POST-DEMOCRACY

What Hacker News says

1. SideloaderJun 2015
   You talk about our ancestors and their descendents fighting to create democracies out of feudalism and I broadly agree with that notion (assuming you mean during the historical period beginning with the American and French revolutions and ending after the Second World War).

   Looking at the western world today it seems obvious that the rights and liberties our ancestors fought to achieve and uphold are not something we should be taking for granted. Indeed, in 2015 there is compelling evidence that liberal democracy and its star progeny - a stable and prosperous middle-class - are seriously wounded. You even list some of the factors contributing to the current state of affairs in other posts in this thread.

   However if I came across as fatalistic that certainly wasn't my intention. Yes, democracy is wounded and under attack but that does not mean a return to feudalism is inevitable. I did say that a return to some sort of feudal order seems likely if current trends continue unopposed. Even pacified westerners have a breaking point. The growing movement to keep the free and open internet from being subjugated by governments and corporations in the name of a global surveillance society shows that people are not going to sit idly by and let the powers that be strip away their hard won rights and liberties. Ditto the ongoing campaign for a liveable wage and police accountability.

   That said it would be a fatal mistake to underestimate the addictive nature of power and the effect it has on those who possess it. The "global elite" will not wake up one morning and decide to share the spoils of legislated inequality.

   As political scientist Henry Farrell, referencing British academic Colin Crouch's 2009 book Post-Democracy, wrote: "At some point shortly after the end of the Second World War, democracy reached its apex in countries such as Britain and the US. According to Crouch, it has been declining ever since. Places such as Italy had more ambiguous histories of rise and decline, while others still, including Spain, Portugal and Greece, began the ascent much later, having only emerged from dictatorship in the 1970s. Nevertheless, all of these countries have reached the downward slope of the arc. The formal structures of democracy remain intact. People still vote. Political parties vie with each other in elections, and circulate in and out of government. Yet these acts of apparent choice have had their meaning hollowed out. The real decisions are taken elsewhere. We have become squatters in the ruins of the great democratic societies of the past." (http://aeon.co/magazine/society/henry-farrell-post-democracy...)

   It remains to be seen whether democracy will persevere or if this brief (so far) respite from feudalism will remain an historical anomaly. The choices we make going forward will have a huge impact here. If we decide to keep our heads buried in the sand and continue telling ourselves that everything is just fine despite evidence to the contrary, that would be immensely disrespectful to every person that has risked life and well-being to create or protect the rights and liberties we too easily take for granted...even as they are being systematically dismantled all around us.

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2. pointernilJan 2014
   Well, maybe it is time to admit that "the market" and its players are not a homogenous mass and as Colin Crouch (of Post-Democracy fame) puts it (paraphrasing):

   there is the market and acting outside of it and mostly by different rules there are the multinational big enterprises/corporations.

   Why should NOT different tax rules apply them?

   Is this an idea easily translated into laws? Probably not. Doable for sure.

   Btw, please do not "combine" those Mega-Corps with small companies... they are not the same and will not be in the future; it only helps to drive certain unrealistic fears benefiting those lobbying and looking FOR the loop holes around the world.

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