously makes “real” democracy—that is, the constitutionalist state married to individualist society—impossible, and thus dooms it historically.  Strangely, the rapidly modernizing Russia that succeeded the most vicious totalitarian state in history is easily the least ideological of the great powers today, a country that rests entirely on raw power in the form of authority, money, corruption, and overt criminality, and that has no use for idealism in any form.  The United States and the nations of Europe, by comparison, have evolved into utopian perfectionist societies dominated by an ideology of activism in service to an ethical (as distinguished from a moral) notion of universal benevolence.  Thus Russia is a “conservative” society, while the United States and the United Kingdom, say, are “radical” ones, according to Minogue’s identification of radicalism with sentimentality and conservatism with realism (a more accurate and useful dichotomy, he thinks, than the now meaningless one of left versus right).

In the 1970’s the notion of “convergence” between the Soviet Union and the United States was much in vogue.  Inevitably, it was said, the first was becoming more free, more capitalistic, even as the second became less individualistic and more socialistic.  Very obviously, that was a false prophecy.  Forty years later, the United States is indeed converging—but upon the People’s Republic of China, not the defunct ideal of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Nor is she alone in her drift toward the new Chinese model.  Instead, the corporate-capitalist state is becoming the ideal of the West and, increasingly, the rest of the world as well.  After all, China appears, to the corporate political mind, to work—unlike the United States.  The financial crisis of the past three years demonstrated that, and Western “leaders” have learned to envy the command economy, just as they increasingly envy the command society.  President Obama’s response to the Great Recession was to nationalize General Motors and Chrysler, and to threaten to do the same with those financial institutions Washington deemed “too big to fail.”  Today, the European Union—essentially a fascist arrangement, as Sir Oswald Mosley understood—through its subsidiary organizations is effectively turning the citizens of Ireland and Greece into so many individual corporate state debtors, and threatening to do the same with the inhabitants of Portugal and Spain.  It is true that the communist government of China has been spectacularly unsuccessful with its demographic and environmental megapolicies, but Obama is undeterred by these failures.  He can do better, he thinks, through cap-and-trade legislation, anti-emission fines, bullet trains, green cars, and so forth, all of these things mandated by the federal government.  Finally, as Bertrand de Jouvenel showed, it is the nature of power endlessly to accrue more power to itself, through blind instinct, until it is undermined and destroyed by some growing power within.  And there is no sign of that happening anywhere in the West today.  The state, Nietzsche’s coldest of cold monsters, remains, so far as anyone can tell, in its expansive phase.

Francis Fukuyama had it wrong 20 years ago.

He was careful to say, of course, that he did not intend to assert that liberal democracy would triumph everywhere in fact, but simply that it could not be surpassed as an ideal in the minds of any people, anywhere in the world.  Yet that condition is of no great help to his thesis.  We in the West tend to forget that a consuming interest in politics and in political activity has not always been—even in the West—a characteristic of social existence.  And so there is no assurance that Americans—and Canadians, and Britishers, and Frenchmen, etc.—will persist in their passion for politics of any sort, especially when they come to discover that there is really nothing democratic about the way their leaders are chosen and their countries governed.  What is more, it is not just the governors who admire a system that “works”—produces, that is, the desired material results.  The governed also can be persuaded to support a system, or regime, that can command the production of cheap and plentiful consumer goods, free healthcare for all, and on-time trains.  And they are the more easily persuaded to do so when they have been reduced to a condition of mental servility in which they no longer think and act for themselves.

Just now, political observers and commentators have their eye on the Chinese, waiting to see if, inspired by the events of the Arab Spring, they will have their own Jasmine Revolution.  The odds are certainly against it.  If it really is to happen, though, it would be nice if the revolution arrived soon enough to serve as a lesson to the rest of us not to take the present China as a model for our own future.  (Not that slaves or simple proletarians have ever been noted for their powers of observation and for drawing appropriate conclusions.)