Democracy that we knew from 60s to 00s is effectively dead everywhere. I would like to think that social media and surveillance technology both played roles in accomplishing that so quickly and without public outcry/protests. All that blood spilled in 1900s to spread democracy wiped out in a matter of couple of years.
The Heritage Foundation has been operating since 70s. They've played the long game, and it's only now that we are, en masse, looking at the culmination of decades of work by them and thinking, "wow, that was quick!".
> both played roles in accomplishing that so quickly and without public outcry/protests.
Bread and circuses. Everyone is comfortable and entertained to the point of drooling. They won't be leaving their cozy warm houses with TV and video games to do anything. Brain isn't built that way. If it were, there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic. It'll always be short-term rewards over long-term most of the time for most people.
On the other hand, none of this is sustainable in the long-run, so it'll all come crashing down and things will work out. We'll probably be dead long before then though. Gotta go through some rough shit first.
It never existed in the first place. You just were unable to see the machinations behind the scenes when all of media was a newspaper and 3 TV stations.
I've found the most freedom on the fringes of the earth. Rural South America and Kurdish Syria to name a couple.
Anywhere with any real government though, it's dead. My theory is the period of classical liberalism in the world was largely a result of the brief period where firearms were the main form of warfare, which represented a short period in history where violence was most decentralized and the government had the least leverage. Before that it was years to train archers or swordsman, after that fighter jets/ missiles / technology tilted back in power of government. In the golden era of the age of the firearm one person was basically one vote of violence (giving the populace the greater leverage); whereas before/after that time each vote was heavily weighted by a government actor.
Can you elaborate on that? Sounds really interesting.
I grew up in a place you could call “rural South America” (specifically in a rural border town between Brazil and Uruguay) and at the time didn’t feel free there, but these days there’s a lot I think I could appreciate about the place if I were to go back (I’ve been living in the US for the past 13 years).
Reading the parent comment, I assume their use of 'freedom' more closely aligns with being undisturbed by a government.
It's a very common usage in America, focusing on "Freedom from X" rather than "Freedom to do Y", the latter of which often needs some sort of societal protection, most often provided by said government.
Interestingly, places that used to be shit holes are becoming better or at least show a desire for becoming better. For example in eastern Europe, there are movements that demands democracy and destruction of the establishment.
So if all the world is against the establishment, it only makes sense that shit holes become better places and better place become shit holes.
That's it I suspect that these moments can be quite fragile. Turkey was crashed, Georgia was crashed, Belarus was crashed, Russia was crashed, Ukraine is fighting generational war, Serbia is teetering, Bulgaria is on to something but its only a spark ATM. However, the crashed ones also did not stabilize, they just become brutal and visibly oppressed and IMHO anything still can happen.
Agreed but even in places like South Korea where they staged national weekend strikes to remove a sitting president, it’s withering away. People are tired of politics and politicians. It’s death by apathy.
South Korea was a dictatorship just 35 something years ago. And its been run by criminals and oligarchs even as a democracy. SK is not an example you can use to say anything about democracy globally.
Most left wing movements and organisations in the West drew strength from the existence of strong socialist states, both materially and ideologically. These kinds of groups were a balancing force against the right wing/capitalist direction, which is inherently undemocratic, having as its logical endpoint the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
I think the true decline begun earlier though, around the Thatcher-Reagan era, with the erosion of all kinds of state ownership and control of our economy and broad attacks on organised labour.
Is quite an assumption to make left wing movements and organizations in the West the defender of democracy. And another assumption to make the right movements the enemy of democracy. Also, take it from me who lived 15 years in communist Romania - the socialist states were very weak relative to the West.
Concentration of wealth and power was (and is) the highest in communist dictatorships - literally a handful (i.e. less than 5) people control pretty much everything in Cuba. North Korea is ruled with an iron fist by 1 guy - that is some concentration of power, right? In Communist Romania / East Germany power was concentrated in 2 people (a couple). In USSR power was concentrated in the 7 members of PolitBuro. In China power used to be concentrated in the hands of Mao Zhedong, now it seems it is concentrated in the hands of Xi Ping (but I could be wrong about Xi Ping. Maybe he shares some power with other people). I could go on forever, baby!!!
Capitalism has its problems but capitalism is quite fine all kinds of political systems - see German capitalism before, during, and following Hitler's rule.
I tend to believe that Communism provided enough of a threat to the Western elites that they felt forced to keep their countries visibly better. Not ready to defend this argument right now, I just think it does hold water.
There's a very common line of thinking that goes like this:
From the end of WWII until the fall of communism, the public in the West (as opposed to the elites) enjoyed much better treatment, and prospered more than ever before or since. This would include both fiscal gains, and the public's opinion being truly taken into consideration. This is mainly because the elites were afraid of people turning socialist / communist, so they gave them a reason to actually be invested in the system. Once that threat of communism evaporated, the elites could proceed to gut the majority as in the previous centuries with no fear whatsoever.
My comments:
I'm not sure I agree with that, though, too simplistic. On the other hand, I also think that people have a rose-tinted view of what "democracy" always was - with enough money / media control and a bit of time, you can convince the majority of anything, anywhere. Letting people prosper does make it easier. Maybe it did play a bit of a role. A counter argument is that (independent) media coverage made the Vietnam war unpopular, and then the US pulled out because of that, a miracle of democracy which never really came close to happening again ever after.
But I think the USSR itself murdered any real chances of communism's further spread in 1968, when they invaded Czechoslovakia. (The Hungarian thing in 1956 isn't nearly as important because of country's undeniable previous Axis affiliation; few had sympathy for that back then). The US and west in general couldn't get rid of their Woody Guthries, and their Klaus Fuchses, until USSR did it for them through sheer idiocy. But after that, was communism really a threat?
But I do think that the 1950s policies were affected by the war (+ Korean war) even more than communism itself. All these traumatized vets, desensitized to violence, were now back home, and the elites were truly afraid. But that doesn't seem like it brought democracy in today's sense of the word? There's a reason why feminism regressed in the 50s - letting men be little despots in their own (cheaply bought) homes was the least the government could do. But that seems to have lasted only until the mid 60s, then the Vietnam thing happened, ... Let's not go further.
I agree. I also challenge readers to watch TV broadcasts from politicians speaking in 70s, 80s and even 90s. You won't even believe your ears. But, the slow takeover of the world by international conglomerates buying up everything else, merging and bankrupting competition just doesn't seem to be on anyones mind with any power to deal with it. An acquaintance works at one of these Frankensteins monsters and there is a hodge podge of internal systems. It's hard to believe how many companies they have bought up over the decades.
"There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime."
