The problem with liberal democracy

In “The End of History and the Last Man,” Francis Fukuyama argues: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such… that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

In explaining the above, Fukuyama is making a clear distinction between totalitarianism and liberal democracy. A totalitarian regime is often characterized by the moral bankruptcy of its ideas. An evil despot will seek to glorify the state as everything and the freedom of the individual as nothing. He has only one aim, and that is to design his own concept of man and impose it on people in his desire to establish a strong state. In fact, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, according to Fukuyama, “redefined the meaning of a strong state by the very audacity of their social and political ideas.”

Hitler dictated what was to become of every human life and controlled how people view the meaning of that life. The aim of Hitler was not only the total control over the lives of the people in the state but the domination of history as well. “The 20th century,” Fukuyama says, “has made all of us into deep historical pessimists.” Stalin’s rise into power meant years of forced famine, bloody mass murders, and the suffering of millions who disagreed with his narrow policies. His slaughter of his own people also gave him a sense of invincibility. Russians, Fukuyama thinks, “appeared contented inmates in the asylum,” chained to their illusionary sense of utopia “by their own craving for security, order, authority, and some extra benefits that the Soviet regime had managed to throw in like imperial grandeur and superpower status.”

Totalitarian states do not possess the moral means to maintain the political cohesion of society. A dictator who finds himself in a serious quandary about a difficult policy crisis has nothing to depend on in terms of a higher principle. With the destruction of its civil society, intelligent political discourse is nonexistent. The desire to create a sense of social discipline appears wanting in terms of political legitimacy and moral justification. The perpetuation of this manifest form of control is only by means of the instrument of state terror. This type of terror annihilates not only human individuality, but also the sense of history and the belief system of a people.

Fukuyama says that “democracy is the right held universally by all citizens to have a share of political power, that is, the right of all citizens to vote and participate in politics.” But he also thinks that formal democracy is sometimes ineffective, given the fact that procedures can be influenced by the interests of the few elites, which means that elections can be manipulated, which in turn deprive people of true representation. Institutions become corrupt and the poverty of a people is perpetuated by systemic abuse and structural injustice.

In its economic manifestation, Fukuyama says that “liberalism is the recognition of the right of free economic activity and economic exchange based on private property and markets.” In short, liberalism is characterized by a free market economy. “Technology and the rational organization of labor are preconditions for industrialization, which in turn engender social phenomena,” he says. The management of the economy must be rationalized. Centralized planning can only devastate the economy. Pricing should be solely the domain of the markets. For Fukuyama, the free market is the social engine that powers universal history.

The problem with liberal democracy, however, is that people don’t seem to agree on the basic meaning of human freedom. An index of social primary goods is too narrow as a unit of measure in terms of determining what people should be entitled to and on what basis and why. The redistribution of resources does not necessarily make the status of people equal. Given the different contexts of people, including culture, historicity and their sense of nationhood, a truly just society in fact cannot be limited to the narrowly composed system of redistribution as envisioned by liberalism.

The trouble, it seems to me, lies in the very definition of happiness. The economic policies in our own country need a thorough and deep rethinking. Western liberal democracies often equate the idea of human well-being with the notion of self-satisfaction. For this reason, all human values are seen as anthropogenic—they emanate from man alone, and to man alone these values must ultimately serve. In choosing between the care of the self and love for one’s family, for instance, liberalism would argue that the first is a necessary condition in order to achieve the latter. This makes our compassion for the poor secondary to the self-centering and self-serving achievements of the human ego.

Christopher Ryan Maboloc teaches philosophy at Ateneo de Davao University. He has a master’s in applied ethics from Linkoping University in Sweden.