liberal democracy
Article
liberal democracy is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 28, 2022 and July 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “arguing that liberal democracy was the last form of government we would ever need”; “liberal democracy is an uneasy compromise between slave and master morality”. It most often appears alongside Putin, Trump, US.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: September 28, 2022
- Last seen: July 30, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Putin (2 shared issues)
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- Trump (2 shared issues)
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- iamverysmart (1 shared issues)
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- 4chan (1 shared issues)
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- 9-11 (1 shared issues)
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- Achilles (1 shared issues)
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- Ada Palmer (1 shared issues)
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- Africa (1 shared issues)
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- Agamemnon (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- American North (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
No! Sorry! Not that! That’s the popular misinterpretation! In 1992 he wrote a book called The End Of History And The Last Man, arguing that liberal democracy was the last form of government we would ever need, everything would get more and more liberal democracy over time, and history - in the sense of a constant progression of paradigms and worldviews and political-economic systems - would settle down and stop, in favor of everything just being liberal democracy all the time.
I think mediocre. On the one hand, nobody has a super-compelling alternative to liberal democracy yet. On the other, China has done better than expected at maintaining its autocracy and uniting it with economic prosperity, other dictatorships have muddled along, and there’s been democratic backsliding in a few countries like Turkey. I would give this prediction maybe a C-.
But I don’t think Fukuyama feels like someone who’s gotten a C-. There is a steady drip of “this proves Fukuyama was more wrong than anyone has been before” takes, which show no sign of running out. The worst was just after 9-11, during the War On Terror, when people were panicking about “the rise of Islamofascism”. See for instance The End Of The End Of History, From The End Of History To The Clash Of Civilizations, The War On Terror: The Retreat Of Liberal Democracy, and many more. Fukuyama himself wrote in October 2001 that “A stream of commentators have been asserting that the tragedy of September 11 proves that I was utterly wrong to have said more than a decade ago that we had reached the end of history”.
We should use checks, balances, vetocracy, and redistribution to limit the power of any individual to some ceiling, although people can disagree on how high the ceiling will be and right now it’s pretty high. Slave morality hates power/excellence and refuses to justify it. Master morality says power/excellence is its own justification, and the rest of us have to justify ourselves to it. Liberalism says that sure, we can probably justify power/excellence, as long as it stays within reasonable bounds and doesn’t cause trouble. Slave morality ignores benefits and sets the importance of harms at infinity. Master morality ignores harms, and sets the value of “benefits” (not that it would think of it in these terms - greatness doesn’t exist to benefit others) at infinity. Liberalism accepts the normal, finite utilitarian calculus and tries to balance benefits against harms. A final secret of this compromise is that master morality and slave morality aren’t perfect opposites. Master morality wants to embiggen itself. Slave morality wants to feel secure that everyone agrees embiggening is bad. The compromise is that we all agree embiggening is bad, but leave people free to do it anyway. So half of Western intellectual output is criticisms of capitalism and neoliberalism, yet capitalism and neoliberalism remain hegemonic5. Everybody agrees to hate billionaires; also, billionaires are richer than ever. This isn’t a complete solution - sure, we’re a free country, but we’re also a democracy, and if people hate something too much they can ban it. But add in the utilitarian justifications above, and it sort of hangs together. X. Richard Hanania So liberal democracy is an uneasy compromise between slave and master morality. One natural interpretation is that the left is the party of slave morality, and the right of master morality. I appreciate how directly Richard Hanania proves that wrong. Richard is an honest-to-goodness Nietzschean master moralist, one of the last you’ll find. Like Rand, he tries to combine Nietzschean master morality with a civilized society and obedience to law. Unlike Rand, he’s not obsessed with presenting a bunch of multi-step proofs showing exactly how it works, and honestly I’m not sure of the exact details. I find him interesting insofar as it clearly works inside his own head and he’s clearly coming from a place of aesthetic coherence. He writes: We can call my philosophy Nietzschean Liberalism. The Nietzschean part consists of the following beliefs. Just as intelligence, a moral sense, aesthetic appreciation, and other factors place humans above animals, some humans are in a very deep sense better than other humans.
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