The Triumph Of Capitalism, The Tyranny Of The Minority, And The End Of History
Way back in 1989, a little known political scientist and early neoconservative, Francis Fukuyama, wrote an essay entitled “The End Of History?” which reflected on the defeat of fascism and communism over the course of the 20th century and the ascendancy of liberal democracies. The essay, which made Fukuyama a star almost overnight, seemed to me to be mere hubris reflecting the euphoria of the collapse of communism and the intervening nearly two decades has shown that to be the case.
Fukuyama’s premise was succinctly stated: “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism…What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” It hasn’t turned out that way.
One of the key points in Fukuyama’s thesis was very typical of the late Reagan period and that was “political liberalism has been following economic liberalism, more slowly than many had hoped but with seeming inevitability”. As an example, Fukuyama pointed to the emerging economies in Asia, saying, “Desire for access to the consumer culture, created in large measure by Japan, has played a crucial role in fostering the spread of economic liberalism throughout Asia, and hence in promoting political liberalism as well.” And when Fukuyama talked about culture, he was specifically referencing Western culture, what he called “the ‘Protestant’ life of wealth and risk”.
The belief that economic liberalism would surely and inevitable lead to political liberalism underlay the reasoning behind creating market-oriented economic structures as quickly as possible in post-Soviet Russia and the Eastern Bloc, instead of focusing on building the institutions that support economic and political liberalism such as a strong and functioning judicial and electoral system. That turned out to be a rather significant error.
This belief also led Fukuyama to declare that the victory over communism was more than just a “triumph of capitalism”. Studies indicated that the expansion of liberal democracies was accompanied by a reduction in the amount of warfare and the number of refugees and displaced persons. All this seemed to indicate the ascendancy and primacy of liberal, pluralistic, capitalist democracies. Alas, the moment did not last long.
In fact, it didn’t take long for authoritarian regimes to adjust to capitalism or for capitalism to adjust to them. Russia had a short spasm of democracy before the plutocrats turned into an oligarchic autocracy with the trappings of a capitalist society. China managed to transition from a communist dictatorship to a one-party state with the most dynamic economy in the world. Those Asian tigers that Fukuyama was so hopeful about devolved into crony capitalist plutocracies with most of the authoritarian regimes that existed in the 1980s still in existence today. The rise, tenacity, and success of what I would call “totalitarian capitalism” was not really foreseen and, in fact, it was encouraged by the very same Western corporations that had thrived under liberal democracies who were happy to exploit the lower wage workers in these continuing autocracies.
In retrospect, the fall of communism truly was the “triumph of capitalism” after all, as market principles easily adopted to authoritarian regimes, sometimes more easily than in liberal democracies. After all, it is far easier to make a deal with just one dictator than to navigate the necessary bureaucracy of a truly liberal democracy. For the oligarchs or plutocrats on the inside of a dictatorship, there is a license to steal. And in democracies, capitalists spend enormous resources trying to control the democratic political processes. Here in the US, corporate interests presently dominate the state legislatures, the US Congress, and now the executive branch. In fact, in the years since Fukuyama’s essay, support for a “strong leader” who does not have to bother with a legislature or elections has risen nearly 15% among higher income individuals. It seems that capitalism and autocracy actually work quite well together.
Fukuyama was right in that the defeat of fascism and the fall of communism left liberal democracy as the only real ideology standing. But it turned out that didn’t really matter all that much. Its victory seemed to almost prove its potential irrelevance. Even by the late 1980s, the percentage of people who felt it was essential to live in a democracy was dropping precipitously and in many Western democracies that number is currently well below 50%.
Fukuyama, to be clear, was not saying all would be “kumbaya” from here on out. He recognized that there will always be competition and conflict between nations. But from an ideological perspective, Fukuyama saw only two threats to the primacy of liberal democracy, namely religion and nationalism. Fukuyama did not see nationalism per se as a competing ideology, saying, “The vast majority of the world’s nationalist movements do not have a political program beyond the negative desire of independence from some other group or people, and do not offer anything like a comprehensive agenda for socio-economic organization.. In the first place, nationalism is not one single phenomenon but several, ranging from mild cultural nostalgia to the highly organized and elaborately articulated doctrine of National Socialism. Only systematic nationalisms of the latter sort can qualify as a formal ideology on the level of liberalism or communism.”
I suggest you could reduce nationalism and religion into the single concept we now call tribalism. And, in this regard, Fukuyma may be right that it is not a competing ideology and is the result of the fact that “the liberalism in question is incomplete”. But he is also right that it would turn out to still be a threat to liberal democracies. We can see this tribalism now infecting what were thought to be stable democracies. In Europe, the turn toward what can best be described as fascism in Hungary and toward the far right in Poland, Austria, France, Germany, even England, and now the Czech Republic is proof of not only rising tribalism but the desire for less liberal societies and more autocratic rule.
Tribalism is tearing at the traditional bonds of democracy across the West. In Europe, another current example is the drive for Catalan independence. On a broader scale, it is the split between the globalists and the isolationists, the free traders and the protectionists, and the pro and anti-immigrant forces. This is often reflected in the urban/rural divide as we see in the UK and here in the US. And of course there are those areas of the world where tribalism never disappeared, such as the Mideast, where the perpetual battle between Sunni and Shia still rages.
