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    Farewell to Democracy?: Lessons Past and Present
    Farewell to Democracy?: Lessons Past and Present
    Farewell to Democracy?: Lessons Past and Present
    Ebook133 pages1 hour

    Farewell to Democracy?: Lessons Past and Present

    By Jack Luzkow

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    About this ebook

    If you think you are living in an era of post-truth, you likely are. If something sounds like magical thinking, it is. Nationalism makes no country great; it often leads to war, genocide, terror, destroyed economies and the turning of cities into rubble. Technology will not get us to paradise. It has made us more unequal than ever, polluted democracy, heightened job risk (displacement), created ever more billionaires, continued the rapid pace of the destruction of the planet, and transformed us from citizens into consumers, often with our active support. The free market is not free; too often it isn’t even a market (because we live in an age of monopoly). The road to serfdom is paved by demagogues, not the state; the state and its institutions are all we have. Trust expertise. Truth does not come from he who shouts the loudest. You are approaching a one-party-state when facts are relativized, science is denied, experts are mocked and threatened, alternative facts are embraced, minorities are criminalized, and lying is normalized. Farewell to Democracy? reminds us that we have been here before. It tells us that we can avoid a repetition of the past, but we must first know what that past was (and is). Farewell to Democracy? insists that nothing is inevitable. That we are not powerless. That we have institutions to help protect us, which we must protect in turn. It shows us what happens when we speak truth to power. It details the strength of mass protest. It pulls back the veil on Post-Truth. It urges all of us to bear witness and to "show up."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Hunt Publishing
    Release dateMar 26, 2021
    ISBN9781789041675
    Farewell to Democracy?: Lessons Past and Present
    Author

    Jack Luzkow

    Jack Luzkow is a professor of history at Fontbonne University, where he has taught European and world history for sixteen years. He also teaches courses on political thought, intellectual history, and hybrid courses such as a history of the present. He is the recipient of two Mellon Foundation awards and the author of Monopoly Restored: How the Super-Rich Robbed Main Street. He lives in Richmond Heights, MO, USA.

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      Book preview

      Farewell to Democracy? - Jack Luzkow

      Author

      Introduction

      History and Democracy

      In 1989 we heard that history had ended. Liberal democracy had won the Cold War and become the only legitimate story. Communism and fascism were now permanently discredited relics of the past. Democracy was now heralded as triumphant. Soon it would be global, spanning all continents.

      Fascism had been based on fear, hatred, and division. It embraced tyranny. And it led to war, and then genocide. By 1945 fascism was a brutal memory, it no longer was a guidepost to humanity’s future: it had never been. It was a past that had passed.

      By 1989 Soviet communism had also failed. It simply rotted from within. It had failed to develop an economic model that could compete with the West. It had preserved class struggle: capitalist bosses were replaced by commissars. It had led to a different kind of genocide and to imperial wars. It had been unable to solve social inequality. It had created new elites. It had been no kinder to minorities. It had failed to modernize or to build the utopia that it had promised. By 1989 it had ceased to be a story with a future. Nobody believed in it.

      The only story still standing after 1989 (hypothetically), the only credible narrative was liberal democracy. It was a story that virtually all political parties in the West embraced: civil liberties, the freedom of movement of goods, ideas, and individuals, political rights. The liberal-democratic story achieved a broad consensus. The past had been a closed society, earlier regimes had suppressed personal liberties, denied free markets, curtailed freedoms of expression and access to (alternative) ideas, suppressed political choice. For most of history few people voted, there was no constitution, political power was restricted to an elite few, and personal liberties were limited to the fortunate and the affluent. For most of history information was closely guarded and kept secret by the elect few, wealth was concentrated at the top, and both liberty and equality seemed a utopian dream at best.

      The liberal-democratic story claimed to change all that. The freedom of movement for people, ideas, goods, and capital would be a great equalizer. Political rights were universal, everybody who was a citizen voted. People were citizens, not subjects. Citizens had personal rights and civil liberties and a constitution that supported them. Liberty was joined by the free market, the open society, political equality. And government was not opaque.

      After World War II, Western countries in particular added social and economic equality (social democracy). The state had a prophylactic role in the social and economic welfare of its citizens. Democracy could not thrive in unequal countries: war and depression proved that. Liberty was meaningless if surrounded by poverty. The free movement of goods meant little if there was too much joblessness. Political rights and democracy could not be sustained in the midst of racial and minority exclusions and animosities. And destabilized democracies would surely lead to demagogues.

