As a friend writes, “Our system is very opaque.” Various thinkers have tried to diagram or schematise the relationships among different branches of western liberal democratic regimes. A popular concept in some circles, and the prototype for many such efforts, is Curtis Yarvin’s Cathedral. What ties together much of this analysis, is the conviction that formal political structures have been increasingly sidelined by informal, illegible and corrupt power networks. We see a growing gulf between how western liberal democracies claim to function, and how they actually behave.
Attempts to model power structures like these are at base arguments about whether regime behaviour is emergent, or centrally directed; whether our governments are simply failing, or pursuing hidden goals; and whether our elites are malicious, or just remarkably stupid, or some unfortunate mixture of both.
Instead of contributing more schemata to the landscape of dissident thought on what is wrong with modern liberal democracy, I’ll take a descriptive approach. It seems to me that not only our pandemic response, but many signature western policies, are distinguished by a curious set of recurring pathologies. Taken together, these suggest important conclusions about how we’re governed.
As I see it, our brave new world is beset by state actions which betray 1) properties of inertia, 2) the absence of strategy, 3) symptoms of profound demobilisation, 4) an obsession with simple metrics, 5) diffuse consensus guidance, 6) transnational uniformity, and 7) media activism.
Inertia: There is always a period of time – whether weeks or months – where energy builds. The lockdowners demand lockdowns, the vaccinators demand vaccines. Then, the policies descend, and they continue across a parabolic arc of enthusiasm, ultimately burning out at some indeterminate future point. While the policies are in motion, it’s very difficult to stop them. Even if they become counterproductive, or obviously inadvisable, they’ll continue on their course. Contrary evidence might slightly hasten their demise or rob them of a little momentum, but there will be no sudden reversal or redirection.
Absence of strategy: Regime actions betray no hints of even moderately sophisticated planning or strategy to achieve well-defined goals. There is rather the blunt insistence upon and pursuit of simplistic, often utopian, aspirations, accompanied by glaring strategic errors. Initially, Corona infection statistics were published to incentivise the population to comply with lockdowns, but then the statistics did nothing so much as reveal that lockdowns don’t work very well. The same happened with vaccine efficacy statistics, which were originally collected to prove the miracle of the mRNA elixirs and shame the unvaccinated, and which rapidly became a monumental own-goal, as the vaccinated quickly developed higher rates of infection. If the vaccinators had pursued more sophisticated messaging strategies and positive incentives, they could’ve probably managed to vaccinate far more people than they succeeded in vaccinating; instead, they resorted to blunt mandates and conjured political opposition out of nowhere. The seasonal nature and age-stratified risk of SARS-2 likewise suggests many strategic options, none of which any western liberal democracy ever pursued.
Demobilisation: Related to both of the foregoing, is the increasing inability of the regime to marshal special resources or rearrange its routine to further any specific initiative. A key element of lockdowns, at least at the level of theory, is centralised quarantine for the infected. Establishing these facilities obviously requires no few resources and no little planning; few western governments ever bothered. They confined themselves instead to cheap and easy prohibitions. When the vaccinators finally arrived on stage, most governments had substantial difficulties obtaining the vaccines and getting them into the arms of their subjects, even though in 2021, it is no exaggeration to say that mass vaccination had become the highest goal of western liberal democracies everywhere.
Simplicity: As with environmentalism, and Corona, and many other matters, there is the ever-recurring tendency to reduce broad, difficult problems that admit of multiple solutions, to a single one-dimensional number. Whether it is carbon emissions, vaccination rates, or infection statistics, policies are inevitably drawn into the vortex of a narrow numerical focus. Similar tendencies have long been visible in economic policy.
