By Sam Hamad
People are rioting in Paris because no one can afford anything. It’s a generation of people locked out of functional life (relatively speaking). And it’s getting worse and worse and worse.
The entire point about liberal democracy and late modernity is that it had to adapt in many ways they could not be foreseen. The third way was one attempted answer to this. It failed spectacularly. It is not, and neither is liberal democracy abstractly, “the forever ideology” or, as Fukuyama via Kojeve via Hegel would have it, “the universal state of recognition”.
These things are interesting dynamics in which we can come to understand elements of liberal democracy, but they don’t actually exist. There is no meta-narrative or secular eschaton of technocratic utopia.
There is only justice. And if justice isn’t delivered, there comes reckoning. And reckoning can be good or evil – or very difficult to discern whether it’s either.
Liberal democracy, and its defenders, have ceded too much ground to those who want alternative illiberal systems. They let the curtain be pulled back and what was revealed? Not justice, but injustice. Not order, but disorder. Not happiness, but pain and fear. Not peace, but war and war crimes.
The entire system rests upon a fiction, namely that power has been abolished by mere procedure or ceremony, or that conflict has been extinguished by consensus, and that justice can be indefinitely deferred in the name of stability. This is mass suicidal ideation.
Beneath the exhausted language of technocracy and progress lies the oldest political reality of all – power, antagonism and the struggle for legitimacy.
We are all fallen – justice can’t depend upon everyone spontaneously choosing the good. Political authority must possess sufficient power to restrain injustice and secure the common good, while itself remaining subordinate to justice
And, thus, when when a political order can no longer distinguish between its own survival and the common good, it begins to mistake its decay for civilisation itself.
There’s no way back.
