Strange to read something that basically says "things are going to continue on pretty much as they always have, etc." and it leave me feeling like I just took the biggest black pill.
Also, are u okay, bro? Have u given up? If I took this article seriously then I wouldn't really have any reason to continue reading your work (sorry I dont pay, inflation and 4 mouths to feed and all that). And honestly, if this is how u feel then why write anything else on these topics?
I think the big question is how we possibly reverse the inflation/interest rate trend of the past 50 years. What happens when everything goes bankrupt? Why seriously believe rule of law and democracy keep being things if mass lawbreaking is popular on both sides escalating?
People collectively lose faith in fiat currency, chaos ensues, something else rises up to become the new monetary standard. The details of how or when that will play out, I have no clue. But something broadly like that is the template for how the infinite money printer will finally come to an end.
I agree with that. For many people, that “something else” is already here: bitcoin. For others, bitcoin is evil. There’s already a red/blue divide here, with some Republican politicians backing bitcoin and democrats saying it’s evil because of pollution. Will democrats accept if bitcoin becomes so prevalent that it’s made a standard? Would republicans ever accept a CBDC run by a consortium of big tech companies and modern monetary theorists?
Even if you don’t like bitcoin, and don’t think it’s the future, the question still stands: what would make the red tribe accept blue money? What would make the blue tribe accept red money?
I would expect the end of fiat to be the end of rule of law and democracy in America. What some people have suggested is that the red/blue divide will pivot to become the orange/green divide.
I don't like pretending to know the future, as I consider that an extremely arrogant thing to do, so I try to avoid making any predictions below the broadest levels. But, I'd say Republicans backing CBDC is much more likely than Democrats ever even slightly entertaining the idea of bitcoin or any other alternative to the almighty fiat dollar. Republicans are still, at the end of the day, creatures of the system, and a threat to the dollar is a threat to the system itself.
Politicians as a whole (i.e. as a class, some particularly brave or sharp individuals may act otherwise) will never accept any alternative to the dollar until/unless they are forced to by an unprecedented economic catastrophe. They will try to control it, neuter it, and protect the dollar from it, at any possible cost.
What you just wrote also applies to, say, trump: even though he was the Republican nominee, plenty of republicans refused to accept him.
I agree that many politicians won’t accept bitcoin, but what about the ones that are already talking about it as being important, like Ted Cruz or Cynthia Lumis? Do you think they’ll stop supporting it? Or just remain a minority?
Remain a minority. Like I said, some people who have particularly strong character might buck the incentives/trends of their class--but the class as a whole will always bend to those influences.
Not really. "Policy decisions made in Washington will matter to a certain extent, but the most important among them won’t have much to do with what we consider hot-button political issues."
I suspect the "most important" policy decisions Hanania is especially referring to are developments in civil rights law. Not many people pay attention to it, despite its importance, it's not a "Current Thing." I will continue to read this Substack to learn about what is happening on this front. Just because the political system is stable doesn't mean fundamentally important things aren't happening!
Forcing myself to think optimistically, I'd say the prophecy here still gives space to prevent some bad things still, like castrating fewer children or having better policing or whatever.
Pessimistically, we're going to get turned into paperclips by AI.
I wouldn't (and I don't think Richard does) underrate the power of demographic changes on the culture and politics though, and that can be unpredictable. Latino-American is less liberal, and more "socialism or strongman" and we might already be seeing shades of it.
Coping even more, maybe Europe will have some alternatives at some point for white-centered nativist tech growth... Hahaha who am I kidding.
Perhaps due to confirmation bias it seemed to me that the bulk of his work is understanding wokeness and trying to turn it around. So for him to write a piece that's basically like "there's really nothing we can do about it, oh well..." just seems a little off.
Maybe others follow him for the TV show reviews, prediction markets, and transhumanism stuff.
I don’t think this piece is at all at odds with his criticisms of wokeness and message on defeating it. When writing about those issues, it’s about our day to day experience as individuals, and how that ideology impacts us when we’re at work, watching tv, applying for jobs etc. In this piece he’s zooming way out and exploring the long term stability of the nation as a whole.
Wokeness sucks ass and, as he acknowledges in the piece, has the real world negative effects such as increased crime and lower growth. Both of these issues are incredibly important on a micro level, being a victim of a crime or losing your job can be traumatic experiences. But a 10% increase in crime and 10% decrease in GDP growth is not nearly enough to undermine the stability of our institutions, especially given how poorly alternative models have performed in comparison. So yeah, wokeness is a handicap on our potential, but it is likely far more desirable to defeat it within the system than to completely dismantle our government. The discussion of how to deal with wokeness in America simply wasn’t what this piece was about.
Wokeness isn’t democracy. They’re two distinct phenomena, and one of the points of this article is that if you’re looking for a victory in the culture war, attacking democracy and looking to foreign systems of government is a damn stupid way to go about it.
It's great to update one's beliefs as the passage of time provides new data. But this would be even more interesting if you were to pre-register how future events would strengthen or reverse these recent conclusions. For example, would you change your mind if life expectancy in China were to surpass life expectancy among Asian-Americans (and not just Americans as a whole)? Or, what are each of the potential outcomes of the next global economic downturn, and which are consistent vs inconsistent with this theory?
