福山：歷史的未來（中文版）-弗朗西斯·福山

*【觀察者按】*2010年6月，在觀察者網與文匯報聯合舉辦的“福山對話張維為”活動中，福山雖然堅稱美國民主制仍然優越於中國的權威體制，不過顯然也意識到了美國體制的嚴重危機，之後不斷撰文批評當下美國。《歷史的未來》一文顯然全面回應了那次對話帶給福山的啓示。福山不無洞見地指出美國技術進步帶來的利益都落入掌握金融技術的少數人手裏。面對美國的不堪現狀，茶黨的主張自然文不對題，但是左翼也未能提出一個系統的解釋和方案。

與其説這位著名策論家擁有深刻的智慧，不如説他擁有精明的政治頭腦和修辭能力。他既要反對金融資本對中產階級的侵害，又要維護國家利益。既要批評美國製度，又要避免釜底抽薪，同時不忘抨擊中國，甚至運用鄧小平三個“有利於”的修辭。在這種艱難的修辭舞蹈中，我們不難發現福山先生也不無矛盾。

比如：明明是美國的民生問題嚴重，福山開出的方案卻是反過來強調民主政治優先於經濟（民生）。

比如：明明是美國的金融階級霸權難以被撼動，他卻批評中產階級沉迷於過去的迷夢。

比如：他在堅持西方政治制度優越性時認為阿拉伯的君主政體“之所以現在還能存活，是因為它們坐擁大量石油。”但這恰恰泄露了他不願説出的真相：不是石油維持了他們的政體，而是美國為了石油美元體系的穩定而支持了他們落後但是穩固的政體。

福山強調中國模式非他國可以複製，這正好支持了張維為主張的各國尋找最適合自己發展模式的論點。當然，民主制度危機不是美國一家的事情，而是關係到所有人。福山的政論技巧和國家立場值得中國的知識分子學習，但是其開出的方案則有必要加以鑑別。

 ————————————————————————————————————————————————

歷史的未來——自由民主制能否在中產階級的衰落中倖存下來？

當今世界有些異樣。2008年開始的全球金融危機和持續至今的歐元危機，兩者都是近三十年來監管鬆懈的金融資本主義所產生的後果。然而，雖然民眾對華爾街的救市計劃普遍不滿，美國左翼民眾運動卻沒有發起什麼大的起色。當然，佔領華爾街運動會吸引一些人的眼球，但近期搞得最有聲勢的民眾運動是右翼的“茶黨”。茶黨的主要目標是加強國家監管，保護普通民眾不受金融投機分子的欺詐。歐洲也是同樣情況，左翼萎靡不振，右翼民粹主義政黨卻在抬頭。

左翼缺乏動員大眾的能力，這是很多原因造成的。其中一個主要原因是思想領域的挫折。近幾十年，經濟事務的意識形態高地全被自由至上主義的右翼佔領了。左翼拿不出可靠的政治議程，除了喊着要回歸以前的社會民主制。缺乏針鋒相對的施政計劃，這對思想辯論和經濟活動都很不利，因為有競爭才是好事。現在急需嚴肅的思想大辯論，因為，當前的全球資本主義體制正在侵蝕中產階級，而中產階級乃是自由民主制的基礎。

民主浪潮

正如馬克思所説，社會力量和社會條件不只是“決定”意識形態，但是，只有當思想回應了大眾的訴求以後才能發揮力量。自由民主制目前是世界上大部分地區的意識形態基礎，部分原因是，自由民主回應並接受了某種特定的社會經濟結構的支持。那些社會結構的變化可能會改變意識形態，就像意識形態變化會反過來造成社會經濟層面上的後果一樣。

三百年以前所有構造人類社會的強勢思想在本質上都帶有宗教色彩，除了一個重要的例外——中國的儒家思想。第一個長時間產生世界性影響的世俗主義意識形態是自由主義，與這一“主義”一同興起的先是十七世紀歐洲某些地區的商業中產階級，然後是工業中產階級。（我所説的“中產階級”指的是處於高收入和低收入之間社會階層，至少接受過中等教育，擁有不動產、耐用品或自己經商。）

自由主義的原則，正如洛克、孟德斯鳩和密爾等人所述，即一個國家政府的合法性來源於對公民權利的保護，並且國家權力要接受法律的限制。其中一項基本權利是私有財產。英國的光榮革命（1688-89）對現代自由主義史至關重要，因為它第一次建立了這樣的憲法原則，規定國家只能在徵得公民同意的情況下徵税。

原先，自由主義不一定表示民主。支持1689年憲法條款的輝格黨人大多是英格蘭最富有的人；那個時期的議會只代表全國10%不到的人口。許多正統的自由主義者，包括密爾在內，非常懷疑民主的價值；他們認為，有擔當的政治參與者必須要接受過教育，並且是社會中的一份子——即必須擁有私人財產。整個十九世紀末，歐洲絕對大多數地區的選舉都有針對私有財產和教育條件的限制。1828年，安德魯•傑克遜被選為美國總統，後來他廢除了選舉權所要求的私有財產條件——雖然僅限白人男性——而成為更加健全的民主原則的一次初期勝利。

在歐洲，當時大多數人被排除在政治權力之外，以及工人階級的興起，這兩個條件為馬克思主義的發展鋪平了道路。《共產黨宣言》發表於1848年，同年，革命浪潮席捲除英國以外的整個歐洲。從那以後的一個世紀間，兩股力量一直在爭奪民主運動的領導權，一方面是共產主義者，他們敢於拋棄程序民主（多黨制選舉）而更支持實質民主（財富再分配），另一方面是自由民主主義者，他們則認為，在擴大政治參與度的同時，要維持法治秩序，保護各種個人權利，其中包括私有財產權。

