Is There a Liberal-Democratic 'Legitimacy Death Spiral'?

None of us are actually going to like it.

There are strange things happening everyday
Oh, the last man judgment day

-Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Strange Things Happening Every Day

Increasingly, when I see some news about what this or that government is doing, I think less ‘that is good’ or ‘that is bad,’ and instead think ‘that is strange.’

Western liberal-democracies (which are no longer liberal nor democratic¹) face growing challenges from dissenters, especially though not exclusively from the political right. These latter challenges typically contain, either implicitly or explicitly, an ethnic or nationalist component. The resulting tensions lead to a lot of hand wrenching, name calling, and deepening fragmentation of society. I think that from the side of the so-called ‘liberal-democrats’ this represents a form of denial (as in a stage of the grieving process; grieving their own passing).

By ‘liberal-democracy,’ in this context, I mean the ‘post-war consensus’ in Western politics which enshrined individual rights, a robust and strenuous welfare state, managed capitalism, and a politics of constrained (because the options were highly structured) representative democracy.

Over the past five years, I think I can discern these regimes entering a legitimacy death spiral, which is now accelerating rapidly.

‘Legitimacy’

I put the above term in quotation marks because while it is in fact a normative, moral, term, that is not how I’m using it hear. Political Philosophers may worry about whether a regime’s claims to legitimacy are objectively morally justified or not. Political Scientists tend to use the term in a way that can be measured. Is the regime perceived as legitimate by the citizenry? This can be measured through opinion polling and other empirical social scientific means. That’s what I’ll be looking at in this essay.

For instance, Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006) said that legitimacy involved “the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate and proper ones for society.” Notice that on this sort of conception, from the regime’s perspective, ‘legitimacy’ is a thing to be managed. The belief of the Populis is subject to regime intervention and manipulation. If a regime wishes to remain stable, it will seek to produce legitimating beliefs among the people.

It has a number of tools to employ to achieve this goal: policy, law, ideology, and propaganda chief among them. These tools are to be used to establish what Gramsci termed ‘hegemony’ or Chomsky ‘the manufacture of consent.’ From this perspective we do not consent or refuse consent based solely of our own freewill; both are epiphenomenon of the regime’s actions (and while I don’t think that is completely right, it is to an extent - the extent that the apparatuses of the regime can affect us).

What is at the forefront of the contemporary legitimacy crisis of the ‘liberal-democracies,’ what I’m increasingly thinking of as a death spiral, are policies and ideologies which divide the population along demographic lines (race against race, gender against gender, class against class, etc…), massive immigration as a matter of regime policy, and a resulting belief among a growing segment of the society that ‘justice’ is not being provided to them by the regime. Again, in the terms of this analysis, I’m not looking at whose claims are legitimately justified, etc…. I’m looking not at the substantive moral claim of legitimacy, but at its functional role in regime stabilization. Also, I’m not most interested in drawing attention to the cause of the contemporary problems with ‘legitimacy,’ but rather at how regimes are and are not responding to this.

Reflexive Propaganda

So, an intelligent regime (staffed no doubt by very smart, capable, objective technocrats) would take symptoms of regime de-legitimation with the utmost seriousness. Further, they would self-consciously understand their role in manufacturing consent. Hence, they would take legal, policy, ideological, and propagandistic steps to re-establish the perceived justice and legitimacy of the regime. As its citizenry is not infinitely malleable, they would recognize the need to adapt and recalibrate the regime’s ideological framework, policy prescriptions, etc….

Ironically, the cadre of the regime (‘the managerial elite’) typically fall prey to their own ideology and propaganda, forgetting these were merely tools to maintain the stability of their own regime and privileged positions within that regime. This largely occurs because they must educate their successors through time. They make the mistake that instead of teaching the next generation of cadre that it is all about control, they instead inculcate them in the regime ideology. Hence, the next generation is likely to believe it. Historically, elites initiated the rising generation of elites into ‘the Reason of State.’ This is where they carefully let the cat out of the bag and explained to the young Prince, or his Minister, or Functionary, how things actually worked. This seems to have broken down.

I’ll call this ‘reflexive propaganda.’ Let’s say I produce propaganda to shape your beliefs so that they align with my interests and power. However, what we increasingly see is that our regime cadres have actually internalized, come to believe, their own propaganda. They have come to believe that they are actually substantively, morally, legitimate: intellectually and morally correct and superior. This is the root of their likely impending doom.

