Given all the ground I’ve covered on this blog so far, I’m now in a position to summarize and synthesize my various observations and arguments about the current state of liberal democracy.
Martin Gurri talks about elites who take a head-first dive into the 20th century. That's the way your conclusion reads to me. Your TL;Dr is that somehow the crisis of legitimacy will lift, we will go back to the 1958 equilibrium, and we'll live happily ever after.
Forgive me for leaving the wrong impression, then. I mean only to say that I don't think we're going to stop having fair elections and peaceful transfers of power. Zero chance of a return to 1958. I'll write more about this later, but I'm firmly of the view that there's no going back. The only way out is through--if we are ever to have a high-trust society again, new mechanisms of trust are going to have to be rebuilt from the bottom up.
For me one of the interesting things about this "crisis of legitimacy" is that it seems to extend practically everywhere and extend far beyond even today's stretched compassing of "politics". Democracy, sure. But also Catholic Church, FIFA, The Olympics, the New York Times, Major League Baseball, Tour de France, the current crypto winter, public stock markets after 2008... I'm sure everyone can add dozens more examples big and small.
I have my doubts that the world is actually more corrupt today than it was in the past -- though the rise of winner-take-all coupled with global markets and continued rising global wealth means the prize for clawing your way to the top is bigger than ever, so perhaps I'm wrong -- but it is hard to escape the feeling that we're in the middle of a decades-long realignment as the pervasiveness of news, phones in every pocket, and social media reshapes everything and our illusions from yesteryear crumble.
In my view it really is an all-of-the-above situation. I don't know if elites are overall more corrupt, but I do think our hyper-individualistic culture does breed sociopathy at the top even as it breeds pervasive distrust in the ranks. Meanwhile, we're now swimming in a 24/7 information glut where almost all the news we read is bad. I do believe it's possible to get to a better place, eventually -- please stay tuned as I keep writing.
As always, many great insights in this piece. No doubt, we are experiencing a crisis in political legitimacy. But query if this is a part and parcel of a broader crisis of cultural legitimacy. Is the problem that government isn’t doing its part to deliver Abundance or that Abundance isn’t delivering what we hoped it would?
The answer to your question is both! Material plenty beats the hell out of poverty, but it's not the same thing as human flourishing. Escaping poverty can be experienced as flourishing, but merely having access to enough stuff isn't enough. That's the premise of the whole blog--we've achieved this amazing thing, the conquest of material scarcity, but instead of that solving all our problems, it just brought the ultimate, permanent problem into view.
For sure. I guess it just begs the question (in my head at least) of whether political legitimacy can be restored without first coming to terms with the cultural crisis. No shortage of reforms to enable government to serve better its Economic Problem mandate. Would cheer on the adoption of such reforms. But am left wondering how much the political crisis can subside without first “solving” the cultural crisis that you correctly associate with the Permanent Problem. Put another way: Can a new political equilibrium be achieved before a new cultural equilibrium is achieved. Thanks.
"Is the problem that government isn’t doing its part to deliver Abundance or that Abundance isn’t delivering what we hoped it would?"
Both?
For example, medical goods and services are heavily regulated, and, even in the US, often more-or-less government-provided. For better or worse, US government is deeply involved in US medical abundance. That abundance is both patchy and, where present, cannot live up to the Prosperity-Gospel promise that people can attract well-being to themselves through sheer moral exertion.
The Prosperity Gospel isn't just a Christian heresy (though it is that). There are secular versions, too. The historical New Thought, Power-of-Positive-Thinking movements. The "law of attraction". (Religious historian Kate Bowler has the details.) I know someone who unironically hangs a motivational poster reading, "Often, your attitude determines your altitude." Because he's not crazy, he found the poster with "Often" in it, acknowledging it's no guarantee. Still, an American streak a mile wide promises that the only thing standing between its being a guarantee and you is you.
Among those who truly have little, prosperity-gospel thinking might amount to little more than harmless aspiration. (I suspect it's harmful even then, but I also trust that the popularity of Prosperity-Gospel churches among the world's most poor isn't some sign they're all dummies.) Maybe when abundance hasn't yet come to your neighborhood, the hope that, when it does, circumstances will no longer hold you back is more tenable. Anyhow, I suspect it's harder to be thoroughly fooled by the Prosperity Gospel when the tragic accidents of deep poverty are still everyday experiences. The problem with prosperity-gospel thinking amid abundance is that it seems to come true often enough for people to be really fooled by it. To already live in abundance and fail to overcome some circumstance that impedes your success is to live in shame.
Freddie deBoer, a writer I respect, recently wrote, "I try to remind them that, under capitalism, success does not spring simplistically from talent and work ethic" – as if this were a problem with capitalism, and not with living in a stochastic world under any political system!