關鍵是新興工人階級的走向。早期的馬克思主義者們認為，他們光憑人數就足以獲勝：十九世紀末，隨着選舉權擴大，英國工黨和德國社會民主黨等政黨迅速發展，甚至威脅到保守黨和傳統的自由主義政黨的統治地位。工人階級的崛起遭到嚴厲抵制，而那些抵制手段通常都不民主；共產主義者和許多社會主義者反過來拋棄了形式民主，轉而尋求直接獲得政治權力。

二十世紀前半段，進步左翼陣營中有一個廣泛共識，即認為某種形式的社會主義——通過政府來控制經濟波動，以確保財富公平分配——對於所有發達國家都是必經之路。甚至保守主義經濟學家，例如約瑟夫•熊彼特，也在他1942年的《資本主義、社會主義與民主》一書中寫道，社會主義將贏得勝利，因為資本主義社會自身在文化上將自我毀滅。社會主義被認為代表了現代社會絕大多數人的意志和利益。

不過，從政治和軍事的層面看，二十世紀的意識形態對峙雙方自己走入了死衚衕。而在社會層面發生了關鍵性變化，破壞了馬克思主義的格局。首先，工人階級的實際生活水平在不斷提高，高到以至於許多工人或他們的子女能夠加入中產階級的行列。其次，工人階級的規模達到一定比例以後停止增長，甚至有下降的趨勢，尤其是二十世紀後半葉，服務業開始代替製造業，進入所謂的“後工業”經濟階段。最後，一個比工人階級更加貧困或孱弱的社會類別開始萌芽，其中包括各種人，少數族裔、新移民和被排斥的人羣，後者例如女性、同性戀和殘疾人。在大部分的工業化社會中，由於這些社會變化，原有的工人階級成為國內的另一個利益集團，並利用工會的政治力量來保衞自己以前辛辛苦苦爭得的利益。

另外，經濟意義上的階級已經無法在發達工業國家中獲得政治動員力。1914年，“第二國際”震驚地發現，歐洲工人階級沒有去為階級福利而鬥爭，而是聽從民族主義的口號，跟隨各國的保守主義政治領導人相互廝殺；這一模式持續至今。許多馬克思主義者想要去解釋這一現象，根據學者恩斯特•蓋爾納的研究，他稱之為“地址誤投理論”：

就像極端的什葉派穆斯林認為天使長加百利犯了錯誤，他把寄給阿里的信投給了默罕默德，同樣，馬克思主義者大多認為，歷史精神或人類意識犯了大錯。喚醒大眾的福音本該送給階級，但誤投給了民族國家。

蓋爾納進一步説，現在中東地區的民族主義也是一樣：它之所以能有效地動員民眾，是因為民族主義具有階級意識所沒有的精神和情感內容。歐洲民族主義的原動力來自於十九世紀末歐洲人從鄉村湧向城市的社會大轉型，而伊斯蘭教則是對當代中東社會城市化和社會流動的回應。馬克思的信永遠不會投到“階級”信箱。

馬克思相信，中產階級，或者至少他所説的“布爾喬亞”那部分人，將會一直是現代社會中的少數特權集團。而實際情況則是，小資產階級和中產階級基本上構成了大多數發達國家的主要人口，這給社會主義提出了難題。從亞里士多德的時代開始，歷代思想家都認為，穩定的民主建立在一個廣泛的中產階級基礎之上，貧富差距懸殊容易導致寡頭統治或民粹主義式的革命。大部分發達國家成功建立中產階級社會以後，馬克思主義的魅力喪失殆盡。激進左翼存活下來的只有一些社會極度不平等的地區，比如拉丁美洲部分地區、尼泊爾和貧困的印度東部。

政治理論家薩繆爾•亨廷頓所謂的全球民主化“第三次浪潮”，始於1970年代南歐地區，並於1989年東歐共產主義垮台而達到頂峯，選舉制民主政體的數量從1970年的45個左右增加到1990年代末的120多個。在巴西、印度、印尼、南非和土耳其等國，經濟發展促進了新興中產階級的崛起。經濟學家莫塞斯•奈姆（Moisés Naím ）所指出的，這些國家的中產階級相對來説受過良好的教育、擁有私有財產並掌握與外界溝通的技術手段。他們能夠和本國政府討價還價，靠先進技術輕鬆地進行政治動員。由此可以理解阿拉伯之春的主力為什麼是受過高等教育的突尼斯人和埃及人，他們渴望找到好工作、渴望參與政治生活，卻被獨裁政權所遏制。

中產階級原則上不一定支持民主：就像任何一個人一樣，他們自私，希望自己的財產和地位得到庇護。在中國和泰國等地，許多中產階級感覺自己被窮人的均富呼聲所威脅，因而支持威權政府保護本階級的利益。民主也不一定能滿足中產階級的要求，如果真的無法滿足，中產階級也會出來鬧事。

最不壞的選擇？

如今，全世界關於政治合法性有一個統一的共識，至少是原則上的共識，即自由民主。用經濟學家阿瑪蒂亞•森的話來説：“民主制度還不能普遍適用，也不能被普遍接受，但民主治理已經被世界輿論廣泛認同。”其中最認同民主價值的，是那些已經獲得物質繁榮的國家，這些國家的主要人口已經能夠自認為是中產階級。所以，高度發展與穩定民主之間存在關聯。