Good question. I’m not impressed with life expectancy. I put a lot of stock in economic growth, I’d need to see it catch up to other countries of similar human capital, like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. It’s well behind and its growth slowed down before they did.
My view also puts a lot of stock in China being uncharismatic and unpopular and having others balance against it. So if it was able to say take Taiwan without experiencing a major economic shock due to sanctions, etc or inspiring a military response that would also cause me to rethink my views. Strong relationships with other countries akin to NATO or the EU would also disprove my view, or even countries welcoming substantial Chinese military bases.
I think that once President Xi is confirmed for his next term we will see a relaxation of their zero COVID approach - which was as much about ensuring political control as it was defeating a virus that originated in China. You also mentioned nothing of the similar approaches once taken by NZ etc. I don’t think the Chinese model is over yet. They will be the ones with good infrastructure and growth while the West faces a self created energy crisis and inflation.
NZ took a similar approach and then stopped once the population was vaccinated. Whether the lives saved were worth the costs or not is something smart people can disagree on. Continuing those policies in the face of Omicron with effective vaccines available is lunacy
People have said they'll end 0 covid after the congress but what actual indications of that are there? They appear to be making the investments you would make if you planned to do it indefinitely...
> I’ve always had a visceral dislike of what I call “normie theories of democracy.” We are told that democracy works because it provides checks and balances, allows for the peaceful transfer of power, and the correction of mistakes.
I think a semi-implicit condition of these theories is that this democracy allows for radical opposition, some amount of riotous protests and at least plausible outside challenge (military or economic). The existence of the Sweden-Democrats forced the Social-Democrats to move back to the middle; Giorgia Meloni's ascendance is likely going to discourage future heavy-handed lockdowns in Italy; the shadow of the Kiev Majdan prevented Zelensky from making any overly strong concessions to Russia (even though he was elected as a dove). Ironically, the "most Western" countries like the US, Germany and France are the ones where these conditions are least satisfied: In Germany, the government has been keeping the Right out of ruling coalitions through a ridiculous informal system of "secondary sanctions" (the most famous case being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Thuringian_government_crisis ); the French Right is constantly battling what in the US would be considered brazen SLAPP lawsuits; and then there is the US, where some parts of the GOP are doing everything they can to speed up their ostracism.
My pet theory is that there is a "size penalty" in force here: Not just democracy, but any kind of responsible government becomes harder to maintain the larger (in population) and more heterogeneous (ethnically, culturally and even economically) a country is. Feedback takes longer to reach the government; local protest is easier to extinguish and marginalize; problems can stay unnoticed for longer while everyone is watching federal politics or pretending it doesn't need to concern them. This doesn't mean that we should try to break up states willy-nilly; Ukraine would probably have been a lot less successful if it entered the war in two pieces, and a divided Britain would be missing at least some of its current influence. But descriptively, it seems like a good predictor for success/failure of states where it would otherwise be surprising. Many small countries (including ones I thought well-governed, like Israel) went draconian on COVID restrictions early on, but quickly let go once they realized it wasn't sustainable or particularly well-advised. Being small and not overly bureaucratized, they reversed their policies without much trouble. Meanwhile, China's government can afford to live in the clouds for a while with its GDP, and the US, even as its government rightly changed course, is struggling to keep significant parts of its population on board.
This also means that success stories like Singapore, Israel, Estonia, Switzerland are perhaps less impressive than they look like -- sure, they've been going the right way, but they also had an easier time finding and following it. I've been joking that whoever loses the 2022 Sweden elections should get to rule Germany as a consolation prize, but in reality they would soon be suffering from the same problems that plague German politics. I'm afraid having Lee Kuan Yew preside over China won't be much better.
Obviously, this also means that the EU should be blown down to its role from the 1990s, but I doubt anyone commenting on this blog would disagree with that.
Large countries, like large companies, often suffer bureaucratic and responsiveness issues. But they also benefit from their size in terms of common markets, economies of scale, etc. So in total it comes down to the specifics and whether one outweighs the other.
Maybe you'll be surprised, but I hope to see the EU become a more perfect union, as it were, in my lifetime. I think their situation is not entirely dissimilar from the one facing Britain's former American colonies in the early years after they won their independence.
Agreed, if your notion of "perfect" involves focusing on areas in which concerted action is at its most useful (such as foreign policy), not trying to dictate laws to its member countries.
I generally agree with your policy priority, but I disagree that there are not economic benefits to larger scale, for the US in particular. The US is home to nearly all the world's most important megacorps, which drive the US economy, and it's just not a coincidence that all the largest companies are located in the world's largest economy. In every winner-take-all race for a new technology, a US company wins and companies in the rest of the world are left fighting over the scraps, mostly in their own domestic markets.
You can't really find any benefits of economies of scale if you compare European or Asian economies, and we could talk about reasons for that, but it's pretty stark in the North American comparison. Why is Canada, with a seemingly-better demographic profile and more natural resources per capita, so much poorer than the US? If it's just that much more poorly governed, this would seem to discredit the idea of a "size penalty" to governance, but I really don't think that's the reason. The difference is economies of scale: the world's largest economy next to a mid-sized one.
We can bemoan the power of the megacorps, argue that they are socially destructive and too little of the value they extract makes it to the working classes, and I'd mostly agree. But US megacorps are in the position they are in because the US is a unified economy, which means that nearly all the power and wealth in the US wants to keep things that way.