Still, he's onto something. People expect abundance to reward merit, and accepting that it does, but only stochastically, imperfectly, rankles. It should especially rankle those who sincerely believe in "meritocracy". I've heard "Life isn't fair, kid" from conservative elders far too often to personally associate belief in a just world with conservatism, but in the US, belief in a just world correlates with leaning right – perhaps because Prosperity-Gospel Christianity correlates with leaning right?...
Returning to US medical care, deBoer writes, "it’s entirely possible for clinics that specialize in adolescent transition to be mismanaged or otherwise imperfect. That’s simply the reality of medical care at scale. What I don’t understand is why this would be uniquely disqualifying; there are no doubt dialysis centers and radiology labs and pharmacies that have serious operational problems, but no one thinks that this discredits those kinds of medicine."
As someone too familiar with medical mismanagement despite abundance, I'm cheering, "Yes! Why aren't more people saying this?! (Why haven't *I* clearly said it before?) I doubt that sexual conservatism, by itself, can adequately explain trans panic. Imagining unwarranted transitioning as some outstanding medical horror takes obliviousness to the profound consequences of other medical mishaps.
The very abundance we're blessed to live in means – thank God! – that despite all the kludges in our medical system, more and more people do get to live lives happily oblivious to this kind of suffering, more secure than ever in the supposition that this sort of suffering must be something you bring upon yourself. The Book of Job shows this supposition is ancient, but also that ancient privation made it easier to doubt. Today's patriarchs really are much better protected against mishaps that leave them scraping their sores in the dirt.
In my opinion, your layout of the symptoms of Capitalism is so astute but they remain in the shadows of the theoretical work out there that pushes a bit further than you seem willing to go—it’s like you’re on the precipice of a Left politics but not willing to go over it because you’re a libertarian. That intellectual line that theorizes that, despite it creating the type of growth Keynes imagined in the piece that underlies your project, Capitalism might actually be the cause of the social demise simply due to its nature. And also may be the cause of all the symptoms you painstakingly lay out in your pieces.
I admit I haven’t read all your essays, but at least the kickoff and a few others, including this one. I see reflections of the idea that the social output of Capitalism has become something uglier but there’s a hedging against this idea that maybe the ugliness is caused by Capitalism’s nature, in and of itself.
I welcome the correction and explicit description if I’ve missed something. Theorists like Wendy Brown, Nancy Fraser, Mark Fisher, Byung-Chul Han, Catherine Casey, Gilles Delueze, Herbert Marcuse, Martin Heidegger, etc. have done an incredible job of describing Capitalism as something beyond an economic system but rather an embodied way of affecting our being.
That neoliberalism’s world-making rationality focused exclusively on its drive to economize all features of existence, from democratic institutions to subjectivity, ultimately prepares the ground for the mobilization and legitimacy of ferocious anti democratic forces (Brown). That Capitalism has expanded beyond economics into an institutionalized social order requiring dominance over social reproduction, politics, and non-human nature (Fraser). That Capitalism is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action (Fisher). That we now live in an achievement society where excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation and a subjugation of ourselves that causes massive burnout (Han). That in the corporation it is not only the personal time of employees that is appropriated but also their identities, a kind-of corporate”colonization of self,” where workers become ‘company people’ even at home where they cannot think about much else beyond their job or well-being in the firm (Casey). That neoliberalism has led us into a society of control where we willingly allow ourselves to be surveilled, sampled, evaluated, and harvested for data that sorts us (Delueze). That Capitalist civilization has to defend itself against a world that wants to be free, therefore our subjectively is more and more given to us by corporations that take our free time in exchange for money that we spend on commodities that don’t make us any more free (Marcuse). That by seeing our world and ourselves as resources to be exploited we have completely altered our way of being that gets us away from our authenticity (Heidegger).
There’s so much.
I guess I’m not trying to criticize, but to be critical in wondering where we go from talking about symptoms of society which you state well are alarming, to talking about the condition. This blog discusses so many symptoms of the broader failure, always skirting around it. Keynes cannot answer the question because he could never imagine the Capitalism of today. You keep massaging it but aren’t breaking through it.
Of course, there’s not absolute truth to discover, but the problem has been revealed for a long time now. You don’t have to be a Marxist to see it. I’m not.
Either way, thanks for sharing your thoughts so thoroughly.