有些社會，比如伊朗和沙特阿拉伯，拒絕自由民主制，而支持某種形式的伊斯蘭政教合一制度。然而，這些國家已經遇到發展瓶頸，之所以現在還能存活，是因為它們坐擁大量石油。原來，阿拉伯地區是“第三次浪潮”的例外，但阿拉伯之春表明，那裏的公眾就像東歐和拉丁美洲人一樣敢於對抗獨裁政權。這不是説通往好民主之路會像突尼斯、埃及或利比亞那樣順利或直截了當，但這至少表明，對政治自由和政治參與的渴求不是歐美人的文化特性。

現在對自由民主挑戰最大的是中國，中國結合了威權政府和局部市場化經濟。中國繼承了兩千多年的高效行政系統，歷史悠久，令國人自豪。中國領導人進行了一次異常複雜的社會轉型，從蘇聯式的中央集權計劃經濟轉為充滿活力的開放經濟，並且體現了驚人的政治能力——坦率地説，比最近美國領導人處理宏觀經濟的能力要高得多。許多人現在傾慕中國體制，不只是因為其經濟成就，還因為該國能夠及時做出宏大而複雜的決策，這與近些年美國和歐洲令人氣惱的決策無能現象形成鮮明對照。尤其是自從金融危機發生後，中國人自己開始宣揚“中國模式”，將其視為自由民主的另一種替代性方案。

但是，這一模式不可能真正成為東亞以外世界其他地區的替代性方案。首先，這一模式具有文化獨特性：中國政府基於歷史悠久的德性統治、公務員考試（科舉制）、重視教育和對技術官僚的推崇。鮮有發展中國家能奢望仿效；即使那些有條件仿效的國家，例如新加坡和韓國（至少是在早期），也本來就已經屬於中華文化圈。中國人自己也在懷疑他們的模式可否推廣；所謂的北京共識是西方人的發明，而不是中國人自己的。

這一模式能否持續，這也是一個疑問。以出口為導向的增長模式和自上而下的決策體制都無法獲得長久的成功。中國政府禁止公開討論去年夏天的高鐵事故，也沒有問責鐵道部長，這表明在高效決策的背後還埋有大患。

最後，中國還面臨巨大的道德危機。中國政府沒能要求官員尊重公民的基本尊嚴。每週都有新的抗議活動發生，反對徵地、環境污染或官員腐敗問題。國家在迅速發展時，這些問題都還包得住。但不可能永遠保持高增長，政府總有一天會因為這些被壓抑的民憤而吃到苦頭。政府不再擁有自己的主導理念；在一個極度不平等且差距還在擴大的社會，共產黨被外界期望去致力追求平等。

所以，不能忽視中國體制的穩定性問題。中國政府稱，國民具有不同的文化，更喜歡仁慈的、有能力促進發展的威權政權，而不是那種威脅社會穩定的民主亂象。但是，中國的中產階級不可能和其他地方的中產階級迥然不同。其他國家的威權政府在仿效中國的成功範例，但不可能五十年後大多數地區都走中國式的道路。

民主的未來

當今世界，經濟增長、社會變遷和自由民主的意識形態之間存在廣泛聯繫。現在還沒有能與之相對抗的意識形態。但某些令人不安的經濟和社會動向，如果持續下去，將會威脅當今的自由民主，並顛覆民主的意識形態。

巴林頓•摩爾曾斷言：“沒有小資產階級，就沒有民主。”馬克思主義者之所以沒有實現共產主義烏托邦，是因為成熟的資本主義會生產出一箇中產階級社會，而非工人階級社會。但如果技術和全球化的發展破壞了中產階級的基礎，使得發達社會中只有少數人能獲得中產地位，那將怎樣呢？

已經有充分的跡象表明，這一動向已然抬頭。按照實際購買力計算，美國的平均收入自從1970年代以來一直處於停滯階段。平均收入停滯增長的後果被上一代美國家庭夫妻雙雙工作的趨勢所暫時彌補。另外，經濟學家拉古拉姆•拉詹令人信服地説，由於美國人不願意直接進行財富再分配，美國所採用的方式是給予低收入家庭房屋貸款，這既有風險，又低效。這一趨勢，加上資金從中國和其他國家不斷流入美國，這使得許多普通美國人產生了錯覺，以為他們的生活水平在逐年提高。從這個角度看，2008-9年的房貸泡沫不過是財富平均分配的一種粗暴途徑。美國人如今受益於便宜的手機、衣服和“臉譜”社交網站（Facebook），但他們漸漸無法負擔自己的房屋、醫保或養老金。

風險投資家皮特•泰爾和經濟學家泰勒•考恩發現了一個更令人不安的現象，最近一波技術創新所帶來的經濟效益都被極少數最有能力、最精英的人佔有了。這一現象也導致美國過去一代人中間極大的不平等現象。1974年，美國1%的家庭擁有9%的GDP；2007年，這一數字達到23.5%。

貿易和税收政策可能加速了這一趨勢，但罪魁禍首是技術。在早期的工業化進程中——即紡織、煤炭、鋼鐵和內燃機的時代——技術革新帶來的好處總是在增加就業機會方面以各種方式流向社會大眾。但這不是自然法則。如今我們生活在學者肖沙娜•朱伯夫所説的“智能機械時代”，技術逐漸代替人手，且日益智能化。硅谷每一項技術進步都會減少低技術含量的工作崗位數量，這一趨勢還將持續下去。

不平等一直存在，這源於能力和天賦上的自然差異。但今天的技術世界極度放大了那些差異。在十九世紀農業社會，擁有數學天賦的人沒有多少機會把自己的才能轉化為資本。現如今，他們可以成為金融行家或軟件工程師，佔有更多的國民財富。