Canada has long had a productivity problem when you search the economic literature that tries to separate its underlying productivity from the pricing power of its natural resources. E.g. here was the first piece I found, which directly blames the productivity problem on small firm size (which I would argue is partly a function of small nation size): https://irpp.org/research-studies/cracking-canadas-productivity-conundrum/
As I noted, you can't really find direct evidence of economies of scale being beneficial in Europe. Mostly what's happening is:
1. Microstates tend to be rich for microstate-specific reasons that aren't scalable and that are mostly zero-sum (i.e., there is a given demand for microstate services and the pricing for their services would deteriorate if more microstates were supplied).
2. The EU is something of an equalizer within Europe.
3. There isn't a single economy that dominates Europe in quite the same way the US dominates the West -- if Germany had 200 million people, maybe things would be different.
National economies of scale come from having relatively low friction from operating within a given national market, and for the mobility of labor within that market.
Crossing state lines in the US today is lower friction than crossing national lines in the EU, which in turn is lower friction than going across a closed national boundary. As you empower state governments to create more of this sort of friction, this equation could change, and the corps hate that idea. I.e., if Texas starts successfully punishing California-based tech companies for Woke policies and California punishes Texas-based tech companies for insufficiently Woke policies, you might see the US become less of a national market as it becomes harder for companies to operate in both places at once.
Hanania’s liberal turn can be explained very simply by his acquiescence to his Silicon Valley paymasters and their social circles. Sad to see how easily the biggest troll on twitter got co-opted by social approval and money.
Or maybe he's just observing reality and willing to alienate a part of his audience if it means he gets to say things as he feels they are. The worst thing that can happen to any writer is being held captive by his audience in fear of not offending them.
FWIW, I agree with his points and have largely thought similar thoughts for years. It can be blackpilling to conservatives, but whatever happened to "facts don't care about your feelings'?
Genuinely disappointing piece! History is LONG, Richard! For hundreds of years in Europe you could have said that feudalism would never end, and for hundreds of years you'd be proven right. And then....
Is Brazil a "liberal democracy?" If so, then liberal democracy can last forever. But remember - America is fast becoming a hybrid of Honduras and Bangladesh. The days of happy-go-lucky Anglo-America are over, and instead we are quickly becoming a Brazil of twerking and mobilized hordes. If you call this a "democracy," then sure. But is it really?
>While Democrats may be in favor of allowing “gender affirming care” for minors and Republicans might oppose it, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell wouldn’t dare misgender a trans adult.
The notion that this state of affairs would continue and even solidify is one of the most depressing things imaginable to me. I agree that China and Russia are not credible threats or alternatives to the "liberal" order we have here. If we are to have change, it will have to come from within, not because Putin or Xi somehow magically showed us the way. But good Lord do I hope it can come somehow. The idea of leftism, in particular on this issue, simply continuing to harden as the status quo indefinitely feels like the final black pill to me, if that's really what one believes we're in for.
I would like to think that this will not happen with the gender insanity, with the transgender issue being fundamentally different from gays in the sense that "we just want to be left alone" works relatively well when it comes to something like gay marriage, and not so well when it comes to transgender people demanding that you engage in forced speech to accommodate their condition.
But, who knows. Anyone betting that the left will just keep "progressing" with little more than token resistance would've certainly been right so far.
For this very reason, I think the trans hype will die down and its concomitant social taboos will go down with it. Novelty wears off, waves of moralistic "awakening" decay to cynicism, and regret stories will pile up. Two years ago I remember saying I'd give the whole thing 10 years, so for the sake of consistency:
You are a big supporter of prediction markets. Prediction markets are a bit similar to democracy in the way they trust the wisdom of the crowds. So preferring ballots to dictators should have been a natural instinct to you.
You didn't mention Sweden but it is pretty amazing how the most progressive nation on earth has just elected a far-right coalition when the excesses of third world immigration became unbearable. Democracy has innate flexibility.
Russia was forced into war *because* it was non-Progressive (it isn't "Conservative", it just has a different ideological spectrum). It could only have been allowed to grow into a "medium European economy" if it accepted Progressivism as its state religion. What then? Just another dying, deracinating 19th century nationstate holdover with different colors on the wrapper. Russia may lose this war, because it isn't a particularly strong country, but it had no choice to fight it.
"Zero Covid" was the West's religion for two years. Now it's China's religion. Dumb I guess, but it's not like the West washed its hands of the dumb just because its media ordered peons (including yourself) to pretend they hadn't been hysterical about covid as recently as January and February this year (remember Austria's 2G+ regime and plans to criminalize being unvaccinated?). The priorities of the rulers changed but the West's dumbasses who did Zero Covid did not lose their positions. They are still there.
One could make a broader argument that neither Russia (a post-Bolshevik country that by no means purged the previous ideology) nor China (a current Bolshevik country) has ever been free of Progressivism in this century. They both inherited very much the same priors as the West. Let's see a Christian orthodox Russia with a birth rate of 7 children per women or a China with a divine Emperor that has no need to appeal to public opinion and see how well the West would be doing. Instead, they're fighting very much the same sort of states just with less incumbency advantage of having won recent conflicts and seized vassals.