I think it’s more the third trend you observed. Cultural changes facilitated and accelerated by the internet mainly are causing the crisis of legitimacy. Government hasn’t really failed. But people have become more entitled, and they are being habituated and conditioned to react on impulse and make emotional decisions. The reason the rational legitimacy for our government began to erode right when the internet began, and it has been getting worse the more the internet has begun to alter social life, is because the internet blunts and dulls your rationality with sensory overload and encourages conformity. It sounds very cynical of me to lay the blame all on the masses themselves so to speak but it is their fault. Indeed it can be no one else’s so long as we believe people are personally responsible for their decisions, a precept of natural which we need to believe. I don’t even blame the technology, but the way people passively allow themselves to react to their environment, and because it’s easier to be passively entertained than know the truth, they submit to demagogy. They even actively will demagogy and anarchy, because it stimulates an overstimulated and thus chronically bored, chronically lonely personality. The reason it’s so baffling to centrists like us, is only because we aren’t addicted to the internet and alternative sources of information, as the masses are. And it’s hard to believe that most people can be this lazy and stupid, but they are and they always have been. The internet has caused us to return to our premodern primitive instincts, after modern assumptions of truth, reality and political order have withered and decayed because they proved not to be fun and exhilarating enough. Why don’t trump supporters care that he’s a liar? They know he is. But they don’t care. That he surprises the elites and offends the left over and over is too entertaining to give up. The reason we’re in a crisis of legitimacy has to do with twitter and fox news which panders to the loudest and most obnoxious voices and empowers them. There seems to be no way around this erosion of the belief in universal morals and objective truth until disaster strikes encouraging people to wise up. This can’t be fixed with money. We can’t just throw money at the working class like biden thinks. That won’t work. We can’t reshore and throw money at local communities. Or regulate the internet to control for misinformation. That will all make the problem worse. Half the reason people are so entitled is not because they’re poor and desperate but because they are being subsidized by big government and talked down to by it. I think leaving big tech alone and privatizing education and cutting welfare benefits, allowing people the liberty to be stupid and see how it works for them, and not subsidizing dependency, would help stem the tide. But how we can get to the point, where someone would make these reforms is the problem, because the system is hijacked by populism and their cronies.
I'm sticking with all of the above, but I agree that the biggest problems are cultural -- and that our new information environment has worsened those problems.
I think that the crisis of capitalism you have been analyzing to great effect conceals a deeper and more disturbing crisis of values. It’s what Nietzsche referred to as the problem of nihilism which he predicted would engulf the modern world. “God is dead.” Especially in an increasingly complex modern world, people look to spiritual things and even terrifying conspiracy theories for consolation and comfort. And they seek spiritual meaning in politics because otherwise the disenchantment of modern progress makes them despairing and longing for God, or cult personalities like Trump. People like Trump symbolize nothing less than power over anarchy. Like people who were drawn to Hitler, the authoritarian persaonlity is an anxious soul who reacts to overwhelming chaos by seeking total order. Hitler’s personality had a spiritual effect notably on many Germans. His speeches were also accompanied with weird ceremonies, torch fire and darkness. A nervous collective is drawn to authoritarian vessels and rituals, who and that will spiritualize and express their grievances almost like artists but also shamans. None of this is an argument against capitalism or progress though by the way. It only means we need to work harder to protect minority rights and free markets. I think we can only save democracy thru renewing our commitment the best we can to everything that makes democracy the best alternative, individual rights and freedom. There is simply no other way. If we try to appease the populists then we conciliate to them. They’ve given up on the whole thing. I was happy yesterday to receive Tom Nichols’s newsletter recently where he said we need to admit Trump supporters’ “moral failure.”
The permanent problem is greed. They just don’t know a good thing when they have it. A few decades of the thing they think will give them more is on the horizon. Since we in Canada love to copy America, I sure hope we see the cost/benefit before jumping in.
As one earlier comment mentioned “the dirty proles” I have to ad; the “dirty proles” will really behave crazily if they find out that everybody isn’t equal under the law. Could that be the thing that breaks the spell of democracy?
Mr Lindsey, as always your writing is incredibly interesting. The link to YouTube was awesome. Can you imagine what it was like for those poor buggers before the revolution?
I am moved to comment half way through reading this. From where I'm standing in Europe (Ireland) I don't see "authoritarian populist parties' and not even in the UK which is the other politics I'm most familiar with. What I am seeing and feeling myself is a scary lurch towards authoritarianism in our centre right parties here in Ireland, typified most recently by their covid response (longest lockdown in Europe and not even an inquiry yet). They seem to have hitched themselves to the authoritarian green left like many in Western (as opposed to central/Eastern) Europe and that is why people are unhappy.
I'll admit to a U.S.-centric perspective, and I'll concede that the problems in the US are especially acute, but the democratic recession is global and authoritarian populism remains a big problem in Europe. Ireland may not have populist parties, but UKIP did make a splash in the UK and Brexit is definitely of a part of the larger populist backlash.