損害發達國家中產階級收入的另一個因素是全球化。隨着交通和通訊成本降低，以及發展中國家數以億計的新工人進入全球市場，原來由發達國家的中產階級做的工作現在可以在其他國家以更低廉的價格完成。在強調總收入的經濟模式下，工作崗位自然會被外包出去。

明智的思想和政策能夠遏制危害。德國成功地保護了本國的很大一部分製造業基礎和工業勞動力，但德國公司仍然保持着全球競爭力。而美國和英國則欣然接受後工業時代的服務業經濟轉型。自由貿易與其説是一種理論，不如説是意識形態：當美國國會議員想要報復中國壓低人民幣匯率時，他們被視為貿易保護主義者，彷彿貿易場上的對手本來就是平等的。人們談論過很多關於知識經濟的暢想，還説製造業骯髒而危險的工作崗位將不可避免地被高素質的工人代替，從事創意產業或更有意思的工作。這是在遮掩去工業化進程中的嚴酷事實。真實情況是，新秩序所帶來的好處被金融業和高技術產業的極少數人所瓜分，他們的利益統治了媒體和廣泛的政治對話。

缺席的左翼

金融危機發生後，最讓人困惑的一點是，民眾運動發起的主要形式是右翼，而非左翼。

例如在美國，茶黨在措辭上反精英，但茶黨成員卻把選票投給保守派的政客，這些政客恰恰是為他們所厭惡的金融資本家和商業精英服務。關於這一現象有很多解釋。包括根深蒂固的對機會平等而非收入平等的信仰，以及文化因素，例如墮胎、槍支管制，這些問題會壓過經濟訴求。

不過，廣泛的大眾左翼之所以沒能實現，其深層原因是思想。幾十年來就沒有一位左翼思想家能夠提出，（一），對經濟變革期的發達社會的完整結構分析；（二），保護中產階級社會的可操作的政治議程。

坦率地説，過去兩代人當中，主流左翼思想既沒提出概念框架，也沒拿出社會動員的強有力工具。馬克思主義已經於多年前死去，少數老派馬克思主義者只想着照顧家務。學院左派代之以後現代主義、多元文化主義、女性主義、批判理論和其他零零碎碎的思想，這些思想取向更多的是在文化層面，而非聚焦經濟問題。後現代主義始於拒絕一切歷史和社會的宏大敍事，而大眾認為自己被精英階層背叛了，後現代主義自己無法建立起權威。多元文化主義幾乎承認每一個外在羣體的價值。不可能在這樣一個破碎的聯盟基礎上開展大眾進步運動：大多數受到制度性損害的工人階級和中產階級下層的公民，他們在文化上比較保守，不願意自己和外人站在一起參加活動。

不論左翼的政治議程背後是什麼理論，它最大的問題是缺乏威信。過去幾十年間，主流左翼依照的是社會民主主義施政綱領，強調國家監管諸種社會服務職能，例如退休金、醫保和教育。這一模式已經破產：福利國家變得龐大、官僚而臃腫；鑑於發達國家幾乎全面老齡化，這一模式在財政方面也不可持續。因而，一旦社會民主黨上台，他們不再想做幾十年前那樣的福利國家守護人；但沒有人能拿出一套新的、激動人心的政治議程吸引民眾。

未來的意識形態

讓我們暫時想象一下，今天一個躲在某處閣樓裏的小報作家正在試圖描繪一幅關於未來的意識形態藍圖，其中有一條通往擁有敦實的中產階級和強健的民主政體的堅實道路。這種意識形態會是怎樣的一番圖景？

它至少要有兩個組成部分，政治的和經濟的。政治方面，新意識形態必須重申民主政治優先於經濟。並且重新使得政府成為公眾利益的表達者。但是其提出的保護中產階級生活的議程不能僅僅依靠現存的福利國家機制。新意識形態也許應該在某種程度上重新規劃國有部門，把它們從相關既得利益者手中解放出來，並且使用新技術手段來提供服務。人們將不得不坦率地要求強化再分配機制並且找到一條終結利益集團主導政治的可行道路。

經濟方面，新的意識形態不可以以否定資本主義開始，彷彿老式社會主義仍然是一種可行的替代性方案一樣。更為緊要的是保持資本主義的多樣性，以及政府幫助社會應對資本主義的能力。全球化不應該被看做一種不可更改的現實，而應被看做一種要從政治上小心控制的挑戰和機遇。新的意識形態不會把市場看做自身完美的事物，相反，而是高度重視全球貿易和投資，以促進中產階級的繁榮，而不僅僅是為了增加國家財富。

但是我們不太可能獲得以上這一結論，除非我們先對當代新古典主義經濟學展開系統批判，首先針對其基本假設——個人擁有完全自主權並自我負責，同時個人收入的彙總和就是衡量一個國家幸福程度的最精確尺度。批評者應該注意到個人收入並不能代表個人對社會的貢獻。還應該進一步深入，並認識到，即使勞動力市場是高效率的，個人的天賦分佈本質上也不是公平的，個人不是自主的實體而是深受周圍環境的影響。

這些觀點中，大部分都已經零零碎碎地為大眾所知；作家得把它們串連成完整的故事。他或者她也要避免“地址誤投”問題。對全球化的批評，將不得不考慮民族國家，將其看做一種動員的策略以便用一種更平衡周到的方式來定義國家利益，而不是簡單地美國各州的“買下美國”式的工會運動。這將是左派和右派綜合的產物，與目前社會進步運動中各種邊緣團體的政治議程無關。這種意識形態將是民粹主義的；口號的一開始，將會批判那些犧牲大眾利益的精英，批判那種偏袒富人的金錢政治，尤其是華盛頓的金錢政治。