The deep problem with "liberal democracy" (Progressivism) is the same as all dying later stage empires which is that it wants a population of atomized eunuchs. Is it going to get it? Probably. And as it gets closer and closer, it becomes easier and easier to conquer until a horse tribe of a few dozen people can come in, knock over the eunuch-bureaucrat "elite" and conquer or slaughter the serfs with minimal opposition. Is that a hundred years away? So what?
"Let's see a Christian orthodox Russia with a birth rate of 7 children per women or a China with a divine Emperor that has no need to appeal to public opinion and see how well the West would be doing." Well the last time the West did pretty well for itself.
"The West" is the American Empire, which didn't exist until after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, so I don't exactly know what you mean by that statement.
Do you mean the Napoleonic Wars, in which Russian troops marched into Paris? The Holy Alliance, where Russia dictated the power balance and even internal policies of Europe as far as the Rhine, much in the way the US does today? Something else?
That's a pretty specific definition of 'the west' that I don't think is standard... anyway there certainly was a 'west' by whatever definition in 1900.
My point is that we had that Russia and that China at the beginning of the 20th century and look what happened.
If you meant something else, I invited you to clarify.
Russia in 1900 was part of the European great power system with widespread alliances in Europe. Are you implying that the First World War was a crusade by the West (e.g. the German Kaiserreich and the Ottoman Empire) against non-Western Russia and its allies (e.g. Britain and France)?
The idea of "The West" as a strategic unit does not make sense until an overwhelming part of Europe's war capacity is bound in a permanent "alliance" to the USA which is a mid 20th century phenomenon.
If Russia had maintained its population trajectory of 1917 it would have about half a billion inhabitants today and world politics would look very different. Instead they were rapidly accelerated in the 20s and 30s to a family structure that the West is only just obtaining today, with the result that they have an aging population of around 140 million. This is the main cause of Russia's current strategic weakness today and it's a result of abandoning those Christian-feudalist institutions in 1917.
The whole point I am making is that Russia's institutions are substantially similar to those of the West and they were both created by people with similar worldviews. Russians do not see themselves as conservative or Putin as a conservative Russian and in large part these views are accurate. If you are merely stating that 20th century Russia wasn't able to preserve its reactionary institutions against Western Progressives then I agree.
The 'west' is not a strategic unit of countries who always fight on the same side in wars, it is more of a rather hazy cultural group that has had a lot of different definitions over the centuries. Countries that are part of it have often fought each other in the past. Its an idea older than the cold war.
You seem to be using 'the west' as a synonym for post-WW2 "western bloc" or "first world" countries. There's certainly lots of overlap but the concepts are different.
Just because liberal democracy produces better results does not at all mean it will become the default organization of human societies. There are more basic forces at work. From the time we came down from the trees humans have schemed, made war, plundered and murdered to gain power over other humans. Liberal democracy is a historical oddity at this point, created by men of the Enlightenment. Human nature is working hard to destroy it, every day.
Preserving a liberal democracy requires leaders willing to respect constitutional restraints. Many if not most of the people who rise to the top leadership positions will chafe at those restraints - it’s just human nature. Over time, the limits will be broken down and a one-party system of government will inexorably grow to dominate society with a corresponding loss of individual liberty. Liberal democracies corrode from within.
I wonder if Fukuyama would have called the increasingly authoritarian-leaning government that we have now in the West "liberalism"? And doesn't the transformation of the political ideology of the West violate Fukuyama's prediction, even though its still Western hegemony?
Are you claiming that the governments today in the west are significantly different in deep ideological terms from the ones existing when Fukuyama wrote his book?
If you truly hope to become the best intellectual in the twenty-first century, you're gonna have to do better than this, Hanania.
You're overupdating on the lockdowns. Chinese liberals are on the ascent, and will likely pressure Xi into relaxing Zero Covid. More broadly, the higher conformity of Asians might have downsides, but higher-comformity countries, -Germany, Japan, etc-, usually are more successful. Don't let your personaly distate for lockdowns and mask mandates alter your worldview.
Also, talk of democracy is usually misguided. What classical thinkers, such as Machiavelli in his Discourse on Livy, and we moderns, mean by democracy are two very different things. They would call what we live in an oligarchic republic, not a democracy. And they might call the Chinese that, too. It's not as if they had proven unable to adapt ; they've walked away from communism, for God's sake.
For states, there's a tradeoff between centralizing power, to be able to plan and make sacrifices for the future, and decentralizing, which improves efficiency. China and Russia are currently more centralized than most Western democracies. However, FDR, Churchill and de Gaulle all amassed amounts of political power comparable to what Xi has today. We should neither make ideological pronouncements nor talk about "democracies" and "dictatorships" ; what a state claims to be, whether socialist, democratic, fascist, or anything really, and what it is, have almost nothing to do with each other.
Strange to read something that basically says "things are going to continue on pretty much as they always have, etc." and it leave me feeling like I just took the biggest black pill.
Also, are u okay, bro? Have u given up? If I took this article seriously then I wouldn't really have any reason to continue reading your work (sorry I dont pay, inflation and 4 mouths to feed and all that). And honestly, if this is how u feel then why write anything else on these topics?
Updating your beliefs based on experimental evidence. Looks quite like Richard to me.
I think the big question is how we possibly reverse the inflation/interest rate trend of the past 50 years. What happens when everything goes bankrupt? Why seriously believe rule of law and democracy keep being things if mass lawbreaking is popular on both sides escalating?
