Unless democracies defend themselves, the forces of autocracy will destroy them
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
They are correct by pointing out our continuous excuse loop to autocratic regimes, however the article doesn't show much new ideals.
Instead it pushes quite old ideals/strategies from as far back as the cold War to the neopolitics of the 2000s.
I think we need a new framework of democracy if we are serious about it, that are aware of and take into consideration global trade and future mishaps and not just do lip service like "never again".
The source of wealth is labor. The people who make stuff will have an advantage because they will have leverage and position due to chronic interdependency. This is nothing new or even complex at it's core.
The tangled mess is complex.
And there is a big difference between using money to make more directly and using money to make more via labor of some kind.
Everyone, to some degree, is accountable to others they need stuff from. This can be mitigated somewhat by mutual dependency, and military prowess, among other things.
But there are limits. Should bets be called?
Mostly, it ends up being quite painful to a lot of people who do not deserve it. One could say democracy carries a burden here, but that can be countered, depending on corruption, money in politics too.
Was church and state causing grief in the past. Still is in parts of the world.
Today it is banks, markets, big industry, very wealthy people causing it now.
To be really clear, I am not intending to cast judgement, blame or the like.
And yes, I oversimplified.
I just want to point out ordinary people just do not have much agency in all of this. Their general preferences would be to labor to make their homeland strong, prosperous and see their government, and in the US the idea was self governance in the form of peaceful democracy being more just and true in return for some degree of personal freedom lost so that which remains may be vibrant and empowering relative freedom, --see their government perform reasonably in return.
All that was decided to be better than the old world ways: divine right, bigger army, more gold, nobility... to form a reputable ruling class.
Everything costs something.
And the people expect to prosper for their labor and will live with decisions made by leaders they elected, again this idea checked by corruption, poor representation.
And I am speaking generally here.
Globalization was pitched to people and the promise of prosperity has not been fulfilled in the eyes of many, in some places, majorities.
Naysayers get marginalized, ignored and the outcome today is here for all to see.
People will weigh all that and I expect they see promises fall well short of the mark more than not.
Where do we go from here?
How does this unwind to a better state?
Can it even?
“Making” order from disorder is also making stuff. A predictable society with overall working courts and trustable populations is a resource in and of itself. Hence the value of the USD, Euro, etc and foreign oligarchs parking their wealth and spending time living in developed countries.
So if you're an American worker you'd maybe want to get tough on Chinese workers rights, while if you own Disney you probably care more about them respecting your IP.
I'd say its lack of democracy in western states that lead to the tolerance of lack of democracy elsewhere. A democratic workforce isn't going to vote to send their own jobs overseas, even if the other workers are basically slaves and so 'cheaper'.
They do much more than mingle, and more than scratch each other's backs. And yes we have learned this, quite a long time ago. The problem is the relationship is very profitable, and thus is a self-rewarding behavior.
Yes, and the way we have to take it into account includes
* Recognizing that the grand and noble experiment has been done. We tested the great idea that trade and engagement with autocracies would lead to freedom and democracy for their subjects. that experiment as been a resounding FAILURE. We proved the opposite - trade and exchange with autocracies leads only to stronger autocracies.
* Trade with China was a strategic blunder of historic proportions. While the West thought we were exploiting their cheap labor, CCP was exploiting our myopic focus on quarterly profits and gaining strategic technology, chokeholds on strategic supply chains, and the ability to insert corrupted tech into our supply chain. While Europe thought they were exploiting plentiful Russian NatGas to boost their economy, Russia was exploiting our myopia to gain a coercive hold on democratic governments — and so this minute, the necessary purchase of gas to heat German homes directly pays for the bombs and bullets used to kill Ukrainian civilians and children.
* The arc of history has now been largely stripped of the 19th-20th century ideologies; these merely obscured the fact that the real battle is autocrats and people who want to live in self-determining liberal democracies. Now, it is clearly and deeply true that you are either helping liberal democracies, or helping autocracy.
This is now really World War III, only hot in a few spots, but the question is whether democracy can survive, or we will all live under one or another autocracy.
The only choice is to as rapidly as possible disengage and cut off all autocracies from all economic engagement. Yes, this will really suck for the subjects of those autocracies. Their only hope of democracy will be to escape or overthrow their govt, and for prosperity, well,the history of autocracies for long-term prosperity is not good.
If we fail to rapidly cut these ties that empower autocracies, we will all soon be subjects of autocracy.
Better to die standing and fighting for freedom than to live on your knees.
The article's sentence "Trading with autocrats promotes autocracy, not democracy." heads a relevant discussion.
I was once shocked to learn how cozy was the relationship between the US and Nazi Germany before WW2. It ran deep. True 'Autocracy' ... 'Government by a single person having unlimited power' seldom exists without the willing support of other powerful people. From there is fairly substancial evidence that some US powers helped to enable the Nazis... materially and philosophically.
