Is liberal democracy in terminal decline?

Edit: Here’s what a federal judge had to say in 2023: "The solution for these deficiencies lies with the legislature, not the executive or judicial branches. Congress, for any number of reasons, has decided not to pass DACA-like legislation ... The Executive Branch cannot usurp the power bestowed on Congress by the Constitution — even to fill a void." https://www.npr.org/2023/09/14/1199428038/federal-judge-agai...

> Also, as an aside, if the bad actors in government who were screeching about DACA's constitutionality put even a fraction of that effort into protecting the Constitution when the First and Fourth Amendments were on the line, that would be great.

This is actual whataboutism

It's not dysfunction, either. It's functioning exactly as intended, by the people who spent years setting it up, and is delivering their goals. Top of which was abortion bans, which required spending years patiently stacking the Supreme Court.

That the goals are stupid and evil and incoherent is a separate problem.

What's changed now, compared to the past, it's that the people deciding that what's written there is bogus have started changing things a little bit faster compared to the usual, hence all the brouhaha. Also a reminder that the Slavery System was very much alive and all under this same US Constitution for more than half a century, which goes to show that's it's really just a piece of dead wood.

There's a huge difference between "I disagree with this legal rationale" and "this court is illegitimate." Like it or not, every Justice on the Court is there legitimately. One of them via bare-knuckle hardball politics, to be sure. But according to the rules.

The average American sees the system producing bad results, at some level people still worship the Constitution like a god when it says something they agree with, on an other level the system can feel like an exhausting and dispiriting legalistic hellscape.

How bad the results we are getting is open to debate. People today seem to be really angry about inflation and cost of living issues although the official numbers don't look too terrible. There's the explanation that the numbers are wrong and the explanation that the perception is wrong. There's probably some truth in both, but more fundamentally people don't find centrist politics of any kind emotionally satisfying anywhere anymore but when you get emotionally satisfying politics you wake up with a hangover the next day.

I think a lack of meaning is a part of it. If you're not really sure your citizenship is worth something or that you're part of something you're proud of, it's easy to get worked up about illegal immigration. If you don't have a sense of purpose, what is there to be concerned about than the price of eggs? Purposelessness turns the slightest irritation into an existential threat.

Also, a large problem is the self-reinforcing pattern of corruption and influence peddling.

Now that Babis is back in power with the backing of SPD and AUTO, it will also revert back into an Illiberal/Flawed Democracy.

Furthermore, all states on the cusp of EU membership (Albania, Montenegro) are also Illiberal/Flawed Democracies.

> largest chunk of GDP and growth still sits firmly in democratic countries

The only Full Democracies in the 10 largest GDPs are Germany, Japan, and the UK. Japan under Takaichi Sanae is pro-Trump and Germany is likely to see the AfD break it's cordon sanitare by 2029.

[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu

Let’s hope they are (happening).

If you want a primer on where we're already moving into, and likely to remain for some time, this wikipedia article is the place to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_regime

In a decade, the year most scholars of political science will say the US slipped fully into this will likely be either 2025 or 2026.

But yes, we'll probably still have elections. Functionally nobody's talking about what those elections would need to be laser-focused on achieving to turn us from this path, though. Court reform, eliminating much of the post-9/11 security apparatus, revoking a great deal of authority congress has ceded to the president. Even the democrats won't have the votes to get a majority on most of that, even if they didn't have to worry about a veto and if they took a slim majority in both chambers. They won't get more than 90% of their own members on board with any of that, in many cases, probably not even 50%. We're toast. The very best we might get is a little push-back on tariff power and, if we're very lucky, a substantial reduction in ICE funding. No restructuring the absurd and dangerous under-the-executive(?!) immigration courts to fall under the judiciary instead. No court reform. No undoing large parts of the USA PATRIOT Act. No full abolition of our paramilitary domestic police force. We'll relieve a few symptoms, maybe, in the very best case, but not treat any part of the disease. And that's the best plausible outcome.

In the early 2000s I was anti-war, anti-intervention, pro free speech, pro freedom of equality, against politicians trying to legislate morality or speech in any way, and thought we should have a strong border but with good immigration opportunities to allow the best to come and make the country even better. I was a fairly text book liberal, perhaps a bit more left than average. I still hold, more or less, these same values - yet somehow in contemporary times that's deemed conservative, if not very conservative.

Why this happened is an interesting question, but it's ultimately irrelevant. It has happened. And so it's predictably going to have long-term consequences for the parties. Basically we keep using the same names for these ideologies, but the values they represent shift, and even flip flop, in dramatic ways over time frames that, in hindsight, seem extremely rapid. Yet paradoxically, it's not like there's any given year or election where you can officially say that issue [x] suddenly flipped.

You write about this in a negative tone ("outrageous views"). To go for the extremely low hanging fruit, what about when the establishment media tried to mostly ignore Epstein, and it was only the hard push from social media personalities that brought the topic back into the mainstream? What confidence does that leave in the establishment media, and that they are not bought and paid for by the 'ruling pedophile class'?

When the establishment media refuses to talk about certain topics, it gives up the control over the narrative on that topic. That is their conscious choice. It is obvious that individuals will rise to fill that gap. Why are you writing about it as if it's a bad thing?

Does a liberal democracy even exist without independent media? I think not.

Know that I would rather social media didn't exist, but putting all the blame for our dire political situation on it is very misguided.

> "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

The people have discovered they can vote OPM to themselves and their pet causes. ICE now has a budget 4x the size of the marine corps. SS fund is on its way to bankruptcy. Corporations get all kinds of subsidies. Farmers get their own subsidies. And it goes on and on.

Meanwhile the national debt just keeps going up.

As each guy pays more OPM to the next guy he keeps asking more for more OPM for himself to cover the OPM he's losing to others. Eventually the portion of the economy that is one big circle jerk ratchets up and then if it goes on too long the whole thing collapses.

"Is liberal democracy, then, in terminal decline? The rise of Carney himself offers a glimmer of hope, fuelled as it was by a reaction against Trump. But electoral trends in Europe do not suggest a repeat. A broad-based recovery of the liberal order will probably depend on a turnaround in the underlying trends, and here the signs are less promising. Attempts to soften the impact of worsening demographics are routinely rejected by voters and parties on both left and right. And the most promising source of renewed economic dynamism — AI — is likely to worsen inequality and increase societal instability, further undermining faith in democracy and hastening the slide into a zero-sum world.

Events of the past year have shocked the democratic world out of its daze, but it is these more powerful and slow-moving forces that should be the lasting cause for concern. Trump may fade from view in a few years, but any expectation that the liberal order will snap back flies in the face of the evidence. The old system was one that worked under a particular set of conditions. Those conditions are no longer present."