People collectively lose faith in fiat currency, chaos ensues, something else rises up to become the new monetary standard. The details of how or when that will play out, I have no clue. But something broadly like that is the template for how the infinite money printer will finally come to an end.
I agree with that. For many people, that “something else” is already here: bitcoin. For others, bitcoin is evil. There’s already a red/blue divide here, with some Republican politicians backing bitcoin and democrats saying it’s evil because of pollution. Will democrats accept if bitcoin becomes so prevalent that it’s made a standard? Would republicans ever accept a CBDC run by a consortium of big tech companies and modern monetary theorists?
Even if you don’t like bitcoin, and don’t think it’s the future, the question still stands: what would make the red tribe accept blue money? What would make the blue tribe accept red money?
I would expect the end of fiat to be the end of rule of law and democracy in America. What some people have suggested is that the red/blue divide will pivot to become the orange/green divide.
I don't like pretending to know the future, as I consider that an extremely arrogant thing to do, so I try to avoid making any predictions below the broadest levels. But, I'd say Republicans backing CBDC is much more likely than Democrats ever even slightly entertaining the idea of bitcoin or any other alternative to the almighty fiat dollar. Republicans are still, at the end of the day, creatures of the system, and a threat to the dollar is a threat to the system itself.
Politicians as a whole (i.e. as a class, some particularly brave or sharp individuals may act otherwise) will never accept any alternative to the dollar until/unless they are forced to by an unprecedented economic catastrophe. They will try to control it, neuter it, and protect the dollar from it, at any possible cost.
What you just wrote also applies to, say, trump: even though he was the Republican nominee, plenty of republicans refused to accept him.
I agree that many politicians won’t accept bitcoin, but what about the ones that are already talking about it as being important, like Ted Cruz or Cynthia Lumis? Do you think they’ll stop supporting it? Or just remain a minority?
Remain a minority. Like I said, some people who have particularly strong character might buck the incentives/trends of their class--but the class as a whole will always bend to those influences.
Not really. "Policy decisions made in Washington will matter to a certain extent, but the most important among them won’t have much to do with what we consider hot-button political issues."
I suspect the "most important" policy decisions Hanania is especially referring to are developments in civil rights law. Not many people pay attention to it, despite its importance, it's not a "Current Thing." I will continue to read this Substack to learn about what is happening on this front. Just because the political system is stable doesn't mean fundamentally important things aren't happening!
Forcing myself to think optimistically, I'd say the prophecy here still gives space to prevent some bad things still, like castrating fewer children or having better policing or whatever.
Pessimistically, we're going to get turned into paperclips by AI.
I wouldn't (and I don't think Richard does) underrate the power of demographic changes on the culture and politics though, and that can be unpredictable. Latino-American is less liberal, and more "socialism or strongman" and we might already be seeing shades of it.
Coping even more, maybe Europe will have some alternatives at some point for white-centered nativist tech growth... Hahaha who am I kidding.
Plenty to write about. We’ll argue about the flavor of lib democracy, like FDR, clinton neolib, compassionate con, 1920s, ect
Perhaps due to confirmation bias it seemed to me that the bulk of his work is understanding wokeness and trying to turn it around. So for him to write a piece that's basically like "there's really nothing we can do about it, oh well..." just seems a little off.
Maybe others follow him for the TV show reviews, prediction markets, and transhumanism stuff.
I don’t think this piece is at all at odds with his criticisms of wokeness and message on defeating it. When writing about those issues, it’s about our day to day experience as individuals, and how that ideology impacts us when we’re at work, watching tv, applying for jobs etc. In this piece he’s zooming way out and exploring the long term stability of the nation as a whole.
Wokeness sucks ass and, as he acknowledges in the piece, has the real world negative effects such as increased crime and lower growth. Both of these issues are incredibly important on a micro level, being a victim of a crime or losing your job can be traumatic experiences. But a 10% increase in crime and 10% decrease in GDP growth is not nearly enough to undermine the stability of our institutions, especially given how poorly alternative models have performed in comparison. So yeah, wokeness is a handicap on our potential, but it is likely far more desirable to defeat it within the system than to completely dismantle our government. The discussion of how to deal with wokeness in America simply wasn’t what this piece was about.
Wokeness isn’t democracy. They’re two distinct phenomena, and one of the points of this article is that if you’re looking for a victory in the culture war, attacking democracy and looking to foreign systems of government is a damn stupid way to go about it.
It's great to update one's beliefs as the passage of time provides new data. But this would be even more interesting if you were to pre-register how future events would strengthen or reverse these recent conclusions. For example, would you change your mind if life expectancy in China were to surpass life expectancy among Asian-Americans (and not just Americans as a whole)? Or, what are each of the potential outcomes of the next global economic downturn, and which are consistent vs inconsistent with this theory?
Good question. I’m not impressed with life expectancy. I put a lot of stock in economic growth, I’d need to see it catch up to other countries of similar human capital, like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. It’s well behind and its growth slowed down before they did.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-state-driven-growth-model-is-running-out-of-gas-11563372006
My view also puts a lot of stock in China being uncharismatic and unpopular and having others balance against it. So if it was able to say take Taiwan without experiencing a major economic shock due to sanctions, etc or inspiring a military response that would also cause me to rethink my views. Strong relationships with other countries akin to NATO or the EU would also disprove my view, or even countries welcoming substantial Chinese military bases.