Ah, well I agree that UKIP and Brexit was populist but I would not say it was authoritarian. There may have been both a 'tough on crime' and anti-immigration element but that's not necessarily authoritarian either. Tony Blair was "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" too. And anti-immigration in the sense of controlling immigration, points systems, timely deportation when required, etc is not authoritarian either. But I don't see populism as a problem per se, except in as much as it cannot deliver what it promises. People are rightly disenchanted with their lives getting worse and I don't think politicians trying to deliver a response to that is a problem.
These processes aren't unique to the US, but they are uniquely bad there. In Europe the recent news is mostly good. The examples of Trump, Putin have gravely damaged the far-right parties that supported them. Rather than radicalising, significant elements of the far-right (Meloni and LePen for example) have tried to move to the centre. At the same time, those events have (mostly) pushed the left and centre-left to unite, as in Germany.
That's from a long way away, and maybe I've got it wrong. But certainly in Australia, there's nothing like a crisis, just a general feeling of weariness with a system that works, more or less, but never seems to deliver very much.
As I concluded, my current sense is that fair elections and peaceful transfers of power are going to hold in the US and western Europe. But avoiding authoritarianism and actually achieving decent quality governance are two different things, and the obstacles to the latter remain daunting.
European government, especially the Nordics, appears to be more responsive to facts. Yes, European governments have an ideology, but they are not as stubborn about it as is American government. Consider that with COVID the European governments either never went as far as did the Americans in locking down or they reversed course much sooner. The Biden administration is still requiring a vax for foreign visitors and it supported school closures much longer than did the Europeans.
"I told people that if it came to that I’d crawl over broken glass to vote for Sanders"
Sanders thought the Soviet Union was a good idea. Trump did nothing that negatively affected my life for four years. You think he is the first dude with his personality type that's been president? That you could even contemplate voting for him over Trump shows a derangement and class loyalty that is discrediting to the core of who you are.
It was the same during COVID. Wasn't COVID the Libertarian Moment! And what did they do? Beltway libertarians either embraced the lockdown culture of their class or muttered on the internet but mostly went along and criticized anyone that tried to take real action against it (those dirty proles). Class loyalty trumped principle.
2016 didn't both me at all. COVID did (I include all of the wacky events of the two years, but COVID front and center). COVID was the first time I believed that "America" didn't mean what I thought it meant. That basic human rights I thought were inherently protected in my country simply did not exist. The idea that whoever held power didn't matter too too much to my life was shattered.
Only power existed. And only winning that power mattered. And the only loyalty anyone has to anything is the power of themselves and their group. Without power, you are not human, you have no rights, and people can take whatever they want whenever they want for any reason they want.
Don't like it? Didn't Biden point out that F-16s can bomb any citizen that resists.
The response of America's elite to Donald Trump says a lot about them. First, they elevated Trump as if he would prove to be an easily defeated opposition. Observe that if Trump were such a threat to the country why was CNN and the media giving him so much free publicity?
Then Trump won and the elite had a nervous breakdown. They bought into the Russia Collusion lie and supported Trump's political enemies in trying to impeach him. They lost all perspective on what was fair, what was true.
Then we had COVID and all the lies associated with it. This was followed by J6 and now we know the prevailing narrative on J6 was a total fabrication.
Trump did not create these lies. His enemies did. Trump did not destroy trust in American government and American media. His enemies did.
The American Federal Government is a contradiction. At its founding, Hamilton & Jefferson fought bitterly over the role of the Federal government, with Hamilton for a strong, authoritarian government and Jefferson favoring a weak and benign system. Hamilton's ideas won but Jefferson and his political party proved more attractive to the people.
Lincoln, at the Gettysburg Address affirmed the populist view, declaring "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." All the while Lincoln was greatly responsible for centralizing the power of the Federal government and increasing its authority over people.
Since President Johnson and the 1960s in particular the Federal government has greatly struggled. The elite have made many bold promises on which they have made claim on the American people and their wealth to pursue. And they have failed, over and over
There is a crisis of political and institutional legitimacy precisely because the "elite" of American society have so demonstrably failed. The response to this failure is worrisome, for what we observe is people choosing to cling to their political tribe regardless of the evidence showing the lies and errors of the tribal leadership.
The response of the elite is to accept this loyalty and exploit it further. So we get no apologies, no public acknowledgement of wrong. No admission of error. But just dogmatic persistence of the same ideology that produced failure - and so we heap failure unto failure.
How does this not end but with social, cultural, legal, political and economic collapse?
Martin Gurri talks about elites who take a head-first dive into the 20th century. That's the way your conclusion reads to me. Your TL;Dr is that somehow the crisis of legitimacy will lift, we will go back to the 1958 equilibrium, and we'll live happily ever after.