On the above model of ‘legitimacy,’ when said ‘legitimacy’ starts to be compromised, the regime is supposed to listen to the people to understand where the slippage is coming from and then adapt the tools at their disposal to regain and strengthen people’s belief in the ‘legitimacy’ of the regime.

When people lose faith in the justice or competence of the regime, it’s ‘legitimacy’ fades, and people are likely to turn to other communities of affinity in search of those things and for self-preservation in an ‘unjust’ situation. This might be the more local community or even the family, but it may also be the nation or their perceived ethnic identity. It can also be toward those adhering to a counter-hegemonic ideology. It is important to recognize, at least at first, their motivation is not ‘racist,’ ‘nationalist,’ ‘nativist,’ ‘ideological,’ etc…. Their motivation is, at first, disaffection with the governing regime. Nevertheless, there will always be those who wish to turn it in these more negative directions, and absent the attempt of the regime to regain legitimacy by adapting to the expressed needs of the people, they will, to a greater or lesser extent, succeed.

Spiral

The reflexively propagandized elite cadre of the Western ‘liberal-democracies’ are proving remarkably inept at adapting themselves and their use of their tools to regain ‘legitimacy.’ Because they have actually come to believe their own ideology and propaganda, they do not see dissent as a technical problem to be addressed (and important feedback loop on how the regime needs to adapt), but as a moral problem to be attacked. Dissent, any dissent, is perceived as evil, immoral, racist, homophobic, illiberal, antisemitic, etc…. I don’t think this is merely rhetorical, I think it is actually believed.

Hence, instead of adapting, the political, economic, and cultural managers double down. Increasingly, this seems to be the only instrument in their toolbox. The problem is that it never works. Instead of listening and adapting to sure up their position, they screech and wail about their inherent virtues and their dissenting opponents’ depravity. This, in turn, further alienates and drives the dissenters further from the regime’s ‘civic norms.’

Perhaps something like this is endemic to all elites: they come to believe in their own propaganda and their own inherent superiority and are rendered incapable of making the pragmatic adjustments which would reestablish their ‘legitimacy.’ They may all become their own gravediggers.

Further, they end up reincorporating that shadow into their own being. Rather than ‘we are liberal-democrats’ (reflecting those actual norms or values), it becomes ‘whatever we believe and say is liberal-democracy,’ even when that entails inherently illiberal and undemocratic actions and values. This represents the process by which something becomes its opposite by reifying its abstract ideals in terms of whatever it actually, concretely, does. I censure you in the name of ‘free speech.’ I overturn your election or ban your party in the name of ‘democracy.’ I treat you unequally in the name of ‘equality.’ I weaponize the judicial system to ‘preserve the rule of law.’

On the view I’m outlining, those sorts of absurd justifications are not really Orwellian. I think they point less to the cynicism of the cadre than to its internalized contradictions.

Given how critical I am of our current elites, and indeed of the whole modern world, it might come as a surprise that I fear their, and possibly its, impending end.

Trapped in the spiral, ‘liberal-democracy’ necessarily produces its own shadow. In failing to adjust to the people and regain the perception of ‘legitimacy,’ it necessarily produces what it claims to despise and what objectively contributes to its further delegitimization- both within itself and within those it alienates. This would be what I termed a ‘legitimation death spiral.’ We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

We can pretty much intuitively see the tragedy here. There are so many issues that we can’t help but be: ‘wait, don’t you see where continuing to play this game leads? You don’t win; probably no one wins, and it is potentially very dark.’ Yet the regime and their supporters seem incapable of stepping back, engaging in a degree of critical self-reflection, and so the spiral continues.

There is this problem that elites don’t like to face up to, but which Confucius, Machiavelli, even the founders of liberalism such as John Locke, and many in between, have pointed to: the elite is responsible for its own fortune- it holds all the cards. If it fails, it owns that failure. If it spawns dissidents and fails to adapt to recapture them, that is its failure too. When you’re in control, whatever happens, that’s on you. Rational, calculating, self-preserving elites are mature enough to understand that. Our elites are largely deaf to this truth.

Regime collapse is not pretty. It can be good, but that is a moral and philosophical concept.

The spiral continues downward, as if scripted out by the Fates themselves, toward what almost no one will actually enjoy.

1. Individual rights, equality before the law, the acceptance of the outcomes of elections, have all faded. COVID tyrannies, overturned elections, banned political parties, weaponization of judiciaries, formal and inform censorship, etc… are now more the norm than the exception in the self-described ‘liberal-democracies.’