I think that once President Xi is confirmed for his next term we will see a relaxation of their zero COVID approach - which was as much about ensuring political control as it was defeating a virus that originated in China. You also mentioned nothing of the similar approaches once taken by NZ etc. I don’t think the Chinese model is over yet. They will be the ones with good infrastructure and growth while the West faces a self created energy crisis and inflation.
NZ took a similar approach and then stopped once the population was vaccinated. Whether the lives saved were worth the costs or not is something smart people can disagree on. Continuing those policies in the face of Omicron with effective vaccines available is lunacy
People have said they'll end 0 covid after the congress but what actual indications of that are there? They appear to be making the investments you would make if you planned to do it indefinitely...
> I’ve always had a visceral dislike of what I call “normie theories of democracy.” We are told that democracy works because it provides checks and balances, allows for the peaceful transfer of power, and the correction of mistakes.
I think a semi-implicit condition of these theories is that this democracy allows for radical opposition, some amount of riotous protests and at least plausible outside challenge (military or economic). The existence of the Sweden-Democrats forced the Social-Democrats to move back to the middle; Giorgia Meloni's ascendance is likely going to discourage future heavy-handed lockdowns in Italy; the shadow of the Kiev Majdan prevented Zelensky from making any overly strong concessions to Russia (even though he was elected as a dove). Ironically, the "most Western" countries like the US, Germany and France are the ones where these conditions are least satisfied: In Germany, the government has been keeping the Right out of ruling coalitions through a ridiculous informal system of "secondary sanctions" (the most famous case being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Thuringian_government_crisis ); the French Right is constantly battling what in the US would be considered brazen SLAPP lawsuits; and then there is the US, where some parts of the GOP are doing everything they can to speed up their ostracism.
My pet theory is that there is a "size penalty" in force here: Not just democracy, but any kind of responsible government becomes harder to maintain the larger (in population) and more heterogeneous (ethnically, culturally and even economically) a country is. Feedback takes longer to reach the government; local protest is easier to extinguish and marginalize; problems can stay unnoticed for longer while everyone is watching federal politics or pretending it doesn't need to concern them. This doesn't mean that we should try to break up states willy-nilly; Ukraine would probably have been a lot less successful if it entered the war in two pieces, and a divided Britain would be missing at least some of its current influence. But descriptively, it seems like a good predictor for success/failure of states where it would otherwise be surprising. Many small countries (including ones I thought well-governed, like Israel) went draconian on COVID restrictions early on, but quickly let go once they realized it wasn't sustainable or particularly well-advised. Being small and not overly bureaucratized, they reversed their policies without much trouble. Meanwhile, China's government can afford to live in the clouds for a while with its GDP, and the US, even as its government rightly changed course, is struggling to keep significant parts of its population on board.
This also means that success stories like Singapore, Israel, Estonia, Switzerland are perhaps less impressive than they look like -- sure, they've been going the right way, but they also had an easier time finding and following it. I've been joking that whoever loses the 2022 Sweden elections should get to rule Germany as a consolation prize, but in reality they would soon be suffering from the same problems that plague German politics. I'm afraid having Lee Kuan Yew preside over China won't be much better.
Obviously, this also means that the EU should be blown down to its role from the 1990s, but I doubt anyone commenting on this blog would disagree with that.
Large countries, like large companies, often suffer bureaucratic and responsiveness issues. But they also benefit from their size in terms of common markets, economies of scale, etc. So in total it comes down to the specifics and whether one outweighs the other.
Maybe you'll be surprised, but I hope to see the EU become a more perfect union, as it were, in my lifetime. I think their situation is not entirely dissimilar from the one facing Britain's former American colonies in the early years after they won their independence.
Agreed, if your notion of "perfect" involves focusing on areas in which concerted action is at its most useful (such as foreign policy), not trying to dictate laws to its member countries.
I generally agree with your policy priority, but I disagree that there are not economic benefits to larger scale, for the US in particular. The US is home to nearly all the world's most important megacorps, which drive the US economy, and it's just not a coincidence that all the largest companies are located in the world's largest economy. In every winner-take-all race for a new technology, a US company wins and companies in the rest of the world are left fighting over the scraps, mostly in their own domestic markets.
You can't really find any benefits of economies of scale if you compare European or Asian economies, and we could talk about reasons for that, but it's pretty stark in the North American comparison. Why is Canada, with a seemingly-better demographic profile and more natural resources per capita, so much poorer than the US? If it's just that much more poorly governed, this would seem to discredit the idea of a "size penalty" to governance, but I really don't think that's the reason. The difference is economies of scale: the world's largest economy next to a mid-sized one.
We can bemoan the power of the megacorps, argue that they are socially destructive and too little of the value they extract makes it to the working classes, and I'd mostly agree. But US megacorps are in the position they are in because the US is a unified economy, which means that nearly all the power and wealth in the US wants to keep things that way.