Doesn't seem like such a likely scenario.
Forgive me for leaving the wrong impression, then. I mean only to say that I don't think we're going to stop having fair elections and peaceful transfers of power. Zero chance of a return to 1958. I'll write more about this later, but I'm firmly of the view that there's no going back. The only way out is through--if we are ever to have a high-trust society again, new mechanisms of trust are going to have to be rebuilt from the bottom up.
For me one of the interesting things about this "crisis of legitimacy" is that it seems to extend practically everywhere and extend far beyond even today's stretched compassing of "politics". Democracy, sure. But also Catholic Church, FIFA, The Olympics, the New York Times, Major League Baseball, Tour de France, the current crypto winter, public stock markets after 2008... I'm sure everyone can add dozens more examples big and small.
I have my doubts that the world is actually more corrupt today than it was in the past -- though the rise of winner-take-all coupled with global markets and continued rising global wealth means the prize for clawing your way to the top is bigger than ever, so perhaps I'm wrong -- but it is hard to escape the feeling that we're in the middle of a decades-long realignment as the pervasiveness of news, phones in every pocket, and social media reshapes everything and our illusions from yesteryear crumble.
Can they be rebuilt when the dust settles?
In my view it really is an all-of-the-above situation. I don't know if elites are overall more corrupt, but I do think our hyper-individualistic culture does breed sociopathy at the top even as it breeds pervasive distrust in the ranks. Meanwhile, we're now swimming in a 24/7 information glut where almost all the news we read is bad. I do believe it's possible to get to a better place, eventually -- please stay tuned as I keep writing.
As always, many great insights in this piece. No doubt, we are experiencing a crisis in political legitimacy. But query if this is a part and parcel of a broader crisis of cultural legitimacy. Is the problem that government isn’t doing its part to deliver Abundance or that Abundance isn’t delivering what we hoped it would?
The answer to your question is both! Material plenty beats the hell out of poverty, but it's not the same thing as human flourishing. Escaping poverty can be experienced as flourishing, but merely having access to enough stuff isn't enough. That's the premise of the whole blog--we've achieved this amazing thing, the conquest of material scarcity, but instead of that solving all our problems, it just brought the ultimate, permanent problem into view.
For sure. I guess it just begs the question (in my head at least) of whether political legitimacy can be restored without first coming to terms with the cultural crisis. No shortage of reforms to enable government to serve better its Economic Problem mandate. Would cheer on the adoption of such reforms. But am left wondering how much the political crisis can subside without first “solving” the cultural crisis that you correctly associate with the Permanent Problem. Put another way: Can a new political equilibrium be achieved before a new cultural equilibrium is achieved. Thanks.
"Is the problem that government isn’t doing its part to deliver Abundance or that Abundance isn’t delivering what we hoped it would?"
Both?
For example, medical goods and services are heavily regulated, and, even in the US, often more-or-less government-provided. For better or worse, US government is deeply involved in US medical abundance. That abundance is both patchy and, where present, cannot live up to the Prosperity-Gospel promise that people can attract well-being to themselves through sheer moral exertion.
The Prosperity Gospel isn't just a Christian heresy (though it is that). There are secular versions, too. The historical New Thought, Power-of-Positive-Thinking movements. The "law of attraction". (Religious historian Kate Bowler has the details.) I know someone who unironically hangs a motivational poster reading, "Often, your attitude determines your altitude." Because he's not crazy, he found the poster with "Often" in it, acknowledging it's no guarantee. Still, an American streak a mile wide promises that the only thing standing between its being a guarantee and you is you.
Among those who truly have little, prosperity-gospel thinking might amount to little more than harmless aspiration. (I suspect it's harmful even then, but I also trust that the popularity of Prosperity-Gospel churches among the world's most poor isn't some sign they're all dummies.) Maybe when abundance hasn't yet come to your neighborhood, the hope that, when it does, circumstances will no longer hold you back is more tenable. Anyhow, I suspect it's harder to be thoroughly fooled by the Prosperity Gospel when the tragic accidents of deep poverty are still everyday experiences. The problem with prosperity-gospel thinking amid abundance is that it seems to come true often enough for people to be really fooled by it. To already live in abundance and fail to overcome some circumstance that impedes your success is to live in shame.
Freddie deBoer, a writer I respect, recently wrote, "I try to remind them that, under capitalism, success does not spring simplistically from talent and work ethic" – as if this were a problem with capitalism, and not with living in a stochastic world under any political system!
https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-so-many-elites-feel-like-losers
Still, he's onto something. People expect abundance to reward merit, and accepting that it does, but only stochastically, imperfectly, rankles. It should especially rankle those who sincerely believe in "meritocracy". I've heard "Life isn't fair, kid" from conservative elders far too often to personally associate belief in a just world with conservatism, but in the US, belief in a just world correlates with leaning right – perhaps because Prosperity-Gospel Christianity correlates with leaning right?...
