Francis Fukuyama Was Wrong
Democracy Will Not Survive the Era of Social Media
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Critics of Fukuyama’s thesis that liberal democracy represents the “end of history”* have tended to look to confirm or falsify it by examining liberal democracy’s direct rivals, e.g. Communist China, Putin’s Russia, and Islamist Iran. To most observers, the weaknesses of these various regimes make liberal democracy seem strong by comparison, and thus tend to confirm Fukuyama’s thesis.
By focusing on such countries, the would-be critics of Fukuyama are looking in the wrong place. If there are any threats or developments that threaten the survival of liberal democracy, they will surely arise not from the periphery of the liberal democratic world or from outside of it, but from within, and especially from its core members.
Certain weaknesses of democracy have gradually been making themselves apparent in recent years. In an era of low interest rates it has been easy for politicians to promise additional spending or tax cuts, without balancing the other side of the ledger. The result is that the burden of government debt has grown steadily higher, and the reforms necessary to fix the problem appear politically impossible: the voters in a democracy will simply not vote for anything that results in short-term pain, and this makes certain problems unsolvable in a democratic system.
But there is a bigger threat to liberal democracy, and one that I think is far more likely to prove fatal. This is that a large portion of the electorate are emotionally volatile, erratic, and of low intelligence. This has always been the case, but for most of the democratic era it didn’t much matter: the upper and upper-middle classes controlled the public discourse through their control of the media and thereby stabilized the system. In such an environment, it was difficult, bordering on impossible, for “grassroots” movements to obtain more than minor influence, except where they had the support of the elite establishment. “Liberal democracy” was thus, in large part, an illusion: outwardly it had the form of a democracy, but in reality politics were firmly under the control and direction of the upper and upper-middle classes.
All of this changed in the social media era. Suddenly, it became much easier for “grassroots” movements to flourish. In the blink of an eye a video or a tweet can go “viral” and command the attention of vast multitudes of the public, regardless of social class or status. Powerful “populist” movements can now arise, based on the support of segments of the public who had previously been excluded from the reality of power. In America we saw the first taste of this with the rise and triumph of Barrack Obama, but the real climax came with the advent of Donald Trump. Whereas the populism of Barrack Obama could easily be, and was, assimilated into the agenda of the established elite, that of Trump could not be, and thus his presidency devolved into a chaotic four-year battle in which the ruling establishment sought, for the most part successfully, to paralyze his administration and curtail its influence over policy.
The Obama-Trump years mark perhaps the only period in history when the American political system became something approaching a full-scale democracy: a democracy not merely in outward form, but in substance—in which the multitudes of the lower and lower-middle classes actually set the tone and direction of politics.
With social media now a fixed feature of the landscape, chaotic figures like Trump are bound to become more frequent, on both the right and the left. We’re entering a populist era that seems destined to last as long as democracy itself.
And this is precisely the question: how long can democracy last in these circumstances?
In the years since 2016, the signs of institutional decay are everywhere: prosecution of political opponents (and here I include Trump’s threats to prosecute his political opponents as well as the legal cases brought against him), attempts to remove candidates from the ballot, attempts to censor social media, attempts to “fortify” the electoral system in such a way as to obtain a desired result—and these are only the most jarring examples. All of these expedients would have shocked an earlier generation of Americans but now they are rapidly becoming the accepted norm.
The essence of the problem is that the upper and upper-middle classes see themselves as—and are in fact—the natural ruling class of society, and are loathe to give up their political power to the lower classes whom they regard—rightfully—as irresponsible and incapable of wielding it.
The only workable system of democracy is one in which the natural ruling class is dominant, but yet appears to share power with the lower classes. When this illusion becomes a reality and the lower classes threaten to obtain real power, the system inevitably breaks down—and this is precisely what is occurring today.
The direction in which the American system is heading is becoming clearer by the day: either democracy will keep stumbling along in the present, ever more chaotic manner, with legal and constitutional norms continuing to fray and with the judiciary serving as a weapon of the ruling class against the unchecked forces of populism; or—which I think is more likely—democracy itself will give way to some other system of government as yet undetermined, but which, with much more reliability than the present system, will entrench power in the hands of the upper and upper-middle classes. In either case, democracy will be destroyed, if not in form, then in substance.
When a new political precedent is set, it seldom occurs just once. If Trump is successfully prosecuted and thereby prevented from becoming president for a second term, we can be sure that this method will be used again in the future, probably by both parties insofar as they able, and probably with less and less ostensible justification each time. Once a taboo has been broken it is next to impossible to re-establish it within the framework of the current system—only a new regime can accomplish that.
In history, periods of turmoil and instability tend to be limited in duration. As an evolving organism, human society tends towards stability. Systems that are unstable and disorderly tend, for that reason, to disappear and to be replaced by those that are stable and orderly. Through such a process of natural selection, a new constitutional order will eventually emerge, though the process may take decades. If I had to hazard a guess I would say that it will involve a restriction of the right to vote to those with a certain amount of education, or who pay above a certain threshold of taxes, coupled with censorship of social media.
We are in such a period of turmoil and instability now. Time will tell how long it lasts and what will come next. Whatever it is, one thing seems likely: Fukuyama was wrong; liberal democracy was not the final stage of history.
*Let me here dispose of a common misapprehension concerning Fukuyama’s work. By the “end of history,” Fukuyama does not mean that historical events will cease to occur; rather, he means by that phrase something more like the “destination of history.” Liberal democracy, in his estimation, is the final stage of historical development: no other socio-political system will supersede it, even though historical events will continue to occur.