Canada has long had a productivity problem when you search the economic literature that tries to separate its underlying productivity from the pricing power of its natural resources. E.g. here was the first piece I found, which directly blames the productivity problem on small firm size (which I would argue is partly a function of small nation size): https://irpp.org/research-studies/cracking-canadas-productivity-conundrum/
As I noted, you can't really find direct evidence of economies of scale being beneficial in Europe. Mostly what's happening is:
1. Microstates tend to be rich for microstate-specific reasons that aren't scalable and that are mostly zero-sum (i.e., there is a given demand for microstate services and the pricing for their services would deteriorate if more microstates were supplied).
2. The EU is something of an equalizer within Europe.
3. There isn't a single economy that dominates Europe in quite the same way the US dominates the West -- if Germany had 200 million people, maybe things would be different.
National economies of scale come from having relatively low friction from operating within a given national market, and for the mobility of labor within that market.
Crossing state lines in the US today is lower friction than crossing national lines in the EU, which in turn is lower friction than going across a closed national boundary. As you empower state governments to create more of this sort of friction, this equation could change, and the corps hate that idea. I.e., if Texas starts successfully punishing California-based tech companies for Woke policies and California punishes Texas-based tech companies for insufficiently Woke policies, you might see the US become less of a national market as it becomes harder for companies to operate in both places at once.
Hanania’s liberal turn can be explained very simply by his acquiescence to his Silicon Valley paymasters and their social circles. Sad to see how easily the biggest troll on twitter got co-opted by social approval and money.
Or maybe he's just observing reality and willing to alienate a part of his audience if it means he gets to say things as he feels they are. The worst thing that can happen to any writer is being held captive by his audience in fear of not offending them.
FWIW, I agree with his points and have largely thought similar thoughts for years. It can be blackpilling to conservatives, but whatever happened to "facts don't care about your feelings'?
Genuinely disappointing piece! History is LONG, Richard! For hundreds of years in Europe you could have said that feudalism would never end, and for hundreds of years you'd be proven right. And then....
Is Brazil a "liberal democracy?" If so, then liberal democracy can last forever. But remember - America is fast becoming a hybrid of Honduras and Bangladesh. The days of happy-go-lucky Anglo-America are over, and instead we are quickly becoming a Brazil of twerking and mobilized hordes. If you call this a "democracy," then sure. But is it really?
>While Democrats may be in favor of allowing “gender affirming care” for minors and Republicans might oppose it, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell wouldn’t dare misgender a trans adult.
The notion that this state of affairs would continue and even solidify is one of the most depressing things imaginable to me. I agree that China and Russia are not credible threats or alternatives to the "liberal" order we have here. If we are to have change, it will have to come from within, not because Putin or Xi somehow magically showed us the way. But good Lord do I hope it can come somehow. The idea of leftism, in particular on this issue, simply continuing to harden as the status quo indefinitely feels like the final black pill to me, if that's really what one believes we're in for.
It seems the most likely outcome to me. We saw a change so quick and so thorough on gays that it gives you whiplash to think about it.
I would like to think that this will not happen with the gender insanity, with the transgender issue being fundamentally different from gays in the sense that "we just want to be left alone" works relatively well when it comes to something like gay marriage, and not so well when it comes to transgender people demanding that you engage in forced speech to accommodate their condition.
But, who knows. Anyone betting that the left will just keep "progressing" with little more than token resistance would've certainly been right so far.
For this very reason, I think the trans hype will die down and its concomitant social taboos will go down with it. Novelty wears off, waves of moralistic "awakening" decay to cynicism, and regret stories will pile up. Two years ago I remember saying I'd give the whole thing 10 years, so for the sake of consistency:
!remind_me 8 years
You are a big supporter of prediction markets. Prediction markets are a bit similar to democracy in the way they trust the wisdom of the crowds. So preferring ballots to dictators should have been a natural instinct to you.
You didn't mention Sweden but it is pretty amazing how the most progressive nation on earth has just elected a far-right coalition when the excesses of third world immigration became unbearable. Democracy has innate flexibility.
Shallow argument.
Russia was forced into war *because* it was non-Progressive (it isn't "Conservative", it just has a different ideological spectrum). It could only have been allowed to grow into a "medium European economy" if it accepted Progressivism as its state religion. What then? Just another dying, deracinating 19th century nationstate holdover with different colors on the wrapper. Russia may lose this war, because it isn't a particularly strong country, but it had no choice to fight it.
"Zero Covid" was the West's religion for two years. Now it's China's religion. Dumb I guess, but it's not like the West washed its hands of the dumb just because its media ordered peons (including yourself) to pretend they hadn't been hysterical about covid as recently as January and February this year (remember Austria's 2G+ regime and plans to criminalize being unvaccinated?). The priorities of the rulers changed but the West's dumbasses who did Zero Covid did not lose their positions. They are still there.
One could make a broader argument that neither Russia (a post-Bolshevik country that by no means purged the previous ideology) nor China (a current Bolshevik country) has ever been free of Progressivism in this century. They both inherited very much the same priors as the West. Let's see a Christian orthodox Russia with a birth rate of 7 children per women or a China with a divine Emperor that has no need to appeal to public opinion and see how well the West would be doing. Instead, they're fighting very much the same sort of states just with less incumbency advantage of having won recent conflicts and seized vassals.
The deep problem with "liberal democracy" (Progressivism) is the same as all dying later stage empires which is that it wants a population of atomized eunuchs. Is it going to get it? Probably. And as it gets closer and closer, it becomes easier and easier to conquer until a horse tribe of a few dozen people can come in, knock over the eunuch-bureaucrat "elite" and conquer or slaughter the serfs with minimal opposition. Is that a hundred years away? So what?