Returning to US medical care, deBoer writes, "it’s entirely possible for clinics that specialize in adolescent transition to be mismanaged or otherwise imperfect. That’s simply the reality of medical care at scale. What I don’t understand is why this would be uniquely disqualifying; there are no doubt dialysis centers and radiology labs and pharmacies that have serious operational problems, but no one thinks that this discredits those kinds of medicine."
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/and-now-i-will-again-ponderously
As someone too familiar with medical mismanagement despite abundance, I'm cheering, "Yes! Why aren't more people saying this?! (Why haven't *I* clearly said it before?) I doubt that sexual conservatism, by itself, can adequately explain trans panic. Imagining unwarranted transitioning as some outstanding medical horror takes obliviousness to the profound consequences of other medical mishaps.
The very abundance we're blessed to live in means – thank God! – that despite all the kludges in our medical system, more and more people do get to live lives happily oblivious to this kind of suffering, more secure than ever in the supposition that this sort of suffering must be something you bring upon yourself. The Book of Job shows this supposition is ancient, but also that ancient privation made it easier to doubt. Today's patriarchs really are much better protected against mishaps that leave them scraping their sores in the dirt.
Thanks so much for such thoughtful comments.
In my opinion, your layout of the symptoms of Capitalism is so astute but they remain in the shadows of the theoretical work out there that pushes a bit further than you seem willing to go—it’s like you’re on the precipice of a Left politics but not willing to go over it because you’re a libertarian. That intellectual line that theorizes that, despite it creating the type of growth Keynes imagined in the piece that underlies your project, Capitalism might actually be the cause of the social demise simply due to its nature. And also may be the cause of all the symptoms you painstakingly lay out in your pieces.
I admit I haven’t read all your essays, but at least the kickoff and a few others, including this one. I see reflections of the idea that the social output of Capitalism has become something uglier but there’s a hedging against this idea that maybe the ugliness is caused by Capitalism’s nature, in and of itself.
I welcome the correction and explicit description if I’ve missed something. Theorists like Wendy Brown, Nancy Fraser, Mark Fisher, Byung-Chul Han, Catherine Casey, Gilles Delueze, Herbert Marcuse, Martin Heidegger, etc. have done an incredible job of describing Capitalism as something beyond an economic system but rather an embodied way of affecting our being.
That neoliberalism’s world-making rationality focused exclusively on its drive to economize all features of existence, from democratic institutions to subjectivity, ultimately prepares the ground for the mobilization and legitimacy of ferocious anti democratic forces (Brown). That Capitalism has expanded beyond economics into an institutionalized social order requiring dominance over social reproduction, politics, and non-human nature (Fraser). That Capitalism is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action (Fisher). That we now live in an achievement society where excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation and a subjugation of ourselves that causes massive burnout (Han). That in the corporation it is not only the personal time of employees that is appropriated but also their identities, a kind-of corporate”colonization of self,” where workers become ‘company people’ even at home where they cannot think about much else beyond their job or well-being in the firm (Casey). That neoliberalism has led us into a society of control where we willingly allow ourselves to be surveilled, sampled, evaluated, and harvested for data that sorts us (Delueze). That Capitalist civilization has to defend itself against a world that wants to be free, therefore our subjectively is more and more given to us by corporations that take our free time in exchange for money that we spend on commodities that don’t make us any more free (Marcuse). That by seeing our world and ourselves as resources to be exploited we have completely altered our way of being that gets us away from our authenticity (Heidegger).
There’s so much.
I guess I’m not trying to criticize, but to be critical in wondering where we go from talking about symptoms of society which you state well are alarming, to talking about the condition. This blog discusses so many symptoms of the broader failure, always skirting around it. Keynes cannot answer the question because he could never imagine the Capitalism of today. You keep massaging it but aren’t breaking through it.
Of course, there’s not absolute truth to discover, but the problem has been revealed for a long time now. You don’t have to be a Marxist to see it. I’m not.
Either way, thanks for sharing your thoughts so thoroughly.
If you haven't read Martin Gurri's "The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium", you really should.
Yes, I have. I mentioned it in an earlier essay, so I didn't refer to it here -- but it is directly relevant.