這樣一種運動帶來的危險顯而易見：美國的倒退，尤其是宣佈更加開放的全球系統會到處引起貿易保護主義。在許多方面，里根-撒切爾主義改革正像支持者期待的那樣獲得了成功——營造了一個更具競爭活力的，全球化的，無摩擦的世界。同時，它在所有發展中國家生產出巨大的財富和不斷崛起的中產階級，民主也因為他們的覺醒而得到傳播。也許，發達國家正站在一系列技術進步的頂峯，技術進步不僅增加生產力，同時為廣大中產階級提供有價值的工作。

但是，與其説這是關於過去30年現實經驗的認識，不如説只是一種信仰而已，現實經驗顯示的完全相反。實際上，有很多理由要求我們思考不平等加劇的問題。當下發生在美國的財富集中已經變得可以自我強化——正如經濟學家西蒙•約翰遜討論的那樣，金融部門正在運用他的遊説能力來擺脱更嚴格的規則監管。貴族學校前所未有地發達，而其他學校則越來越糟。每個社會的精英都在運用他們進入政治權力的便捷機會來保護自己的利益，我們正缺少一個能抵消這種狀況的民主動員機制來平衡形勢。美國精英不應該自外於規則。

然而，只要發達國家的中產階級仍然沉迷於上一代人創造的敍述話語，即他們的利益將獲得完全自由市場與小政府的充分保護，那麼，上文所説的民主運動就不會發生。另一套話語仍然缺席，等待降生。

（弗朗西斯•福山是斯坦福大學民主、發展與法治研究中心的高級研究員，新著有《政治秩序諸起源：從史前史到大革命》）

中文版由觀察者網組織翻譯，轉載請註明；感謝人文與社會網站提供英文版全文，見下頁。

  The Future of History 

Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?

Francis Fukuyama

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. Something strange is going on in the world today. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 and the ongoing crisis of the euro are both products of the model of lightly regulated financial capitalism that emerged over the past three decades. Yet despite widespread anger at Wall Street bailouts, there has been no great upsurge of left-wing American populism in response. It is conceivable that the Occupy Wall Street movement will gain traction, but the most dynamic recent populist movement to date has been the right-wing Tea Party, whose main target is the regulatory state that seeks to protect ordinary people from financial speculators. Something similar is true in Europe as well, where the left is anemic and right-wing populist parties are on the move.

There are several reasons for this lack of left-wing mobilization, but chief among them is a failure in the realm of ideas. For the past generation, the ideological high ground on economic issues has been held by a libertarian right. The left has not been able to make a plausible case for an agenda other than a return to an unaffordable form of old-fashioned social democracy. This absence of a plausible progressive counter­narrative is unhealthy, because competition is good for intellectual ­debate just as it is for economic activity. And serious intellectual debate is urgently needed, since the current form of globalized capitalism is eroding the middle-class social base on which liberal democracy rests.

THE DEMOCRATIC WAVE

Social forces and conditions do not simply “determine” ideologies, as Karl Marx once maintained, but ideas do not become powerful unless they speak to the concerns of large numbers of ordinary people. Liberal democracy is the default ideology around much of the world today in part because it responds to and is facilitated by certain socioeconomic structures. Changes in those structures may have ideological consequences, just as ideological changes may have socioeconomic consequences.

Almost all the powerful ideas that shaped human societies up until the past 300 years were religious in nature, with the important exception of Confucianism in China. The first major secular ideology to have a lasting worldwide effect was liberalism, a doctrine associated with the rise of first a commercial and then an industrial middle class in certain parts of Europe in the seventeenth century. (By “middle class,” I mean people who are neither at the top nor at the bottom of their societies in terms of income, who have received at least a secondary education, and who own either real property, durable goods, or their own businesses.)

As enunciated by classic thinkers such as Locke, Montesquieu, and Mill, liberalism holds that the legitimacy of state authority derives from the state’s ability to protect the individual rights of its citizens and that state power needs to be limited by the adherence to law. One of the fundamental rights to be protected is that of private property; England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 was critical to the development of modern liberalism because it first established the constitutional principle that the state could not legitimately tax its citizens without their consent.

At first, liberalism did not necessarily imply democracy. The Whigs who supported the constitutional settlement of 1689 tended to be the wealthiest property owners in England; the parliament of that period represented less than ten percent of the whole population. Many classic liberals, including Mill, were highly skeptical of the virtues of democracy: they believed that responsible political participation required education and a stake in society -- that is, property ownership. Up through the end of the nineteenth century, the franchise was limited by property and educational requirements in virtually all parts of Europe. Andrew Jackson’s election as U.S. president in 1828 and his subsequent abolition of property requirements for voting, at least for white males, thus marked an important early victory for a more robust democratic principle.

In Europe, the exclusion of the vast majority of the population from political power and the rise of an industrial working class paved the way for Marxism. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, the same year that revolutions spread to all the major European countries save the United Kingdom. And so began a century of competition for the leadership of the democratic movement between communists, who were willing to jettison procedural democracy (multiparty elections) in favor of what they believed was substantive democracy (economic redistribution), and liberal democrats, who believed in expanding political participation while maintaining a rule of law protecting individual rights, including property rights.

