Liberal Democracy/The Democratic Republic

TwoGallants

We are living in interesting times. Fascism and communism have been discredited and the only viable political system left is liberal democracy. Many liberal democracies remain imperfect and there are plenty of banana republics with presidential dictatorships and/or military junta's. China is offering a bad example to developing nations, but I'm confident it will continue to open up as time progresses. But overall, liberal democracy is considered the default political ideology of all aspiring people's.

On the other hand, the western economic model was exposed as a sham with the financial crisis and the ensuing debt crisis of many advanced economies. In countries which have experienced real hardship, such as Greece, faith in democracy is flailing. Indeed, in pretty much every economically developed country, faith in democratic ideals are being eroded. Confidence and support for democratic institutions are at their lowest since the inter-war period, when fascism and communism and totalitarianism in general seemed to be the inevitable end course for industrial societies.

The exponential rise in surveillance and information technology would make a totalitarian political system far easier to implement than ever before. There are still some brave and selfless individuals like Bradly Manning and Edward Snowden who are prepared to expose the ugly inner belly of the 'deep state' in our supposedly democratic institutions, and their revelations should worry anyone acquainted with Orwell.

Will liberal democracy survive or has the financial crisis exposed some pretty fundamental problems with the model? Will the relative safety of totalitarianism replace the wayward and often chaotic democratic system? Are we headed for a grim, dystopic future? Or will we muddle through as we've always done?

KyussBishop

That's a topic that it's hard to get your head around, because you need an understanding of a lot of different complicated (and propaganda-filled) topics, like economics, (intellectual-)corruption in academia/business/politics, international politics/finance etc. etc..

When you understand economics well enough, you see that debt is set to grow perpetually and forever, and that this is unsustainable, and it's kind of the driving force of the problems we see now, and is used to control populations and entire countries. Inflation does not ameliorate it (debt is measured nominally), and economic growth only slows it down (but does not stop it - debt grows faster than economies).

The way the monetary/finance/banking system is set up as well, means that this debt is going to be owned largely by a powerful financial class, which preys upon the rest of society and countries - the debt can never all be paid down either, because Debt is always growing greater in proportion to Money, meaning that over time more and more income (both for government and privately) gets spent on just sustaining debt and rolling it over, and will become such a strain that eventually the financial class gets to strip many of the assets owned by the public.


There are only two ways to solve this:
1: Reduce the amount of debt (defaults/writedowns), or
2: Increase the amount of money, without adding more debt (government spending without debt is the primary way of doing this, and it is pretty much never done)
(there is also economic growth, but that does not solve the problem, only delays it - and itself becomes difficult to maintain as debt grows)

Good luck getting a political class captured by finance (nevermind trapped within a politically deadlocked Euro), to write down or cancel any debt, and good luck getting that political class to reform the monetary system, so government can spend money without relying on debt, when that will remove most of the banking/financial industries power over politics/society.

The logical conclusion of this, absent any major political change (and there will be political change, even if decades away, because this can only go so far before there is major civil unrest), is an increased privatization of the state and sell-off of assets, further political capture by private interests, and increased rent-seeking upon and indebtedness of populations.

This would eventually (though in reality would never get this far) lead to a consolidation of power, probably into the hands of a small number of private oligarchs (backed by a small state, which uses its monopoly on violence to protest the oligarchs), and pretty much an end to democracy (with a transition to corporatism).