I think it’s more the third trend you observed. Cultural changes facilitated and accelerated by the internet mainly are causing the crisis of legitimacy. Government hasn’t really failed. But people have become more entitled, and they are being habituated and conditioned to react on impulse and make emotional decisions. The reason the rational legitimacy for our government began to erode right when the internet began, and it has been getting worse the more the internet has begun to alter social life, is because the internet blunts and dulls your rationality with sensory overload and encourages conformity. It sounds very cynical of me to lay the blame all on the masses themselves so to speak but it is their fault. Indeed it can be no one else’s so long as we believe people are personally responsible for their decisions, a precept of natural which we need to believe. I don’t even blame the technology, but the way people passively allow themselves to react to their environment, and because it’s easier to be passively entertained than know the truth, they submit to demagogy. They even actively will demagogy and anarchy, because it stimulates an overstimulated and thus chronically bored, chronically lonely personality. The reason it’s so baffling to centrists like us, is only because we aren’t addicted to the internet and alternative sources of information, as the masses are. And it’s hard to believe that most people can be this lazy and stupid, but they are and they always have been. The internet has caused us to return to our premodern primitive instincts, after modern assumptions of truth, reality and political order have withered and decayed because they proved not to be fun and exhilarating enough. Why don’t trump supporters care that he’s a liar? They know he is. But they don’t care. That he surprises the elites and offends the left over and over is too entertaining to give up. The reason we’re in a crisis of legitimacy has to do with twitter and fox news which panders to the loudest and most obnoxious voices and empowers them. There seems to be no way around this erosion of the belief in universal morals and objective truth until disaster strikes encouraging people to wise up. This can’t be fixed with money. We can’t just throw money at the working class like biden thinks. That won’t work. We can’t reshore and throw money at local communities. Or regulate the internet to control for misinformation. That will all make the problem worse. Half the reason people are so entitled is not because they’re poor and desperate but because they are being subsidized by big government and talked down to by it. I think leaving big tech alone and privatizing education and cutting welfare benefits, allowing people the liberty to be stupid and see how it works for them, and not subsidizing dependency, would help stem the tide. But how we can get to the point, where someone would make these reforms is the problem, because the system is hijacked by populism and their cronies.
I'm sticking with all of the above, but I agree that the biggest problems are cultural -- and that our new information environment has worsened those problems.
I think that the crisis of capitalism you have been analyzing to great effect conceals a deeper and more disturbing crisis of values. It’s what Nietzsche referred to as the problem of nihilism which he predicted would engulf the modern world. “God is dead.” Especially in an increasingly complex modern world, people look to spiritual things and even terrifying conspiracy theories for consolation and comfort. And they seek spiritual meaning in politics because otherwise the disenchantment of modern progress makes them despairing and longing for God, or cult personalities like Trump. People like Trump symbolize nothing less than power over anarchy. Like people who were drawn to Hitler, the authoritarian persaonlity is an anxious soul who reacts to overwhelming chaos by seeking total order. Hitler’s personality had a spiritual effect notably on many Germans. His speeches were also accompanied with weird ceremonies, torch fire and darkness. A nervous collective is drawn to authoritarian vessels and rituals, who and that will spiritualize and express their grievances almost like artists but also shamans. None of this is an argument against capitalism or progress though by the way. It only means we need to work harder to protect minority rights and free markets. I think we can only save democracy thru renewing our commitment the best we can to everything that makes democracy the best alternative, individual rights and freedom. There is simply no other way. If we try to appease the populists then we conciliate to them. They’ve given up on the whole thing. I was happy yesterday to receive Tom Nichols’s newsletter recently where he said we need to admit Trump supporters’ “moral failure.”
The permanent problem is greed. They just don’t know a good thing when they have it. A few decades of the thing they think will give them more is on the horizon. Since we in Canada love to copy America, I sure hope we see the cost/benefit before jumping in.
As one earlier comment mentioned “the dirty proles” I have to ad; the “dirty proles” will really behave crazily if they find out that everybody isn’t equal under the law. Could that be the thing that breaks the spell of democracy?
Mr Lindsey, as always your writing is incredibly interesting. The link to YouTube was awesome. Can you imagine what it was like for those poor buggers before the revolution?
I am moved to comment half way through reading this. From where I'm standing in Europe (Ireland) I don't see "authoritarian populist parties' and not even in the UK which is the other politics I'm most familiar with. What I am seeing and feeling myself is a scary lurch towards authoritarianism in our centre right parties here in Ireland, typified most recently by their covid response (longest lockdown in Europe and not even an inquiry yet). They seem to have hitched themselves to the authoritarian green left like many in Western (as opposed to central/Eastern) Europe and that is why people are unhappy.
I'll admit to a U.S.-centric perspective, and I'll concede that the problems in the US are especially acute, but the democratic recession is global and authoritarian populism remains a big problem in Europe. Ireland may not have populist parties, but UKIP did make a splash in the UK and Brexit is definitely of a part of the larger populist backlash.