Fukuyama also believed that Western liberal democracies had largely dealt with the issue of class. He stated “But surely, the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West. This is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the United States, or that the gap between them has not grown in recent years. But the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions.”
In fact, especially in the West, the citizenry has come to believe that the root causes of inequality are driven by the underlying legal and political structures. In Europe, the revolt against the policies of the EU has driven the rise of the far right. In the US, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders reflected the fundamental dissatisfaction with the country’s ruling elite. In the West as a whole, both the left and the right believe that they are suffering under what I would call the “tyranny of the minority”, although their targets are distinctly different.
For the right, it is the fear that immigration is destroying or at least a significant threat to their dominant culture, with the resulting increase in tribalism. This is especially apparent in the US where whites will soon no longer represent an absolute majority of the population but will become simply a plurality of the citizenry. That is what is currently driving the white nationalist movement that Trump exploits so constantly. And, although its policies are an absolute minority of the electorate, it is still able to dominate the political environment through radical gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the rural bias of the American electoral system. In Europe, the rise of the right is driven by the feeling that a small group of bureaucrats in Brussels are allowing unfettered immigration which also threatens the dominant culture, again increasing tribalism.
In addition, decades of stagnant wages and rising inequality have rightly convinced those on both on the left and the right that a small group of plutocrats are controlling the levers of economic power to the detriment of the people as a whole. The revolt embodied by that belief was largely responsible for the Brexit vote. In the US, we see the current ruling party desperately trying to pass an enormous tax cut for corporations who are already making record-breaking profits that are an ever-increasing share of GDP. The most perfect example of the tyranny of the minority is the fact that the current Republican proposal for “tax reform” actually will raise taxes on the upper middle class in order to pay for an enormous tax cut for the top 1/2 of 1%.
Concurrent with, and perhaps responsible for, this toxic mix of cratering faith in liberal democracies ability to actually solve their countries’ problems and the resulting rise in tribalism is the explosion of technological change, specifically in the form of the internet. The reach of social media on a global scale has created information bubbles in which whole segments of the population can live. The whole right wing propaganda machine in the US relies on the power of social media. It also allowed the Russians to exploit the existing tribal divisions in an attempt to prevent Hillary Clinton from winning the election or at least leaving her as a weak President. That attempt succeeded beyond Putin’s wildest dreams. Social media was also an important factor in the Brexit vote. Even more disturbingly, take a look at what has happened to the Rohynga in Myanmar, where the ethnic cleansing has been fueled by anti-Muslim propaganda on Facebook, the country’s dominant media platform.
Yesterday was the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther pinning his 95 theses to the cathedral door. That was made possible by the media revolution of the printing press, the mass communication device of its time. While the Reformation may have upended the power of the ruling political and religious elites and laid the groundwork for the modern world of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, it was also responsible a rise in nationalism and a century of sectarian violence that cost the lives of well over 11 million people on a continent where just 27 million lived in the two largest countries, Germany and France. It is certainly not a remote possibility that the swift rise and domination of social media will lead to increased tribalism and sectarian strife today. We can see it already happening.
The other part of this rapid technological change lies in automation, especially the exponentially increasing capabilities of artificial intelligence. A recent study showed that just here in the US, almost 40% of the current jobs were in danger of being replaced by robots or artificial intelligence. The chances that a massive disruption like this can happen without accompanying violence is delusional. The same change that effectively destroys the livelihood of potentially hundreds of millions worldwide will also shift that income directly into the plutocrats pockets, rapidly and massively increasing inequality. At the same time, this will also increase the tyranny of the minority, in this case the rule of the plutocrats, and make it even harder politically to do what needs to be done, namely the redistribution of those wages lost through automation back to the workers from which it was essentially taken.
Meanwhile, the triumph of capitalism has yet to help us face the massive problems facing the planet. We’ve known since the 1970s that increasing levels of carbon dioxide will create massive disruptions to the world’s climate. That, in turn, will also create strife on a worldwide scale. It has been theorized that the Syrian uprising was in large part driven by the worst drought in the modern history of that country. The power of capitalism and a distinct lack of political will has barely made a dent in the problem. As inequality keeps increasing and the economic and political power accrues to fewer and fewer people, it seems improbable that these environmental issue will be adequately addressed. In fact, it may already be too late.
The UN’s latest report shows that atmospheric carbon dioxide has reached levels not seen since 3 to 5 million years ago. Another study shows an apocalyptic collapse of insect populations in just the last 25 years, reporting “a seasonal decline of 76 percent, and mid-summer decline of 82 percent in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of study.” Just like the devastation of the honey bee populations, a decrease in other insect populations will effect the ability of plants to pollinate, reduce the food supply of other animals, and devastate agriculture worldwide.
If that future of sectarian strife, mass unemployment, and agricultural collapse isn’t dystopian enough for you, then take a look at some of the options that Kevin Drum envisions as robots and artificial intelligence take over our lives, assuming we haven’t died of starvation before that. We will lead illiterate lives, in isolation, engaged in constant war, with no interest in reproduction and a handful of plutocrats living eternal lives. Eventually, with no real reason to exist, we will simply die off out of boredom and disinterest. The ultimate triumph of capitalism would lead to end of humanity and would truly be the end of history. That’s nothing like the future Francis Fukuyama envisioned less than twenty years ago.
