Yes, History Goes Barrelling Along—or Perhaps Continues Its Circle…

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-10-18 Tu

FIRST: Yes, History Goes Barrelling Along—or Perhaps Continues Its Circle…

This is not the kind of essay you feel you have to write if you are in fact at the End of History. This is the kind of essay you write if you had thought you were at the End of History, but then history ignored you, blew past the sign, and kept on going—perhaps at increasing speed:

Frank Fukuyama: More Proof That This Really Is the End of History: ‘Over the past year, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of seemingly strong authoritarian states…. The concentration of power… all but guarantees low-quality decision making…. The absence of public discussion and debate… and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow…. The long-term progress of modern institutions is neither linear nor automatic. Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad…. Celebrations of the rise of strong states and the decline of liberal democracy are thus very premature. Liberal democracy, precisely because it distributes power and relies on consent of the governed, is in much better shape globally than many people think….

Unfortunately, [in] the United States… 30 to 35 percent of its voters continue to believe the false narrative that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and the Republican Party has been taken over by Donald Trump’s MAGA followers, who are doing their best to put election deniers in positions of power around the country. This group does not represent a majority… but is likely to regain control of at least the House of Representatives this November, and possibly the presidency in 2024. The party’s putative leader, Trump, has fallen deeper and deeper into a conspiracy-fueled madness….

Liberal democracy will not make a comeback unless people are willing to struggle on its behalf. The problem is that many who grow up living in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies begin to take their form of government for granted…. The Russian invasion of Ukraine… may serve to remind the current generation of what is at stake…. Ukrainians… understand the true value of freedom, and are fighting a larger battle on our behalf, a battle that all of us need to join….

Now, let me stay most strongly, that history, so far at least, does have a direction. We are a good enough anthology intelligence that our technological prowess does grow over time. We are no longer ensorcelled by the devil of Malthus: we no longer see half our babies die before five, we are no longer stunted, we no longer spend hours each day focused on how good it would be to get more calories now, and it is no longer the case that only a relative few of us have enough, and that those of us have enough because they are part of a force-and-fraud exploitation-and-domination machine composed of thugs-with-spears and their attendant bureaucrats, propagandists, and accountants.

That is real progress.

Alongside—or maybe part of—our repeated revolutions in our technologies of production have come revolutions in our technologies of communication and organization. We can assemble far larger groups of people to pull together in much more complicated ways to accomplish tasks now than was possible back earlier in history., Or maybe part of, our repeated revolutions in our technologies of production outcome, revolutions in our technologies of communication and organization. We can assemble far larger groups of people to pull together in much more complicated ways to accomplish tasks now than was possible back earlier in history.

But has there been progress in modes of political order? And have we reached the End of History in the sense that such progress in modes has come to a halt? That is what Fukuyama claims he believes. But what he writes seems to me to strongly undermine that claim. The underlying structure of his thought appears to be to be not a progress, not a journey to a destination that we have reached, but rather that we need to work hard to arrest the turning of a wheel—the Wheel of Fortune, on which we are now at the good apex, and which, if it continues to turn, will carry us downward to less desirable modes of political order.

How else are we supposed to interpret him? For he does write:

Liberal democracy will not make a comeback unless people are willing to struggle… many… in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies… take their form of government for granted…. Ukrainians… understand the true value of freedom… a battle that all of us need to join….

Do we not hear echoes? Is this not: democracy decays into ochlocracy which creates pressures for monarchy which decays into tyranny overthrown by aristocracy which decays into oligarchy which creates pressures for democracy again? Are our modes of political order really that different than those of the Athens of Pericles or Demosthenes, or the Rome of the Gracchi? Nobody would go to Cato the Elder for advice about farming technologies today. But a lot can still be learned about the “technologies” of political order from examining the declines of the Roman Republic and of Classical Athens.

For, as Thucydides the Athenian did write, in his pitch for people to read his history, political history remains very relevant to us, while technological history is of only antiquarian interest:

The absence of the fabulous in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In sum, I have written my work, not as a careerist ticket-punch or as a performance to win applause in the moment, but as a treasure for all time….