That support suggests that our popular 'democracy' had already been under siege, from some powers within, for a long time. An ideal needing faith to be fully born, our well-devised 'framework of democracy' had always been and continues to be compromised by special interests. Today, all the surveillance is certainly evidence.
Suddenly globalizazion is less important, almost a crutch, because it doesn't serve well the imperialist cause anymore.
What is the utility of globalization in the eyes of the imperialist, when they can't exploit economically third world countries, or blackmail them into submission?
From liberalism to imperialist nationalism, the process is quick, because the imperialism has always been there.
How sad that internationalism has fluorished in our society only a a tool of oppression, to be quickly replaced by nationalism, once it served its imperialist purpose.
I also think you’re using the word “liberalism” pretty loosely here. There’s the group of people that conservatives call “liberals” which is sort of anything left of conservative politics, and then there is the actual political ideology, and as far as I can tell you’re talking about the former.
Or maybe you’re not American and thus “liberal” means something entirely different to you, I really can’t tell.
I don't understand how we can still talk with a straight face about foreign interventions after messing up such a long list of countries in North Africa and Middle East.
If it looks hypocritical from the outside, so be it. At least, when somebody says "but what about WMDs in Iraq", you can tell them that you were against that war as well and you protested - if you did.
I was 15 in 2003 so I didn't really have an opinion at the time. Maybe I would have bought the bad cases belli if I were an adult, who knows. I belive there were genuine post-cold war optimism "fixing" all these dictatorships at the time.
Similar to mr.putin at the moment is triggering the next wave, by preventing ukraine from producing for the world.
I dont hear you complaining about this matches lighting at the powder keg, so i just assume you do not have the welfare of the people in that region at heart, at all.
And the western interventions did in the end not change a thing. The middle east, is the same as before the interventions, still a stagnant, backwards region, not prepared at all for climate change and what it will bring. All the bright minds leave early and permanent. The despots, that either nature or western power disposes, are replaced with new despots, that align to whoever offers the most, selling the region to the highest bidder.
If anything, western influence is greatly overrated. Iraq was going to dissolve itself anyway after the death of saddam from old age. It was a horrific construct drawn by the british onto the maps and how those lines hold up, can be seen africa.
The only promising democractic candidates in the region, turkey, tunesia and iran are sliding backwards and israel will sooner or later succumb to political barbarism too, cause the cultural enthusiasm of the neighbours for butchering and discriminating one another is catchy.
Some places stuck in the loop, the question of who bombs who at the moment and why is rather irrelevant. Important is that the butchering happens every 2nd generation, to make place for the great genetic lottery that god wills and that god is that we self-optimized for this loop. Super depressing that humanity not given a constant surplus by the environment or science, devolves back into tribal warfare.
The use of 'defend' in the title, and the weird bit about how stationing troops in new NATO countries was the important bit we didn't do, worry me.
But yeah, decentralize power supply, spread global democracy, stop actively supporting fascists and oligarchs at home or abroad. All sensible things we should have been doing since the end of the second world war but it was more profitable for well connected people to align with dictators around the world, from South Africa to South Korea to South America and the American South.
Well done to all those, like George Soros, who actually championed Democracy as a real thing and don't just use that as a slogan to start wars for oil with dictators we couldn't control as much as we used to.
„Trading with autocrats promotes autocracy, not democracy.“
Globalization which doesn‘t take that into account will endanger our free society. Global Trade must only happen between free democratic countries.
(I'm aware of how western imperialists fight progress in the shadows via subversion, abuse of secret service powers, coups and disruption of opposition groups.)
There are definitely better concepts than current democracies on paper but most haven't been tested in production/reality at nation state scale but without some sort of democracy in place, state power will reside with only the elite oligarchy, noble families and strong leaders that will do anything to protect their power and wealth.
You don't stop writing tests and fixing bugs for your application even if you're aware that perfection is impossible to reach (give up on democracy because of its inherent flaws) because letting the rot fester will lead to collapse.
For the free world to be truly free we need total energy and resource independence. We have unlimited resources laying around our planet yet we depend on autocracies or outright dictatorships. If i had the money or the know how i would dedicate my life and career to this cause. People don't realise but many conflicts arise from scarcity of resources (and of course human nature, but what makes us war witch each other usually has a resource motive behind it). Manufacturing and automation are also crucial. We can tax robots by taxing high profit margins and boost progress to a level not known before. Otherwise we’ll be stuck with a repeat of -isms and a gradual degradation of freedoms.
Because they offer the same resources we already have but cheaper.
> many conflicts arise from scarcity of resources
Might as well say profits.
The conflict is, and has always been, one of competing interests and geopolitical power-struggle among countries. If China becomes a democracy overnight none of the sticking points will disappear, for instance, because none of them are caused by the difference in political regimes between China and the West.
