The current Narrative of the Educated Class is nicely captured by journalist Matt Johnson who has written a number of pro-educated class pieces at Quillette. His latest is “Chaos at the End of History.”
“The End of History” is a reference to Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man. Johnson represents Fukuyama’s argument thusly:
[Fukyama’s] central argument was that capitalist liberal democracy has proven to be the most durable political and economic system[.]
And to emphasize Fukuyama’s correct analysis, the other guys are messing up.
Meanwhile, democracy’s authoritarian challengers [like Russia and China] are foundering.
And yet, nobody is happy.
Despite the remarkable success of liberal democracy, citizens are increasingly dissatisfied with it—particularly in the world’s most powerful democracy, the United States.
And not just in the US, but Europe too. It’s the internal threats that worry Matt Johnson.
While the liberal-democratic world faces more dangerous external threats than at any point since the Cold War, the internal threats may be even more ominous. A decade ago, who could have imagined that an American president would attempt to steal an election? Or that he would then be rewarded with his party’s nomination and have a realistic shot at returning to the Oval Office?
What could be the problem?
Maybe, just maybe, the problem is that what we live in today isn’t the “capitalist liberal democracy” of the Narrative, but something else.
Maybe the problem is that “capitalist liberal democracy” isn’t very capitalist but rather oligarchic, not very liberal but rather hegemonic, and not very democratic but rather authoritarian.
The hidden clue, of course, is blazing out of the recent Rasmussen study of the Elite 1%, who typically have post-graduate degrees, live in a tony urban neighborhood and earn in excess of $150,000 per year. So when our liberal friends run around warbling about “capitalist liberal democracy” it helps to understand that, whatever we call it, the current political and cultural and economic regime has been very good to the top of the educated class with their graduate degrees.
Let us remind ourselves of Joseph Schumpeter’s line on democracy in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in Chapter XXIII:
[D]emocracy does not mean and cannot mean the that people actually rule... Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule over them... [D]emocracy is the rule of the politician.
So “Our DemocracyTM” means rule by our politicians.
Translated, that means that we elect politicians to office and then they decide whether to spend another $100 billion in Ukraine this year. Because liberal democracy.
Under capitalism, the capitalists decide where and how to invest their capital. But today in all the capitalist liberal democracies the capitalists are being ordered around by government policy that mandates an all-hands effort to convert the economy from fossil fuels to renewable energy. That’s not capitalism.
Under liberalism the government rules with a light hand and people go about their lives ruled mainly by their religious and cultural beliefs. But in our day the government censors what we can read and imposes its beliefs on the rest of us with government education and racist anti-racism. And 36 percent of the economy is government spending. That’s not liberalism.
Under democracy the people rule. In all societies with a central government the ruling class rules. That’s not democracy.
Yet Matt Johnson is shocked that populist authoritarianism has reared its head in the US and Europe.
Look Matt, ordinary people aren’t really that interested in politics. They go about their lives and vote at elections but they are really not that interested in power. But when their kids can’t afford to buy a house, then they start to wonder. When prices at the grocery store and the gas pump have gone way up they start to get restless. When ideologues at work insist they take the knee to left-wing anti-racism they start to get resentful. And when their kids come home from school spouting left-wing slogans they wonder what has happened to the good old USA of memory.
Nothing new here. Rulers always get insulted when the peasants get restless, and blame the people instead of asking themselves “are we the baddies?”