At stake was the allegiance of the new industrial working class. Early Marxists believed they would win by sheer force of numbers: as the franchise was expanded in the late nineteenth century, parties such as the United Kingdom’s Labour and Germany’s Social Democrats grew by leaps and bounds and threatened the hegemony of both conservatives and traditional liberals. The rise of the working class was fiercely resisted, often by nondemocratic means; the communists and many socialists, in turn, abandoned formal democracy in favor of a direct seizure of power.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, there was a strong consensus on the progressive left that some form of socialism -- government control of the commanding heights of the economy in order to ensure an egalitarian distribution of wealth -- was unavoidable for all advanced countries. Even a conservative economist such as Joseph Schumpeter could write in his 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, that socialism would emerge victorious because capitalist society was culturally self-undermining. Socialism was believed to represent the will and interests of the vast majority of people in modern societies.

Yet even as the great ideological conflicts of the twentieth century played themselves out on a political and military level, critical changes were happening on a social level that undermined the Marxist scenario. First, the real living standards of the industrial working class kept rising, to the point where many workers or their children were able to join the middle class. Second, the relative size of the working class stopped growing and actually began to decline, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, when services began to displace manufacturing in what were labeled “postindustrial” economies. Finally, a new group of poor or disadvantaged people emerged below the industrial working class -- a heterogeneous mixture of racial and ethnic minorities, recent immigrants, and socially excluded groups, such as women, gays, and the disabled. As a result of these changes, in most industrialized societies, the old working class has become just another domestic interest group, one using the political power of trade unions to protect the hard-won gains of an earlier era.

Economic class, moreover, turned out not to be a great banner under which to mobilize populations in advanced industrial countries for political action. The Second International got a rude wake-up call in 1914, when the working classes of Europe abandoned calls for class warfare and lined up behind conservative leaders preaching nationalist slogans, a pattern that persists to the present day. Many Marxists tried to explain this, according to the scholar Ernest Gellner, by what he dubbed the “wrong address theory”:

Just as extreme Shi’ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations.

Gellner went on to argue that religion serves a function similar to nationalism in the contemporary Middle East: it mobilizes people effectively because it has a spiritual and emotional content that class consciousness does not. Just as European nationalism was driven by the shift of Europeans from the countryside to cities in the late nineteenth century, so, too, Islamism is a reaction to the urbanization and displacement taking place in contemporary Middle Eastern societies. Marx’s letter will never be delivered to the address marked “class.”

Marx believed that the middle class, or at least the capital-owning slice of it that he called the bourgeoisie, would always remain a small and privileged minority in modern societies. What ­happened instead was that the bourgeoisie and the middle class more generally ended up constituting the vast majority of the populations of most advanced countries, posing problems for socialism. From the days of Aristotle, thinkers have believed that stable democracy rests on a broad middle class and that societies with extremes of wealth and poverty are susceptible either to oligarchic domination or populist revolution. When much of the developed world succeeded in creating middle-class societies, the appeal of Marxism vanished. The only places where leftist radicalism persists as a powerful force are in highly unequal areas of the world, such as parts of Latin America, Nepal, and the impoverished regions of eastern India.

What the political scientist Samuel Huntington labeled the “third wave” of global democratization, which began in southern Europe in the 1970s and culminated in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, increased the number of electoral democracies around the world from around 45 in 1970 to more than 120 by the late 1990s. Economic growth has led to the emergence of new middle classes in countries such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey. As the economist Moisés Naím has pointed out, these middle classes are relatively well educated, own property, and are technologically connected to the outside world. They are demanding of their governments and mobilize easily as a result of their access to technology. It should not be surprising that the chief instigators of the Arab Spring uprisings were well-educated Tunisians and Egyptians whose expectations for jobs and political participation were stymied by the dictatorships under which they lived.

Middle-class people do not necessarily support democracy in principle: like everyone else, they are self-interested actors who want to protect their property and position. In countries such as China and Thailand, many middle-class people feel threatened by the redistributive demands of the poor and hence have lined up in support of authoritarian governments that protect their class interests. Nor is it the case that democracies necessarily meet the expectations of their own middle classes, and when they do not, the middle classes can become restive.

THE LEAST BAD ALTERNATIVE?

There is today a broad global consensus about the legitimacy, at least in principle, of liberal democracy. In the words of the economist Amartya Sen, “While democracy is not yet universally practiced, nor indeed uniformly accepted, in the general climate of world opinion, democratic governance has now achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.” It is most broadly accepted in countries that have reached a level of material prosperity sufficient to allow a majority of their citizens to think of themselves as middle class, which is why there tends to be a correlation between high levels of ­development and stable democracy.

Some societies, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, reject liberal democracy in favor of a form of Islamic theocracy. Yet these regimes are developmental dead ends, kept alive only because they sit atop vast pools of oil. There was at one time a large Arab exception to the third wave, but the Arab Spring has shown that Arab publics can be mobilized against dictatorship just as readily as those in Eastern Europe and Latin America were. This does not of course mean that the path to a well-functioning democracy will be easy or straightforward in Tunisia, Egypt, or Libya, but it does suggest that the desire for ­political freedom and participation is not a cultural peculiarity of Europeans and Americans.

The single most serious challenge to liberal democracy in the world today comes from China, which has combined authoritarian government with a partially marketized economy. China is heir to a long and proud tradition of high-quality bureaucratic government, one that stretches back over two millennia. Its leaders have managed a hugely complex transition from a centralized, Soviet-style planned economy to a dynamic open one and have done so with remarkable competence -- more competence, frankly, than U.S. leaders have shown in the management of their own macroeconomic policy recently. Many people currently admire the Chinese system not just for its economic record but also because it can make large, complex decisions quickly, compared with the agonizing policy paralysis that has struck both the United States and Europe in the past few years. Especially since the recent financial crisis, the Chinese themselves have begun touting the “China model” as an alternative to liberal democracy.