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Must-Read: &, Closely Related to Fukuyama:

But there have been some advances in the sciences of government, even if they are not as conseuentual as Madison and Hamilton, talking their book, claimed:

Adam Gurri : A Realist Defense of Legislative Supremacy: ‘Representative democracy is a moral achievement, but it is not just a moral achievement. Its great global success does not chiefly rest on its morality but on its realism. Centuries ago, the extremely militant societies of Europe established parliaments for their military and economic powers to peacefully agree upon mutually binding laws. As the age of agriculture gave way to the age of industry and commerce, modern representative institutions developed out of the old ones, better reflecting the broadening distribution of social power.. This practical lens provides… concrete answers…. A single officeholder… can afford to ignore quite a large portion of the population without much risk…. A legislature is therefore superior… because it creates advocates for specific subdivisions of the population… [to] sit at the center of political power and participate in creating the country’s laws…. We need to meet the authoritarian’s accusations of weakness and ineffectiveness with the confidence representative democracy has plainly earned….

Representative democracy has clear advantages in the field of legitimation. The early European parliamentarism from which modern representative democracy springs owes its origin precisely to the need for regimes to obtain legitimacy in the eyes of those with the power to make trouble for them…. The great practical merit of representative democracy continues to be in the function…. The ideal representative institutions ought to be exclusively legislative, involve a truly competitive multiparty system in which the votes of a group comprising even 5-10 percent of the population can make a difference under the right conditions, yet still enable the governing coalition to regularly pass legislation that successfully molds the character of the political and legal systems….

Party-led representative democracy encompasses a wide range of potential institutional forms. Some work better in general than others, some are better for particular types of societies, and all have weaknesses…. The key thing is the interaction between the formal system with the structure of the underlying society…. Here in America, we often get the worst of both worlds in terms of responsiveness and effective action. There is a great deal of low hanging fruit to be found in simply moving closer to the best institutional designs found elsewhere. We should do so, not just because it is right—which it is—but because it is practical…

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Other Things Þt Went Whizzzing by…

Very Briefly Noted:

• Charlie Warzel: The Negative Appeal of the Metaverse: ‘An era of brute-forcing innovation (or why AI art is different than Web3):  Perhaps, one day, we’ll all be trapped like legless rats in the “infinite office” of Meta’s Horizon Worlds and toiling in a parade of conference calls under stultifying virtual halogen lights...

• Aura: ‘My litmus test for “is your VR metaverse app even remotely as good as vrchat" is "are furries holding actual exercise classes in it?”…

• Nicholas Weaver: ‘The amount of bezzle in Tesla is huge. They are a second tier car-maker who's advantages have now disappeared, who's build quality is crap, and are about to get steamrollered by Ford, GM, Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes etc across all their current and future product lines…

• Brad Delong & Jacob Soll: Slouching towards a Free Market: ‘Thursday, October 20 at 4:00pm  to 5:30pm :: Zumberge Hall (ZHS), 352 3651 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089 :: Moderated book talk with authors Brad Delong and Jacob Soll…

• Rana Faroohar: Globalism Failed to Deliver the Economy We Need: ‘Trade policy is shifting to better consider labor and environmental standards, with an understanding that cheap isn’t always cheap if products are degrading the environment or being made with a child’s tiny hands. There’s also a rethink of trade in digital services to account for privacy and liberal values…. We don’t yet have a new unified field theory for the postneoliberal world. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to question the old philosophy…

• Adam Mead: No Grand Strategy: The Complete Financial History of Berkshire Hathaway: ‘Valuation confirms that it took investors until the mid-80s before they ascribed a premium to Buffett’s skills and the value of the operating businesses accumulating within the Berkshire umbrella. That’s when the price to book ratio sustainably rose above 1.0x, meaning a dollar invested at Berkshire was ascribed more than a dollar of value by the market…

• Baratunde Thurston: Rethinking Democracy After L.A.’s Racism Scandal: ‘I was feeling pretty good about the story of my own newly-adopted city, Los Angeles, and had been looking forward to returning home when I received a distressing breaking-news alert…. Multiple people on the recording can be heard complaining about Black Angelenos, and openly discussing plans to divide up the city along racial lines in ways that would protect their own power while doing little for the residents they are supposed to serve…