Philosophical Apprentice comments.

Mr Ferguson no longer writes a column of opinion, but now resorts to that Straussian Methodology of writing a 2,626 word manifesto. That apes the Starussian ‘History of Philosophy’ as re-written in light of ideological imperatives ?

Could it be that Ferguson writing his new book in installments, to test the waters? Modesty is not a virtue that this Intellectual Technocrat, masquerading as an Historian might aspire? But the student of Strauss cultivates another kind of virtue of an ideological stripe?

The first paragraphs of the ‘essay’ :

Is democracy on a roll? You would think so if you listened to President Joe Biden’s speech at last week’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. It was vintage Biden, the rhetoric alternately soaring and stumbling. He started with “the transformational power of freedom” in Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors as they broke free of Soviet rule, lighting up “the flame of liberty.” The enlargement of NATO and the advance of democracy are one and the same, he argued, because the alliance is “bound by democratic values.” 

The war in Ukraine, the president declared, is a war between a coalition of democracies and a Russian autocracy that poses a threat “to democratic values we hold dear, to freedom itself.” In the same way, the Quad partnership between Australia, India, Japan and the US is “bringing major democracies of the region together to cooperate, keeping the Indo-Pacific free.” Biden depicted the world in Manichean terms, divided starkly between the democracies, united in “the defense of freedom,” and their benighted foes, who would prefer “a world defined by coercion and exploitation, where might makes right.” 

Fine words. But what if democracy, far from being ascendant, is really in retreat? For the past few years, my Hoover Institution colleague Larry Diamond has been warning of a “democratic recession.” As he put it in a recent Foreign Affairs essay: “In countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Hungary, and Turkey, elections have long ceased to be democratic. Autocrats in Algeria, Belarus, Ethiopia, Sudan, Turkey, and Zimbabwe have clung to power despite mounting public demands for democratization. In Africa, seven democracies have slid back into autocracy since 2015, including Benin and Burkina Faso … the world is mired in a deep, diffuse, and protracted democratic recession.” 

…

After the appearance of Larry Diamond of The Hoover Institution, in the next paragraph ‘Freedom House’ and Fareed Zakaria have brief walk-ons. Mr. Ferguson’s manifesto commences in earnest. Scrolling through this hysterical diatribe, it reads like his ‘The Great Degeneration’ : See Dr. Mark Kass’s brief, but insightful review:

The final paragraphs of Mr. Ferguson’s diatribe, featuring himself, hardly a surprise.

Finally, what about the challenge to American democracy posed by technological change? Two weeks ago, I wrote about the rise of corporations to positions of power unmatched since the 17th and 18th centuries. A central theme of my book The Square and the Tower was that the originally decentralized internet had swiftly and unexpectedly become dominated by a handful of network platform companies: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta. Does this threaten democracy? Indeed it does. 

And the spectacular breakthrough of large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT has implications for next year’s election that could be even bigger than the impact of big data in 2012 and Facebook ads in 2016. If both Democrats and Republicans are not already frantically working on applying artificial intelligence to voter mobilization in the key counties of swing states, I would be astonished. Remember: The people who first work out how to exploit any new technology are, in this order: 1. The nerds 2. The crooks and 3. The campaign operatives. 

 Democracy is not in recession. The invasion of Ukraine has elicited real democratic unity. The response to the challenge posed by China is weaker, but it is real. The idea of a global descent into illiberal democracy or electoral autocracy is exaggerated by dubious statistics. 

But the future of democracy hinges, as it always has, on how far voters in the most important democracy are willing to vote their rights away. And the mechanisms to persuade them to do so have never been more powerful. Democracy is on a roll. The question is whether it is rolling toward a cliff edge. We shall find out in less than 16 months. 

Like that notorious Neo-Conservative, who has converted to ‘Liberalism’, Francis Fukuyama, Mr. Ferguson’s defence/advocacy for democracy, is really a defence of a carefully Managed Democracy. It’s champion was Walter Lippmann’s faith in ‘experts’ in modern parlance Technocrats, who will check the ever-present threat of too much democracy.

Philosophical Apprentice