      Democratic regimes meant that people thought for themselves, they were responsible for their own histories. Democratic regimes meant access to education where citizens learned they had rights and the power to determine their fates. Democracy meant rejecting political demagogues, bigoted priests, and self-appointed soothsayers. The democratic story was celebrated as the last and inevitable story after the collapse of alternatives. Barack Obama certainly believed it. So did many Republicans before and even today.

      Circa 1975, the liberal democratic story was joined by the globalization story. Globalization would lift all boats. Free markets and free trade would benefit all nations. Liberalization and globalization together would mean eternal progress. Open societies and open economies would mean prosperity and peace at last. No more closed societies, no more walls or barbed-wire fences: only open borders, common markets, free trade, and the unleashing of capital. All countries were invited to hold these simple truths.

      After 1989, virtually all nations that had been in the Soviet orbit, including Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, opted for the new democratic religion. They embraced free trade, open borders, civil society, and globalization. Political rights, personal liberties, and democracy were touted as roads to the future. There were celebrations. At last there was a future. A new global order was emerging, and it was good. China remained a thriving outcast, but it was sure to fail.

      By 1989 it did seem that the end of history had come. The future could offer nothing new, only more of the present. There were no alternatives, all that needed to be done was to perfect the institutions that already existed. The American version of the end of history was elegant and simple. The Industrial Revolution was part of a Natural Order that gave birth to a market, which provided a foundation for Democracy, which led inevitably to Globalization, which produced Universal Happiness.

      In the European story, History produced the Nation, the Nation inevitably led to Nationalism, and Nationalism led to war. So Europe chose a new path toward peace and integration: Europeans had no doubt that integration meant human rights and the sanctity of the individual. The European Union was the antidote to Nationalism, it signified no borders, prophylactic states, perfect and Universal Happiness.

      Then came the Russian story. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, this narrative was rooted in communist ideology: Nature created Technology, Technology created Social Classes, Social Classes led to Revolution, which led to Utopia, which led to Universal Happiness.

      It was the collapse of this latter version of Utopia that led to celebrations of the end of history across America and Europe. The failure of the Soviet Utopia was a cause celebre for the victory of market capitalism and liberal democracy. The new millennial order was celebrated in Europe as well: Europeans busied themselves forming the European Union even as the corpse of the Soviet Union was still smoldering. Concealed in all these expectations of the end of history was the disappearance of history itself. Each of the three stories had been based on the politics of inevitability, on mythologies or ideologies that had nothing to do with history: each branded a new religion, a new story of redemption, a new emancipation of humanity. And each was entirely wrong.

      The Soviet story was the first to collapse. This story ran straight into history and facts. Instead of a democratic communist utopia, the return of history meant secession states locked into disputes over borders, ancient faiths on a permanent collision course, a new class of billionaire oligarchs that monopolized much of the wealth in Russia, a kleptocracy instead of a communist Commonwealth of equals, an authoritarian plutocracy more akin to proto-fascism of the 1930s than an end of history.

      And that was not all. Russian history post-1991 — the same for the history of Ukraine post-1991 — was proof that the American version of past and future was wrong: nature does not lead to the market, does not lead to democracy, does not lead to happiness. The attempt of America to transplant itself into Russia was a monumental failure — as any sober analysis would have concluded. And that failure would have ramifications. Vladimir Putin would reply in kind. He attempted to transplant Russia into America, and he achieved a success that even he could not have predicted. But American confusion was not only the result of Putin’s counter-insurgency: it was based on the illusion that American exceptionalism had triumphed in 1991, and that the entire world would follow its lead — voluntarily or not.

      But one hardly needed to go to Russia to learn that American triumphalism was only so much blather rooted in a gigantic myth about itself and the universality of its own story. One could just as easily travel to Michigan or Oho or Pennsylvania or Wisconsin and many other states and learn the same thing: the future was winding down even as the celebration continued. The American led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which led to a disastrous meltdown of much of the Middle East, was a sign of what could happen when myth replaced history and facts. And then came another sign: the 2008 financial meltdown in the United States contradicted the so-called magical powers of the market. Combined with the 2010 deregulation of political campaign contributions, the power of the ultra-wealthy and of corporate America was magnified, even as the power of voters (and democracy) was diminished. America’s future as universal paradigm was no longer assured. American mythology had run straight into history, and facticity, and lost. Instead of a straight line into the future, instead of certainty that nature provided for free markets that led to Democracy that led to Happiness, America now fastened on its victimhood, on its past and how to Make America Great Again. America was retrofitted for nationalism. It looked to the past, not the future.

      After 2008 at the latest, Americans no longer believed that the future was on their side. They experienced unprecedented inequality. They lost their jobs and their homes by the millions. They no longer had a functional state. Health care, education,

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