"Let's see a Christian orthodox Russia with a birth rate of 7 children per women or a China with a divine Emperor that has no need to appeal to public opinion and see how well the West would be doing." Well the last time the West did pretty well for itself.
"The West" is the American Empire, which didn't exist until after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, so I don't exactly know what you mean by that statement.
Do you mean the Napoleonic Wars, in which Russian troops marched into Paris? The Holy Alliance, where Russia dictated the power balance and even internal policies of Europe as far as the Rhine, much in the way the US does today? Something else?
That's a pretty specific definition of 'the west' that I don't think is standard... anyway there certainly was a 'west' by whatever definition in 1900.
My point is that we had that Russia and that China at the beginning of the 20th century and look what happened.
If you meant something else, I invited you to clarify.
Russia in 1900 was part of the European great power system with widespread alliances in Europe. Are you implying that the First World War was a crusade by the West (e.g. the German Kaiserreich and the Ottoman Empire) against non-Western Russia and its allies (e.g. Britain and France)?
The idea of "The West" as a strategic unit does not make sense until an overwhelming part of Europe's war capacity is bound in a permanent "alliance" to the USA which is a mid 20th century phenomenon.
If Russia had maintained its population trajectory of 1917 it would have about half a billion inhabitants today and world politics would look very different. Instead they were rapidly accelerated in the 20s and 30s to a family structure that the West is only just obtaining today, with the result that they have an aging population of around 140 million. This is the main cause of Russia's current strategic weakness today and it's a result of abandoning those Christian-feudalist institutions in 1917.
The whole point I am making is that Russia's institutions are substantially similar to those of the West and they were both created by people with similar worldviews. Russians do not see themselves as conservative or Putin as a conservative Russian and in large part these views are accurate. If you are merely stating that 20th century Russia wasn't able to preserve its reactionary institutions against Western Progressives then I agree.
The 'west' is not a strategic unit of countries who always fight on the same side in wars, it is more of a rather hazy cultural group that has had a lot of different definitions over the centuries. Countries that are part of it have often fought each other in the past. Its an idea older than the cold war.
You seem to be using 'the west' as a synonym for post-WW2 "western bloc" or "first world" countries. There's certainly lots of overlap but the concepts are different.
"Democracy is the road to socialism" Karl Marx
Since the advent of democracy:
- taxes were never so high
- the state was never so patronizing
- the regulatory burden was never so heavy
- the surveillance state was never so snoopy
- political power was never so centralized
- the currency was never so worthless
- totalitarianism was never to close
- economic growth was never so low
Just because liberal democracy produces better results does not at all mean it will become the default organization of human societies. There are more basic forces at work. From the time we came down from the trees humans have schemed, made war, plundered and murdered to gain power over other humans. Liberal democracy is a historical oddity at this point, created by men of the Enlightenment. Human nature is working hard to destroy it, every day.
Why? If liberal democracies on average outproduce and outfight and outcoordinate other systems, then how will they *not* become dominant?
Preserving a liberal democracy requires leaders willing to respect constitutional restraints. Many if not most of the people who rise to the top leadership positions will chafe at those restraints - it’s just human nature. Over time, the limits will be broken down and a one-party system of government will inexorably grow to dominate society with a corresponding loss of individual liberty. Liberal democracies corrode from within.
I wonder if Fukuyama would have called the increasingly authoritarian-leaning government that we have now in the West "liberalism"? And doesn't the transformation of the political ideology of the West violate Fukuyama's prediction, even though its still Western hegemony?
Are you claiming that the governments today in the west are significantly different in deep ideological terms from the ones existing when Fukuyama wrote his book?
Uhm, clearly yes? Italy-style lockdowns were unthinkable in the West in the 1990s, as was most of wokeness (other than as satire).
This entire article reads like it was written by someone who went into a coma in 1998 and woke up last month.
If you truly hope to become the best intellectual in the twenty-first century, you're gonna have to do better than this, Hanania.
You're overupdating on the lockdowns. Chinese liberals are on the ascent, and will likely pressure Xi into relaxing Zero Covid. More broadly, the higher conformity of Asians might have downsides, but higher-comformity countries, -Germany, Japan, etc-, usually are more successful. Don't let your personaly distate for lockdowns and mask mandates alter your worldview.
Also, talk of democracy is usually misguided. What classical thinkers, such as Machiavelli in his Discourse on Livy, and we moderns, mean by democracy are two very different things. They would call what we live in an oligarchic republic, not a democracy. And they might call the Chinese that, too. It's not as if they had proven unable to adapt ; they've walked away from communism, for God's sake.
For states, there's a tradeoff between centralizing power, to be able to plan and make sacrifices for the future, and decentralizing, which improves efficiency. China and Russia are currently more centralized than most Western democracies. However, FDR, Churchill and de Gaulle all amassed amounts of political power comparable to what Xi has today. We should neither make ideological pronouncements nor talk about "democracies" and "dictatorships" ; what a state claims to be, whether socialist, democratic, fascist, or anything really, and what it is, have almost nothing to do with each other.
Fantastic post
Respect to you for being honest enough to admit all this.