This model is unlikely to ever become a serious alternative to liberal democracy in regions outside East Asia, however. In the first place, the model is culturally specific: the Chinese government is built around a long tradition of meritocratic recruitment, civil service examinations, a high emphasis on education, and deference to technocratic authority. Few developing countries can hope to emulate this model; those that have, such as Singapore and South Korea (at least in an earlier period), were already within the Chinese cultural zone. The Chinese themselves are skeptical about whether their model can be exported; the so-called Beijing consensus is a Western invention, not a Chinese one.

It is also unclear whether the model can be sustained. Neither export-driven growth nor the top-down approach to decision-making will continue to yield good results forever. The fact that the Chinese government would not permit open discussion of the disastrous high-speed rail accident last summer and could not bring the Railway Ministry responsible for it to heel suggests that there are other time bombs hidden behind the façade of efficient decision-making.

Finally, China faces a great moral vulnerability down the road. The Chinese government does not force its officials to respect the basic dignity of its citizens. Every week, there are new protests about land seizures, environmental violations, or gross corruption on the part of some official. While the country is growing rapidly, these abuses can be swept under the carpet. But rapid growth will not continue forever, and the government will have to pay a price in pent-up anger. The regime no longer has any guiding ideal around which it is organized; it is run by a Communist Party supposedly committed to equality that presides over a society marked by dramatic and growing inequality.

So the stability of the Chinese system can in no way be taken for granted. The Chinese government argues that its ­citizens are culturally different and will always prefer benevolent, growth-promoting dictatorship to a messy democracy that threatens social stability. But it is unlikely that a spreading middle class will behave all that differently in China from the way it has behaved in other parts of the world. Other authoritarian regimes may be trying to emulate China’s success, but there is little chance that much of the world will look like today’s China 50 years down the road.

DEMOCRACY’S FUTURE

There is a broad correlation among economic growth, social change, and the hegemony of liberal democratic ideology in the world today. And at the moment, no plausible rival ideology looms. But some very troubling economic and social trends, if they continue, will both threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood.

The sociologist Barrington Moore once flatly asserted, “No bourgeois, no democracy.” The Marxists didn’t get their communist utopia because mature capitalism generated middle-class societies, not working-class ones. But what if the further development of technology and globalization undermines the middle class and makes it impossible for more than a minority of citizens in an advanced society to achieve middle-class status?

There are already abundant signs that such a phase of development has begun. Median incomes in the United States have been stagnating in real terms since the 1970s. The economic impact of this stagnation has been softened to some extent by the fact that most U.S. households have shifted to two income earners in the past generation. Moreover, as the economist Raghuram Rajan has persuasively argued, since Americans are reluctant to engage in straightforward redistribution, the United States has instead attempted a highly dangerous and inefficient form of redistribution over the past generation by subsidizing mortgages for low-income households. This trend, facilitated by a flood of liquidity pouring in from China and other countries, gave many ordinary Americans the illusion that their standards of living were rising steadily during the past decade. In this respect, the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008–9 was nothing more than a cruel reversion to the mean. Americans may today benefit from cheap cell phones, inexpensive clothing, and Facebook, but they increasingly cannot afford their own homes, or health insurance, or comfortable pensions when they retire.

A more troubling phenomenon, identified by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the economist Tyler Cowen, is that the benefits of the most recent waves of technological innovation have accrued disproportionately to the most talented and well-educated members of society. This phenomenon helped cause the massive growth of inequality in the United States over the past generation. In 1974, the top one percent of families took home nine percent of GDP; by 2007, that share had increased to 23.5 percent.

Trade and tax policies may have accelerated this trend, but the real villain here is technology. In earlier phases of industrialization -- the ages of textiles, coal, steel, and the internal combustion engine -- the benefits of technological changes almost always flowed down in significant ways to the rest of society in terms of employment. But this is not a law of nature. We are today living in what the scholar Shoshana Zuboff has labeled “the age of the smart machine,” in which technology is increasingly able to substitute for more and higher human functions. Every great advance for Silicon Valley likely means a loss of low-skill jobs elsewhere in the economy, a trend that is unlikely to end anytime soon.

Inequality has always existed, as a result of natural differences in talent and character. But today’s technological world vastly magnifies those differences. In a nineteenth-century agrarian society, people with strong math skills did not have that many opportunities to capitalize on their talent. Today, they can become financial wizards or software engineers and take home ever-larger proportions of the national wealth.

The other factor undermining middle-class incomes in developed countries is globalization. With the lowering of transportation and communications costs and the entry into the global work force of hundreds of millions of new workers in developing countries, the kind of work done by the old middle class in the developed world can now be performed much more cheaply elsewhere. Under an economic model that prioritizes the maximization of aggregate income, it is inevitable that jobs will be outsourced.

Smarter ideas and policies could have contained the damage. Germany has succeeded in protecting a significant part of its manufacturing base and industrial labor force even as its companies have remained globally competitive. The United States and the United Kingdom, on the other hand, happily embraced the transition to the postindustrial service economy. Free trade became less a theory than an ideology: when members of the U.S. Congress tried to retaliate with trade sanctions against China for keeping its currency undervalued, they were indignantly charged with protectionism, as if the playing field were already level. There was a lot of happy talk about the wonders of the knowledge economy, and how dirty, dangerous manufacturing jobs would inevitably be replaced by highly educated workers doing creative and interesting things. This was a gauzy veil placed over the hard facts of deindustrial­ization. It overlooked the fact that the benefits of the new order accrued disproportionately to a very small number of people in finance and high technology, interests that dominated the media and the general political conversation.

THE ABSENT LEFT

One of the most puzzling features of the world in the aftermath of the financial crisis is that so far, populism has taken primarily a right-wing form, not a left-wing one.