The US and some of western Europe was involved at various levels with Chechnya, Georgia and the Ukraine. You can watch video of John McCain with pre-9/11 Chechnyan jihadists, or Victoria Nuland handing out cookies in Maidan Square in Kiev to the people forcibly overthrowing the Ukraine's elected government.
Insofar as democracy and autocracy, you can also watch videos of Clinton and other Americans celebrating Yeltsin's shelling of the Duma, as Russia's elected representatives were heeding the wishes of Russian citizens to not be in a mad rush to sell enterprises to western companies and dismantle the social welfare system. The US put all its energy behind forming a strong Russian presidency including armed attacks on Russia's parliament by the presidency, and the presidency got molded the way the US advocated. Now the Applebaum turns around and whines the Russia presidency and Russia is autocratic.
We could perhaps get smarter with the whole process. The carrot approach - we'll give you trade access if you get democratic seems to work better than the bombing approach in practice.
No autocracy is coming for our democracy. Usually it's the "democracies" like ours that go on the other side of the world to impose democracy (the irony) on people who never asked for it.
Even Russia has shown no intention of imposing an autocracy in Ukraine.
The major threat to our democracies are capitalism and the slow acceptance of fascism as a political force, rather than a scourge to eradicate.
Remember, capitalism doesn't need democracy to function. Fascism has always coexisted with capitalism.
Putin runs an established autocracy in Russia (in this case, basically a transnational criminal gang masquerading as a government). Political opponents are openly murdered and jailed on pretext.
Putin himself said that Ukraine should not have a right to exist as a separate state, and that Ukrainians should be under Russian rule. He has already imposed that on Crimea and more.
Russia has now invaded Ukraine specifically in order to impose autocracy in Ukraine.
So how can you make such a statement? (Or should I just read you as one of the idiots who said on 23-Feb-2022 that Russia would never invade Ukraine?)
Care to elaborate? What is it Russia is doing in Ukraine? To me it looks like Ukraine was given a choice of becoming a vassal state like Belarus or Russia would ensure this by force (or at least ensure it in parts of the country where it’s militarily feasible to do so).
> The major threat to our democracies are capitalism
In what sense? The correlation between capitalist and democratic countries is nearly perfect - so obviously the only countries that risk losing their democracy are capitalist states. The others never had any to lose.
Except when the "democracies" pick an autocrat as their BFF, and showers him with money and weapons, like happens to the murderous psychopath that rules Saudi Arabia and likes to butcher journalists.
First, Capitalism is vastly more compatible with democracy than is Autocracy.
Second, while the basis of Capitalism is a "Free Market(TM)", in reality, there is no free market - any market must be regulated in order to exist, whether the regulations are informal moral and ethical codes or formal sets of commercial laws and regulations that require large trucks to haul the full set (as in the US), and a set of courts to enforce them, or a combination of both.
What you are indicating as the problem for capitalism in relation to democracy is actually a problem of some implementations of democracy, which is regulatory and legislative capture by corporate interests. THAT has a serious possibility to get out of hand, undermine democracy, and exacerbate inequality.
No question, better tools are needed to reduce the influence of corporations in the democracy, but eliminating capitalism will not do that - what you will get is something like the old Soviet state, which sucked far worse than any capitalist state.
The only way you get rid of capitalism is with a revolution. They won't allow you to vote it away.
Perhaps you should look at the history and governments of Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
It was a very hard fight, with violence, but it was achieved.
We can also notice that the Nordics aren't exactly hotbeds of growth, although there seems to be no shortage of innovation there.
Yes, it is a damn hard balance to achieve, and harder to maintain.
Yes, many of the capitalists will happily turn towards fascist-like tendencies.
The key is to dial up the market regulation so that the excesses are curbed and to minimize (but not eliminate) inequality. Killing capitalism altogether by having the government own all the means of production is simply a recipe for disaster.
IMO, the Nordic model is really the most sustainable.
the Atlantic has sunk to trash level and its bad opinion pieces cranked out daily incite bad discussion here and give propagandists and reactionaries a lot of fuel
Do those political science papers and books get retracted?
Do those who propagated this nonsense for years do public apologys?
Will professors who carriers road on this dead horse leave universitys and grants?
Does the end of history have a shelf life?
If Linux as a global open source project started gain traction just in last 5-10 years, pundits and columnists would condemn Linus because he allowed entities to build IT ecosystem beyond US sanctions regime, e.g. North Korea has its own Linux distro however flawed it is.
Having said that, the reason we have this kind of hysteria is that somehow western liberalism won't stop until every nook of earth from North to South pole follow it without question. Liberalism could just basked in glory after the fall of Soviet Union but here we are.
It's only fair to question how Qatar treats human rights or how China treats anyone opposed to the ruling party to name a few examples.
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.… Winston Churchill