Ah, well I agree that UKIP and Brexit was populist but I would not say it was authoritarian. There may have been both a 'tough on crime' and anti-immigration element but that's not necessarily authoritarian either. Tony Blair was "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" too. And anti-immigration in the sense of controlling immigration, points systems, timely deportation when required, etc is not authoritarian either. But I don't see populism as a problem per se, except in as much as it cannot deliver what it promises. People are rightly disenchanted with their lives getting worse and I don't think politicians trying to deliver a response to that is a problem.
These processes aren't unique to the US, but they are uniquely bad there. In Europe the recent news is mostly good. The examples of Trump, Putin have gravely damaged the far-right parties that supported them. Rather than radicalising, significant elements of the far-right (Meloni and LePen for example) have tried to move to the centre. At the same time, those events have (mostly) pushed the left and centre-left to unite, as in Germany.
That's from a long way away, and maybe I've got it wrong. But certainly in Australia, there's nothing like a crisis, just a general feeling of weariness with a system that works, more or less, but never seems to deliver very much.
As I concluded, my current sense is that fair elections and peaceful transfers of power are going to hold in the US and western Europe. But avoiding authoritarianism and actually achieving decent quality governance are two different things, and the obstacles to the latter remain daunting.
Australia has also avoided recessions for decades.
European government, especially the Nordics, appears to be more responsive to facts. Yes, European governments have an ideology, but they are not as stubborn about it as is American government. Consider that with COVID the European governments either never went as far as did the Americans in locking down or they reversed course much sooner. The Biden administration is still requiring a vax for foreign visitors and it supported school closures much longer than did the Europeans.
"I told people that if it came to that I’d crawl over broken glass to vote for Sanders"
Sanders thought the Soviet Union was a good idea. Trump did nothing that negatively affected my life for four years. You think he is the first dude with his personality type that's been president? That you could even contemplate voting for him over Trump shows a derangement and class loyalty that is discrediting to the core of who you are.
It was the same during COVID. Wasn't COVID the Libertarian Moment! And what did they do? Beltway libertarians either embraced the lockdown culture of their class or muttered on the internet but mostly went along and criticized anyone that tried to take real action against it (those dirty proles). Class loyalty trumped principle.
2016 didn't both me at all. COVID did (I include all of the wacky events of the two years, but COVID front and center). COVID was the first time I believed that "America" didn't mean what I thought it meant. That basic human rights I thought were inherently protected in my country simply did not exist. The idea that whoever held power didn't matter too too much to my life was shattered.
Only power existed. And only winning that power mattered. And the only loyalty anyone has to anything is the power of themselves and their group. Without power, you are not human, you have no rights, and people can take whatever they want whenever they want for any reason they want.
Don't like it? Didn't Biden point out that F-16s can bomb any citizen that resists.
The response of America's elite to Donald Trump says a lot about them. First, they elevated Trump as if he would prove to be an easily defeated opposition. Observe that if Trump were such a threat to the country why was CNN and the media giving him so much free publicity?
Then Trump won and the elite had a nervous breakdown. They bought into the Russia Collusion lie and supported Trump's political enemies in trying to impeach him. They lost all perspective on what was fair, what was true.
Then we had COVID and all the lies associated with it. This was followed by J6 and now we know the prevailing narrative on J6 was a total fabrication.
Trump did not create these lies. His enemies did. Trump did not destroy trust in American government and American media. His enemies did.
I think accusing the government of being Satanic pedophiles is too fringe for the counter-establishment at Fox News.
The American Federal Government is a contradiction. At its founding, Hamilton & Jefferson fought bitterly over the role of the Federal government, with Hamilton for a strong, authoritarian government and Jefferson favoring a weak and benign system. Hamilton's ideas won but Jefferson and his political party proved more attractive to the people.
Lincoln, at the Gettysburg Address affirmed the populist view, declaring "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." All the while Lincoln was greatly responsible for centralizing the power of the Federal government and increasing its authority over people.
Since President Johnson and the 1960s in particular the Federal government has greatly struggled. The elite have made many bold promises on which they have made claim on the American people and their wealth to pursue. And they have failed, over and over
There is a crisis of political and institutional legitimacy precisely because the "elite" of American society have so demonstrably failed. The response to this failure is worrisome, for what we observe is people choosing to cling to their political tribe regardless of the evidence showing the lies and errors of the tribal leadership.
The response of the elite is to accept this loyalty and exploit it further. So we get no apologies, no public acknowledgement of wrong. No admission of error. But just dogmatic persistence of the same ideology that produced failure - and so we heap failure unto failure.
How does this not end but with social, cultural, legal, political and economic collapse?