Fake Democracy Is Under Attack

Is it time to try real Democracy?

What follows will be an admittedly amateurish foray into domains of metapolitics. These are my thoughts. I circle around them, in an ever-recursive spiral. 

The 1990s were called the “end of history” with the presumed victory of neoliberal hegemony. The following decade revealed that neither corporate globalization nor neoliberalism lived up to their promise. After the 2008 financial crash, the triumph of the liberal Democratic world order was no longer assured. We woke up to discover that our financial elites ran a fake economy. The theme of the last decade has been the resurgence of the Far Right. Much of the world regresses toward authoritarianism and autocracy as the globalized world order breaks apart. The masses are scared, angry, and seek crude solutions.

I am a Leftist who supports the US and NATO arming Ukraine, even though it means risking nuclear conflict. I do this while recognizing American atrocities across the world, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Chile to Vietnam – and going all the way back, to slavery and genocide against the indigenous people. I agree with the Leftist / Chris Hedges analysis that the US is a behemoth ruled by plutocrats, oil barons, and the military industrial complex, where Democratic participation is basically a fraud. I also recognize that the US and Europe massively benefited from Colonialism and Imperialism. According to a recent analysis, England looted $43 trillion from India alone, between the 18th and 20th Century. (They are asking for it back). 

All of this is to say that Putin could have good reasons to feel animosity toward the West. But mainly, he is narcissistically fixated on Russia’s past and future greatness. He desires vengeance for Russia’s past humiliations. It is true that the US and Europe failed to provide the support and assistance that former Soviet countries needed after the collapse of the USSR. As Naomi Klein chronicled in The Shock Doctrine, we sent our economists into former Eastern Bloc countries to help them privatize state-owned enterprises, forcing market-driven Capitalism down their throats. This led to the current system of oligarchs and kleptocrats – and to Putin, who believes the breakup of the USSR was the greatest tragedy of the Twentieth Century. He has conceived it as his sacred destiny to undo it, even if this requires mountains of corpses and cities razed to the ground. 

I don’t find, in anything I read, a satisfactory, full-spectrum, multidimensional analysis of our current geopolitical situation. We need to analyze historical trends, cultural differences, psychological traits, religious ideologies, class conflicts. We need an overview of the global economy, the debt structure, the petro-dollar. We need to map on top of that the reality of the Earth’s remaining mineral and fossil fuel resources – a fundamental element inciting global conflict – as well as the trajectory of anthropogenic climate change, already causing droughts, burning down forests, bleaching coral reefs, soon to get much worse. We need to consider how the technologies that once represented “progress” in practice enable dictatorships, surveillance states, and mind control; how technology propels our world toward Orwellian doom. Then we can start to talk!

We are in the midst of a global war between political systems, between totalitarian dictatorships and liberal democracies. The temporary trend does not favor democracies. But in the long term, dictatorships are far more hopeless.

Dictatorships are rigid, inflexible structures. Anyone put in a position of unrestricted power will eventually go insane. Whether it is Putin’s robotic, almost mindless war on Ukraine; Bolsonaro’s assault on the Amazon and its people; or Jinping’s disastrous Zero Covid policy, dictatorships inevitably unleash deepening catastrophes. They can only hasten humanity’s plunge toward extinction. 

But unfortunately, in the other corner we have liberal Democracies mortally wounded by hypocrisy, deception, short-term thinking, corporate and financial corruption. Even in their current, limited form, Democracies tend to be messy and cumbersome. One President immediately seeks to undo the work of the last one. The buck is passed. Responsibilities are fudged. In fake democracy, short-term political expediency makes more sense than planning according to long-term wisdom and forethought. 

This form of Democracy is – let’s admit it – a failure. We can’t continue like this, either. So what can we do? Perhaps we need to try a new idea…