In the United States, for example, although the Tea Party is anti-elitist in its rhetoric, its members vote for conservative politicians who serve the interests of precisely those financiers and corporate elites they claim to despise. There are many explanations for this phenomenon. They include a deeply embedded belief in equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome and the fact that cultural issues, such as abortion and gun rights, crosscut economic ones.

But the deeper reason a broad-based populist left has failed to materialize is an intellectual one. It has been several decades since anyone on the left has been able to articulate, first, a coherent analysis of what happens to the structure of advanced societies as they undergo economic change and, second, a realistic agenda that has any hope of protecting a middle-class society.

The main trends in left-wing thought in the last two generations have been, frankly, disastrous as either conceptual frameworks or tools for mobilization. Marxism died many years ago, and the few old believers still around are ready for nursing homes. The academic left replaced it with postmodernism, multiculturalism, feminism, critical theory, and a host of other fragmented intellectual trends that are more cultural than economic in focus. Postmodernism begins with a denial of the possibility of any master narrative of history or society, undercutting its own authority as a voice for the majority of citizens who feel betrayed by their elites. Multiculturalism validates the victimhood of virtually every out-group. It is impossible to generate a mass progressive movement on the basis of such a motley coalition: most of the working- and lower-middle-class citizens victimized by the system are culturally conservative and would be embarrassed to be seen in the presence of allies like this.

Whatever the theoretical justifications underlying the left’s agenda, its biggest problem is a lack of credibility. Over the past two generations, the mainstream left has followed a social democratic program that centers on the state provision of a variety of services, such as pensions, health care, and education. That model is now exhausted: welfare states have become big, bureaucratic, and inflexible; they are often captured by the very organizations that administer them, through public-sector unions; and, most important, they are fiscally unsustainable given the aging of populations virtually everywhere in the developed world. Thus, when existing social democratic parties come to power, they no longer aspire to be more than custodians of a welfare state that was created decades ago; none has a new, exciting agenda around which to rally the masses.

AN IDEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE

Imagine, for a moment, an obscure scribbler today in a garret somewhere trying to outline an ideology of the future that could provide a realistic path toward a world with healthy middle-class societies and robust democracies. What would that ideology look like?

It would have to have at least two components, political and economic. Politically, the new ideology would need to reassert the supremacy of democratic politics over economics and legitimate anew government as an expression of the public interest. But the agenda it put forward to protect middle-class life could not simply rely on the existing mechanisms of the welfare state. The ideology would need to somehow redesign the public sector, freeing it from its dependence on existing stakeholders and using new, technology-empowered approaches to delivering services. It would have to argue forthrightly for more redistribution and present a realistic route to ending interest groups’ domination of politics.

Economically, the ideology could not begin with a denunciation of capitalism as such, as if old-fashioned socialism were still a viable alternative. It is more the variety of capitalism that is at stake and the degree to which governments should help societies adjust to change. Globalization need be seen not as an inexorable fact of life but rather as a challenge and an opportunity that must be carefully controlled politically. The new ideology would not see markets as an end in themselves; instead, it would value global trade and investment to the extent that they contributed to a flourishing middle class, not just to greater aggregate national wealth.

It is not possible to get to that point, however, without providing a serious and sustained critique of much of the edifice of modern neoclassical economics, beginning with fundamental assumptions such as the sovereignty of individual preferences and that aggregate income is an accurate measure of national well-being. This critique would have to note that people’s incomes do not necessarily represent their true contributions to society. It would have to go further, however, and recognize that even if labor markets were efficient, the natural distribution of talents is not necessarily fair and that individuals are not sovereign entities but beings heavily shaped by their surrounding societies.

Most of these ideas have been around in bits and pieces for some time; the scribbler would have to put them into a coherent package. He or she would also have to avoid the “wrong address” problem. The critique of globalization, that is, would have to be tied to nationalism as a strategy for mobilization in a way that defined national interest in a more sophisticated way than, for example, the “Buy American” campaigns of unions in the United States. The product would be a synthesis of ideas from both the left and the right, detached from the agenda of the marginalized groups that constitute the existing progressive movement. The ideology would be populist; the message would begin with a critique of the elites that allowed the benefit of the many to be sacrificed to that of the few and a critique of the money politics, especially in Washington, that overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy.

The dangers inherent in such a movement are obvious: a pullback by the United States, in particular, from its advocacy of a more open global system could set off protectionist responses elsewhere. In many respects, the Reagan-Thatcher revolution succeeded just as its proponents hoped, bringing about an increasingly competitive, globalized, friction-free world. Along the way, it generated tremendous wealth and created rising middle classes all over the developing world, and the spread of democracy in their wake. It is possible that the developed world is on the cusp of a series of technological breakthroughs that will not only increase productivity but also provide meaningful employment to large numbers of middle-class people.

But that is more a matter of faith than a reflection of the empirical reality of the last 30 years, which points in the opposite direction. Indeed, there are a lot of reasons to think that inequality will continue to worsen. The current concentration of wealth in the United States has already become self-reinforcing: as the economist Simon Johnson has argued, the financial sector has used its lobbying clout to avoid more onerous forms of regulation. Schools for the well-off are better than ever; those for everyone else continue to deteriorate. Elites in all societies use their superior access to the political system to protect their interests, absent a countervailing democratic mobilization to rectify the situation. American elites are no exception to the rule.

That mobilization will not happen, however, as long as the middle classes of the developed world remain enthralled by the narrative of the past generation: that their interests will be best served by ever-freer markets and smaller states. The alternative narrative is out there, waiting to be born.